In Tommy Haines’ and Andrew Sherburne’s 2017 documentary Saving Brinton, Iowa history teach Mike Zahs discovers a treasure trove of old film reels in a farm basement, including rare footage of Teddy Roosevelt and a never-before-seen film by Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage). Zahs then embarks on an international odyssey to get the reels — originally collected at the turn of the 20th century by early motion-picture projectionist Frank Brinton — preserved and shared with the world, taking him from Paris to D.C. to Washington, Iowa.
Only one of those cities is home to the world’s oldest continuously operating cinema. After years as a traveling entertainer, Brinton returned to his home county in Iowa and took ownership of Washington’s Graham Opera House, today called the State Theatre. He began screening movies there in May 1897, and the theater hasn’t stopped since. In July, roughly seven miles east of the State Theatre at the Ainsworth Opera House, Zahs hosted the 27th annual Brinton Film Festival, sharing his found footage with the public once again.
Through no small amount of work, Zahs preserved some of the first moving pictures ever seen by Midwestern eyes — and proved Iowa’s cinematic history goes much further back than 1989’s Field of Dreams.
To wit: The Iowa Theater in Winterset. Built in 1899, the location was originally a one-story grocer and meat market before becoming a live theater and cinema in the early 1900s. (Just in time for the birth of John Wayne in Winterset in 1907.) The theater showed silent films, then talkies; for decades, films were presented on 35mm using carbon arc projectors.
“It was where I spent my weekends,” Rebecca Fons, the Gene Siskel Film Center’s director of programming, told Little Village. “I hung out with my friends without parental supervision, my first kiss was there, I pulled a filling out of my tooth when I was eating Milk Duds.”
But with the transfer of celluloid to digital projection in the early aughts, the Iowa Theater began to flounder financially. The building fell into disrepair. By Memorial Day weekend of 2015, the business closed its doors indefinitely.
“This was also the weekend of my wedding,” Fons continued, “and I got word the theater was shuttered unceremoniously. [My mom and I] sort of instantly looked at each other with a glint in our eyes and said at the same time: we should buy it.”
What followed was an intense restoration project that only the closest of collaborations, like mother and daughter, could weather.
“The revitalization included pretty much taking the whole place down to the studs and then making it stronger as we built back,” Fons admits. “[This included] plumbing, electric, expanding the lobby, bringing back the balcony, making it ADA compliant, installing a digital projector, giving the marquee a face lift, and restoring many of the historic elements, including the gold arch above the screen. We also made the screen retractable so the local community theater could have a home, and opened our doors to the local ballet school [for their annual Nutcracker show]. Two years to the day, and about a million dollars later, we reopened the Iowa.”
The rise, fall and reemergence of the Iowa Theater is a familiar narrative for many nonprofit cinemas in the past 20 years. The Varsity Theater in Des Moines, for example, originally opened in 1938, and by the late ’70s, was known for primarily playing arthouse films. Roughly 50 years later, in 2018, the owners announced they would be closing the theater. Subsequently, the nonprofit Des Moines Film Society stepped in to purchase the Varsity. After a sizable capital campaign and extensive renovations, the Varsity reopened in 2022 and has stayed true to its 1970s roots.
“While [arthouse programming] has always been core to our mission, we see more and more that what our audience is hungry for is not so much any one specific film, but for the opportunity to gather together and connect with fellow film lovers,” said Ben Godar, executive director of Des Moines Film and the Varsity. “Our most successful screenings are consistently those that provide a Q&A, panel conversation or some other opportunity to connect and go deeper than just the film on the screen.”
Though movie theaters have financially suffered with both the advent of streaming services and COVID-19’s impact on audience attendance, the local theater as a site of community, collaboration and conversation is irreplaceable.
Andrew Sherburne, the executive director of Iowa City’s nonprofit FilmScene, admitted, “It hasn’t always been easy since we reopened, but moviegoers are showing up and they’ve reconfirmed what matters — excellent presentation, thoughtful curation, a real sense of community and connection.”
“Our attendance hit an all-time high last year,” he said, even though their team had to “work a little bit harder to make it happen. But that’s OK — it’s the work we love to do, and it connects us more authentically with our audience.”
It’s a labor of love only a select few Midwest cinephiles can truly understand. Fons is among them.
“Now the Iowa Theater is again a place for first kisses [and] girls nights out,” she mused. “A place to see the world on the screen, to eat really good popcorn and escape for approximately two hours — without driving far from home.”
Related events
Buster Keaton Double Feature with live score, Sept. 29, 7 p.m., Varsity Cinema
Sunday Movie Club, last Sunday of the month, 5:30 p.m., the Iowa Theater
Refocus Film Festival, Oct. 17-20, FilmScene and the Englert Theatre
A fundraiser to support a historic Iowa theater
Built in 1910 as an Opera House that entertained residents of West Liberty and those traveling by train, the New Strand Theatre has long been a part of the community’s social fabric. Unfortunately, the movies in town are on hold as the theater’s projector needs replacing. Part of the conversation on the local Iowa cinema landscape involves the challenges of historic preservation (estimated costs are over $55,000 for the project). Check out the “Support New Strand Theatre” GoFundMe page to learn more.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2024 issue.
