Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Grant Jones, left, and Matt Blakeslee stand outside the old Center Lanes bowling alley on North 30th Street, which they are transforming into the Art House Cinema & Pub.
Although they’ve still got some fundraising ahead of them, the people behind an “event-centric” movie theater and pub in downtown Billings will be getting down to business Saturday morning.
That’s when they’ll start demolishing portions of the old Center Lanes bowling alley at 109 N. 30th St., beginning its transformation into the Art House Cinema & Pub.
“This was something I always felt Billings could use,” said Matt Blakeslee, who has been working on the project for almost two years.
The earliest the new venture will open, he said, is mid-November. How well the fundraising goes, and what surprises demolition and renovation will bring, remain to be seen.
“In the next three weeks, we’re going to find out if that’s realistic or not,” Blakeslee said.
Blakeslee’s main partner will be Grant Jones. They have a board of directors and are trying to raise $200,000 to fund the project, which will be a nonprofit venture. The nonprofit status also means they’ll be able to obtain a relatively cheap beer-and-wine license, which his attorney is applying for.
They’ve already raised $85,000 and on Wednesday launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $30,000. Indiegogo is a crowd-funding website similar to Kickstarter.
Blakeslee said he is modeling the first phase of the Art House Cinema & Pub after the Tin Pan Theater in Bend, Ore., shown above, with its single-screen theater and pub in the same room.
The $30,000 is what they figure they need for a “final push” to buy equipment for the bar and concessions area and some classic theater seats. Depending on how much donated labor they have — and they’ve already got volunteers lined up for the renovation — they may not need the whole $200,000, Blakeslee said.
Their plan in the first stage is to have one theater, with 40 to 50 seats, and a small lounge and bar serving wine and local microbrewery beers. The idea is that patrons will watch independent, small-budget films not being shown by Carmike Cinemas — the behemoth that owns every screen in Billings and most of the screens in Montana — then repair to the pub for stimulating discussions.
That phase would make use of the bowling alley’s lobby area and the old bar and casino, about 1,500 square feet in all. Eventually, they would like to open three more theaters — two with seating capacity similar to the first and another with seating for up to 200 people — in the 6,500-square-foot space where the bowling lanes used to be.
Blakeslee said he considered a lot of different buildings in downtown Billings, where he was committed to locating from the start, and knew from his first look that the old bowling alley was where he needed to be.
The big expanse where the lanes used to be is one of the few such downtown spaces without post-and-beam construction, he said, beams being one thing you can’t have in a movie theater.
Blakeslee is a pastor and founder of the CMYK Church. He worked for Faith Chapel for 10 years before quitting in January 2013 to work on his dream of opening an alternative movie theater. His wife, Kate, is a physician’s assistant at Billings Clinic, which has allowed him to do all the preparation work without a paycheck.
Art House Cinema & Pub won’t have anything to do with his ministry, Blakeslee said. It will be a nonprofit stand-alone business with no religious component.
Blakeslee is looking forward to tapping into the energy of an increasingly vibrant downtown. He hopes to draw patrons from the downtown hotels, and he has been talking to downtown restaurants about having people bringing in their meal receipts for a discount at the movie house.
Center Lanes, located in the old G&W Building, closed in 2007. To make it more attractive to retail tenants, the owner of the building put up several internal walls, including one that separated the old bowling alley snack bar from the main business. That space now houses La Tinga, a Mexican restaurant.
The only other ground-floor tenant in the building is the Leather Factory. Blakeslee said they don’t need any more space than what is available in the bowling alley. They are leasing only the front section now, with plans to lease the back area, where the lanes were, when it’s time to expand.
They will be installing new digital projectors that will be perfect for the kinds of films they want to show, though they wouldn’t work for a Hollywood blockbuster.
“We won’t be able to bring in ‘Avenger 2’ when it releases next summer,” Blakeslee said, “which is totally fine with us.”
