The Majestic reopened Friday night after six years dark, and the first thing you notice is the smell, warm dust and hot bulb, the smell of an actual film projector running. The Dock Street cinema is back, with 212 seats and a restored 35mm projector, and it is showing film on film.
The theater closed in the year the multiplex opened out by the highway, and most people assumed it would become another empty storefront on a block that already had three. Instead a nonprofit formed by three former projectionists bought the building, spent four years raising money, and spent most of it on the projector rather than the seats. The group raised just over 600,000 dollars, mostly in small donations from people who remembered watching a first film there as kids.
The double bill
Opening night paired a restored print of a 1962 harbor noir shot partly in Port Alden with a short program of local footage from the city archive, including grainy color film of the old fish market before the fire. The noir looked better than any streaming version of it I have seen, grain and all, and the crowd audibly reacted when a shot lingered on a stretch of Front Street that is still recognizable sixty years later.
The seats are the original 1948 frames, reupholstered but not replaced, and they are narrower than what a modern theater would install. Nobody at opening night seemed to mind, though the nonprofit's director joked from the stage that legroom was the one thing the restoration grant did not cover.
What is next
The Majestic plans a repertory program of one film a week drawn from its own archive of prints, plus a monthly local shorts night open to submissions from anyone in the city. Tickets are priced at eight dollars, cheaper than the multiplex, on purpose, and the theater is selling a modest ten-film season pass aimed at getting regulars in the door before winter.
It will not replace a multiplex, and it is not trying to. What it offers instead is a room built for one kind of watching, and a projector that took four years and most of a nonprofit's budget to get right. Worth the trip, and worth going before the season pass sells out.
