Not the last picture show: A small-town theater brings hope to the heartland

“The town isn’t what it used to be,” Rozella Thomas says, shaking her head. As she pauses to reminisce, I realize the setting, an antique store called Yesterday’s Keepsakes, is almost too ironic. Thomas owns and operates this hidden gem of a shop just off Interstate 94, at the edge of the tiny community of Hebron, North Dakota, population 794. On this rainy, late-summer afternoon, Thomas and I are chatting about the Mayer Theatre, an Art Deco throwback a few blocks and a sturdy one-way bridge away on Hebron’s main street. It strikes me that standing among Thomas’ wall-to-wall collection of eye-popping bric-à-brac — all of it painstakingly organized by color — is not unlike living in Hebron, a place haunted by fragments of its past.

Formerly dubbed “The Brick City” for its long-vanished stone industry, Hebron was once a vibrant farm town for families and business owners. Now, it’s more of a bedroom community, many of whose residents leave early each morning to spend their day  somewhere else. Even for those who live here, Hebron is more a stop-over than a destination. The local Jack & Jill supermarket is still there, but many people buy their groceries at Costco or Walmart, an hour away in the state capital of Bismarck, where I was born and raised.

Thomas has lived in Hebron all her life, and remembers when times were different. “You knew everybody in town,” she recalls. “When you’d go out in the morning, you could even catch men running home from places they weren’t supposed to be.” But things have changed over the years, she says, with the gradual loss of local businesses and a pandemic that isolated an already sequestered town. “Nobody’s friendly,” Thomas says. “They keep to themselves. And when they’re gone, they’re gone. People come here, and when they go, they leave their mess.”

But Hebron’s mood of melancholy seems to lift when Bonnie Brekke drives into town from her family farm, just west of city limits. Brekke runs the Mayer, an old-fashioned, single-screen movie house that has, improbably enough, been beautifully restored to its former glory. The Mayer is one of the few businesses remaining in Hebron, alongside the Pizza Pantry and a newer coffee and lunch spot, Dark Side of the Brew.

But when Brekke flips the switch to light up the theater marquee, this sleepy town comes alive, at least for the night. Streets and sidewalks that have been desolate all day are suddenly bustling with people, seemingly drawn in by the glowing light. As the popcorn machine warms up, a handful of volunteers arrive and Brekke hustles upstairs to pop in a CD of an old film score, letting the music of John Williams or Elmer Bernstein welcome guests into the auditorium. All the parking spots on Main Avenue are suddenly full and Hebron looks something like its old self again.

“I want the theatre to be an anchor,” Brekke tells me as she pours kernels and oil into the popcorn machine that’s been here since the Mayer first opened in 1949. “You get people that come here, they haven’t seen their friends for a while, and you see them talking in the lobby, that kind of thing. They haven’t had a real place to congregate. That’s the anchor that we hope we can supply.”

With movie screens across the country going dark and the theatrical exhibition industry hobbled by a series of unpredictable obstacles, many independent movie theaters are barely scraping by. In much of small-town and rural America, moviegoing is becoming a thing of the past, pushed out by streaming services that have magnified the social isolation of the worst pandemic years. Then there are the theater industry giants in big cities and suburban malls, which have automated, insulated and homogenized the moviegoing experience for most Americans.

If the Mayer isn’t quite a singular remnant of a bygone era — there’s probably a surviving small-town movie theater somewhere near you — it can sure feel that way. Brekke’s commitment to preserving the pleasures of theatergoing has made the Mayer a local sensation, but with a large asterisk looming overhead. The future is uncertain, and every weekend is another battle to get people in the door. As with so many other independent cinemas, if the Mayer can’t attract customers, its legacy will become just another statistic.

The Money Pit

In fact, the Mayer was lost once already. It was built by Arnold Mayer in 1949, who ran it with his wife, Irene, and their three children for 36 years, playing three movies a week and providing Hebron’s lively farm community with access to Hollywood cinema. But after they retired and sold the business in 1985, the new owner closed down the theater shortly afterward, allowing the building to deteriorate.

