Buying a local movie theater ‘seemed really crazy.’ These couples did it anyway.
While many couples across the country will be hitting movie theaters for date night on Valentine’s Day, other couples, like Colleen and Bill Barstow in Elkhorn, Neb., or Andrew and Juanita Thomas in Houston, will be making sure the projectors are running smoothly and the popcorn is fresh — just as they do every night.
They’re not the only ones. Yahoo Entertainment talked to several couples across the country who have become theater owners in their respective communities, revitalizing silver screens and giving locals a place to connect.
For many of them, getting into the movie business was a decision they never planned.
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“Some people come into this industry where they love the gears of a projector or they have the love affair with movies. And while [Colleen and I] certainly had that,” Bill told Yahoo Entertainment, “nothing in our background would prepare us for this.”
That said, none of the couples could imagine it any other way, and they have relished the vital roles they’ve played in their communities.
Meet the four couples who shifted their careers to become local theater owners.
Colleen and Bill Barstow — Elkhorn, Neb.
Colleen and Bill Barstow opened Main Street Theatres in 1988. (Colleen and Bill Barstow)
After spending eight years in the Air Force, Bill Barstow was looking for something different in his new home outside Omaha. In the late 1980s, he and his wife, Colleen, were “broke” at the time and “looking to survive.” Originally from Detroit, the couple was hundreds of miles away from their support system.
That’s when Bill saw a newspaper ad showing a single-screen theater for sale.
“I went home and I told Colleen that I thought we could do this,” he told Yahoo. “She thought I was crazy.”
After talking the owner into taking monthly payments and borrowing $1,200 from three different credit cards, the Barstows made their purchase and named their company Main Street Theatres (now ACX Cinemas).
The couple, who “worked side by side from Day 1 on this,” wanted to change the perception of so-called “mom and pop” theaters.
“We treated it like we were inviting people into our home,” Bill explained. “If they’re coming into your home, everything had to be perfect.”
A favorite movie the pair often returns to is 1988 film Mystic Pizza, which hit theaters around the same time they opened theirs.
“It was the magic of movies, and it launched Julia Roberts,” Bill said. “There was a series of movies where you could stand in the back of an auditorium and watch people react to things. And we loved that. Like, they were in our living room. They made a choice to come to us.”
The Barstows now own theaters in five states, and their three children help run their growing business, which also includes separate restaurants and bars.
“One of the reasons that kept moving us to keep working hard was that we had a product that the community could come under one roof, and we were allowing people of all walks of life to create their own memories of, ‘Oh, I saw this movie for the first time with my mom, my dad,’” Colleen said. “Being able to recreate that for people is a really cool, cool thing we get to do.”
Beth and Kevin Burrows — North Bend, Wash.
Kevin and Beth Burrows own the North Bend Theatre, located in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. (Courtesy of Kevin and Beth Burrows)
Beth and Kevin Burrows own the single-screen North Bend Theatre in the town where the popular TV series Twin Peaks was filmed. The couple moved to the town in 1989, just before the show aired, but their love of movies began even earlier.
“We started dating in high school, and one of our very first dates was to a movie,” Beth told Yahoo. It was the 1979 wrestling movie Take Down, and, Beth says, “That kind of cemented our relationship with each other, and movies have played just such an important role through all of our lives.”
Their movie fandom continued into parenthood, as they took their two kids to see Harry Potter, the Narnia movies and the Hunger Games trilogy.
“So when our local theater came up for sale,” she said, “we wanted to make sure that it stayed the way it’s been since 1941.”
Adding that she and her husband “never thought that we would do this,” Beth said “it just kind of all clicked together.”
On April 1, 2018, they opened, playing everything from mainstream movies to vintage art house releases. “That was a big April Fool’s joke on each other,” she said. “It was never in our plans.”
The couple has since leaned heavily into the Twin Peaks lore, continuing the historical link from when its creator, David Lynch, the writer, Mark Frost, and much of the cast visited the theater for a sneak peek of the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in August 1992.
“We have Twin Peaks days the last weekend in February,” she said. “We’ve started something cool with the theater, the North Bend Walk of Fame, where we have handprints and stars of Kyle MacLachlan and Sheryl Lee.”
