A small-town U.P. movie theater faces the end

NEWBERRY – He has given this place everything. And now he might lose it all.

Fred Dunkeld is the owner, the ticket taker and the film projectionist at the Tahqua Land Theatre, a tiny movie house built 85 years ago in the middle of the Upper Peninsula.

Here in Newberry, the moose capital of Michigan, a builder long ago thought that the people of a small town deserved the kind of magnificent theater usually found in big cities. He outfitted it with decorative moldings and colorful murals, and lit its rooms with chandeliers.

Four decades ago, Dunkeld found it abandoned and shuttered, overrun by rats and clogged with coal dust. It was for sale.

And he wanted it.

At first he just wanted to own a business, to have a source of income. “And then I got looking at it,” he said.

He was at the back of the theater one day after he’d bought it, taking it all in as the daylight poured in through the reopened doors. “I remember sitting back here on an old wooden box, a milk crate, saying, ‘Wow, there’s more to this place than I realized.’ ”

He spent a year and a fortune cleaning it out and restoring it to what it once was. He moved into the apartments upstairs and opened an office next door for his day job in real estate. His whole life was here. And anytime he made a big sale, he put the money into his beloved theater to make it better.

Then the rug was pulled out from under him.

A few years ago, the Hollywood studios that supply movies to theaters announced they were soon switching from film to digital. The big theaters, such as the multiplexes with a dozen screens, handled the cost of the switch easily. But hundreds of small, independent movie houses around the country have struggled to come up with the tens of thousands of dollars needed for the new equipment. Some have succeeded. Some have failed and closed forever.

Dunkeld tried twice to raise the funds and fell far short both times.

“They did it in Rogers City and Grayling,” he said, noting two Michigan cities where old theaters have raised funds for the conversion. “But there’s just not that much money up here. It’s just a bunch of Yoopers up here.”

There’s no hard deadline from the studios, no official final date for the switch. Every film he gets could be the last one sent to him. So he waits, either for the last show or for a miracle.

“About all I do is buy a lottery ticket every week, which I know isn’t going to work,” he said. “But it helps you sleep.”

To see the Tahqua Land Theatre’s Go Fund Me page, go to gofundme.com/tahqualandtheatre

Diamond in the rough

He was working at General Motors in Pontiac years ago when some buddies took him on a hunting trip to the Upper Peninsula. He fell in love with the area.

“It’s a slower life,” he said. “You don’t have the pressure, you know? You’re not going to work with 10, 20 miles of traffic, fighting traffic. And people, you walk by them on the sidewalk, they say, ‘Good morning’ or something. They don’t knock you to the side and say, ‘I’m late. Get out of my way.’ ”

He quit his job, moved Up North, bought 900 acres just outside Newberry, and opened a campground for tourists. Right when the 1970s gas crisis hit. Right before a severe recession. Right when nobody downstate could afford to take long drives Up North anymore. The campground went bust.

That’s when he found the old State Theater in downtown Newberry for sale. It was built in 1930 and opened to great fanfare after being largely financed by bonds sold to the people of Newberry. It seemed like it could be a solid business opportunity.

Dunkeld became the owner of a disaster. After being closed for several years, the seats were rotten, the carpet was moldy, gum was on everything, and there were dead birds and rats lying everywhere. And he had a 3-ton pile of coal in the basement from the days when that’s how they heated the place.

He hauled out the coal one basket at a time with the help of some local kids, had the carpet torn out, the seats removed, the floors sanded, the walls repainted. In 1973, the town theater was reborn.

He opened its doors almost daily, even on Christmas Eve. It thrived through wars and recessions, through the years when its customers were lumberjacks who’d come stumbling in from the woods, stinking of fuel oil and alcohol, and would pass out in the back rows. It persevered through the years of street fights out front, when residents from nearby towns like Engadine and Paradise would clash in a mob with the people of Newberry in the street.

“I think a lot of it started with high school football,” he said of the intense town rivalries that burst into brawls. “Or somebody had taken someone’s girl. It was one excuse after another.”

Business was good until 1990, when the Newberry Regional Mental Health Center, the area’s biggest employer, closed and took 300 jobs with it. Suddenly, nobody in town was going to see movies anymore. Dunkeld had to shut it down.

But during those years it was closed, he couldn’t stop imagining what he could do with his little theater. He wanted to make it even better, more incredible, more elegant. And when it reopened its doors four years later, after a new state prison and its jobs brought a boost to the town’s economy, the residents found their old movie house transformed.

