You're in front of the State Theatre — the tall neon sign, the lit marquee hanging over Front Street. This corner has wanted to be a theater for well over a century. There's been a grand opera house here, then a movie house, then another movie house, and two of them burned down before this one opened its doors at the end of the nineteen forties with over a thousand seats. Then, like every downtown movie palace in America, it slowly died. By the mid-nineties it was dark. By the two-thousands it was basically condemned — no screen, no projector, water getting in.
Here's how it came back. In the spring of two thousand five, the filmmaker Michael Moore — yes, that one, he's got a place up here — was having lunch at a restaurant right across the street, trying to plan a little film festival. And he happened to look out the window at the dead marquee. His words: "I stopped and looked at it and said, hey, why don't we show movies there?" And somebody at the table had to gently explain that "
there" was a building the city considered too far gone to save.
He did it anyway. A local charity bought the wreck, handed it to the film festival on generous terms, and they poured everything into bringing it back. It reopened in two thousand seven and it's been running ever since — year round, mostly staffed by volunteers, one of the great small-town movie houses left in the country. A condemne