On the weekend of Feb. 22, Twin Peaks actor Ray Wise will visit the theater to participate in post-screening Q&As and add his handprints to the sidewalk.
“So often we get stopped when we’re out,” Beth added, “and people will just say, ‘Oh, we love what you’re doing at the theater. It’s so much more than just movies.’”
The Burrows are keeping their love of movies in the family and have now included their son and his fiancée to help run their business.
Ky J. Boyd and Michael O’Rand — Northern California
Kyle J. Boyd, right, and Michael O’Rand now have three Rialto Cinemas locations in Northern California. (Photo by Chris Goodfellow)
Ky J. Boyd fell in love with movies and movie theaters after seeing his first film, the 1970s The Aristocats, at the Liberty Falls Theater in Great Falls, Mont., where he grew up.
“I actually used to play movie theater in my parents’ basement,” Boyd told Yahoo Entertainment. “I chose Super 8 movies.”
He later became interested in opening an arthouse theater while living in San Francisco with his husband, Michael O’Rand, and in 2000, he opened Rialto Cinemas, a five-screen theater in Santa Rosa, about an hour north of the city.
While O’Rand “was supportive from the get-go,” Boyd said, “in our relationship, I’m the optimist and the dreamer, and Michael’s the realist.”
That meant creating a solid business plan and showing O’Rand all the numbers to prove how this investment could work. Boyd added that he “really pushed me to do the research.”
The theater “succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.” He said it helped that four key films opened at around the same time: Best in Show, Billy Elliot, You Can Count on Me and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
“When you’re opening an art house, you have to let the audience learn to trust you and trust your taste and learn to take chances on things that they might not otherwise seek out,” he explained.
While Boyd and O’Rand have since closed the Santa Rosa location, they have three other Rialto Cinemas in California, in Sebastopol, Berkeley and El Cerrito.
Boyd said he wanted to make his theaters a “third place” after home and work, “where people gather and the community comes together.”
“I love standing in the lobby on a Friday or Saturday night and just watching and seeing as one set of movies is getting out and another set is going in and the people that run into each other and, you know, family or friends,” he said. “It’s just so important that as movie theaters, we recognize that we aren’t just entertainment. We’re part of the communities in which we operate.”
Andrew and Juanita Thomas — Houston
Juanita and Andrew Thomas at their Moonstruck drive-in theater in Houston. (Courtesy of Andrew and Juanita Thomas)
On one of their early dates, Andrew Thomas was talking to his then-girlfriend, Juanita, about what kind of businesses they each would have if they could start one.
“I said, ‘I would have a movie theater,’ and she said she would have a restaurant,” Thomas told Yahoo. “And, you know, that was just — we were young.”
Fast-forward past college, a marriage and three kids, and Thomas, who had majored in economics, said he didn’t want a conventional job “in the strictest sense.”
“So my wife said, ‘Hey, you have talked about this movie theater thing for a long time, and there’s an old movie theater closed down in the next town over. Why don’t you just take a look at it and see what you find?”
While starting a business “seemed really crazy,” Thomas couldn’t get the theater out of his head.
After looking at their finances and having a “Jerry Maguire moment” when he asked the theater’s then-owner for a $150,000 investment to renovate the venue, he and Juanita were on their way.
“My wife is just one of the most supportive people,” Thomas said. “It was just moments like that where we had to kind of grab each other by the hands and jump at the same time.”
The couple opened Wellborne Cinemas in Alvin, Texas, on Christmas Day 2013. They have since opened the Moonstruck drive-in in downtown Houston and acquired another drive-in in northern Virginia.
Thomas praised his wife’s continued support and said he “totally knew this was the girl for me 100%” when they saw the 2003 film Kill Bill together and loved it.
“It’s like one of those moments where seeing a movie together, we realized what kind of connection we had with each other,” he said.
Their shared taste in movies is something Thomas appreciates and calls it “part of our story.”
“We’ll have showings of The Notebook, and there’s lots of couples that will come out, and they’ll have a great time watching the romantic movie,” he said. “And our romantic movie is a woman getting revenge against her former love — that’s us.”
