Up North's Second Golden Age Of Cinema

In recent years in northern Michigan, movie theaters have come to inhabit a special place in the life of small towns and foster great devotion from residents. In this week's Northern Express - sister publication of The Ticker - writer Patrick Sullivan goes behind the scenes of Traverse City's State Theatre and Bijou By The Bay, Harbor Springs' Lyric Theatre, Frankfort's Garden Theater, the Elk Rapids Cinema, and the Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay to look at how vintage movie houses are rewriting the script for a happier ending.

Take the single-screen Garden, a theater that’s been continually in business since it opened in 1924 but was taken off life support in the last decade, thanks to owners who are less concerned with making a profit than revitalizing a town and community members who are willing to invest for the sake of local cinema.

Jennie Schmitt, who with her husband, Rick, is one of the co-owners of the Garden, says it’s been a labor of love to get the theater on its feet again.

“It’s not a moneymaker. We make enough money to keep putting more into it, but we don’t get anything out of it,” she says. “Really, the whole thing was, Rick and I lived in Frankfort, and we really liked the movie theater, and we knew the person who had owned it. It took us several years to be able to buy it from him, and we knew something had to be done, and we just kind of formed a group of people and got lucky.”

Sara Herberger, one of three paid employees of the Vogue Theatre in Manistee, got involved with the nonprofit in a roundabout way. Her eight-year-old son had asked about the then-dilapidated building after a fundraiser to restore it was announced, and she tried to explain to him what restoring it could mean to the community.

Luke immediately saw the appeal of having a movie theater in town that he could walk to with friends.

“He saw the Vogue, and he said, ‘What is the Vogue, mom?’ I explained it to him. And then, like as a parent, I said, ‘So, what could you do to help the Vogue get here? Wouldn’t that be great to have a movie theater?’” she says. “He goes, ‘I could sell lemonade.’ So I wound up selling lemonade with my son for about a year-and-a-half.”

Long before there was a Traverse City Film Festival or a revived State Theatre in Traverse City, Suttons Bay was virtually the only place in northern Michigan to see independent and foreign films, thanks to the vision of Bob Bahle. The theater always has been a source of cultural enrichment and an economic driver for the village, but it’s never been very profitable. Today, Erik Bahle says he’s trying to figure out how to make sure the theater lasts another generation. The Bay has just received its license to sell hard cider and beer, and Erik Bahle has completely revamped the concessions to offer only Michigan-sourced treats.

“It’s Leelanau County’s only movie theater, and it’s one of the things that really sets Suttons Bay apart from the other towns," says Bahle. "I think everyone benefits from it, other businesses benefit from it.” 

Read more about northern Michigan's burgeoning independent movie theater scene in this week's Northern Express feature story, "Up North's Golden Age of Cinema, Part II." The Northern Express is available to read online, or pick up a copy at one of nearly 700 other spots in 14 counties across northern Michigan.