Can Moviegoing Make It Back as a Mainstay on the East End?

The moviegoing habit that once thrived across the East End now looks like a thing of the past — but maybe it’s just a phase.

With the bright, shining exception of the rebuilt, state-of-the-art Sag Harbor Cinema, which has drawn steady audiences for a wide range of films and events since it reopened in 2021 after a rebuild in the midst of the COVID pandemic, most of the region’s remaining movie theaters have closed or are limping toward oblivion.

Struggling even before the COVID-19 lockdown, as home streaming and other new small-screen media habits cratered ticket sales, the venerable Southampton and Greenport theaters and the Hampton Arts Cinema in Westhampton Beach all went dark as the pandemic hit.

The Mattituck Cinema is hanging in there but only after a new tenant, Marc LaMaina — the owner of Lucharitos, the Mexican bar and restaurant chain that has a location next door — abandoned its former mission.

Beginning in February, he stopped showing first-run movies on the single screen that he kept of the theater’s former eight. First-run films are too expensive and ticket sales, which always tank after a film’s first weekend, just don’t cover the cost, LaMaina said.

Instead, he has been screening old classics from Thursdays to Sundays; two recent titles were “The Wizard” and “All the President’s Men.” As for the rest of the theater’s former auditoriums, he’s using them for family and date-night thrills including ax-throwing and paint-splattering. (See sidebar.)

In downtown Hampton Bays, the movie theater limps along but its days are numbered. It still shows first-run films on its five screens, but its operator, Regal Cinemas, has declined to renew its long-term lease and continues to operate on a heavily discounted, month-to-month basis, according to landlord Walter Morris.

“They said to me five years ago, ‘You should look for a new tenant. We are not going to be able to extend the lease,’” Morris recalled. “They aren’t doing enough business at this theater. That’s the reason they’re not staying.” Allowing Regal to stay on month to month at reduced rent “is better than leaving that space vacant,” he added.

His new tenant will be CVS, which is in its fourth year before the Southampton Town Planning Board, seeking permission to redevelop the property as a retail pharmacy.

“I don’t want to see movie theaters go away,” Morris said, but “you can see the trend with streaming and home theaters in every house.”

He asked other regional theater operators if they were interested in the space. “If they didn’t make it there,” he quoted them as saying of Regal, “how are we going to make it?”

Regal’s other East End venue, the five-screen East Hampton Cinema, appears to be a lone survivor. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings of its parent company, Cineworld, Regal in February shut down 39 of its approximately 500 theaters after having shut down a dozen in 2022. East Hampton was not among them.

Serving a veritable Beverly Hills East demographic, the cinema has an attentive core audience. It’s also the major venue for the Hamptons International Film Festival every fall.

Anne Chaisson, the executive director of HIFF, said that contract negotiations with Regal for the 2023 season were on track. Regal’s district manager has told the organization that the company has no plans to close East Hampton.

“No one knows what’s going to happen” in the long run, Chaisson said, but “it feels status quo to us right now.”

People do still wonder.

“I never see anybody go in there,” East Hampton Village historian Hugh King said of the East Hampton Cinema. “It looks like it’s empty — although I have heard of people who’ve gone in there to see a movie.”

A woman at the cinema door who said she was the manager declined to comment. “We’re not allowed to talk to the press,” she said, referring all questions to the notably opaque Regal website, which lists no number for media inquiries.

A message submitted via the website of Regal’s East Hampton landlord, a Donald Zucker company subsidiary, went unanswered. The Zucker company spokesperson quoted in a 2017 East Hampton Star story about the cinema — quashing rumors then that the cinema would soon close — did not respond to a voicemail or an email.

Despite darkened or doomed commercial screens, auditoriums repurposed for rage-room fun and lingering doubts about Regal’s lone survivor in the region do not tell the whole story. There is burgeoning hope that moviegoing, for all the gloom, has a future across the East End.

