In Newberry, a town in the middle of the Upper Peninsula, the days of the Tahqua Land Theater could be numbered.
John Carlisle of the Detroit Free Press reports that Fred Dunkeld is the owner, the ticket taker and the film projectionist for the movie house built 85 years ago. He believes that the small-town folks deserve a movie house like big cities.
Carlisle writes:
Four decades ago, Dunkeld found it abandoned and shuttered, overrun by rats and clogged with coal dust. It was for sale.
And he wanted it.
At first he just wanted to own a business, to have a source of income. “And then I got looking at it,” he said.
He was at the back of the theater one day after he’d bought it, taking it all in as the daylight poured in through the reopened doors. “I remember sitting back here on an old wooden box, a milk crate, saying, ‘Wow, there’s more to this place than I realized.’ ”
Carlisle writes that he spent a fortune fixing it up, and moved into the apartments upstairs. He had an office next door for his real estate job, and put income from that into the theater.
Carlisle writes:
A few years ago, the Hollywood studios that supply movies to theaters announced they were soon switching from film to digital. The big theaters, such as the multiplexes with a dozen screens, handled the cost of the switch easily. But hundreds of small, independent movie houses around the country have struggled to come up with the tens of thousands of dollars needed for the new equipment. Some have succeeded. Some have failed and closed forever.
Dunkeld tried twice to raise the funds and fell far short both times.
Carlisle writes that each film he gets could be his last, unless a miracle comes along and he gets the money to convert to digital.
"About all I do is buy a lottery ticket every week, which I know isn’t going to work,” he told Carlisle. “But it helps you sleep.”
