LITTLE ROCK — The Saenger and Community theaters in downtown Pine Bluff have been closed for years, but the two opposites stand in recollection of yesterday’s moviegoing at its grandest and rootin’-tootin’-est.
The Saenger opened in 1924 with a presentation of director D.W. Griffith’s silent saga, America, so impressive with its thundering pipe organ that the pioneering director himself attended.
Renaissance in style, enormous in size, the Saenger filled all 1,600 seats in Pine Bluff’s heyday as a railroad and steamboat stop. Travelers looked for entertainment, and the Saenger had everything from full-scale orchestras to the mystifying Harry Houdini onstage - and movies, besides.
Practically across thestreet, the Community (or “bloody bucket,” as the locals called it), specialized in scruffy shoot-’em-ups that starred the two-fisted likes of Tex Ritter. (Cowboy superstar Tom Mix’s fancier productions played at the Saenger.)
Unlikely partners, the two theaters co-starred as locales for the Pine Bluff Film Festival. From 1994 to 2008, the festival attracted a roster of celebrity guests with ties to some of Hollywood’s classics, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Gunga Din), Fay Wray (King Kong), and silent comedian Charlie Chaplin’s actress daughter, Geraldine.
Today, the Saenger “is really endangered,” says Kathy Majewska of the Old Town Theatre Center that she describes as “a few of us” devoted to preserving the old structure.
The Community lingered as a museum of movie memorabilia. But when the annual Pine Bluff Film Festival dwindled away, “I just closed it down, too,” Majewska says, still hoping for better days.
Like the imperiled heroine of an old-time movie serial, Pine Bluff’s historic theaters are left to the chance of a rescue that might or might not come in the nick of time.
The festival, however, will be back with a new name - The Starlight Film Festival: Formerly the Pine Bluff Film Festival - May 6-7 at the Malco Theatre in Hot Springs, Majewska says, announcing the guest star will be actress Claire Bloom.
Style, Pages 50 on 02/20/2011