BillLindau

Sunrise Theater: Like coming home again

Submitted to The Moore County Independent, December 2006; unpublished
BILL LINDAU
SPECIAL TO THE INDEPENDENT
I lived two blocks from it for about 21 years (off and on), going to the movies in my teens and 20s. Now plenty of people are participating on both sides of the stage at the Sunrise Theater in downtown Southern Pines. Artists as famous as Leon Russell, Leo Kottke, Richie Havens and the Pure Prairie League have performed there.
This quaint little structure closed down as a movie house late in 1981, but the Arts Council of Moore County brought it back from the "dead" before too long. In 1998, a group of preservation-minded citizens calling itself the Sunrise Preservation Group took over the operation of the theater. It became a non-profit organization, taking its funding from on individual and corporate contributions as well as ticket sales from plays, concerts and, yes, movies, among others. Last year, the Sunrise Preservation Group took over the ownership from the Arts Council of Moore County.
The building was constructed in 1898. First it housed a hardware store. It became a movie house in the 1940s, and for close to 40 years it was the primary source of entertainment within walking distance for people in Southern Pines. It was also one of the primary sources of employment for local teens. I'd have sworn about half the kids I knew in high school, plus a few after that, held jobs there.
"Escape from New York," starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine, and "Blade Runner", that science-fiction movie starring Harrison Ford and Darryl Hannah, were about the last two movies that played at the Sunrise Theater before it closed in 1981.
The Sunrise Theater was one of many small downtown cinemas that folded during the past 20 years, and then were reopened to serve as performing arts centers for concerts, plays, ballets and classic and foreign films. Hamlet's old opera house was old arts and entertainment facility that is being "reborn". Asheboro has an old cinema that has been reopened to serve the same purposes.
You don't see too many one-screen movie houses that show motion pictures only. Such businesses seem to have gone the way of LPs and black-and-white photography. Multi-screen cinemas with ear-splitting sound are the thing. For years, moviegoers in Moore County went to Fayetteville, Charlotte or Chapel Hill to see many current movies and quality limited-run films. Now we have two cinemas, including a 10-screen facility, for current movies, and the Sunrise for the foreign and indie films, plus a few popular ones such as "A Prairie Home Companion."
Even in the 1960s, however, the Sunrise Theater had some competition, namely, the Town and Country Cinema. This Aberdeen cinema showed a lot of the big ones that the Sunrise didn't, such as The Dirty Dozen, Romeo and Juliet and Sean Connery's early James Bond films. In 1976 the Town and Country Cinema added a second screen.
In the age of the Internet and DVD/VHS rentals, cinemas have become a risky business. The Town and Country Cinema folded one time, but it has then been revived. Another four-screen cinema folded early in 2003.
But the Sunrise Preservation Group knows how to keep the Sunrise Theater going, with the variety of shows they put on. Last winter I had the pleasure of working as a stage hand in "Deathtrap", a play by Ira Levin produced in February by the Sandhills Theatre Company. For the first week and a half of this month, "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" is showing there.
The Sunrise has kept the stellar attractions coming, with the play "Sylvia" showing in November, followed by the free Thanksgiving Day showing of "The Last Waltz," followed by another movie and then "Best Christmas Pageant." Among the upcoming attractions are the French-made film "Changing Times" (Dec. 11-13), starring Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Gepardieu, "Nutcracker", Dec. 17 and "For Your Consideration", directed by Christopher Guest, Dec. 26-30.
"The Last Waltz" on Thanksgiving night has become an annual event for a lot of rock-music lovers suffering from post-dinner cabin fever. Martin Scorsese's 1978 film centering on the final tour of Bob Dylan's old backup band, The Band, has filled the seats to capacity the past two Thanksgiving Day nights in Southern Pines. It has its share of a regular audience. I saw at least one of my old high-school classmates there, Sam Amato, the past two years. This time he brought his son. Cynthia Leach, Herbie Cameron, Lisa Wylie and Bill Hopkins were among my other old friends who came this year, if not last year.
That movie was a real trip down Memory Lane, with quite a few of the rock-pop-folk icons performing and the movie concluding with Bob Dylan leading a mass singalong with "Forever Young." Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and EmmyLou Harris were among the other performers. One of Neil Young's songs, "Helpless" (1970), always reminds me of one particular party I went to when I was 17.
It was hard to beat as a source of entertainment from the 1940s through the early 1980s. I thought I was one of the oldest people to remember going to the Sunrise as a kid, but one of my old classmates just told me she'd been going there since she was 6 years old (!). Summer Saturday matinees with low-budget monster movies drew scads of kids during that era, and if you lived close to downtown Southern Pines and had nothing else to do on the weekend, the Sunrise was only a brisk walk or a bike ride away.
I'm not really moaning about the good old days, except that if you want to see the big box-office smashes of the week, you have to travel a bit farther. But the Sunrise Theater is experiencing some good new days, with more things to show than simply popular films.
Going through the doors of that beloved place is really like coming back home. For about 30 years my family owned a house on North Ashe Street, and I lived there off and on until late 1987, when I took a job outside Moore County. I still spend a lot of time in Southern Pines, and I still go to a good number of the performances there, either cinematic or live. On my last birthday, I saw Woody Allen's recent film, "Scoop", plus some others I mentioned. The silent classic film "Wings" played there this year. So did the 2005 movie "Merry Christmas", about an impromptu truce on Christmas Day 1914, the first year of World War I.
Last year really gave me a feeling of coming home, of like a second adolescence. Leon Russell and Richie Havens, both of whom I have listened to since I was 17 and 18, put on brief concerts within a month and a half of each other: Russell in early August, Havens in mid-September. I was still living on North Ashe Street when they became popular. A few of my old classmates showed up, too, including Eddie Howell of Charlotte, whose brother Ken is one of the volunteers involved with the Sunrise Preservation Group. Brenda Phelps, my dramatics instructor from Pinecrest High School, also does a lot of work for them.
I cannot imagine any other place that feels more like going back home than the Sunrise Theater in downtown Southern Pines. I hope it continues to host plenty of quality performances and entertainment long after my friends and I are gone.

Labels: Unpublished newspaper columns about Moore County

posted by Bill Lindau @ 5:14 PM