Stories

The Times-Picayune
February 9, 2003

By Keith O'Brien
Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS -- On the night the movies ended at the downtown theater, the old man sat in an empty room with a piece of paper, a pencil and a telephone. He asked for some time alone and set his mind on saying goodbye.

He hadn't expected it to be this hard. But that last week at the Joy Theatre on Canal Street, he found meaning in everything he saw. A film splicer reminded him of old projectionists, now dead and gone. A popcorn machine, of the nights he had spent there with the ghost of his father, the original showman, or his wife, the concession girl he loved, or his five children.

The kids had grown up there, working in the box office or at the concession counter. He had grown old and watched the movie palaces he had once owned disappear one by one. They were tired victims of progress: the suburbs, shopping malls, multiplexes with sprawling parking lots and banked walls of stadium seating. And he was their tireless crusader, one of the few who cared enough to stay and fight long after the fight appeared lost.

This is why he took control of the Joy in 1978 as his contemporaries were building futures in concrete dreamscapes. This is why he poured himself into the single-screen Prytania Theatre in 1997 after others had abandoned the red-brick building for shiny boxes of glass and steel. He wanted these places to last. Not another year or two. But forever.

Now at 81 years old, Rene J. Brunet Jr., the New Orleans movie theater icon, faced what appeared to be a final struggle between the time he longed for and the time he had come to live in. He wasn't just in danger of losing his two movie theaters. Both landlords wanted him out.

The Joy was closing after 56 years. This much Brunet knew for sure. He couldn't pay the rent anymore and business had been declining for longer than he cared to admit. Perhaps most important, the Ecuyer family, which owns the Joy building, had been trying to evict Brunet for months because of what Marion Ecuyer called "non-payment of rent over a long period of time."

Brunet had lost this fight. But as he sat down in an empty room of the Joy to say goodbye, he knew there would be at least one more. He knew there was still the Prytania, that 88-year-old survivor of fires and closings and time, the last of the old movie houses still operating in the city, his last picture show.

. . . . . . .

Weeks after the Joy shut down, neither Brunet nor his son Robert plan to give up their fight over the Prytania. It doesn't matter that the Prytania's owner, Poseidon, LLC, is preparing to take them to court on Wednesday to evict them. It doesn't matter that Poseidon's attorney claims that they have violated their lease by failing to pay rent and insurance and taxes.

The Brunets' other problems in recent months don't matter either. Not the $31,000 they owed to the state in sales taxes. Not the $23,000 they owed to Whitney Bank for a loan they took out and still need to pay back. Not the $9,000 they owed in property taxes to the city.

Brunet struck deals or calculated ways to pay back these debts -- anything to keep his theaters running. Because for him it has never been about making money. If it had, he would have closed the Joy years ago. What it's been about, what it's always been about, is the show.

And so, he hung on, and hangs on, often losing money in the process, because to him the theaters represent another time, when movie houses were palaces filled with beauty and pageantry and he was the host of the party, there at the door in a suit and tie to take your ticket and shake your hand and welcome you to his show.

If the Prytania closes, Rene Brunet believes all of this will come to an end. Robert Brunet, 38, believes that, too. And he worries that the end of the Prytania might also bring about the end of his father, who lives for the theaters and taught him everything he knows about running them.

Treat the customers like guests, the father told the son. Treat them with respect. Put on a great presentation and remember, above all, no matter what happens, no matter what goes wrong or what you have to do to make it right, the show must always go on.

. . . . . . .

Fifty-eight theaters were showing movies the day his father died in October 1946. The Fox had a Bing Crosby film, the Isis a double feature. "Jesse James" was at the Carrollton, the Poplar, the Prytania and the Tivoli. "State Fair" was at the Imperial, and the show would go on without the man who started it.

"Heart Attack Fatal to Movie Pioneer," the newspaper headline read the next day above the obituary of Rene J. Brunet Sr., which proceeded to tick off his accomplishments: the opening of a Baronne Street nickelodeon in 1907, the Harlequin Theatre five years later and finally the Imperial, his last, in 1921.

His middle child, blind in one eye, had sat in that theater years earlier listening to the sounds of its great organ. It was the organ that he loved first, this cacophony of sound that raged in the dark as silent pictures danced across the screen.

Almost all the theaters had them back then. They provided the sound -- the battles, the chases, the clatter, the polkas -- for the silent film rolling on stand-up reels. By the mid-1940s, however, the organs the boy loved so much were disappearing, replaced by magnetized sound strips embedded in the film, and so was his father, the movie man who could not be replaced. The son, 25 and living with his mother, went off to run the father's business.

