Exclusive: A Tri-Cities family movie theater’s 7-month shutdown struggle
Editor’s Note: Movie columnist Gary Wolcott has reviewed movies for the Tri-City Herald for nearly 30 years. After some businesses began reopening in recent months, he helped connect Fairchild Cinemas manager Kevin Fairchild with an advisor in the governor’s office in an effort to allow movie theaters to reopen. Here is Wolcott’s recent interview on the theater business and family’s struggles during the pandemic.
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Imagine spending $10 million on a new building for your business. For three months crowds pack the place and then — suddenly — you’re shut down. And not just for a few weeks but for seven grueling months.
Fairchild Cinemas manager Kevin Fairchild said that happened shortly after the company opened Kennewick’s Southgate 10.
“A theater is very expensive to build. ... It was almost heartbreaking. We spent a year building this,” he said. “We are the ones who laid the carpet, we are the ones who put up the wall fabric and we are the ones who installed the projectors and the speakers. We are very hands-on and this was a labor of love to build. To have it lay empty for such a long time is heartbreaking and very discouraging. It’s like we did all that work for naught.”
As COVID-19 infection rates began dropping in Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee started allowing restaurants and bars to reopen more with safety restrictions. At first they did outdoor seating and then indoor dining was allowed. Theaters, however, remained closed.
“Since both bars and restaurants were allowed to open when things relaxed, and since we have a liquor and food license, we planned on opening in September,” Fairchild said. “We didn’t because the studios asked us to hold off until movie theaters had explicit permission to open.”
It would be another month and a half before the Tri-Cities advanced to Phase 2 of the state reopening plan, and theaters could officially open their doors with limits. Fairchild’s Southgate theater showed its first movie since March on Oct. 17.
Fairchild said the shutdown has been brutal because most theaters east of the Cascades are owned by individuals or small businesses.
Living lean
“It’s very frustrating to be told you have to be completely closed. Instead of the state working with us to find a safe solution we’re told we have to be closed,” Fairchild said. “It was quite the change for us. We’re open 365 days a year so to be closed for seven months straight was kind of surreal. We did a lot of deep cleaning projects and things to keep us occupied and busy.”
Like a lot of businesses, Fairchild Cinemas reached out to the governor’s office early in the pandemic.
“We kept contacting the governor’s office for help. In March, April and May we got automated replies back saying we’re too busy to reply to these emails. We were given a link to a frequently asked questions page,” Fairchild said.
The link wasn’t helpful and for seven months Fairchild’s theaters in Kennewick, Pasco, Richland and Moses Lake remained closed.
“We lived off of savings and we cut expenses. You cut back on all services you don’t need at the moment and you just live very lean,” he said.
In late September, I helped Fairchild connect with Sheri Sawyer, a senior policy advisor for Inslee, because as a citizen, I had been bugging the state about the need to reopen theaters.
Fairchild passionately explained to Sawyer how he believes theaters can actually be much safer than restaurants.
“She was very open to our position,” he said. “I told her that in a typical restaurant people are facing several different directions. They usually will have only one HVAC system for the entire dining area. Whereas, with cinema you have separate HVAC systems for separate rooms. You’re walled off and have a different air supply. Plus, everyone’s facing the same direction so don’t have any face-to-face action. You don’t have conversations like in a restaurant.”
Laughing, Fairchild noted that talking in theaters has always been highly discouraged.
“You have very tall ceilings compared to most other venues. With stadium seating we have different seating levels. The person in the row in front of you is not only six or seven feet horizontally away from you, but they are three or four feet vertically separated from you. So when you compound that over two or three or four rows, you start to have significant social distancing,” Fairchild argues.
He pointed out that right now the limit is 25 percent of capacity but he maintains theaters could easily and safely open to 50 percent occupancy.
“One study looked at different activities and the spread of COVID. It looked at people sitting still and not talking like at a movie and at people sitting in a place like a restaurant where they’re having conversation. It also looked at performances like someone singing,” Fairchild said. “What they found was people sitting and not talking had a 14-times less opportunity for virus transmission. The same study found people sitting were 90-times safer than being where people are singing.”
“If you’re comfortable going to a restaurant right now then you should definitely be comfortable going to a theater,” he noted. “This is a very safe environment. There is a lot of fresh air in a theater auditorium.”
Clean and safe
Fairchild said he and the employees of Fairchild Cinemas are very serious about being clean and safe. Everyone wears a mask all the time and he argues his theater is safer than most fast-food places or drive-thru coffee businesses.
“The vast majority of people use a credit card to purchase a ticket. About 90-percent of theater ticket sales are online. When they come into the lobby and up to the ticket counter they scan their bar code on a scanner and they don’t touch anything,” he explained.
“That scanner is on the other side of the screen separating the person selling tickets from the moviegoer. The machine that prints the ticket is also on the moviegoer side of the screen. If it’s a cash transaction, our employee uses a hand sanitizer before the cash is given to them and after the change is given back to the moviegoer,” he said.
They also have new safety protocols at the concession stands.
“In a cash transaction after every transaction the employee selling the concessions uses a hand sanitizer or washes their hands to assure safety for the next person using cash. In the case of a credit card, the employee does not touch the card. The card is scanned on the customer side of the shield,” he said.
The auditoriums get a similar treatment. “We know what seats are used at each movie. They are thoroughly wiped down, the handrails and doors are all wiped down,” Fairchild noted. “Anything that can be touched by people is wiped down.”
Holiday movie season
The holiday season is rapidly approaching and that’s when movie studios release their best films and the movies they expect will bring in the most money at the box office.
“We’re are in a good spot with our business. What we need now is help from the studios. Without movies there are no theaters. As long as what was promised to be released is released, we’ll do great,” Fairchild said.
“Eighty percent of the movies that were scheduled to be released theatrically are still scheduled to be released. The studios have a lot of comfort about the market but are still hesitant to put out huge blockbusters; films they’ve spent a half-a-billion dollars on. We won’t see them until they’re confident they can recoup their investment.”
He said right now theaters are getting mid to smaller titles, and it will be a few months before we start seeing the blockbusters start to come out. The real hope now is to be able to stay open and to reach the 50-percent capacity mark.
“I’m hesitant to get my hopes up with this governor’s office. I lost my trust in the system when the governor indefinitely paused his safe start system,” he said. “Why don’t counties advance when cases are lower and go backward when cases are high? Isn’t that the point of responding to a virus? With the current way the governor’s office is running the COVID response, I don’t have a lot of confidence we will progress to 50% even if our numbers are low.”
What he — and other theaters in the area — want moviegoers to know is it’s safe to go back to theaters.
“I want people to know how safe a theater is compared to other common activities. I understand that people are apprehensive and that their first thought about a theater is the crowd. That’s not the case at the moment and that’s especially true when a theater is limited to 25 percent capacity,” Fairchild said. “It’s not an ideal situation but we are super grateful for the opportunity to be open. And — truthfully — a lot of people don’t like staying home. A lot of people don’t want to watch movies on TV, they want to go to a theater.”
Fairchild Cinemas Southgate 10 opened last weekend. The doors of the Queensgate theater opened on Friday. Pasco’s theater is scheduled to reopen in mid-November.
“We want to help those financially struggling because of COVID,” he said. “This gives them an outing, too. They can bring their kids or they can have a date night. We are providing one free movie per week.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 12:50 PM.