Brekke calls it “the worst pit I’ve ever seen,” moldy and full of trash. A tenant in an upstairs apartment caused fire damage, she says. “You know how renters can be. They had an oven [in the apartment upstairs] and it ran over and burned, there was junk, and it was so smelly.”

Another reprieve came in 1998, when Bob Spangolo bought the building, partly renovated the theater, and operated the business on and off for the next eight years. In 2010, Bonnie Brekke’s twin brother, Jerry, who owns the Grand 22 Theatres, a multi-screen movie palace 60 miles east in Bismarck, heard that a buyer planned to close the theater permanently and convert the building to another use. Jerry and Bonnie had grown up in Hebron going to the Mayer every week, and Jerry had even worked there as a projectionist when he was in high school. So they bought the place and vowed to restore it to pristine condition.

That was no small undertaking. The building’s windows were leaky, which means big trouble in North Dakota’s frigid winters and scalding summers. The roof needed to be replaced to withstand heavy snow, hard rain and the golf-ball-sized hail of prairie thunderstorms. Gorgeous wall sconces that flank the theater’s interiors were covered in rust from the leaking roof, until Jerry scrubbed them all clean by hand. And then there are the Mayer’s new front doors, sporting curved, half-moon glass reminiscent of a classic theater. It’s a glorious renovation, one that demands constant and expensive upkeep.

“It’s kind of a money pit here,” Bonnie says with a laugh. But the Brekkes take justifiable pride in their work, building on top of the Spangolo family’s full-scale restoration. A frame outside the auditorium door displays five photos of the Mayer’s dilapidated conditions in the ’90s, with the theater caked in rust and mold, a shell of the version I’m standing in now. A paper placard in the middle reads: “ALMOST LOST FOREVER!”

Uptown Saturday Night

Walking into the Mayer on Saturday night, I’m greeted by 14-year-old Oliver Tutorow, a theater volunteer sitting behind the ticket booth inside the doorway. “That will be $8, please,” Oliver tells me. The Mayer does not take credit cards and never has, only cash and — yes! — local checks. Luckily, I’ve come prepared. I haven’t lived in North Dakota since I was 19, but I still bank in a credit union here, and took out $40 before making the drive from Bismarck.

That might have been overdoing it. In New York and other coastal cities, I’m accustomed to inflated prices for popcorn and soda — hey, the moviegoing experience just isn’t the same without them. At the Mayer, freshly popped popcorn, made in that 76-year-old Manley machine, will run you $2, $4 or $6. Sodas and candy are either $1 or $2. With a medium popcorn and a large Diet Coke, my grand total for this showing of “Freakier Friday” is $14.

Movies only screen Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Mayer. Half an hour before showtime on this sunny Saturday afternoon, I’m one of the only patrons in the lobby. “Last night was slow, tonight is really slow,” Bonnie says from behind the counter, flanked by Oliver’s mother, Alexia, another volunteer. Since the Brekke’s reopened the Mayer, they’ve relied on a steady stream of local volunteers to keep the business running, jotting names like Alexia’s and Oliver’s on a paper calendar that sits on a back counter.

Alexia has been volunteering at the Mayer for the last two years, and says that sentimentality played a big part in her signing up. “I grew up in Hebron,” she told me. “I moved away for a while, but moved back a few years ago, so it’s very nostalgic. And it’s fun! If you can help out with something like this to keep it going, I think that’s important.” She says the community should be “thankful” to Bonnie and her brother, because in “the city,” meaning Bismarck, going to a movie by yourself might cost $50, including concessions.

It’s a small town, and some people here don’t leave home often. Still, Bonnie says she’s never had trouble wrangling volunteers.