New owners bought two of the East End’s shuttered cinemas in 2022 — the Southampton Cinema and the more humble but also beloved Hampton Arts in Westhampton Beach — and both say they want to bring their screens back to life.

A so-far mysterious entity called Hill Street Cinema LLC bought the five-screen Southampton Cinema for $8 million last summer, issuing a press release announcing that the company “plans to reopen the historic theater for movies and cultural events.” The company claimed that moviegoing is “approaching prepandemic levels” with audiences “seeking the glorious theater experience you cannot get from streaming home programming.”

The theater closed once before, in 1995, as United Artists sought permission to build a modern theater outside the village’s downtown. That effort failed, and UA recommitted to the Hill Street location, demolishing the original 1932 auditorium space and building a new four-screen cineplex behind the original façade and its classic marquee.

The press release and the company’s one-page website offered no contact information. Multiple queries submitted through an email link on the website all went unanswered. Tips that Hill Street Cinema LLC is linked to a commercial real estate mogul with an oceanfront house in Southampton could not be confirmed.

So far, there’s been no sign of activity at the building, which was designated a landmark by the Southampton Village Board of Architectural Review in January. That means no exterior changes can be made without the ARB’s approval.

The theater is within a proposed cultural district the Village Board is considering as part of a new master plan and updated zoning code. It could bar large retail operations like CVS from the theater space.

Mayor Jesse Warren said in late February he was not aware that any plans for the building had been submitted to the Building Department.

But two local filmmakers, brothers Orson and Ben Cummings, are watching with interest. Long before the theater’s purchase last August, they formed a nonprofit, Southampton Theater Inc., and rounded up backers to fund a feasibility study and a concept design. They showed that a reimagined Southampton theater could not only thrive as a vibrant community hub but reinvigorate the village’s all-too-quiet downtown.

“Basically, the philosophy is movies are cool,” explained Orson, “and if you make a really great room, people are going to use it. You show older movies, new movies, Marvel movies, indie movies. But you don’t lean on that exclusively for revenue.”

Their concept calls for “three pillars for the stool,” Ben said: movies, educational programs and live events including music and talk-backs. There will be multiple screening rooms, an accessible rooftop, and an airy, open central lobby that “would be open all day, that could be used for meetings, having coffee, kibbitzing, you name it,” Orson said. “You’ve got a restaurant component and a bar — it’s not just a movie theater. It becomes this thing that functions all day.”

In the midst of their effort, the shuttered building “turned out to be a desirable space for someone” and it was sold before they could round up the money to make an offer, Orson said.

The brothers believe anyone who develops a business and concept plan will come to the same conclusions they did. “This is the model,” Orson said. “This isn’t like something we’re pulling out of a hat. This is what you have to do if you want something that is really going to work.”

“We remain an entity,” he said of their 501(c)(3), “and if certain people want to be involved in what we have learned, we’re open … We’re here. We easy to find.”

In Westhampton Beach, the forlorn Hampton Arts twin-screen theater at Six Corners suddenly has a clearer future. A group of four partners led by Inge Debyser, a local real estate salesperson with Corcoran who also has a small residential construction company, bought the 1947 building in 2022 for $1.15 million.

This winter they won conditional approval from the Westhampton Beach Village Board of Architectural Review to redo the façade. They hope to file plans soon for interior improvements including the addition of an upstairs bar, according to Debyser.

“It’s nostalgia,” Debyser said of her and her partners’ motivation. “I know there’s a lot of streaming. I know we live in the Hamptons, where a lot of people live in a big home and that they very often come with media rooms. I understand that. But I think that after COVID … there’s a lot of people who just say: ‘Wait a minute. There’s something, something nostalgic, to be able to go to an actual movie theater and just sit there with other people and have some popcorn in your hand.’”

“To go see a movie with other people,” she said, “creates a dynamic and an energy that if you’re sitting alone with your spouse in your media room it’s not going to be the same thing.”

