New movie theater to open on Lindell
By Joe Williams
Post-Dispatch Film Critic
12/19/2004
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GRAND OPENING
MOOLAH THEATRE
Lindell & Vandeventer
St. Louis's BIGGEST SCREEN movie theatre
a 500 seat deluxe MOVIE THEATRE & MUCH MORE
balcony seating
COUCH AND STADIUM SEATING
Full Bar!!
Live Music!!
OPENS WEDNESDAY
DECEMBER 22ND!!
Harman Moseley stands in the upper level of the main auditorium that will house the movie screen.
(David Carson/P-D)
In 2004, the only thing dicier than opening a single-screen movie theater might be opening a single-screen theater with "Arabian Nights" decor. But Harman Moseley has been betting against the conventional wisdom for more than 20 years. When he inaugurates the lavish Moolah Theatre and Lounge on Wednesday, it will be the costliest in a string of theater ventures that have bucked the trend of building mallplexes to serve the latest Hollywood dreck to suburban teenagers.
Although locally owned Wehrenberg remains the largest theater operator in town, Moseley is the last of the one-man developers. While the chains have often overbuilt and underperformed, Moseley has specialized in reviving old theaters in forsaken locations or starting new ones in venues that were never intended to screen movies.
When ticket prices rose, Moseley invested in dollar-show theaters. When cable and video threatened to end the era of repertory cinema, he bet on the classics and midnight-movie fare. When the studios pitched their products to amorous teens, he invited mothers to bring their bawling babies. When the chains abandoned the metropolitan core for greener pastures, he carved movie theaters into the city's two best hotels, hitting the jackpot with the Chase in the city but rolling snake eyes with the Ritz-Carlton in Clayton.
But the aptly named Moolah may be the riskiest of his gambles. "Opening a single-screener is insanity!" he declares with an impish laugh. Not all the money is Moseley's - the landmark 92-year-old building near Lindell Boulevard and Vandeventer Avenue, originally the Moolah Shrine Temple, is being developed by Amrit and Amy Gill at an estimated cost of $17 million. The building also features 42 apartments, an eight-lane bowling alley and a parking garage. But the centerpiece theater will be leased and run by Moseley, who's betting "a couple hundred G's" that St. Louis University students and patrons of Grand Center will want to take a look.
The lap of luxury
What they'll see is astounding, a theater space that is unlike anything else in town. It starts with the lobby, restored to its Moorish splendor after 20 years of slumber behind locked doors. To the right is the Moolah Lounge, a self-contained bar that Moseley hopes will attract a late-night clientele. Straight ahead is the ticket counter and concession stand, staffed by employees wearing conical red fezzes. And through the massive interior doors is the theater space, which is utterly unique from floor to ceiling. Six stories overhead is a barrel-vaulted ceiling, hung with chandeliers. Underfoot is carpet - rare inside a movie theater - and a flat-surface floor that leads to one of the largest movie screens in town. At 45 feet wide and 20 feet tall, it's not exactly IMAX proportions, but it's wide enough for Cinemascope.
For a deeper immersion into the experience, up-front patrons can sink into one of the 70 chocolate-leather couches and love seats that will be scattered across the floor. Although such unconventional movie viewing has been tried in venues from the elegant indoor/outdoor Foreign Cinema in San Francisco to the funky storefront Ragtag in Columbia, Mo., it's a first for St. Louis. Along with the full bar, the comfy seats promise to create a lively atmosphere. (They can also be rolled away for the live performances and special events that Moseley expects will be a big part of the venue's business.)
For the same ticket price, patrons can opt for four rows of traditional stadium-style seating at the back of the auditorium or an experience that St. Louis moviegoers have not enjoyed for years: a balcony. Looking out over the wide expanse are six rows of upper-level seats, on a balcony that sweeps around three quarters of the room's perimeter.
It's an almost obscenely luxurious space, and it defies the latest trends in theater management. Although screens are getting larger - the biggest one at Wehrenberg's new Galaxy 14 Cine, which opens Wednesday in Chesterfield Valley, is 80 feet wide and five stories tall - almost all the plush new theaters are in suburban multiplex developments with dozens of screens.
Single-screen theaters are rare - the swank-but-aging Hi-Pointe in Dogtown and the restored Lincoln in Belleville are exceptions - and newly built ones are almost unheard of. "I wanted to subdivide the space," Moseley admits, "but it had to be a single screen to qualify for historic tax credits."