“We’re like a little family, the volunteers,” Peggy Rolle tells me the next night. A local middle school teacher, Peggy has been working unpaid at the Mayer since it reopened. “I love it. Hebron is my home … I teach at the school, so I get to see the kids and people in a different light when they see me here. And I just know that in a community this size, you need to help out in order to have stuff like this.”

Violet Sease, the beaming retiree who has taken Oliver’s place at the ticket booth for Sunday night’s screening, has lived in Hebron for 50 years and seen the changes firsthand. After growing up in Utah, Sease spent 10 years in Alaska before settling in Hebron with her husband 50 years ago. “When we first moved to town, there were a lot of businesses, and then they died,” Sease says. “Then the oil boom came [in the late 2000s] and things picked up again, but now it’s going the other way.” The Mayer, she says, “is the only thing in town, really.”

When you actually watch a movie at the Mayer, it’s easy to understand why the volunteers are so loyal. While “Freakier Friday” is well short of Oscar material, the viewing experience was tremendous, making a mediocre Disney sequel much more enjoyable than it had any right to be, crisply projected on the theater’s impossibly high screen with booming Dolby sound. An HVAC retrofit now keeps the massive auditorium cool during the summer months, although that hefty expense is dwarfed by the cost of heating the barn-like space in winter. But what makes the Mayer’s moviegoing experience special, it’s the feeling of being surrounded by history and memories while sitting in the auditorium and making new ones of your own.

The modest Saturday night turnout was a disappointment, but as we all shuffled out of the theater to a song by Lindsay Lohan’s fictional rock star, the families, friend groups and one teenage couple on a date who sat near me were talking about the movie, not the sparse attendance. Then there was the customer who didn’t see the movie at all: A man who entered the theater, ordered a large popcorn and took it to go. Bonnie and Alexia knew what he wanted before he got to the counter. I don’t know what his story is, and didn’t ask. But in the rapidly changing exhibition business, every dollar counts.

Staying Alive

According to the media research firm Omdia, there are 5,961 fewer movie screens in the U.S. than there were before the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, 2,638 went dark. Some theaters closed and were sold for development, but many are just sitting empty, eerie ghost-town sites among more active businesses.

You might expect that small-town, independent theaters would be the first ones to close, but several local theaters in sparsely populated North Dakota towns are still holding on, fighting to keep rural Main Streets alive. In fact, it’s been the corporate theaters that lost their shirts in North Dakota. AMC has closed down locations in Bismarck, Devil’s Lake and Grand Forks — three cities with many times the population of Hebron’s 794 residents. It was just business: Keeping them running through pandemic uncertainty was unlikely to yield a profit.

For many small theater owners like the Brekkes, the math is different: The job is their life, and in some cases, their family’s legacy. Closing the doors is pure heartbreak. Adapting to new realities is a key part of the movie exhibition business, and in major metropolitan areas, theaters like the Alamo Drafthouse have turned moviegoing into a heavily incentivized and catered evening out. At Nitehawk Cinemas in Brooklyn, New York, where I live now, concessions include cocktails, mocktails, specialty coffee drinks and full meals. There are special repertory screenings of classic movies and parties built around new releases.

None of that is likely to happen anytime soon in Hebron, or for that matter, in any other part of rural America. Vox recently produced an entire video suggesting that independent cinema is adapting just fine to the post-COVID era, without even mentioning the fate of small-town theaters in the Midwest, where even switching to digital projection was a Herculean undertaking.

When movie studios halted major 35mm film production in the early 2010s, converting the industry standard to digital, small theaters like the Scenic in Lisbon, North Dakota, and the Strand Twin in Grafton, North Dakota, faced a crisis. Installing new digital projectors could cost tens of thousands of dollars that these theater owners didn’t have.

The Strand Twin made it through with community support, and the Scenic’s patrons got the attention of the USDA Rural Development branch, which provided a rural business grant. Both theaters are still in business today, but the Rockford Theatre, whose roof caved in during a particularly heavy snowfall in early 2023, has yet to reopen. The local community has tried to raise the necessary funds, but so far it hasn’t been enough.

