For the
last half-century—really, since the premieres of Jaws and Star Wars—millions
of movie fans have marked their calendars for the start of the summer season,
with the Memorial Day weekend as the unofficial kickoff.
But that
won’t be the case at Bow Tie Cinemas this year.
Its last poster outside, just when COVID-19 shut down the film industry and so much else five years ago, advertised Ben Affleck’s The Way Back. As late as November 2020, its marquee proclaimed, TEMPORARILY CLOSED—WILL REOPEN SOON. Unfortunately, both predictions proved overly optimistic.
Despite
the effort of community groups to keep it open—at least, to preserve its
original façade—the borough of Tenafly decided that this would be the local
version of the classic The Last Picture Show. Current plans call for the site
to be redeveloped as a mixed-use property.
This
script has become all too common in recent years across the country, and Bergen
County has been no exception.
Next year
would have marked the movie house’s centennial. It began as a single theater
before, like so many other cinemas a few decades ago, being converted into a
quad.
With the
closure of the Englewood Theater and the Plaza Theater (later repurposed as
BergenPAC) in my hometown, the Bow Tie (then called the Bergen Theater) became
the de facto movie house for me and my friends by the mid-Seventies.
I agree
with Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning director of Anora, that the big
screen rather than at-home streaming is the best way to experience a film. But
watching a film with others is more than a matter of technology—you also come
away with memories only tangentially connected to what’s projected overhead, as
I found several other times in Tenafly:
*In the
mid-Seventies, my mid-teens, I joined several older guys in watching the
R-rated shocker The Exorcist. Despite the massive publicity the horror
flick had generated over the prior few years, we were still so unprepared for
its terrifying scenes of demonic possession that we staggered out of the
theater late that night. When one of my close relatives piped up with, “Hey
guys, let’s go get some pizza!”, they looked ready to kill him.
*A decade
later, a new owner took over, eventually turned the theater from a single
screen into the quad form it retained for the rest of its existence. I just
wish he had spent more on HVAC equipment. As a long line of moviegoers waited
patiently outside one summer night in 1985 to see A Room With a View,
the owner (who I thought of thereafter as Baldy for his chrome dome) yelled
out, “Folks, I just wanted to tell you: It’s close in there.” Close? I
thought. It wasn’t till I settled into my seat that I discovered he had come up
with a euphemism for “no air conditioning.”
*In early
1988, the theater—now known as Tenafly Cinema 4—ran The Last Emperor.
This Oscar-winning Best Picture was 163 minutes long, but moved so slowly that
it felt more like 240 minutes. I watched it on a Friday night with seven or
eight friends from work at the time. Every one of us caught 40 winks, at one
point or another, as we viewed it, but we were collectively able to piece
together the plot afterward at a local diner.
It’s
estimated that more than 3,000 cinemas have closed since the start of the
pandemic, a situation not helped any by the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes,
which slowed new products down to a trickle.
But in
truth, the malaise affecting theater has been developing for years. Higher
ticket prices masked the problem for a while, as did the increase in the number
of screens. (Just when audiences had finally gotten used to the idea of
multiplexes—usually regarded as properties with two to 20 screens—they found
themselves going to megaplexes, with upwards of 24 screens. A shakeout
was bound to come sooner or later with so much overbuilding.)
Over the
last five decades, independent, usually single-screen, theaters, often located
in downtowns, have become endangered, if not extinct, species. In addition to
the ones named above, my part of Bergen County has seen the final curtain come
down on the following cinemas:
*The Rialto (Ridgefield Park)
*The Park Lane (Palisades Park)
*The Grant Lee (later the Sharon Cinema) (Fort Lee)
*The Ramsey Theater (Ramsey)
*Bergenfield Cinema 5 (Bergenfield)
*The Warner Theater (Ridgewood)
(These
last two were part of the same Bow Tie Cinemas chain that owned the Tenafly
location.)
Longtime
residents of this blog who, at one time or another, have resided in Bergen
County can undoubtedly supply other area locations that I may have missed. Some
readers will simply observe that these closures are simply a product of the
passage of time, and, compared with the departure of other longtime
institutions, not something to especially concern ourselves with.
I don’t
agree. Movie audiences have been forced to accept a diminished experience over
time: While screens inside the home expanded in size, those outside contracted.
Gloria Swanson’s faded screen queen in Sunset Boulevard was more correct
than anyone could have imagined 75 years ago when she complained, “It’s the
pictures that got small.”
Towns pay
a price, as well, for these closures, in ways more significant than merely
dollars and cents. Sociologists speak about “third places”—relaxed, informal
environments outside the home and work where people can gather, talk, exchange
ideas, build community, and feel a sense of belonging (or, as the theme song of
Cheers goes, “where everybody knows your name”).
Movies were
among such places for the longest time, and, as I indicated in the examples
above, people carried those experiences with them to other businesses in
downtowns and, indeed, elsewhere. In an era when so much divides Americans, it
is an unwelcome sign that they lose yet something else that brings them
together.
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