How a mother and her daughter saved an Iowa movie theater

Courtney Crowder | The Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption Movie Magic: Reopening The Iowa theater Marianne and Rebecca Fons share the story of how they rehabilitated and reopened The Iowa theater in their hometown of Winterset.

Marianne and Rebecca Fons are freaking out over a handrail.

They are frantic clapping, jumping up and down, shrill squeal-level excited over this railing, which is a sturdy wood banister, sure, but not a furnishing that should elicit this much happy hysteria.

But to this mother-daughter duo, that handrail is so more than a stairwell safety requirement. It’s a sign.

A harbinger that construction inside the historic Iowa Theater is on track. Proof that they are, indeed, in the final stages of renovating the beloved movie house that has graced Winterset’s town square since the early 1900s before falling into disrepair and closing in 2015. And, most importantly, an auspice that maybe their audacious idea for Rebecca to quit her steady job in Chicago and commute from the Windy City to Winterset for two years as the pair whipped up community support and raised funds to the tune of $800,000 to renovate the now-multi-use entertainment space wasn’t such a foolhardy endeavor.

Like the renovated movie theaters in nearby Newton and Knoxville, The Iowa Theater reopening in Winterset is a direct result of neighbors taking up the mantle of change and locals, like the Fonses, investing time and money in their community.

As the drum beat of decline in population and amenities in rural Iowa continues steadily, Winterset is playing a different tune. The town has grown by about 10 percent since the turn of the century, according to U.S Census data, and has averaged about 16 new dwellings built per year for the past 13 years, according to the Madison County Development Group.

While all growth is mostly good growth to small communities, a focus for Winterset and many similar locales is the retention of young professionals, who want to play in their town as much as they want to live and work. Having places for residents to dine out and options for entertainment are simply necessities if you want to ensure a prosperous future, said Tom Leners, executive director of the Madison County Development Group.

And having even one successful amenity, like a movie theater on the square, can be a big driver of foot traffic and dollars to an otherwise quiet town, he said. In Knoxville, four new or remodeled restaurants have opened since their community-financed movie theater began operations in late 2015.

How, exactly, The Iowa will influence its environs has yet to be seen, but after two years of a dark theater, many residents are just excited to have movies in Winterset again. Pride drips from the Fonses as they explain how they’ve partnered with their community to restore the one-screen cinema and live performance space in the style of its glory days, but with the digital technology of modern theaters.

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A couple weeks ago, the Fonses were in the home stretch, but recently the theater opened and entertained sold-out crowds for showings of classic films starring local hero John Wayne.

The story of how this unlikely mother-daughter team got those full houses, the story of the last two years of the Fonses life, well, that plays out a little bit like one of The Duke’s movies. Here, in excerpts from their recollections, the people closest to the project tell the Register how — and why — they decided to turn the lights back on at The Iowa Theater.

The main characters

REBECCA FONS, development director of The Iowa Theater: So in May of 2015...

MARIANNE FONS, chair of The Iowa Theater board: I heard wind that the movie theater was for sale.

REBECCA: We were at my wedding on Memorial Day weekend in Wisconsin and somebody told us. I think you took a phone call and you told me, “Rebecca the movie theater has closed. I don’t know about you, but it could be neat and I would not do it without you, you know.” And I was like, “Let me get married and go on a honeymoon and do that and then we will talk.” That was in May and I think in July or in late June I came to Winterset and we met with our contractor.

MARY FONS, sister and middle daughter: When my mom wants something she gets this twinkle, like this gleam in her eye. I remember her kind of thinking about looking at how much it cost and what she could do. My mom is not a women who’s flashy. She doesn’t buy jewelry and handbags, but real estate projects are her thing. She’s interested in renovation.

REBECCA: By September of that year, as a newlywed, we had acquired the theater and since then have been working to make it a nonprofit and rehab it.

The memories

BRENDA HOLLINGSWORTH, manager with the Madison County Historic Preservation Commission: Winterset always had a theater, really. The opera house was one of the first buildings built in town. And culture and arts have always played an important role in our community.

JANE MARTENS, former Iowa Theater employee: I worked at the theater in 1946, 1947 and 1948. I graduated in 1948, so it was a high school job for me and it was a fantastic job. I called myself, “The Big Boss.”

STEVE REED, contractor for Iowa Theater renovation: I am from Winterset, so (I) used to go to the theater all the time. It was a great place to be a kid.

MARTENS: Sometimes kids would be throwing stuff down in front of the screens and we would call their parents and tell them we put their kid out of the theater and they weren’t allowed back in the theater for three weeks. We did!

MARTENS: Then, there were people who couldn’t afford to come to the show. We had a little fund because I knew some of the kids’ parents couldn’t afford to hardly eat, so I would take from that little fund and, it was 35 cents at that time, so I would give them a ticket and let them see a show.

REBECCA: I would not want to have been a kid here without a movie theater because it showed me the world. And maybe it was the world through crummy movies. I wasn’t seeing foreign films or anything from film festivals or anything fancy, but it showed me the world and it showed me stories and it expanded my mind.

MARTENS: And I have hilarious stories that stick with me, too. Our projectionist had gone on to college, but he came back and one day he said to me, “Can I have a roll of pennies?” I gave it to him and all of a sudden when the movie started, the door flung wide open and a man came to my window and I said, “Yes, sir, is there is something wrong? Do you need help?” And he said, “It’s raining pennies from heaven!” The projectionist had been throwing pennies out of the window of the projector room.

