Among his most important managerial duties prior to the opening was hiring the staff, all except for the projectionists who were furnished by the local union at that time. The original full-time operator in the booth was Howard Powers. The first part-time, relief projectionist was Gary Fisher. 

The first person Rea hired was Chuck Wrenn, who started out as an usher. When Wrenn was promoted a few weeks after the place opened, he then became the Biograph's first assistant manager. Of the many personnel decisions Rea made, during his nearly 12 years as manager, there wasn't one any better than deciding to hire Wrenn.  

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Chapter One: Repertory Cinema

On what I remember as a bright morning, it was in early July of 1971, I went to a construction site on the north side of the 800 block of West Grace Street. Mostly, it was a big hole in the orange dirt between two old brick houses.

A friend had tipped me off that she’d been told the owners of the movie house set to rise from that hole in the ground were looking for a manager who knew something about movies and could write about them. She also said they were hoping to hire a local guy. Chasing the sparkle of that opportunity I met David Levy at the construction site.

Levy was the Harvard-trained attorney who managed the Biograph Theatre at 2819 "M" Street in Washington. D.C. He was one of a group of five men who, in 1967, had opened Georgetown’s Biograph in an old building that had previously been a car dealership. Although none of them had any experience in show biz, they were hip young movie lovers whose timing had been impeccable -- they caught a pop culture wave. 

The golden age of repertory cinema was waxing and they happened to be living in what was the perfect cosmopolitan  metropolis for their venture. They did well right from the start. With their success in D.C. to encourage them, a few years later the same five, plus one, looked to expand. In Richmond’s Fan District they thought they had found the right neighborhood for a second repertory-style cinema. 

A pair of local players, energy magnate Morgan Massey and real estate deal-maker Graham “Squirrel” Pembroke, acquired the land. They agreed to construct a cinder block building to house a basic single-auditorium cinema, just a stone’s throw from Virginia Commonwealth University’s academic campus for the young entrepreneurs from D.C. to rent ($3,000 a month). The "boys in D.C." then had to acquire and install the projection booth equipment, the turnstile (we used tokens, rather than tickets) and the seats, some 515 of them. 

*

At the time I was working for a radio station, WRNL, so I gave Levy a few tapes of some lighthearted radio commercials I had made for what had been successful promotions. About 10 weeks after that first meeting with Levy I was offered the manager’s position for the new Biograph. Can't recall all that much about that day, except I was told I beat out a lot of competition. 

Oddly, what I do remember clearly is a brief flash of me sitting in my living room, trying to act nonchalant, so as to not to reveal just how thrilled I was at getting that offer. At 23-years-old, I could hardly have imagined a better job for me existed. At least not in the Fan District, the neighborhood in which I then lived with my wife, Valerie, and 21-month old daughter, Katey.  

This all happened three years after Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia merged to become Virginia Commonwealth University in 1968. However, in the fall of 1971, other than the school's new James Cabell Branch Library, which opened in 1970, there were few visible signs of the dramatic impact the new university would eventually have on Richmond's landscape. 

Although a couple of film societies at VCU were active on campus at that time, other than local film critic Carole Kass' History of Motion Pictures class, the school, itself, was offering little in the way of classes about movies or filmmaking. There were a few cool VCU professors who showed artsy short films and occasional features in their classes. 

Mostly, independent and foreign features just didn’t come to Richmond, pre-Biograph. The dominant movie theater chain, Neighborhood Theatres, would run a half-dozen, or so, European films a year. Thus, in 1971, the coming of the Biograph Theatre to West Grace Street was great news to local film buffs. Generally speaking, it was also seen as another positive sign the neighborhood's nightlife scene was becoming more attractive to the hip young adult market. 

Levy and I got along well. We saw eye-to-eye right away and became friends who trusted one another. He and his partners were all about 10 years my senior. 

*

Comment from Rebus:   

Rea's manager’s job was good to him and lasted until 1983. For reasons he will explain in a subsequent chapter, Rea became overwhelmed by the urge to leave the Biograph that summer. So he did.  

In December of 1987, owing to unpaid rent, Grace Street’s Biograph building was seized by Graham Pembroke and the locks were changed. It stayed locked down until 1992. A hundred miles to the north, the Biograph on "M" Street went dark in 1996. A drug store moved into the space.