Moseley says that he and the developers are not expecting a huge windfall from a theater that can only bet on one movie at a time. "For the Gills, the movie theater will be a loss leader," he says. "But what they want to do is create some action in the neighborhood. They own the apartments in the building, and they renovated the old Coronado Hotel and some other properties nearby, so they want to generate excitement. Besides SLU, you've got the Fox, you've got Powell Hall, you've got the Contemporary Art Museum and all the other things in Grand Center. We want to give those people a reason to stick around instead of driving back to the county. Until recently, there wasn't even a place to get a cup of coffee around here."
A movie family
Coffee, by the way, is another business on which Moseley took a chance. In the 1990s, he owned six Caffe Paradiso shops in the area. But the espresso boom soon petered out. "I was so foolish," he says. "I'd been to Seattle and Vancouver and seen how popular coffee was becoming, so I thought I couldn't go wrong. I ended up losing a lot of money. It turns out I wasn't meant to be in the food business."
On the other hand, the Moseley family has been in the movie business for three generations. His father, the late Harman Sr., sold projection equipment. His brother John operates the discount St. Andrews Theater in St. Charles. And Harman's daughter Julia, 23, will help operate the Moolah, particularly the bar.
At 51, Moseley is a restlessly energetic and mercurial fellow. After graduating from Clayton High School, he left for what he thought would be a six-week European vacation. He ended up living abroad for five years, in Amsterdam, Australia and Southeast Asia.
When he returned to the States in 1977, he entered the family business, managing the Gem Theater in St. John. "We tried everything there - midnight movies, rock-concert films, you name it. During the Christmas season, we showed 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' for 14 straight nights, and it saved the business."
After that, he bought the Ritz, an adults-only theater on South Grand Boulevard. "That's about the time I married Sara," he says. "In a one-month period, I got married, bought a porn theater and moved to south St. Louis. Her parents weren't too happy."
Neither were the authorities, who arrested Moseley and a ticket-taker for screening a movie called "Sensations." Although the charges were dropped, Moseley agreed to convert the theater into a family-friendly discount house.
When the city of St. Louis bought the property for a parking lot, Moseley made a tidy profit and went into real estate. "I finally learned about business from these real-estate sharks who got up every morning at 5 a.m.," he says. "I hated it."
After a five-year hiatus, he got back into the movie business, buying the Kirkwood Cinema from the AMC chain, leasing the Sunset Hills fourplex and operating the art-house Tivoli for an owner who had no intention of renovating. "The Tivoli was a lot of fun, but the place was a mess," Moseley says.
One year after Moseley hung a "Closed Forever" sign in the window, the Tivoli was renovated and reopened by Blueberry Hill owner Joe Edwards, who later handed the operation to Landmark, the nation's dominant exhibitor of independent and foreign films. Landmark also took over the Hi-Pointe and opened a six-screener in Plaza Frontenac - which spelled doom for Moseley's two-screen art-film operation in Kirkwood. He sold the Kirkwood Cinema to a children's theater troupe in 1999.
Squeezed between Landmark and the mainstream chains, all of which were expanding, Moseley made two bold movies. He took over AMC's ailing Galleria Cinema, where the kiddie flicks and weekly "crybaby matinees" have proved a success, and he opened a five-screen boutique theater in the Chase Park Plaza, serving beer and wine to complement a menu of prestige films. Although a similar venture quickly fizzled at the Ritz-Carlton (because of a management change, Moseley says), the Chase is still thriving after five years. Pending the opening of the Moolah, it is the only movie theater within the city limits of St. Louis.
Although the Moolah will open with the middlebrow "Meet the Fockers," Moseley wants to concentrate on the kind of "quality films" that have crossed over into the mainstream since "The Crying Game" and "The English Patient." But because small distributors have an unofficial rule that they will not give the same movie to two theaters within five miles of each other, he will sometimes have to compete with the Tivoli and Hi-Pointe, the latter of which outbid him for "The Phantom of the Opera."
"The key to this business is the movie on the screen," he says. "I'm a golden-rule kind of guy. If I can show movies that I like in a clean place where people are treated well, I figure that I'll succeed."
Screen and screen again
Local movie theaters that have been operated by Harman Moseley:
Gem (aka St. John)
Ritz
Granada
St. Andrews
Star (Granite City)
Fine Arts
Kirkwood
Tivoli
Sunset Hills
Chase
Galleria
Screening Room at the Ritz-Carlton
Moolah
Critic Joe Williams
E-mail: joewilliams@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8344
By Joe Williams
Post-Dispatch Film Critic
12/19/2004
GRAND OPENING
MOOLAH THEATRE
Lindell & Vandeventer
St. Louis's BIGGEST SCREEN movie theatre
a 500 seat deluxe MOVIE THEATRE & MUCH MORE
balcony seating
COUCH AND STADIUM SEATING
Full Bar!!