The theater will not be reimagined as a nonprofit cultural center, Debyser said. Noting the presence of a large school system nearby, she said, “All the kids have to drive quite far out to see first-run movies, so we’re going to tailor to that. We’ve got to bring first-run movies whether it’s ‘Top Gun’ or ‘Black Panther.’ We’ve got to do that, 100 percent.”

“I’m an optimistic person,” Debyser added. “I’m realistic too, and I know it’s going to be brutally hard to break even within the next three years.” She and her partners are “not expecting to live off this,” she said. “We’re just hoping to employ the people we need,” including a director of operations, “and that the building will be a fixed venue in Westhampton Beach and that we’ll all be able to keep it afloat.”

“I don’t think there’s any real money to be made in this,” she admitted.

So why make the investment?

“Maybe it’s the human element. Maybe it’s the community part. It’s the human element of social engagement and bringing people together. Does that make sense? It makes sense for all of us.”

Debyser said she hopes the theater will reopen by early 2024.

As a commercial venture, the Greenport Cinema ran at a loss for years, kept alive as a labor of love by its doting owner, Josh Sapan, the recently retired CEO of media giant AMC, who has a house on nearby Shelter Island.

“I loved Shelter Island. I loved Greenport. And there was the Greenport Cinema when I need something to do,” recalled the lifelong movie fan in an interview in February.

The building dates to 1939, erected after the Hurricane of 1938 wrecked the original 1916 structure, which had been remodeled in 1930. Sapan bought it in 2004, lavishly restored it, and tried for 18 years to find a way for it to pay for itself. “I tried everything,” he said, including running it only seasonally and selling subscriptions.

Now it soon may be reborn as the same kind of community hub that the Cummings brothers envision for their old neighborhood theater on the South Fork.

“Things are going incredibly,” said director, screenwriter and producer Tony Spiridakis of the fundraising effort that he and his partner, Lisa Gilooly, launched this winter to reopen the cinema as the nonprofit North Fork Arts Center, offering a range of curated films, live events and educational programs.

There seems to be a groundswell of support and interest in their project. By the end of the first week in March, the pair — cofounders of the Manhattan Film Institute, an intensive moviemaking training program based in Greenport — had raised more than 70 percent of their $1 million goal.

That number was set as a challenge by Sapan. He put the theater on the market in January for $5.5 million but offered to donate it to Spiridakis’s and Gilooly’s nonprofit if they could set up a board of directors and reach the $1 million goal before a buyer showed up.

With the board in place and the million dollars close, “I don’t see a dilemma on the horizon,” Sapan said in late February, noting then that Spiridakis and Gilooly were 60 percent of the way after just a few weeks of fundraising.

Spiridakis, who met Sapan through the Manhattan Film Institute, has practice with the building. A few years ago, he raised funds to fix the boiler so he could run a winter film series there. Despite expectations, “It was packed,” he said, with enthusiastic audiences who roundly cheered for the hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“The idea that movies are dead — I get it,” Spiridakis said, acknowledging what COVID and streaming have done to commercial ticket sales. But the energy and spirit that drive people to see movies together on a big screen are still alive, he argued. “You have to curate and offer education. You do first-run when the place is packed from Memorial Day to Labor Day. What you do after Labor Day is all lecture series, Colin Quinn, Graham Nash, and curated art house films.”

The Sag Harbor Cinema, with its community events and curated film offerings, including first-run movies, “has been an inspiration,” Spiridakis said. His biggest donor, he added, had come forward right after reading a local news story about Marc LaMaina’s reinvention of the Mattituck Cinema.

The North Fork is in the midst of a cultural awakening, Spiridakis said. “We hit the mother load” of community interest and support — not by targeting “day-trippers” but by reaching “a real community that has roots.”

“There’s a lot of talk about the death of cinema,” Spiridakis added. “I think COVID has freaked out a lot of people. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the visual arts have been greatly exaggerated.”