Savoy Theater co-owner Rick Winston of Calais checks the film in the projection booth. Photo: File photo by Stefan Hard

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

Rick Winston, co-owner of Montpelier's Savoy Theater, says he can't remember a time when he wasn't a film buff.

As a kid growing up in Yonkers, N. Y., in the 1950s, he would be glued to the television set for hours at a time, watching old black-and-white movies with his parents, forging a life-long fascination with film.

He realized the emotional power of film when, as a boy, he watched his mother cry when Spencer Tracy died at the end of 1937's "Captains Courageous."

As a Columbia University student in the late '60s, Winston frequented New York's art-movie houses on the Upper West Side. (His wife-to-be/future business partner, Andrea Serota, meanwhile, was hanging out at Lower East Side cinemas. The two would meet in Vermont ultimately. Their love of film, so the story unfolds, would lead to their marriage in 1983.)

Winston finished college at the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English, but also took in that city's wonderful film scene. (Pauline Kael, venerable film critic for the New Yorker, for example, got her start there.) Though a student of film, he says he never got the bug to make movies or become a film critic.

Instead, Winston moved to Vermont in the fall 1970. Then in 1972 he started Lightning Ridge Films, showing classic films at Montpelier's Pavilion auditorium on Friday nights. In 1980, at age 33, he opened the small Savoy Theater on Main Street, which has become a beacon for movie goers looking for off-beat and artistic fare in central Vermont.

"It had been my dream for a while to have a theater," Winston says from the Savoy Theater's second-floor office, which is decorated with a ragtag assortment of movie posters — Charlie Chan, Monty Python's "Life of Brian," "I Married A Communist." There's also some ephemera, such as 3-D glasses, old ads and newspaper clippings.

In his office Winston seems both relaxed and preoccupied.

He's having a problem downstairs with the projector and is awaiting a repair call. The phone rings, but it's a woman who wants the details, all of them, about this evening's fare: "Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont," a movie that is doing so-so, he says. Its predecessor, "Little Miss Sunshine," enjoyed a five-week run, and was one of the theater's bigger successes, Winston says.

The biggest success, however, goes to "Fahrenheit 911," Michael Moore's irreverent film about the Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq after the September 11 terrorist attack.

"That was a case by itself. We opened it on the day that it opened nationally. We got to take advantage of maximum publicity. We sold out every single show for the first week and a half, which has never ever happened before, and I don't think it will again." As for the flops? Winston says he tries to block those out after a while.

"Last fall we had two very disappointing films: Bill Murray in 'Broken Flowers,' and then right on the heels of that, the David Cronenberg film 'A History of Violence.' We had the unusual experience of showing a movie that had just opened and was number eight nationally, and hardly anybody was showing up."

This up-and-down is but one of the challenges facing a single-screen independent theater, he says.

"When the time came to actually do it (open an art theater in Montpelier), the idea of having a twin theater was not in my mind. … that was one or two years in the future. As the '80s wore on into the 90s, it became obvious that the industry was very much becoming a multiplex theater industry. With a one-screen theater you constantly have to ask: 'Okay. Does this (movie) have enough pizzazz for another week? If I can't play this for another week, am I going to be in a hole?'"

In the last 10 years, Winston says, the gray area between what is a commercial film and what is an art film has gotten grayer and grayer.

"I think things really changed in the '90s with films like "Howards End," "The Crying Game," and "Shakespeare in Love." All of a sudden there's this category that didn't exist before — the really classy commercial film that sometimes is available to us, sometimes not. It depends on who the distributor is and what kind of relationship we've had."

And then there's the audience itself.

"Montpelier is one of those pockets like Northampton, Mass.; Waterville, Maine; Missoula, Montana. There's a certain ethos and consciousness. People will be very interested in things having to do with the environment, with spirituality. They generally do well here."

The flip side, he says, is that this same audience reacts strongly against films that have violence and an edginess to them. "People around here are not interested in edgy as a rule," he says.

Fortunately, not all audiences think this way – especially those who attend the 9-year-old Green Mountain Film Festival.

The festival, which has been under the auspices of the Savoy Theater in varying degrees since 1997, has grown by 10-15 percent each year, Winston says; and its operations committee is determined to keep it small. Why? "To retain our sanity for one thing," he says with a laugh. "The festival seems just the right size for a town of this size. The other big part is that Andrea and I, especially, have to run a business in the meantime and devote a good part of our energies to the theater and the video store (Downstairs Video, which opened in 1989)."

"Sometimes I'm not terribly optimistic about making a go of art-house cinema. It's the same as in the classical music world: The audience is getting older and less adventurous.

"I knew people who would be the first on their block to see the new Antonioni movie or Fellini movie or Godard movie in the '60s. Now they want a little more guarantee they're going to have a good time."



Patrick Timothy Mullikin writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.