“I just realized I don’t even have a theatre in my own hometown,” laughs Gary Moore, founder and chief executive officer of Premiere Cinema Corporation. Although he’s based where his enterprise began in Big Spring, Texas, “a sleepy community located halfway between Dallas and El Paso on Interstate 20,” you can nevertheless hear a tinge of nostalgia in his voice. “I can still see the Ritz over there on Main Street from my office window,” he confides.

Moore sold the Ritz, his first theatre, “when Cinemark moved into town”, and the 1929 cinema has been closed for years now, but the city has announced plans to revive the venue that may include showing movies again.

“In 1985,” Moore reminisces. “I was walking past what was left of the old downtown Ritz Theatre. It was closed and boarded up, with the marquee barely hanging on rusted brackets. ‘Believe it or not,’ I said to a friend who was with me at the time, ‘this was the most beautiful theatre back when I was a kid. I worked here three years as a projectionist and it was the best time of my life.’” Moore continues his reverie for Film Journal International: “This was the place where I had my first date...Cindy Day. It’s where I saw Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s where we used to turn in our milk cartons for movies every Saturday morning.”

Moore says taking on the Ritz Theatre was more than a labor of love. “It was like having a time machine and being able to exhume childhood memories and relive them again; it was one of my greatest thrills… It was sad to see the Ritz in shambles. I just felt really compelled to buy it and reopen it; it was a good fit.”

Within three weeks, Moore had purchased the building and begun “the process of renovating it to its glory days.” In December 1985, “crowds lined up for two blocks” to see Rocky 4. “I stood in the back of the auditorium and watched every show that week, making sure everyone was enjoying the theatre. I must have seen James Brown singing ‘Living in America’ 40 times… But that was all it took for me, I’d been bitten all over again by the movie bug.”

Moore professes to live by “something beyond just a love of movies,” having “an affinity for the theatre itself.” Even as a child, “I went to extremes just to hang out in the theatre. When I was 12, I would hop the Greyhound bus and ride 70 miles to Sweetwater where my Uncle Don managed the Texas Theatre for United Artists. It was a cavernous single-screen art-deco theatre on the courthouse square with a balcony, stage, velvet drapes…the whole deal. I would work there during the summer and get paid 25 cents for every chair I reupholstered, plus keep any change I found hidden in the seats: I was in high cotton.” Immediately, Moore explains this as Texas talk for “being in the money, a reference to a good cotton crop.”

Although he was “too small to reach the top magazine of the projector and had to stand on a wooden Coke bottle crate,” Moore also learned what he calls “the art of projection.” Within a year, his uncle had taught him how to run Simplex E-7s and carbon arc lamphouses. “I’ll never forget my first solo, I was sweating bullets… For six hours I never took my eyes off the projector, I checked my threads every two minutes to make sure they were right before turning on the motor. I would have probably had a heart attack if the film had broken and would have never gotten into the business.”

By the time Moore turned 15, word had gotten back to the theatre operator in Big Spring. “J.Y. Robb of Robb & Rowley United Artists fame talked to my mother and wanted her permission for me to come to work for him,” Moore explains. “She was just glad to get me out of the house, so that became my first full-time job, making two dollars an hour. I never said this to Mr. Robb,” he now admits, “but I would have worked there for free just to run the movies.”

Equally fondly, Moore recalls every visit when the Ritz’s technician—Bobby Pinkston, now at Dolby—came in from Dallas. “I’d check myself out of school early just to rush down and bask in his knowledge of projectors. I would pass the hours on my shift taking apart spare Simplexes and putting them back together until I figured out how to do it without having too many parts left over.” For Moore, “it was the best job a kid could ever have. It was like flying to the moon every night; I never wanted to leave the theatre at the end of the shift.”

Moore did eventually leave the Ritz and his job as projectionist behind. Soon after graduating from high school, he found himself “knee-deep in the consumer-electronics industry” instead. Founding a microwave communications company in 1981 and brokering satellite technology throughout the Southern U.S. and Mexico “was a huge step for me and a complicated business actually. There were no business models to emulate or history to repeat, so it was trial by fire every day.” After three years, the flames were fanned so high that he sold the company and took time off for traveling.

Ever since returning to his roots at the Ritz, Moore has remained grounded in Big Spring, although he still travels the world in search of the best materials. A trip to the Dolphin Seating manufacturing plant in China, for instance, extended to several weeks “making sure that our custom-designed seats came out perfectly.” Now Premiere has in-house development and manufacturing divisions that make Moore and his team “somewhat of a one-stop cinema shop.” In addition to consulting on cinema design and construction, “we make 35mm projectors, consoles and platters along with lenses, draperies, screens, splicers, even poster cases.” (For additional vendors and service providers, see our sidebar.)

“Whether its fabric from China, quartz tile from the Czech Republic or custom-designed vinyl wall coverings for accent splashes,” Moore takes pride in finding “ways to blend surface textures, colors and architectural layers into our Premiere theatres.” To make them “fun and interesting” he tries to put himself “into the blueprints,” he explains. “Looking around every corner of the floor plan, I envision what the customers will see once the theatre’s complete. I think I pretty much drive my architects nuts telling them to put a canopy here, extend this soffit, widen this corridor, tile this wall, change this color, add columns here.” In fact, the joke around Premiere is that Moore always shows up fully prepared at a theatre because he usually sees something that he wants to change. “Guilty,” he admits laughing. “I have been known to carry a tape measure even if I’m just seeing a movie with friends. There’s always a wall that needs something done to it to make it more entertaining.”