Live Music!!
OPENS WEDNESDAY
DECEMBER 22ND!!
Harman Moseley stands in the upper level of the main auditorium that will house the movie screen.
(David Carson/P-D)
In 2004, the only thing dicier than opening a single-screen movie theater might be opening a single-screen theater with "Arabian Nights" decor. But Harman Moseley has been betting against the conventional wisdom for more than 20 years. When he inaugurates the lavish Moolah Theatre and Lounge on Wednesday, it will be the costliest in a string of theater ventures that have bucked the trend of building mallplexes to serve the latest Hollywood dreck to suburban teenagers.
Although locally owned Wehrenberg remains the largest theater operator in town, Moseley is the last of the one-man developers. While the chains have often overbuilt and underperformed, Moseley has specialized in reviving old theaters in forsaken locations or starting new ones in venues that were never intended to screen movies.
When ticket prices rose, Moseley invested in dollar-show theaters. When cable and video threatened to end the era of repertory cinema, he bet on the classics and midnight-movie fare. When the studios pitched their products to amorous teens, he invited mothers to bring their bawling babies. When the chains abandoned the metropolitan core for greener pastures, he carved movie theaters into the city's two best hotels, hitting the jackpot with the Chase in the city but rolling snake eyes with the Ritz-Carlton in Clayton.
But the aptly named Moolah may be the riskiest of his gambles. "Opening a single-screener is insanity!" he declares with an impish laugh. Not all the money is Moseley's - the landmark 92-year-old building near Lindell Boulevard and Vandeventer Avenue, originally the Moolah Shrine Temple, is being developed by Amrit and Amy Gill at an estimated cost of $17 million. The building also features 42 apartments, an eight-lane bowling alley and a parking garage. But the centerpiece theater will be leased and run by Moseley, who's betting "a couple hundred G's" that St. Louis University students and patrons of Grand Center will want to take a look.
The lap of luxury
What they'll see is astounding, a theater space that is unlike anything else in town. It starts with the lobby, restored to its Moorish splendor after 20 years of slumber behind locked doors. To the right is the Moolah Lounge, a self-contained bar that Moseley hopes will attract a late-night clientele. Straight ahead is the ticket counter and concession stand, staffed by employees wearing conical red fezzes. And through the massive interior doors is the theater space, which is utterly unique from floor to ceiling. Six stories overhead is a barrel-vaulted ceiling, hung with chandeliers. Underfoot is carpet - rare inside a movie theater - and a flat-surface floor that leads to one of the largest movie screens in town. At 45 feet wide and 20 feet tall, it's not exactly IMAX proportions, but it's wide enough for Cinemascope.
For a deeper immersion into the experience, up-front patrons can sink into one of the 70 chocolate-leather couches and love seats that will be scattered across the floor. Although such unconventional movie viewing has been tried in venues from the elegant indoor/outdoor Foreign Cinema in San Francisco to the funky storefront Ragtag in Columbia, Mo., it's a first for St. Louis. Along with the full bar, the comfy seats promise to create a lively atmosphere. (They can also be rolled away for the live performances and special events that Moseley expects will be a big part of the venue's business.)
For the same ticket price, patrons can opt for four rows of traditional stadium-style seating at the back of the auditorium or an experience that St. Louis moviegoers have not enjoyed for years: a balcony. Looking out over the wide expanse are six rows of upper-level seats, on a balcony that sweeps around three quarters of the room's perimeter.
It's an almost obscenely luxurious space, and it defies the latest trends in theater management. Although screens are getting larger - the biggest one at Wehrenberg's new Galaxy 14 Cine, which opens Wednesday in Chesterfield Valley, is 80 feet wide and five stories tall - almost all the plush new theaters are in suburban multiplex developments with dozens of screens.
Single-screen theaters are rare - the swank-but-aging Hi-Pointe in Dogtown and the restored Lincoln in Belleville are exceptions - and newly built ones are almost unheard of. "I wanted to subdivide the space," Moseley admits, "but it had to be a single screen to qualify for historic tax credits."