The theater

HOLLINGSWORTH: The Iowa Theater was originally a one-story building that was a meat market in 1899 and then later a bakery and restaurant. In the early 1900s, the building was purchased for a new playhouse for vaudeville productions. And then around 1928, they remodeled the whole structure and built the second story and upgraded it to put in silent movies.

MARY: The Iowa Theater is where I saw my first film in the 80s. It was “Fox and the Hound,” the Disney cartoon, with my dad. I remember sitting in the balcony and the place had fallen into disrepair. It just looked terrible.

MARIANNE: It was threadbare.

REED: It was where dreams went to die, really.

LENERS: It turns out the building itself was transitioning from one generation to another in 2015, so the ladies that were taking the property over came out to see it and they decided the building needed some TLC that they weren’t able to give it.

REBECCA: The Theater finally closed in 2015. It was operational up until that point, but not super consistently.

HOLLINGSWORTH: It was a very, very sad moment for the town when the theater closed, but it was a necessary moment because the building wasn’t up to code and it wasn’t a safe place.

The comeback

REED: There’s a movement in Winterset right now to go through and restore these old buildings in town. There’s a lot of character to them and their structure is good, but if we don’t keep them up, they will fall apart.

HOLLINGSWORTH: The Theater is in the courthouse historic district, which is on the historic register. The entire square is a great example of Italianate architecture at the turn of the century in Iowa. It's like stepping back in time.

REBECCA: We did a historical audit of the building and we found that a lot of the insides of the theater had been irreparably changed in the 1980s, so we didn’t have a huge requirement to keep a lot of the inside, but the outside of the theater, the marquee specifically, and the front ticket lobby, were the original 1930-ish marquee and terrazzo floor ticket lobby and ticket booth, so we were like, well, we’re keeping that.

REED: My opinion is, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Marianne’s goal was to keep what we could and make the rest look original. If they wanted to build a brand new modern movie theater they could do that on the edge of town, but her dream and the community’s dream was to restore The Iowa as a major part of the town square.

HOLLINGSWORTH: The downtown historic square, of which the theater is a part, is a picture of who we are in Winterset. It's our legacy and our roots. Somebody once said to me that a city without old buildings is like an old man without a memory. Those buildings create context for our life today.

REED: From the first moment I stepped into the theater, I could see the finished product. I knew what it could become.

The personal growth

REBECCA: My relationship with my mom was always good, but it’s definitely stronger now. I left my job at the Chicago International Film Festival after 10 years, but I would never have done it if she wasn’t one of my best friends.

MARIANNE: I was raised by altruistic parents and was raised with the idea that if you can make the world a better place, you should. So because I had the ability to jump in and get the project started for the theater I decided to do it. Because of Rebecca, because I knew she had the expertise, the industry knowledge and the youth and the energy to really be the brains of the project.

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REBECCA: For me a large desire to do this came from a love for movies and the power of cinema and what it can do for anybody, especially a kid growing up in Winterset, Iowa.

REBECCA: I feel like, living in Chicago, so often we put on our sunglasses and go to the grocery store and it’s like, ugh, I don’t want to see anybody, just let me do this and let me get home and rush, rush, rush. And then I come here and it is like kind of like, oh, there is someone at the coffee shop let’s just talk, and I love that, and I think it is in my blood, and I think I had kind of forgotten that part of myself, because I was so like, “I left Iowa and I never looked back.” But then I looked back and I was like, “Oh, Iowa is awesome.”

The end credits

HOLLINGSWORTH: When I first walked into the theater, I sat down in one of the seats and wept happy tears. I just had a moment. If you saw it originally, a lot of it just had to be gutted and how they went from that humble beginning to the finished product is pretty amazing.

LENERS: I was observing Friday the crowds in downtown Winterset and, you know, it just feels good that the square is parked full again and I heard from the restaurants that they had big nights on the weekend the theater opened.

MARY: I’m so proud to be from a small town that is thriving and I don’t take it for granted that people like my mom and my younger sister are investing in the town. I live in Chicago and when you go to places like Berwyn (Illinois) you realize these places thrive because people decide to stay and to invest and make a lecture series or a music festival or brewery or a winery. It doesn’t happen because you hope it happens. It happens because people invest.

LENERS: Who knows what is available to us now? Maybe a show going to the Stoner Theater can land here before they do their weeklong run in Des Moines. One of my wife’s nephews is a musician and there are more and more of these small town playhouses to have gigs at. At some point, we think politicians might want to rent the place.

LENERS: There is this feeling that if the theater can succeed then maybe an evening coffee and dessert spot is possible and more restaurants are possible. We have people wanting to be downtown, so I am just wildly optimistic.

MARIANNE: I bought a seat during our Sponsor a Seat Campaign, of course, and when I was laying the theater out, I chose the seat way in the back corner. It would be the last seat that a person would pick, so I just imagine myself sitting in it in the way back looking out over a full house, watching everyone watch a movie from my very own seat in this theater.

Now, that would be heaven at The Iowa.

The Iowa Theater

121 N. John Wayne Drive, Winterset.

Learn more at The-Iowa.com.