Anything But Regal! (Page 1 of 2)

August 22, 2007
By: Knoxville Voice

By Brian Ambroziak

Over the past months, anyone who has battled the extreme heat and ventured downtown to Gay Street has witnessed a crisis of epic proportion, an architectural blunder in Knoxville’s amazingly successful attempt to reclaim its unique and historic downtown. I am talking, of course, about the construction of the new Regal Cinema — the Riviera.

To understand how this could have happened,, we must travel more than 100 years back in history to the origins of the moving picture when on Dec. 28, 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumiere premiered their cinematograph in the basement lounge of the Paris Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines. Audiences sat in a state of panic as a projected train seemingly pulled toward them into the station at La Ciotat. Surprisingly, the Lumieres could not imagine what the future held for their newly invented optical device. As they saw it, their machine merely captured what anyone could go out on the street and see for him or herself.

Thomas Edison would soon seize upon the potential of the moving image with the introduction of his “Greatest Marvel,” the Vitascope, an invention that expanded upon the Lumieres’ early vision and was soon playing to large audiences around the country. During the Great Depression, ticket sales reached an unprecedented level, which since have never been reached, as the movie theater provided an escape for the masses and a way to put their troubles on hold for a couple of hours.

With the introduction of the television in the years following World War II, the moving image entered our living rooms and increasingly became our culture’s “second window.” Purchases of television sets increased dramatically from one-half of a percent of U.S. households in 1946 to 56 percent in 1954, demonstrating our addiction. In June of 1956, the first remote controller, “Lazy Bones”, entered the American home, and by 1963, nine out of 10 homes owned a television. Finally, dinner could be served in the “family room” without interruption; Norman Rockwell’s Sunday dinner was almost a thing of the past, and American culture had sunk to an all-time low… or finally hit its stride?

In 100 years, the moving image had been transformed from a mere novelty off the crowded Parisian Boulevards to an obsessive form of entertainment, whose success as a medium is inversely proportional to the act of thinking. Amidst the demise of Main Street USA and the mass exodus to suburbia, our new window to the world operated as a mode of distraction and provided a release from the ever-increasing American workday.

To compete with the influence of television and to take advantage of the vast tracks of land now available away from the decaying city centers, the multiplex was born — a cacophony of cheap materials, bad design and stale popcorn.

Unlike Wal-Mart, however, the multiplex could not offer an inferior product at a lesser price. The Hollywood studio fee structure, one that is front-loaded to receive a higher percentage in the first week of a movie’s showing, along with the perception that movies showing on multiple screens seldom sell out, forced an increase of more than 200 percent in ticket prices since 1980. An article in Forbes magazine in 2001 listed that three of the top five movie chains in this country, Carmike, Loews Cineplex Entertainment and United Artists, had filed for bankruptcy, and Regal Cinema and General Cinema Theaters were “in trouble.” Not surprisingly, the innovative business model of increasing supply to accommodate a decreased demand was not effective. Something had to give! Perhaps it was time to rethink the current state of the movie house altogether.

It seemed as if the story of our obsession with the moving image had reached its lowest point until on April 14, 2005, city of Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam announced that a movie theater in downtown Knoxville was a “go.” The new movie theater was put forth as a strategic investment that would help to repay the debt associated with the Knoxville Convention Center, create pedestrian access from the State Street garage to Gay Street and Market Square, and ultimately only cost the city’s Industrial Development Board $3 million, with a smaller investment coming from Regal.

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