"Rene Brunet Inc." reads the sign today. It's not big, not even visible from the street. But it's there in black letters on the white door across the gravel parking lot and behind the uniform supply shop on a gray stretch of the Earhart Expressway. Up the stairs, and through a locked door, there is from time to time the smell of popcorn butter lingering in the hallway that leads to the offices of Rene and his son Robert. They were talking on this day about show times at the Prytania that weekend.

"Can you remember?" the father asked.

The son read him the times and left him. He never wanted to get involved in the Prytania in the first place. He was sure it was a bad idea when Chris Riley, the latest owner of the 88-year-old movie house, offered Brunet a chance to run it in 1997. They already had two theaters to operate -- the State Palace for live shows and the Joy for movies -- and he saw no reason for another one.

But his father couldn't resist the idea of operating a neighborhood movie house like the ones he used to have decades ago: the Carver, the Clabon, the Gallo, the Famous, the Circle and, of course, the Imperial.

He called the Imperial his "doll house," this grand, old theater with the terrazzo floors and raised concession stand. He knew everyone there and everyone knew him, and if he could have done anything to save the place from the fire that ravaged it in March 1957, he would have done it.

But all he could do was stand across the street with his mother and watch it burn, he explained. "The show's on fire," he remembers telling her. Then it was gone, years before the others would fall, and there was nothing he could do about those, either.

"Look," he said. "The Arcade is gone. The Algy is gone. The Beacon is a Whitney Bank out on Harrison Avenue. The Carrollton is a wedding reception hall. The Dreamland is gone. The Escorial is gone . . . The Folly is a church. The Granada is gone. The Grand is a day care center for kids. The Happyland is a roofing warehouse. The Mecca is gone . . ."

The list went on and on.

. . . . . . .

Forty-nine theaters were showing movies the day he married the concession girl in August 1960. Seven of them were drive-ins. One of them featured Tony Curtis, another John Wayne. "Bells Are Ringing" was in its fourth week at the Loew's State and Rene Brunet was in love with a woman he plainly described as a "raving beauty."

She didn't like him at first. He was tough, consumed by details and quick to criticize those who didn't understand the importance of little things. That popcorn kernels have to go in the kettle before the oil. That the perfect soda starts with a cup, three-fourths filled with ice. That hot dog buns have to be heated just so. Just think, he used to say, what I could see if I had two eyes.

The girl didn't care. She had wanted the job at the Famous Theatre on Claiborne and Marigny because it sounded like fun. She had little interest in perfect sodas and popcorn kernels. She called the man Mr. Brunet and he barely noticed her for years.

Then one night, closing up after a show, Rene and Muriel kissed inside the empty theater. By then, the girl cared. She saw that toughness was just another word for passion and that his passion for theaters had no end. They got married, lost themselves in movies and theaters and life and raised five children who would work for them in the theaters.

But by the 1970s, all that was changing. Old showmen who had started off in neighborhood theaters -- people like T.G. "Teddy" Solomon -- were moving from the cities to the suburbs. They would make millions building boxes in parking lots and naming them after the malls nearby, calling them Lakeside I, II, III, IV, and V, instead of calling them the Rivoli, the Tivoli, or the Peacock.

Back in the city, Brunet shut down the Famous and the Circle, the Gallo and the Carver. They would become a parking lot and a Rally's, a pawn shop and a medical clinic in the years ahead. But the Joy would stay open just as people were beginning to worry it would become a fried chicken stand. Brunet saved it just as Chris Riley had kept open the Prytania in 1997.

Riley, then 29, was declared a hero. But not even five years after he and Brunet reopened the shuttered Prytania, the building is for sale, the owners want Brunet out and Riley is dead. The former Navy SEAL turned a gun on his estranged girlfriend and then on himself in 1999. His mother took ownership of the theater and Evangeline Vavrick, her attorney, said Brunet has caused nothing but problems ever since.

"He won't move out unless we put him out on the street with an eviction notice," she said. "He thinks he's right. Thinks he's the movie industry in New Orleans. He's not. He's a tenant."

He's a tenant, she explained, who doesn't pay rent, taxes or insurance on time. A tenant who violated the lease and should be evicted. This is what Vavrick has argued and will continue to argue as the tenant in question defends himself, saying he is current on his payments, that he is not in default on the lease, that he should not be evicted.

Brunet, the man so particular about the amount of ice in a cup, admits that he doesn't "get into the nitty-gritty" when it comes to the day-to-day finances of the theater. "I guess I should," he said. But he dismissed Vavrick's lawsuit as a ploy to get rid of him because she wants to sell the building to a buyer and that buyer doesn't want the building to come with him and the 15 years of options left on his lease.