Money Never Sleeps

The Mayer opened its brand new front doors in December of 2019. Three months later, they were locked again — for an entire year.

Getting people to come back out to the movies has been a challenge for film exhibitors nationwide, but it was especially tricky in a tiny community like Hebron. Neighbors are socially distanced as it is, spread out among the city’s few paved streets and dirt roads. Then there’s the age question, common to most of rural America. We all become more prone to isolation as we get older, and census data suggests that the median age of Hebron residents is over 45, and the town has many seniors. Most of the people I see at the Mayer on Saturday and Sunday night, however, are teenagers or relatively young parents with children.

“COVID had a real impact for so many local businesses,” Bonnie says. “Some never tried to open again. What you had is people that were used to staying home. They just didn’t want to get out.”

Alexia adds that she organizes the high school plays in the town of Richardton, 15 miles away. “They used to have three plays a year. Before I took over last year, they hadn’t had a single one since COVID. Just restarting all of that, getting people to come out and be involved is tough.”

Making sure the Mayer can screen major nationwide releases, Bonnie says, is its own struggle. To get “Freakier Friday,” she had to agree to show the movie for two consecutive weekends.

“Our booking agent from Florida has had conversations with the movie moguls, telling them that this is not a big operation,” Bonnie says. “He tells them, ‘It’s a small town, they’re trying to keep their theater open, can’t you give them a break?’ Do you know what their idea of a break is? 65% [of the box office gross].” In other words, if the Mayer sells 25 tickets on a Saturday night — generating a total of $200 at $8 per ticket — Disney takes $130 of the box office gross, leaving Bonnie with $70 and whatever she can make from concessions.

Bonnie says she’s grateful for her volunteers, who allow her to save money on her operating costs, but believes that the “big guy” studios don’t understand the effort it takes for a small theater to stay in business: “They should come out and work here in the country, where we’re scratching for every penny.”

On the verge of saying what she really thinks about the major studios, Bonnie changes her mind. “I went to church this morning. I better not! Being a little theater, what are you going to do? You don’t have the power to rebel, and if you don’t pay your film rent, they’ll cut you off. You’ll never get a film from them ever again.”

But the threats to the Mayer even faced unexpected competition close to home, when the local park board tried to start up a series of free movies in the park on Friday nights.

“I blew up,” Bonnie says. “I hit the fan. I thought, you can do a Tuesday, a Monday, a Wednesday. But why did you pick Friday? I wrote them a response, and I just said, ‘I don’t like being stabbed in the back.’ That’s how I started it.”

She told the board “about the extreme amount of pressure a little town theater is under,” she says. “I stood on my own two feet. I thought, you can get knocked down and you can be criticized, but I put a hell of a lot of work into this place. Do you really want to close this little theater down? Is that what you want?”

Bonnie admits she has a temper when she”s tested, especially by “inexperienced young ding-dongs,” but that she was vindicated by community support and the park board’s one botched attempt at putting on a free Friday movie. “But do you know what these idiots did?” she laughs. “They went out on a summer night, with mosquitoes coming out of every little crevice, telling these little kids to sit down in the park. And they showed a movie off of a laptop, on the side of a building.

“If they want to run a Friday night movie, we run them every Friday night. Are they here? And yes, they are here, they live here, but they don’t support the community. They just say, ‘We’ve got a house here, and if you plow the street and the snow is moved, we’re gonna get the hell out of here. We don’t care about Main Street.’ You should support your local businesses. Keep your little town alive. What the heck?”

In the Palace of the King

Jerry Brekke shares his twin sister’s passion, but is more careful about how he expresses it. “This is a sue-happy industry,” Jerry says, gazing out the window of his bordello-red office atop a velvet spiral staircase, overlooking the magnificent lobby of Bismarck’s Grand Theatre. Bonnie told him she’d said something about the extortionate cost of film rent: “I thought, ‘Oh, Bonnie!’”

