Reel devotion Belfast couole’s chance venture into theater business now a full-blown love affair

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Never in their wildest dreams did Michael Hurley and Therese Bagnardi of Belfast ever think they would own a movie theater, let alone two.

A spur-of-the-moment decision may have gotten the local couple into the movie business, but their venture has grown into a full-blown celluloid love affair.

“We don’t have kids, we have movie theaters,” said Bagnardi. “And movie theaters come with lots and lots of kids.”

Hurley, 52, and Bagnardi, 45, have owned the three-screen Colonial Theatre in Belfast since 1995 and hosted the grand opening of the fully renovated two-screen Temple Theatre in Houlton in November. Both businesses are thriving and have helped bring new jobs and life to their downtowns.

“We’re strong believers in downtowns. They are the heart of any community,” said Bagnardi. “Belfast is a beautiful city and Houlton is a beautiful town. They both are real community spots. People come downtown, see a movie, meet other people, walk around, check out the stores. Theaters keep downtowns alive.”

Hurley, who also is mayor of Belfast, described the movie business as completely removed from any business he’s ever been involved in. He said he started out learning the ropes from people who had been in the business since the 1920s and that the industry has a cast of characters out of a screwball comedy.

Despite those characters, it is a business based on trust and a business that is harder than it looks, he said.

“It is not just turning on the lights, making the popcorn and showing the movie,” said Hurley. “It is endlessly more complicated than you would ever imagine. As is any business that looks easy.”

Hurley said it took awhile for him to pick up on the nuances of the business, but he now feels he has a pretty good handle on it after years of study and missteps.

“This is a completely verbal business. All the deals are done over the phone. People hold you to your word and vice-

versa, we hold them to their word,” said Hurley. “There are no middlemen; you’re dealing directly with the studios, so you have to know when to hold or give ground. It’s a relationship that’s based on trust, but you also have to carry a big stick. It’s confusing if you don’t know it, but once you understand it, it works.”

While Hurley busies himself with wading through the hundreds of movies offered by the studios each year, Bagnardi handles the daily operations of the theaters.

Both the Colonial and Temple offer first-run movies. Tickets are $6 for adults, $3.50 for children, and $4 for seniors. All matinees are $3.50.

Sometimes the couple will premiere a movie at the Temple and then bring it to Belfast a few weeks later. Other times Belfast will get the opening followed by Houlton. The movies are shuttled back and forth, with the transfer point somewhere along Interstate 95 in Old Town.

The films run the gamut from blockbusters to the occasional art film. Each theater featured its own minifestival of art films this past winter, interspersing one or two showings of a film among the regular run movies each week. Each studio has its own rules about the time and number of days a movie must be shown, so it takes some negotiating to get the leeway to break into those showings with more obscure films.

While some movies have fared well in one community, but not the other, both the Colonial and Temple audiences seem to be big on family entertainment. The couple have had eight years to judge the audience in Belfast but only a few months to get a take on Houlton. Hurley said that after a year or so he figures to have a better handle on the kind of movies to show in Houlton.

“They are different markets and it takes time to gain that knowledge,” said Hurley.

With all of this newfound knowledge of the movie business, Hurley also developed a Web site three years ago – www.bigscreenbiz.com – that has become a popular Internet link used by theater owners around the world.

The couple have put a lot of effort into getting to this point, but their start in the movie theater business eight years ago was rather haphazard.

“We weren’t sitting at home dreaming about a movie theater,” recalled Bagnardi. “We didn’t even go to the movies all that much.”

Hurley was juggling a number of small businesses and Bagnardi was having moderate success running a decorative painting company when they “fell” into the movie business by chance.

“We were home one night and Therese was talking about trying something different,” said Hurley. “I opened up the paper and there was an ad for the Colonial. I said, ‘Why don’t you buy the Colonial’ and bang, three days later we owned a theater.”

They were struck by a similar inspiration in early 2002 when they noticed a story out of Houlton in the Bangor Daily News about the final days of the Temple Theatre. The couple drove to Houlton, fell in love with the town and left determined to save the community’s only theater.

“Going up there we knew it was a big town, but we never realized how beautiful it was,” said Hurley. “We looked at it as a challenge. Any town that has a Wal-Mart and doesn’t have a movie theater should hang its head in shame. If you have enough people to have a Wal-Mart, you have enough to have a theater. We wanted to give Houlton a nice theater.”

It was quite an undertaking. The Temple had fallen into disrepair over the years and was a shabby shell of the way it looked in its heyday in the 1940s. Hurley and Bagnardi embarked on a floor-to-ceiling renovation with fresh paint, new seats, new marquee, revamped bathrooms, lobby and concession stand.

Bagnardi is the artistic one, and her eye for design is quite pronounced at the Colonial. Rehabilitating the Temple proved to be a much more daunting task. The couple rented an apartment in town, hired some local contractors, donned their old clothes and began the arduous task of reversing years of neglect.

“We had some good features to work with at the Colonial, so we were able to jazz it up,” she said. “But the Temple had nothing except some old light fixtures I found out back. It was quite a job, but we think it looks quite nice and a lot of people agree.”

Because it was so run down, community support for the Temple had faded to black, said Hurley.

“It had reached the point where we basically were dealing with a lost generation of people who did not go to the movies,” he said. “We had to bring them back, and it’s working. We’ve got a great manager in Tony Jay, a local guy, and a great, great staff. They know the community and they know the kids. Right now we’re ahead of projections. The Temple is doing better than we did when we had two screens at the Colonial.”

When the couple bought the Colonial, the theater already had been converted from a single-screen movie house to a twin-screen. The original screen remained in the rear of the theater, and Hurley and Bagnardi got the inspiration to tunnel below the existing theater to create a third screen called Dreamland. All three screens regularly show to packed houses.

With its distinctive rose, purple, green and red exterior and a giant fiberglass elephant on the roof, the Colonial is a downtown Belfast landmark. Local theatergoers are enamored with the Colonial’s Art Deco feel and Bagnardi’s quirky design elements.

When folks in Belfast learned the couple had expanded their venture to Houlton, it wasn’t long before they started asking Hurley about arranging a trip to The County to check out the couple’s handiwork.

Hurley and Bagnardi weren’t about to let their fans down. On a recent Saturday, more than 50 movie lovers bordered a chartered bus in Belfast for a day trip to Aroostook County for a day at the movies and lunch in some local establishments. The “Rolling Tundra Reviewers” were joined in Houlton by local attorney Dick Rhoda, who hopped onto the bus to serve as tour guide and historian.

“This Mike Hurley and Therese, they’re something else,” Rhoda remarked during his “Around and About Houlton Tour.” “Mike wanted to revive the Temple and he did it. Mike wanted sun today and he got the sun today. What they have done with the Temple is wonderful. People were desperately happy to have it opened. I wish we had more like them here.”

The Belfast crowd was enamored with the town and the Temple. “It’s got that Bagnardi touch,” exclaimed Charlotte Peters, a Belfast city councilor, when she entered the lobby. “Fantastic. And what a beautiful downtown.”

Running businesses from the coast to The County hasn’t seemed to faze Hurley and Bagnardi. They both love their life with the movies and always are on the lookout for coming attractions.

“I’m always thinking about opportunities, so if another came along, why not?” said Hurley. “Therese may not be that interested. She’s great with design and helping out with the renovations, but I’m not sure how she’d feel about another theater.”

Bagnardi replied: “The fixing up is kind of fun, but if he wants to get another one, I will enjoy picking out the light fixtures and the carpets – he can run the show.”