A Treasured Cinema in its 92nd Year

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April 9, 2023

How do I explain this? Every once in a while, we get an experience that’s like meeting an old friend for the first time. That just happened and I want to tell you about it. I had gone to the Cape Cinema to talk to its executive director, Josh Mason. With 92 years of continuous operation, the Cape Cinema is the oldest movie theater on Cape Cod.

The theater itself is also a work of art. The building was modeled after an old church in Centerville, and the design included a long barrel-vaulted ceiling. Famed artist Rockwell Kent was commissioned to paint — Sistine Chapel-like — the entire ceiling. Like Michelangelo, Rockwell Kent also had a vision of heaven, but the style is art deco. Human figures blend with signs of the Zodiac to sprawl across the vaulted ceiling in a kind of dance. Arrive at the theater early and it’s fun to lean back in your seat and let your eyes wander across the ceiling above you. There’s nothing else on Cape remotely like it.

Josh and I met to collaborate on a project you’ll be reading about in a subsequent column. There is at least a generational difference in our respective ages, but it didn’t feel that way once we started talking. Like the boy in Stephen Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans”, Josh fell in love with film in his youth when his folks gave him his first movie camera. He studied film at Hofstra University and then moved out to Hollywood where he became a personal assistant for Ellen DeGeneres and then began making movie trailers for the industry.

Cape Cinema as a multicultural center, available and responsive to the surrounding community

For years, the Cape Cinema has offered a blend of good movies and live entertainment — and certainly, that’s not going to change. Josh wants to take this original vision and grow the space out into its potential as a multicultural center available and responsive to its surrounding community on Cape Cod. “I want this place to become a vessel for creativity,” says Josh … “to entertain and educate … a ‘green space’… more than the movies.”

We know there are high schools on Cape Cod with film clubs. This is where interested young people learn how to merge their cinematic creativity with the technical expertise required to actually make good movies. Josh would love to see the Cape Cinema become the venue for youth film festivals. In addition to offering first-run films to the public, the Cape Cinema now features “Splatterday Nights” with classic horror films on the screen. The theater is surveying patrons twice a year to find out what sorts of movies and performing artists they want to see and what would be ideal show times.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Josh what his vision might be for five to 10 years out. There was a long pause. “I want,” he said finally, “to see the Cinema be the Cape’s premier destination for what we do: film and live shows. We have a 92-year history here and I want to build on that legacy… see if we can change lives through art.”

How does that happen as a practical fact? I think it’s going to happen through collaboration. The Cape Cinema is a venue, after all … a place where things can happen. What sorts of good things will depend on the quality of the ideas that other individuals and organizations can bring to the discussion. For example, we found ourselves imagining what a multi-generational slam poetry event might look like. Imagine young poets from high school performing their work side by side with poets old enough to be their grandparents … in other words, with people who have been writing and performing poetry their whole lives. It’s not just hearing the work; it’s the conversations that might follow between the young and the older poets and their audience about what poetry means and how it’s done.

That’s just one example of the Cape Cinema’s vision for its second century of operation. Such collaborations between our libraries, our colleges and schools and all sorts of civic organizations are out there, just waiting to enrich us all. It is, Josh reminded me, about more than just the movies.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. E-mail him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

A Treasured Cinema in its 92nd Year

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