Today there’s a noodles eatery in the same location that once housed the repertory cinema these stories are about. Now it’s the oldest building on what is truly a storied block -- a block of Grace that has received a complete makeover in the new millennium. Its shops and eateries in the front rooms of brick town houses look of the 1960s/'70s has faded into the mists. 

On the evening of Friday, February 11, 1972, the Biograph adventure got off the ground with a gem of a party. In the lobby the dry champagne flowed steadily, as the tuxedo-wearers and colorfully outfitted hippies mingled happily. 

A trendy art show was hanging all over the walls. The local press was out in force to cover what was an important event for that little commercial strip in the northeast edge of Richmond's Fan District. The feature we presented to over 300 invited guests was a delightful French war-mocking comedy — “King of Hearts” (1966); Genevieve Bujold was dazzling opposite the droll Alan Bates. 

In the wake of news stories about the party celebrating the Biograph's arrival, the next night we opened for business with a pretty cool double feature: “King of Hearts“ was paired with “A Thousand Clowns“ (1965). Every show sold out. 

On the opening night's staff were: cashiers Cathy Chapman and Susan Eskey; ushers Bernie Hall and Chuck Wrenn. A few weeks later Susan Kuney was hired as a third cashier and for the first few months that team smiled and sold the tokens for entry through the turnstile and the buckets of popcorn (slathered with a butter-like product). 

The Biograph’s printed schedule, Program No. 1, was heavy on documentaries; it featured the work of Emile de Antonio and D.A. Pennebaker, among others. Also on that first program, which had no particular theme, were several titles by popular European directors, including Michaelangelo Antonioni, Costa-Gavras, Federico Fellini, and Roman Polanski. Like this first edition, each of the next several published programs covered about six weeks and offered mostly double features.

*

In reading everything I could find about which movies were well-respected and popular in art houses, especially in New York and San Francisco, it was easy to gather that the in-crowd viewed most of Hollywood’s then-current product as either laughingly naïve or hopelessly corrupted by the system. The fashion of the day elevated certain foreign movies, selected American classics, a few films from the underground scene, etc., to a level above most of their more accessible Hollywood counterparts. 

In 1972, perhaps the most admired of all foreign films were those considered to be part of the French New Wave, which began in the late-'50s. Features made by Louis Malle, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard set the pace. Yet, what my first year on the job eventually taught me was how few people in Richmond at that time really cared all that much about seeing such films.

After the opening flurry of interest in the new movie theater, with long lines to nearly every show, it was surprising to me when the crowds shrank dramatically in the months that followed. Among other things, that suggested to me how important the publicity running up to the Biograph's opening had been.

As VCU students had been a substantial portion of the theater’s initial crowd the slump was chalked off by the owners to pretty weather, exams and then summer vacation. In that context, the first summer of operation was opened to experimentation aimed at drawing more customers from beyond the immediate neighborhood. 

That plan gave me an opportunity to do more with a project my bosses had put me in charge of developing, Friday and Saturday midnight shows -- using radio in particular to promote them. By trial and error Chuck and I learned what sort of movies that lent themselves to attention-getting promotion performed well at the box office. 

Early midnight show successes were “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “Yellow Submarine” (1968), “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” (1971), and an underground twin bill of “Chafed Elbows” (1967) and “Scorpio Rising” (1964). No need to dwell on tailures in the midnight show experiment.

The third member of the promotion team was Dave DeWitt, who produced the radio commercials. We happily shared the copy-writing chore. We discovered there were two basic and essential elements to midnight show promotions: 

1. Wacky radio spots had to be created and run on WGOE, a popular daytime AM station aimed directly at the hippie listening audience. 

2. I created cartoonish handbills/flyers that were posted on utility poles, bulletin boards and in shop windows in high-traffic locations. Both elements had to show a sense of humor. 

In his studio, Dave and I frequently collaborated on the making of those spots with an ample supply of cold Pabst Blue Ribbons and whatnot. Most of the time we went for levity, even cheap laughs. Dave had a classic announcer's baritone voice and he was adept at physically producing radio commercials on reel-to-reel tape. Plus, he was possibly more of a nitpicker for getting it right than I was, so we brought out the creativity in one another and made a good team.