The Elk Rapids cinema will always hold a special place in my
heart for being so integral to my moviegoing experiences in my infancy, seeing
films there as young as five years old and being the very first theater the late
owner Joe Yuchasz allowed yours truly into a projection booth to watch the
trailers before a 35mm screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas. In the years since Michael Moore donated $5K
to finish the restoration of the cinema, it also became not only an integral
part of Elk Rapids as a community but a partner theater to Traverse City’s
sadly retired summer film festivals.
When
Yuchasz passed for a brief moment in time the theater’s future was up in the
air with the terrible possibility of it being sold or even leveled. Thankfully however, the theater was able to
continue operations and under new management have began taking unique risks
with their programming, starting with the theater’s very first ‘brew & view’
event with the Great Lakes Roadshow for Lake Michigan Monster filmmaker
Mike Cheslik’s surreal silent comedy Hundreds of Beavers.
Sponsored by Short’s Brewery and The Foundry,
a woodfire pizzeria in Elk Rapids adjacent to the theater, patrons who bought
tickets were treated to half-off appetizers, $1 Local Lights beers and in the
theater itself you were entitled two beers of your choice from Short’s and
Starcut Ciders. Further still the new
manager took patrons on a tour of the theater and it became the first time I
got a good look behind the screen where apparently it’s previous owner built up
quite a record collection. Finally when
it came time for the movie, patrons with T-shirts for the film showed up and
the wacky live-action cartoon for adults unspooled in easily the strangest film
to ever play in the history of the Elk Rapids Cinema.
In the screening itself,
mostly consisting of the theater’s elderly clientele interspersed with some
younger viewers in the area, everyone was on board with the rampant yet
technically playful zaniness unfolding. An
already lovely theater venue that just got a much needed goofball
countercultural artistic boost with the weirdest local jointly sponsored
special event in quite some time, the Great Lakes Roadshow rounded out the
screening of Hundreds of Beavers as a swell way to spend a winter
weekend in the upper peninsula. The film
is a hoot but the local regional event built around it was indeed something
very special.
--Andrew Kotwicki