The Movie Man

Some months back, TCM ran a pair of documentaries about people who have a love for the movies. As part of a day of movies about movies TCM is running tomorrow, July 23, TCM is giving another airing to one of those movies: The Movie Man, tomorrow at 10:00 AM.

The Movie Man is the story of Keith Stata, who grew up in a small town in "northern" Ontario called Kinmount. (I don't know what Ontarians refer to as "northern" Ontario, but to me I'd think of anything north of about a line from Ottawa to where Michigan's Upper Peninsula meets Ontario, and Kinmount is well south of that, albeit not in a heavily populated part of the province.) Stata grew up with a love of movies from his days as a child seeing the Saturday matinees in the next bigger town that had a movie theater, with a particular fondness for the Rod Taylor version of The Time Machine. But being from that part of the world and in that time, there was no way he could go to film school to fulfill his dream of making movies.

So, since there wasn't much opportunity, he went into construction, which allowed him to become adjacent to movies in a different way. He bought a property and turned it into the town's movie theater in the late 1970s, opening it for the summer. It became enough of a success that, over the decades, he was able to add on to the building, eventually winding up with five screens as well as collecting enough memorabilia to include a nostalgia museum which is partly movie-related with props, posters, and vintage projectors. But how is a man in his 70s going to keep the theater a going concern, and who's going to take over when he dies?

There are scenes in the film that are dated 2019, and as we all know, the following year governments everywhere fucked over a whole lot of businesses with coronavirus lockdowns. (I survived several rounds of layoffs, having to work close to 60 hours a week when the volume of work finally returned, and then another bigger round of layoffs when we lost one of our contracts, but none of the powers that be or the lockdown supporters gave a shit about people like me.) Stata's theater was forced to close for two summers in a row, and the climax of the movie deals with the plans to reopen in 2022.

After watching The Movie Man, I couldn't help but think of Errol Morris' first documentary Gates of Heaven, on the subject of pet cemeteries. Apparently I never blogged about that one before, but when I watched it, I got the distinct impression that Morris got material about two different subject both related to pet cemeteries, but not enough of either subject to make a feature-length documentary. By the same token, a goodly portion of The Movie Man deals with how Stata became Kinmount's cat rescue person, to the point that at the time the film was made he was taking care of some four dozen cats with that being as much of a full-time job as running the theater is. The two parts don't go quite so well together, but you get the feeling that director Matt Finlin didn't have enough material for either part of Stata's life. The fact that coronavirus lockdowns intervened also doesn't help, but that's not the director's fault.

Ultimately, The Movie Man is an interesting enough idea, but a movie that has its share of flaws.