It’s easy to see why Jerry feels so protective of his legacy. The Grand lives up to its name and then some, a 22-screen multiplex that’s one of the largest theaters in the Midwest and one of the few big movie palaces anywhere that’s independently owned. Jerry got his start just across the Missouri River in Bismarck’s sister city, Mandan, at a theater called the Showboat. But after some landlord problems, Jerry decided to build a classic movie house like the ones he and Bonnie went to as kids. The Grand started with a handful of screens and lobby interiors styled with Old Hollywood memorabilia — including a statue of Charlton Heston as Moses in “The 10 Commandments” that has overlooked a working wishing well since before I can remember — and has kept on expanding.

People’s jaws drop the first time they walk through the doors. For a movie theater this spectacular to exist smack dab in the middle of one of the least populous American states — all of North Dakota has less than one-tenth the population of New York City — defies all logic. Bismarck residents can see all kinds of films here: blockbusters, indies, repertory classics and even the occasional work of local cinema. When I was growing up here, Jerry’s theater provided me with a robust and varied cinema diet. As with the Mayer, simply being here is part of the experience. The Old Hollywood portion of the structure is still there, with Heston’s Moses watching over us, and the newer sections decked in Egyptian-styled decor. If you come out here, catch a movie in theater 15, the Pharaoh’s Theater: You’ll find yourself enjoying a film under the stars, or rather under ceiling lights that mimic the night sky. It is an unparalleled moviegoing experience.

“As a kid, I was always a huge fan of Cecil B. DeMille,” Jerry says. “The pageantry of ‘The 10 Commandments,’ and the beauty of Egyptian architecture. I just thought it was fantastic. And I thought, ‘Why can’t a person build a theater that resembles the old-fashioned ones and use that Egyptian architecture?’ There are a lot of Egyptian theaters in the country, and it does feel like you’re really going somewhere. That’s what theaters of today are missing. They’re just black boxes. I thought, ‘I will never own something like that,’ I can’t stand those theaters.”

The Grand is the furthest thing from a corporate, black box, chain theater that one could conceive. Brekke recently implemented online ticketing, but you still have to pick up your tickets at the box office and present them to a human being. There is still a motorized curtain that opens and closes before the start of every movie, on every screen. And while you can find just about any genre of film playing at the Grand, there is one thing you’ll never see on its screens: advertising.

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“We’ve never done them,” Jerry says. “I had an ad salesman stop in, one that does all the theaters, and he was looking at me like I was a joke. He couldn’t believe that this theater doesn’t do ads. He said, ‘Before I leave, I’m going to have you sign a contract. I know I am. Do you know how much money you’re leaving on the floor?’ You know what I said to him? ‘I couldn’t care less. I don’t care about money.’ And he looked at me like, ‘You’re the first one I’ve ever heard that from.’”

Jerry chalks his stubbornness up to his Norwegian heritage, and I tell him that as someone with Norwegian-German roots myself, I know where he’s coming from. The Brekkes are the type who aren’t afraid to go after what they want and protect what they have, all with North Dakota good nature. In business, it’s rare to find obstinacy mixed with integrity, and I can’t help thinking that’s the formula behind the Grand’s success. “Without the parents Bonnie and I had, I don’t know how I’d be able to stand this business,” Jerry admits. “Watching what they had to put up with in the farming and ranching [industry], it’s a cruel business.”

“I worked alongside my dad, and I worked hard with him, I saw what he was going through,” Jerry continues. “So I thought, ‘My God, the movie business would be so wonderful compared to this.’ Little did I know! Be careful what you wish for. If you don’t get a crop in farming, you don’t have money. It’s the same thing at a theater: If you don’t get an audience, you don’t have any money.”