Dunkeld had hired a group of Italian restoration experts from Toronto who traveled the world restoring art houses and state capitols, and brought them here to elevate his theater. They put marble in the concession area, restored the antique ticket booth and painted the theater walls using soft feather strokes.

“We couldn’t find feathers, so we sent the guys up to Whitefish Point one morning and they came back happier than hell with pockets full of goose feathers from the beach,” Dunkeld said, laughing. “Everything just fell into place.”

The artists painstakingly painted 11 color-saturated reproductions of 18th-Century artwork depicting episodes in Greek and Roman mythology, like Cupid and Psyche from the “Metamorphoses,” the abduction of Europa, the triumph of Amphitrite and the death of Orpheus. They fitted them with elaborate molded frames that they sheathed in 10,000 sheets of sparkling gold leaf. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Dunkeld’s money went into making it better.

All to bring a sense of wonder and imagination to a little, Up North, single-screen movie theater that few people outside the area knew about.

“It was kind of a process of evolution,” he said. “You get started on something and it just draws you in. It ended up quite a project — a lot of work, a lot of frustration, really. But you just keep going.”

A lost cause

Once the movie studios began the change to digital, small-town theaters became an endangered breed.

As of August, some 5,319 theaters in the country had converted to digital, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. That leaves 537 mostly small theaters still needing to make the leap. Many that already have did so thanks to donations from local residents.

“There’s a lot to be said for the connection between small, local theaters and their communities,” said Patrick Corcoran, spokesman for the theater owners’ association.

“That’s always been a big part of the strength of the industry over many years, which is that it’s very local. People feel very attached to their theaters. And in a lot of places, it’s the place to go for entertainment and the only place for miles around. It’s important that they remain.”

If the Tahqua Land Theatre wants to stay open, it will cost about $60,000 to do so. It’s hard to raise that kind of cash up here, though.

“It’s just too much money for the average small guy,” Dunkeld said.

He tried twice. His Kickstarter campaign was called “Digital or Die” to emphasize the seriousness of the need. But Kickstarter is all or nothing — a campaign has to reach its full fund-raising target or it gets none of the pledged money at all. And since he never got near the total, he never got any money from those who pledged donations.

Charles Cleaver, village manager in Newberry, said the Tahqua is an important part of the community. “I think it’s critical to keep stuff like that here, especially when small communities, the downtowns, have been struggling the last few years,” he said. “It’s one of our bright spots downtown, actually. It’s absolutely gorgeous inside there.”

Dunkeld said he’s trying one more fund-raising campaign. It’s his last chance. With every passing day, he’s closer to the end

“Right now, we don’t know,” Dunkeld said. “They might come out tomorrow and say, ‘This is the last film right now.’ ”

The final frame

Every night he walks over to the theater from his wood-paneled office next door, or down from his apartment upstairs, and opens the big front door.

His footsteps echo in the dark, cavernous lobby. He flips on the theater lights. And he’s reminded why he did all this.

It’s not just its history or beauty, he said. A small town’s theater is one of its few gathering places. The nearest theater is 100 miles away in Marquette. Not many people take a three-hour round trip to see a two-hour movie. Out here, this is the only one. And he feels a duty to keep it going.

“A few times, when nobody shows up in the middle of winter in a storm, I’m lost,” he said. “What do I do, you know? People say, ‘Can’t you turn on the TV?’ It’s just not the way after you’ve done this for 40-some years. And you want to be available to people when they have the urge to go see a movie.

“I don’t believe in being closed. I think it’s just good business practice to stay open all the time.”

Every night he goes upstairs, unpacks the night’s movie, splices seven reels together, and feeds them through an old-fashioned projector. Then he goes down to the ornate ticket booth, just inside the front door that has been propped open, and waits in case somebody wants to escape into a movie for a couple hours. His only other company is the young girl who works the concession stand.

“This is hard because there’s a certain amount of satisfaction of seeing that house full, especially with kids,” he said. “They get together with their friends, they scream and laugh. And just seeing people from different towns. It’s the only time we see them because so many people are 30 miles away. And you get to know them through the years.

“But nobody misses something until it’s gone.”

He stood inside his masterpiece, as he does every night, surrounded by Apollo and Daphne, and Neptune and Amymone, as Cupid and Psyche embraced above him, and Amphitrite looked down on him serenely.

“Somehow, some way, it’s going to stay open,” he said, more wishful than certain. “I’ve got too much in it to close it up. I just haven’t figured out how yet.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle.

To see the Tahqua Land Theatre’s Go Fund Me page, go to gofundme.com/tahqualandtheatre