Restored Brattle back from the brink

Upgrade and fund drive solidify screen's fan base

Patrons gathered outside the Brattle Theatre on Wednesday evening. On shaky financial grounds after a restoration just before 9/11, the theater again thrives. (John Bohn/Globe Staff)

The interior of the Brattle Theatre is as distinctive as its exterior is nondescript.

Tucked away in a barn-shaped brick building in Harvard Square, its entrance buried down a flight of stairs off Brattle Street, the theater would be hard to find if not for the single-poster billboard standing guard at the top of the stairs.

Upon making their way through the pint-sized lobby and up a steep, winding stairway, moviegoers at the Brattle discover the red stage curtains, neon analog clock, scuffed wood floors, and niche-like balcony of a well-known performance space that has been in operation since 1890.

Today, this wholly independent movie theater - one of a dwindling breed in this country - is drawing regular patrons with its careful selection of classic, foreign, and art-house films. And two years after a crucial fund-raising drive, the theater has attained enough financial stability, its managers say, so that they can focus on programming and the growing donor base rather than on mere survival.

The theater has been led by a series of groups and individuals since Harvard students Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey bought the building in 1949 and installed a rear screen projection system - still in use today - that converted the hall from a live theater into a movie house.

Most recently, two former Brattle employees, Ned Hinkle and Ivy Moylan, formed the Brattle Film Foundation in 2001 and assumed responsibility for the theater's programming and operations.

The theater had gone through "varying phases of being successful and unsuccessful," Hinkle recalled, "but by the time we took over, it was facing so many challenges from competing outlets for film viewing that it was really struggling." Instead of dealing with the difficulties of running a for-profit independent theater, Hinkle and Moylan created a nonprofit foundation. Still, they ran into an unexpected set of challenges almost immediately.

"We renovated the theater right after we took over in the summer of 2001, and then we had essentially no audiences for six months after Sept. 11," said Hinkle, who adds that the 9/11 attacks also "had repercussions nobody would have expected in terms of funding drying up for cultural nonprofits."

The foundation's renovations, which included the installation of new seats throughout the house, as well as a complete overhaul of the sound system ("It had always been a mono sound system pretending to be stereo - split-channel mono - but we put in a Dolby stereo system to give us more power behind the sound and the subwoofer," Hinkle explained) incurred expenses that placed a drag on its finances for the next four years.

In 2005, Hinkle said, "we initiated a campaign that was essentially a 'Save the Brattle' campaign. It was about bringing us to a level of sustainability and financial security we hadn't had since we took over."

The success of that campaign, which brought in $400,000 in donations and theater memberships, has allowed the foundation to continue the theater's tradition of "showing films that people really wouldn't otherwise be able to see on the screen," he said. Today, annual attendance is 50,000 to 60,000, and the Brattle has an operating budget of $700,000.

Sean Coyle, a 30-year-old Rockland resident who confessed to having left his seat only once to get a candy bar during a recent eight-hour, four-movie Monty Python marathon, echoed Hinkle's assessment of the Brattle's appeal.

"They've got a great selection of movies and indie films," said Coyle, who checks the theater's website every Friday to find out what movies he can "see on the big screen."

Coyle, whose first show at the Brattle was a Halloween screening of the Bruce Campbell B-movie "Evil Dead II" five years ago, also attends many of the theater's special events.

"I'll definitely be back for 'Grindhouse' and for Bugs Bunny in February," he said, referring to the theater's January screenings of Quentin Tarantino's latest oeuvre and its annual Bugs Bunny film festival during the February school break.

"The Brattle is great for when you want to see a movie with people who really want to see a movie," said Massachusetts College of Art student Nicole D'Arco, who swung by the theater on a balmy January day to pick up its winter calendar. Flipping it open, she smiled. "People look at the calendar and think about what they want to watch," she said, adding, "I circle my movies over tea."

"There are still plenty of screening rooms across the country where you can see the kinds of films that the Brattle plays," Hinkle said, "but most of them are associated with universities or museums."

While such screening rooms tend to emphasize film "as an art" rather than as a "popular art form," the Brattle deliberately occupies more accessible cultural territory, acting as a bridge between the familiar and the unknown in the world of film, Hinkle noted.

"We have popcorn, show trailers, and have seats with cupholders in them," he said. "There's a point of reference for people; we're a movie theater."