The Tower Theater, 876 E. 900 South, will reopen Friday, hoping to recapture its '60s reputation as Salt Lake City's premiere movie art house. Indeed, with the closure of Cinema in Your Face! last week, the Tower will be Salt Lake's only art house.
While it's true Cineplex Odeon's Trolley Square Cinemas occasionally brings in a foreign-language film and the Avalon Theater continues to be the mainstay for old classics, the Tower hopes to establish itself as a first-rate repertory house for art, foreign-language, classic and children's films. Yes, that's right, children's films.Owner-operator Greg Tanner, who also ran Cinema in Your Face! and the Blue Mouse in their declining years, hopes to establish the Tower as both a serious art house and a neighborhood theater.
"The Tower has been a family theater for the last couple of decades," Tanner said, "and the neighborhood wants that again. It's not strictly family movies, of course, but we will have kids' matinees for $1, second-run films and children's classics like `The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.' and `The Brave Little Toaster.' "
The main emphasis, however, will be foreign-language and independent art films. "I think that Salt Lake has never had a high-quality art theater. Not since the Tower held that satus in the '60s. We feel there will be a lot more support for an arts theater here."
Tanner acknowledged that though many potential customers told him they liked his lineup of films, they simply would not go to the Blue Mouse, which was in the basement of a building on 100 South, or Cinema in Your Face!, which still suffered from the stigma of having once been a soft-core porn theater.
At the Tower, he plans to downplay the sleazy cult films that often dominated the Cinema in Your Face! calendar and hopes to attract more top-of-the-line first-run films. "Everyone has been very excited about the move and everyone agrees the Tower will be a nicer place to go to. And with 480 seats (as compared to 140 at Cinema in Your Face! and even fewer at the Blue Mouse) we hope to be able to get the bigger art films."
After a two-week run of his first Tower film, the restored version of "Citizen Kane," Tanner has lined up a number of first-run art films for August and September, including "The British Animation Invasion," "Ruben & Ed," "The Comfort of Strangers," "Strangers in Good Company," "Eating," Dark Obsession," "One Thousand Pieces of Gold," "Ju Dou" and "The Nasty Girl." And he will bring back some local favorites:"The Vanishing," "Impromptu" and "La Femme Nikita."
"We will also doing some classics, concentrating on new reissues (the first will be the 1934 French film `L'Atalante'), with occasional revivals of great directors or actors. And later in August we'll start midnight shows, with `Heavy Metal' and `Rocky Horror' and `Eraserhead.' "
Tanner's video business, offering offbeat cult, foreign and independent movies on cassette, will also move to the Tower.
Tanner said he and his crew have been working around the clock in recent weeks to renovate the theater. "We've improved the projection, renovated the lobby and rest rooms, fixed the electrical and plumbing problems.
But, he confesses, there is still work to be done. "We need to renovate the marquee, recover the ceiling inside the theater, upgrade the Dolby sound system."
Though Tanner is disappointed at being unable to achieve non-profit status for the Tower as a community theater, he says he is confident the theater will become a thriving business, enabling him to complete all the necessary renovations very soon. "We didn't raise enough to do all that we wanted to do, but we can open and work on it as we go." - Chris Hicks