The Comeback Kid

COVID hit the Grand just as hard as it did the Mayer out in Hebron. Jerry furloughed all his employees and shut down for three months, until the theater was allowed to reopen with strict social distancing rules in place.

“I would come in here every day and work in the office, because you still have to make sure everything is working,” Jerry says. “Bills still had to be paid. And I remember going into Theater 11 and sitting in there in the dark just trying to figure out, what in the world am I going to do with this place, and all the employees that we have? We’ve got 50-some incredible employees, and it was just totally bizarre … I would never have done that last addition had I known what was coming up. COVID has changed everything.”

While the Bismarck metro area has more than 100 times the population of Hebron, it’s still been tough getting people out of their homes and back to the movies.

“It’s mostly the adults that you’re having a real hard time with, the older adults,” Jerry says. “I think they’re starting to come back, because they get bored too, just sitting at home. I don’t care how many streaming channels there are, it’s not the same. The people are coming back, but you have to have the right kind of product. Studios aren’t doing a lot of good adult movies. They’re starting to show up again, slowly but surely. I hope it continues, because that’s a whole audience that’s been forgotten.”

Jerry tells me he nearly lost the Grand in the 1980s, in a local battle over film licensing, against a big corporation that owned another theater in town. “They were ruthless,” Jerry admits. “They warned me that if I ever built any more theaters, they were going to make it very rough for me.” He asks me to leave the specifics out of this story, given the industry’s litigious nature and the lingering trauma of this decades-old battle. “I’m a farm boy from Hebron, for crying out loud,” he exclaims. “I didn’t know anything about this stuff, I had to learn it all on my own.”

In the end, Jerry and the Grand got the last laugh, and the people of Bismarck voted with their dollars against the poorly maintained corporate theater, with its notoriously sticky floors and unpleasant bathrooms. “That was music to my ears,” Jerry says.

“I wanted to save what I was used to when I was a kid for today’s audience,” Jerry says. “You just didn’t find it anywhere else. I loved seeing the curtains open … I’ve been surprised how many [online] comments about the curtains, and the ambiance, and the fact that it’s a throwback theater. There’s that audience out there that appreciates it. Maybe it did work.”

Coming Home

Driving back and forth between Bismarck and Hebron, and spending my afternoons and evenings alongside Jerry, Bonnie, Peggy, Alexia, Violet and even 14-year-old Oliver, I have plenty of time to think about what I’m doing here. Why am I speeding down this interstate at 80 miles per hour, and furthermore, when did the speed limit change to 80? While I was growing up, it seemed like North Dakota never changed. Now, everything is different, practically overnight. At least as I perceive it, there’s a strange coldness that wasn’t here before, ironic given how hot it is in the dog days of summer.

Bismarck has changed a lot; it feels more corporate and less personal — as well as perennially under construction. Every time I go back to visit, it seems that five new franchises have appeared in my absence. Small businesses that used to thrive in energetic local communities are having a difficult time keeping up, and the ripple effect is reaching the community. Bismarck is much larger than it was when I was a kid, but everyone seems much more detached, as though the growth has only magnified a shared loneliness.

I was raised with a keen understanding that I lived very far from the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world felt the same way, if they ever noticed our state at all. But a place like the Grand dulls the bite of that persistent feeling. As Jerry reminds me, this place was designed to be transformative, to bring you into another world, in the same way that movies themselves do. Watching a film together in silence with a group of strangers creates a quiet kinship. This is a shared experience, a journey that everyone who paid the price of admission embarks on together.

Small-town independent theaters are special because they are the antithesis of the movie-theater corporatization that has exacerbated our nagging, national loneliness. Here, excited conversation isn’t drowned out by pre-movie reels, and the screen is revealed with spectacle when the motorized curtain opens, instead of projecting a slew of advertisements from the moment one enters the auditorium. When these locations are forced to close, or run out of town by chains, it doesn’t just hurt the business owners, it damages the increasingly fragile sense of community.

