Photo of the Day: The Last Picture Show in Tenafly, NJ

I took the attached photo two weeks ago, right after reading the news that Bow Tie Cinemas, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, had been demolished.

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 Fox and Oritani (Hackensack)
*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.