Great Barrington — For the past 28 years, South Egremont resident Richard Stanley has owned the Mahaiwe Triplex Theater on 70 Railroad Street.
Now, however, Stanley is intending to sell the building to Montclair, New Jersey-based theater company Cinema Lab. The potential sale has been confirmed to The Berkshire Edge by Cinema Lab Chief Executive Officer Luke Parker Bowles.
According to town property records, the building was built in 1995 and has been valuated at $1,538,800, with its land of 0.4 acres valued at $234,300, with a total valuation of $1,773,100. The property is owned through Stanley’s Mahaiwe Triplex Theater Inc. Previously, Stanley also owned the Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield from 2009 to 2018, but he sold it to Michigan-based Phoenix Theatres.
“I’ve had somebody approach me and they seem to be the right kind of people,” Stanley said in an interview with The Berkshire Edge in early December. When asked why he is selling the property, Stanley said, “I guess the short answer is that it needs new and younger blood to bring it into the future.”
Stanley said that the theater currently has two full-time employees and “about four or five part-time employees.” After answering the question about how many employees the theater has, however, Stanley refused to answer any more questions.
It took The Berkshire Edge several weeks of phone calls and emails to reach Cinema Lab CEO Parker Bowles. but after contact was made on Wednesday, December 21, he was more than willing to answer questions about the potential sale.
According to Cinema Lab’s website, the company owns three theaters: The Cañon in Cañon City, Colo.; The Bradley at Bradley Beach, N.J.; and The Village at SOPAC in South Orange, N.J. In November, the company announced that it is buying The Playhouse in New Canaan, Conn.
While Parker Bowles confirmed that the company intends to buy The Triplex, he said that Cinema Lab still needs to raise $750,000 by December 31 to purchase the property. “We already have a certain amount, which is basically half of that or a little less than half,” Parker Bowles explained. “But I will be in town on Wednesday, December 28 and I will have several meetings with potential investors.”
Parker Bowles said that he needs verbal commitments from investors, with a minimum investment of $100,000 each. “We want to keep our [investment] group small, and I think that always makes sense from a business standpoint,” he said. “Also, it gets a bit fiddly when you’ve got 50 people who’ve all put in $25,000. I have about 10 meetings [with potential investors] set up right now, but I want to say that the rule of thumb is that [the meetings] will be 50 percent successful.”
When asked whether or not he would reach the goal, he said, “I’m not concerned if we’re not going to make it. I think that people need to know about the opportunity because it’s a community thing. That’s why we’ve always done it this way. We have skin in the game, but it’s really about local investors being able to benefit.”
Parker Bowles said that the company already has plans for the Triplex building. “To the left of the Triplex building, the storefront will become an independent bar,” Parker Bowles said. “We will knock through the wall [of the building] and it will be renovated. We will renovate the entire building.”
Parker Bowles would not give an estimate of how much the renovation project would cost the company, but that the theater would be closed for a time during the project. “We will try to work around the slow season,” he said. “The goal is that we will be open for the summer, whether in a fully formed phase or not, because we obviously don’t want people to miss out on summer movies. At the very worst, we would be open during the third quarter, but we will not open until the building is up to the quality that we demand for ourselves.”
Parker Bowles said that once reopened, the building will be renamed “The Great.” “We want to call it ‘The Great’ because not only is it in Great Barrington but there is The Barrington B & B across the street,” he said. “Also, in our mind, we’ve always had these experiences akin to the atmosphere that you have at a pub in England. ‘The Great’ seemed to be something that would be the name of a pub and it seems very sophisticated in that respect.”
When asked why the company is investing money into movie theaters while increasingly movie-goers are watching movies at home via Internet-based streaming services, Parker Bowles said that streaming is not the same as the experience of watching a movie in a theater. “The movie experience is something that people have been craving,” Parker Bowles said. “Streaming has this endless supply of not always great content which has developed this disconnect between what I call the ‘water cooler experience.’ That experience is when people discuss with each other the same show or movie. People have become tired of this disconnect and so they crave the opportunity to go and talk about the same thing. That’s why the cinema still exists. People can’t wait to get back into the dark and share an experience with other people, be it a big blockbuster or a Broadway show. There’s nothing that can replace the human experience, and I think people are just dying to get off their sofas.”
For more information about Cinema Lab, visit the company’s website.