Coming back here helps me understand just how different my life would be if I didn’t have the Grand, and that the young people who live in Hebron today might not have the Mayer forever. The Grand changed my life. I mean that. I forged a love of film there that gave me not only a career but, far more important, a life. Film gave me my friends, strengthened my family and made me understand romance long before I ever knew it myself.

I sit in Jerry’s office and listen to him talk about seeing Randolph Scott and Audie Murphy Westerns with his dad, and I remember the movies my parents brought me to in my most formative years. Eventually, I tell Jerry about one of my favorite memories, from December 2005, when my father brought me here to see Peter Jackson’s “King Kong,” just after the Grand’s first expansion was completed. It was the first film I ever saw in the Pharaoh’s Theater, and watching Jackson’s epic, achingly romantic take on a classic tale under the twinkling stars overhead, with my dad next to me and Christmas right around the corner, was an unforgettable experience I could never have had in a chain theater.

In that moment, I realize I’m not just telling Jerry about this memory. I’m thanking him for it. I have to fight back a few tears suddenly understanding all the things his theater has given me, things I will hold onto as long as I’m on this Earth. We don’t just go to movies for vicarious adventures. We go to make memories, to forge new pieces of ourselves that we can carry with us after we leave the theater and walk back into the real world.

Cinema Paradiso

Justin Barclay, his wife, Kacey, and their four daughters might just have a memory in the making. It’s Sunday night, the final showing of the first of two weekends of “Freakier Friday” at the Mayer. Compared to the night before, the place is absolutely packed. As Bonnie shows me some of the Hebron bricks outside the theater and tries to stop herself from cursing, people keep piling through the theater doors.

“We love coming out here,” Justin tells me when I ask him why he’s driven two hours from New Town, a small city 130 miles due north of Hebron. “We get supper at a restaurant in town, then we come over here for a movie. It’s quiet, and it’s got an awesome feel to it.” The Barclays make the trip every couple of months, and look forward to it every time. “It’s our favorite family adventure that we take,” Kacey adds. “It’s just such a classic movie theater.”

As this tiny, one-screen movie house fills up, the world feels much less divided. It’s like looking into a not-so-distant past that’s still close enough to reach, pulling it back with us into the present.

“I told my grandkids, we’d rather come here than see a movie in Bismarck,” Rita Wallin tells me before the movie starts. She’s in the lobby, laughing with fellow patrons while Peggy fills bags of popcorn and tends to the line that has formed at the concessions stand. Rita points up the stairs nearby, toward the Mayer’s “crying room,” a sound-reduced space with a large glass window that looks out on the auditorium. “We tell the grandkids that Grandpa and Grandma used to take them upstairs to the crying room,” she says, “and that we’d come here as a young couple and bring their mom up there too. My daughter didn’t want to be outside because of the forest fire smoke, so she wanted to go to the movies.” Her daughter wound up going to Bismarck, “but I told her, Grandpa and Grandma are going to the Mayer!”

I can’t help feeling like this crowded house is a positive sign for where independent theaters are headed, not just here, but in hundreds of other small towns. Cinema and community are intertwined, and we need them to survive in this world.

With the audience seated, Bonnie stops for a moment to bask in the sense of accomplishment. Another weekend of screenings is done, one of the last of the summer movie season. She points out the spool of paper tickets in the box office, now coiling on the floor and ready to be counted. We hear people laugh inside the theater, and the noise is much louder than the night before. It’s a successful Sunday, but the job’s not done yet. “Make sure we order more Milk Duds and Junior Mints,” Bonnie tells Peggy. If the Mayer runs out of candy, Bonnie might not ever hear the end of it, though she might have a few choice words for anyone who complained. Inspecting her inventory, she calls back to Peggy one more time: “Oh, and Hot Tamales, too!”

The post Not the last picture show: A small-town theater brings hope to the heartland appeared first on Salon.com.