Moseley says that he and the developers are not expecting a huge windfall from a theater that can only bet on one movie at a time. "For the Gills, the movie theater will be a loss leader," he says. "But what they want to do is create some action in the neighborhood. They own the apartments in the building, and they renovated the old Coronado Hotel and some other properties nearby, so they want to generate excitement. Besides SLU, you've got the Fox, you've got Powell Hall, you've got the Contemporary Art Museum and all the other things in Grand Center. We want to give those people a reason to stick around instead of driving back to the county. Until recently, there wasn't even a place to get a cup of coffee around here."
A movie family
Coffee, by the way, is another business on which Moseley took a chance. In the 1990s, he owned six Caffe Paradiso shops in the area. But the espresso boom soon petered out. "I was so foolish," he says. "I'd been to Seattle and Vancouver and seen how popular coffee was becoming, so I thought I couldn't go wrong. I ended up losing a lot of money. It turns out I wasn't meant to be in the food business."
On the other hand, the Moseley family has been in the movie business for three generations. His father, the late Harman Sr., sold projection equipment. His brother John operates the discount St. Andrews Theater in St. Charles. And Harman's daughter Julia, 23, will help operate the Moolah, particularly the bar.
At 51, Moseley is a restlessly energetic and mercurial fellow. After graduating from Clayton High School, he left for what he thought would be a six-week European vacation. He ended up living abroad for five years, in Amsterdam, Australia and Southeast Asia.
When he returned to the States in 1977, he entered the family business, managing the Gem Theater in St. John. "We tried everything there - midnight movies, rock-concert films, you name it. During the Christmas season, we showed 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' for 14 straight nights, and it saved the business."
After that, he bought the Ritz, an adults-only theater on South Grand Boulevard. "That's about the time I married Sara," he says. "In a one-month period, I got married, bought a porn theater and moved to south St. Louis. Her parents weren't too happy."
Neither were the authorities, who arrested Moseley and a ticket-taker for screening a movie called "Sensations." Although the charges were dropped, Moseley agreed to convert the theater into a family-friendly discount house.
When the city of St. Louis bought the property for a parking lot, Moseley made a tidy profit and went into real estate. "I finally learned about business from these real-estate sharks who got up every morning at 5 a.m.," he says. "I hated it."
After a five-year hiatus, he got back into the movie business, buying the Kirkwood Cinema from the AMC chain, leasing the Sunset Hills fourplex and operating the art-house Tivoli for an owner who had no intention of renovating. "The Tivoli was a lot of fun, but the place was a mess," Moseley says.
One year after Moseley hung a "Closed Forever" sign in the window, the Tivoli was renovated and reopened by Blueberry Hill owner Joe Edwards, who later handed the operation to Landmark, the nation's dominant exhibitor of independent and foreign films. Landmark also took over the Hi-Pointe and opened a six-screener in Plaza Frontenac - which spelled doom for Moseley's two-screen art-film operation in Kirkwood. He sold the Kirkwood Cinema to a children's theater troupe in 1999.
Squeezed between Landmark and the mainstream chains, all of which were expanding, Moseley made two bold movies. He took over AMC's ailing Galleria Cinema, where the kiddie flicks and weekly "crybaby matinees" have proved a success, and he opened a five-screen boutique theater in the Chase Park Plaza, serving beer and wine to complement a menu of prestige films. Although a similar venture quickly fizzled at the Ritz-Carlton (because of a management change, Moseley says), the Chase is still thriving after five years. Pending the opening of the Moolah, it is the only movie theater within the city limits of St. Louis.
Although the Moolah will open with the middlebrow "Meet the Fockers," Moseley wants to concentrate on the kind of "quality films" that have crossed over into the mainstream since "The Crying Game" and "The English Patient." But because small distributors have an unofficial rule that they will not give the same movie to two theaters within five miles of each other, he will sometimes have to compete with the Tivoli and Hi-Pointe, the latter of which outbid him for "The Phantom of the Opera."
"The key to this business is the movie on the screen," he says. "I'm a golden-rule kind of guy. If I can show movies that I like in a clean place where people are treated well, I figure that I'll succeed."
Screen and screen again
Local movie theaters that have been operated by Harman Moseley:
Gem (aka St. John)
Ritz
Granada
St. Andrews
Star (Granite City)
Fine Arts
Kirkwood
Tivoli
Sunset Hills
Chase
Galleria
Screening Room at the Ritz-Carlton
Moolah
Critic Joe Williams
E-mail: joewilliams@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8344
) right above the pins. This downstairs section also has a darts game, an electronic jukebox and also an arcade bowling game if you want some practice first.
