PROVO -- A movie house at Brigham Young University is closing its box office after this semester.
But in true Hollywood fashion, the curtain will open again at Varsity Theater if substantial crowds can be drawn.Jerry Bishop, director of the Wilkinson Student Center, said the theater will shut its doors during the spring and summer terms, when most of the school's 27,000 students aren't on campus.
"It just hasn't proven to be profitable," Bishop said.
As a result, the once-thriving theater, which also features live comedy routines and musicians once a week, will close for spring and summer terms for the first time in some 30 years.
The 400-seat theater will open during BYU's Education Week and a few weeks before school starts next fall, Bishop said.
"We always cut back in the summer anyway," said Linda Nelson, theater manager. "We normally just run three days a week."
A decision to stop showing edited versions of popular movies also has played a part. The theater now only shows G-, PG- and a limited number of PG-13-rated movies.
"That has definitely had an impact on the number of people who come to the movies," Bishop said.
With the exception of such hits as "Toy Story II" and"The Phantom Menace," students haven't flocked to shows since BYU opted in 1998 to no longer show current movies that had been edited for content.
Before the school banned edited movies, students would wait in line for hours before the box-office opened, hoping to nab up to six tickets of that night's feature.
"We don't have the lines like we did before," Bishop said. "With the change of not showing edited movies, the interest has gone to other theaters."
The policy was announced shortly after Paramount Studios ordered American Fork's Towne Cinemas to stop snipping scenes from the Academy Award-winning "Titanic."
The school edited the movies to meet the school's moral code and because LDS Church leaders have advised church members not to watch films with profanity, nudity or excessive violence.
BYU's theater has attracted attention for its main attractions. It made headlines when Steven Spielberg refused to allow the school to cut parts of his 1994 Oscar-winning holocaust epic, "Schindler's List."
Another Spielberg film, "Amistad," was targeted by university movie editors a few months before the anti-editing policy was put into place and after studios began sending letters asking administrators not to edit the movies.
B4 DESERET NEWS, WED. P.M./THURS. A.M., APRIL 5-6, 2000