Before the entertainment can begin, be it on the walls or up on the big screen, Premiere has to find the right location. “Our growth has come from both real estate acquisition and mall leases,” reviews Joel Davis, the company’s VP of operations. “Building from scratch and from the ground up is easier on many levels than retrofitting an existing location, but we’ve done our share of retrofitting tough mall spaces also and made them into very nice stadium theatres.” As a case in point, he illustrates the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando, Florida. As part of that redesign, “several operators had looked at the space made available between existing retail and said it couldn’t be done. We actually designed about 70 different potential floor plans for the space and eventually figured out how to build a 14-screener by raising the lid of the mall. We incorporate new ideas in every new theatre; there are no two Premieres alike.”



Premiere’s expansion has been exceptional of late, with 50 new screens in four locations and three states throughout 2008, and 48 more in the works. “We’re not on a war path to grow for the sake of growing,” Davis insists. “Screen count isn’t important to us, what’s important is making sure the locations we have are as good as they can be. We like to grow using our existing cash flow so we stay pretty much debt-free, which helps the boss sleep at night when things get slow during the fall.”

Davis feels another advantage is that “Premiere consults a lot with developers on potential new cinema sites and provides market research and feasibility studies to help them make informed decisions.” Almost every developer wants a theatre in his center whether it is needed or not, Moore adds. “They want the traffic that theatres create. Every customer that we generate in a destination visit translates into retail and restaurant sales for their center. We look at lots of locations, but a good portion of our time is spent convincing them that another theatre in the market is not needed. Oversaturation doesn’t benefit anyone.”

How times have changed. Back in the ’80s, Moore remembers getting much resistance from those very same shopping centers. “They’d complain about bad experiences they’d had with theatres such as hogging their parking and attracting undesirable kids and skateboarders. They’d complain about chewing gum on the sidewalks and all kinds of reasons not to have a theatre. When they did do one, they’d position the theatre at the back of the center out of sight so it wouldn’t negatively interact with their retail.”

Given Gary Moore’s own intense interaction with those not-so-simple Simplexes, our readers might be wondering if that could negatively impact Premiere’s transition to digital projection. (This author did not ask Moore if he ever took apart one of his Barcos.) “Not the case,” he responds, emphatically citing his decision to move forward with Cinedigm’s phase-two rollout. “Last year, we built two completely mezzanine-less theatres” in Alabama, one near Birmingham and the other near Mobile, making them “perhaps the world’s first multiplex cinemas incorporating d-cinema directly into their architecture.” And putting the accompanying bits and bytes front and center, we might add.

Premiere’s Digital Command Center, as it has come to be known, is a “high-security, glass-enclosed chamber that not only houses all the racks of digital servers, automation systems and sound equipment, but actually puts them on display for the public to see.” Joel Davis has also observed that when customers walk by, “every one of them stops to get a better look at it. Kids especially are going, ‘Wow, it’s like the Starship Enterprise!’ It’s something they’ve never seen in a movie theatre before.” Moore agrees, “What we’re doing is putting a face on an otherwise invisible technology. By seeing it in this format, the public becomes aware of the difference and advantages of digital versus film, and we believe that will translate into improved customer loyalty.”

Nonetheless, like most if not all exhibitors, Moore believes “wrapping your arms around cost versus benefit” is the main obstacle to overcome in going digital. “We were never confused about the benefits of the technology,” he assures. “What we found cryptic, however, were the integration models and the cost disparity between digital and film. For a company like Premiere that owns all its film equipment outright, it’s natural to question the logic of spending millions to replace it when it’s really not broken.”

Once again, Moore looks at the past to draw his conclusions for the future. Both multiplex cinemas and stadium seating were “innovations that came along well into what was already a mature exhibition industry,” he has found. “Both were intimidating and daunting at first as well. But they enhanced the experience for our customers, and ultimately exhibitors reinvented themselves by adding these amenities. The industry sometimes forgets that it overcame those economic obstacles, which were extreme. I think that digital is just another one that the industry will successfully embrace. It’s not a question of whether everyone will go to digital, it’s a question of when and making sure it’s done responsibly. It’s got to work for everyone involved or it won’t work for anyone.”

For now, Premiere Cinema Corp. is concentrating on their next new two mezzanine-less rollouts, a 20-plex and an 18-plex in Texas. Along, of course, with converting all of its existing locations to 100% 2K DLP Cinema by year’s end. “We’ve done the beta testing for two years now and made our decision to go digital,” Gary Moore concludes. “So, from a commitment level, I’d say we’ve pretty much taken the ‘ham-and-eggs’ path. With an egg the chicken is involved in the process, but with ham the pig is pretty much committed. I think that makes us digital ham.”

Gary Moore’s Favorite Things
Favorite Theatre: “Besides Premiere, the Majestic in downtown San Antonio. I wish we could still build them like that.”
Movie Star You’ll Watch Any Day: Robert Downey, Jr., Nicole Kidman
Favorite Line: “Hollywood screenwriter Wilson Mizner once said, ‘The real movie heroes are the ones in the audience.’ It’s become our mantra.”
Favorite Movie: “Almost always the last one I saw.”
Hobbies: Theatre design, popcorn tasting
Nightmare Opening: “1998, when a fire broke out in a furniture store adjoining our theatre on opening day. We used all of our fire extinguishers putting it out before the fire department ever arrived; the newspaper called it a ‘hot’ Premiere movie opening event.”
Best-ever Opening: “A couple of thousand people lined up three hours in the rain prior to opening events. We sent runners out with free hot dogs and drinks to keep them entertained.”

Premiere Vendors: Horizon, DTS, Strong, Simplex, Dolphin, Tempo, Gold Medal, Coca-Cola, Dippin Dots, Ricos, Tri-State, Screenvision. Digital equipment includes Barco projectors (DP1500 and DP2000) and both Doremi and GDC servers.