"My attorneys tell me, 'Don't have the slightest concern about it,' " Brunet said. But he does, of course. He can't help it, and neither can his son, who sits in the office next to his father's using "craftsmanship" and "wizardry" to pay for the pictures that play every night. The bills keep coming.

"Is Rene in position to pay for this? I don't believe," said Vavrick. "I don't know what his finances are, but they are obviously shaky. If you can't pay the rent to the building that's providing your livelihood, you're having problems. This is apparently his livelihood."

. . . . . . .

Nine theaters were showing movies the night Brunet sat down in an empty room last month with a piece of paper, a pencil and a telephone. Seven of the theaters were multiplexes. Six of them were owned by national corporations. Only two of them had been built before 1948, and one of them was closing.

Brunet looked at the phone. In recent weeks, the employees at the Joy had used it to call him at home to ask if they should play the late show. There was no one there to see it, they told him, and Brunet let them close up. Other times, over the years, it was Brunet calling them to see how long it would take them to answer. He hates voice mail, hates answering machines. He likes the personal touch.

But tonight he needed voice mail. How else could he say goodbye to everyone at once? How else could he let everyone know that the Joy was closing after all these years? He wrote down his message, picked up the phone and began to speak in a voice that crackled with time.

Sometimes he and his son talk about what it would have been like if they had moved to the suburbs like Solomon, who made a fortune building shopping mall theaters and the chain of Palaces with stadium seats. They talk about what kind of money they would have made opening multiplexes like Solomon did, near interstate exits.

"He was very smart," Rene Brunet likes to say. "He saw the future of the business. Let me tell you, single-screen theaters is the past. It's the long past. I may enjoy running this. But it's the past and I know it. I'd be sticking my head in the sand if I said, 'Just you wait, there are going to be single-screen theaters all over the city.' We'd be waiting a very long time."

Still, back into the past he goes again and again, waiting out the future, escaping the present. Sometimes, he escapes to the Saenger Theatre, which opened in 1927 as one of downtown's finest movie houses. There, like everywhere, much has changed over the years. But the theater still has the original organ from the days of silent pictures and sometimes Brunet goes there alone, after hours, to play it.

More times than he can count, E. P. Miller, the theater's operations manager, has come back to lock up late at night and found Brunet still there: shoes kicked off, playing the organ in front of 2,800 empty seats until he sweated through his shirt and stripped down to his waist. Other times, Brunet locks the place up on his own and peers through the peephole of the stage door onto Basin Street before stepping outside into the night.

More often, though, he is at the Prytania in a suit and tie and he is talking to his guests who are coming to his theater to see the show. Recently, at 7 o'clock on a Friday night, weeks after the closing of the Joy, Brunet was there for the opening of "Chicago," the acclaimed remake of the old musical.

"What are people saying about 'Chicago'?" he asked his assistant manager. He couldn't stop talking about "Chicago." How entertaining it is. How much it's like the old movies in which people sang and danced and you could forget your troubles for a spell. "It's entertainment," he clarified, as if all movies didn't qualify as such. Then he rattled off examples that fit his definition: "It's a Wonderful Life," "The Wizard of Oz" and "Casablanca."

He loves these movies. They had a formula, he explained. There was a character, a hero. His or her life was good. But as the movie rolled everything began to crash, problems loomed and grew larger and you worried that things weren't going to work out. Then in the end, always in the end, just when it seemed that all was lost, there was that uplifting moment, that certain something, that saved the hero.

An angel named Clarence.

A pair of ruby slippers.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship.

These are the endings Brunet likes, happy endings. This is what he wants to bring to the people, who were arriving now at the door for "Chicago" and smiling at the old man in the suit who was smiling back at them.

"Hello . . . How are you? . . . Enjoying this cold weather? . . . I'm not either . . . I've been running theaters all my life . . . Come on in from the cold . . . Come on in . . ."

He held out his arms to show them the way and they followed him inside, talking to him about the theater, how they loved it, how they hoped it would last forever.

"How's the future looking?" asked one.

"Looking pretty good," Brunet replied.

Light flickered on a white screen. Pictures danced and moved in the dark. Previews rolled. The show began and the people settled into their seats.

They laughed. They winced. They lost themselves in the story on the screen, oblivious for the moment to the character standing outside the theater in the cold, rubbing his hands together to stay warm, hoping he wouldn't have to say goodbye to the picture show one more time.

"Thank you for calling the Joy Theatre," he had said in that final voice mail message. "We thank you for your confidence and patronage for the last 56 years. We hope you have enjoyed the Joy Theatre as much as we have enjoyed serving you. This is the last telephone message you will hear from the Joy Theatre. The Joy is closed. . . .

"This is Rene Brunet signing off."