Hello, neighbors, I was lucky and managed to catch part of an interview with Tom Kiefaber, owner of the Senator theater, on WCBM's Tom Marr Show. In case you hadn't heard, the Senator is saved! It got enough donations to pull through and avoid the auction.
A caller asked why if the Senator is getting so many donations, why he doesn't make it a nonprofit. Kiefaber said he hears that suggestion a lot. He says there is a misunderstanding about nonprofit status. If the Senator were to become nonprofit, it could no longer show first-run movies. He says a number of old theaters that closed were reopened by a "Friends of ..." nonprofit organization and show only older movies. I've heard that a nonprofit can't compete head-on with for-profit businesses, because otherwise the tax benefits that a nonprofit enjoys would make for unfair competition. Kathleen tells me that's one reason why her organization, the House Rabbit Society, can sell discount supplies only to its members. If the HRS were to sell to the public, then it would be competing with for-profit retail stores, which wouldn't be allowed under the HRS nonprofit status. Kiefaber went on to say that the Senator does have nonprofit educational activities, like showing movies to school children as part of an educational program. There either already is or soon will be a nonprofit partner organization to the Senator to which you can make deductible contributions that will go to support the educational activities. He said this will indirectly help the Senator's bottom line by bringing in more viewers. A caller asked about why the Senator doesn't have more arts films. Kiefaber said that "clearance" contracts are part of the reason for this. A "clearance" is an agreement that one theater has with a distributor to disallow other movies from being shown at another theater within the same region. Kiefaber said that for 12 years since the General Cinema in Towson opened, the Senator could never show any movie that was playing on any screen of the Towson GC. He said he knows that The Charles is a "sacred cow", but the fact is that The Charles uses clearance agreements to ensure that only it can show the arts films that it gets. He says that a Landmark theater is going to open in the Inner Harbor later this year, and that he suspects The Charles will experience the problem of clearances from the other side. This part of the discussion also went into how clearance agreements are a major reason why the Senator has had a lot of difficulty over the years. Kiefaber says that clearance agreements are an anti-competitive business practice that were developed by chain cinemas to drive traditional single-screen theaters out of business by depriving them of a variety of movies to screen. He said that when people saw the old cinemas going out of business, they assumed that it was economic Darwinism, that the old cinemas just couldn't compete. In fact, it was death by asphyxiation. A caller asked whether the Senator could get more movies by asking further in advance. Kiefaber said he asked to get Little Miss Sunshine far in advance (I think he said two months before distribution was announced) and that he still couldn't get it. Kiefaber was asked if the Senator will still show old movies. He said that they missed doing it this year, because of the financial difficulties. But they will go back to running 1939-style movie nights where you can see "Casablanca" or "It's a Wonderful Life" for a quarter. Kiefaber says the other night, they put a film can in the lobby of the Senator to collect contributions for the SOS fund. He said he felt like George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" because so many people were throwing in money and checks. --Emil -- Emil Volcheck [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://acm.org/~volcheck _______________________________________________ Chat mailing list Chat@charlesvillage.info http://charlesvillage.info/mailman/listinfo/chat_charlesvillage.info