Company: Cable Car Cinema and Café
Owner: Albert Bilodeau
Location: 204 South Main St., Providence
Employees: 8 to 14, seasonally
Type of business: Movie theater and café
Annual sales: WND
Running the Cable Car Cinema and Café is like having an affair with a “bittersweet mistress,” according to Eric Bilodeau, who manages his family’s business. That’s a fittingly romantic synopsis for the small art house movie theater on South Main Street, where people go to take in a foreign film while wrapped with a preferred someone in an upholstered loveseat, sipping an Almond Sunset and munching a roast-turkey-on-Syrian.
This theater is the antithesis of the 10-screen movie palaces that line America’s strip malls, emanating the drone of Hollywood crash-bangs. In contrast, for the same ticket price, the Cable Car has a single auditorium that swaddles 130 people in lush upholstery and strives to be a thoughtful and artistic alternative to the mainstream movie-industry factory.
A live performance of blues, folk or forgotten 40s pop songs before the movie starts is a Cable Car tradition. When a hailed new documentary about the life of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the so-called father of deconstruction, opens in February, filmmakers Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman will visit the theater to speak to the Cable Car audience about their film. This is not your typical movie theater.
“The people that come here are people who are film educated, who are not following the media stream,” said Bilodeau.
Undeniably, the Cable Car Cinema has a high cool factor. But owning and operating the art house has its downsides too, insists Bilodeau, 38, who manages the day-to-day operation of the business founded by his uncle and currently owned by his father. It’s not easy being an exhibitor of cultural cool, an arbiter of celluloid art.
Specifically, you’ve got to pay the bills.
“What is of interest to us is what is making money,” said Bilodeau. “My personal aesthetic is not always the movie I book. A movie should be good, but it’s got to sell tickets.”
Searching beneath the radar to find the next independent film that will fill the loveseats in his small theater is a full-time endeavor for Bilodeau, and involves a lot of guesswork. Bilodeau books films week to week to be able to cash in on an unexpected hit or dump a good film that’s unfortunately just not drawing crowds.
When “Pulp Fiction” touched down in 1993, the little Cable Car Cinema showed it for weeks. Bilodeau showed “Life is Beautiful” for seven months, and sold out every showing of the Italian film for four solid months.
“‘Life is Beautiful’ was my ass-kicker of the century. Other theaters had it and let it go,” said Bilodeau. “But it works the other way too. The reviewers have a lot of power. I’ve seen so many fantastic movies before the reviewers and booked it. Then the movie gets two stars and no one has any interest. I’ve lost thousands of dollars that way on films. The independent, alternative and foreign film industry is a bittersweet mistress. You cannot tell what’s going to do well.”
Bilodeau bristles at the suggestion that any film with subtitles will sell to Rhode Island School of Design students and East Side couples that saunter down to the Cable Car for their weekly dose of art and espresso. When Bilodeau’s uncle bought an old garage and turned it into the Cable Car Cinema in 1976, he was among the vanguard of entrepreneurs thick skinned enough to open a business on South Main Street. At the time, the blighted neighborhood was unattractive by day and abandoned by night. Bilodeau’s uncle, a teacher in the Providence school system, poured $100,000 into creating his dream theater and opened with a Bergman film. No one showed up.
“It takes many years to build up a clientele. It didn’t just happen. I get really annoyed when people who don’t know what we’ve been doing here for all these years say, ‘oh, of course the Cable Car does well – look at their location,’” said Bilodeau. “From 1976 to 1985, this place was a hellhole. We would open the door, sell tickets, close the door and lock it. Not the happening economic place it’s developed into now.”
The Bilodeaus put in the café in 1989, in a space that had been a storage closet. The combination of movies and coffee proved to be a potent one, said Bilodeau, and the Cable Car has been selling it since even before the famed Angelica Theater in New York City’s Soho.
“I would humbly suggest that we’ve inspired many an alternative operator in other cities. I’ve had many a call from owners requesting to sit down and ask us about what we do and how we do it,” said Bilodeau. “I love film as an art form. I never want to be a filmmaker, but I love being an exhibitor. Programming is fun! There’s no doubt about it. It’s like being a DJ and making people listen to your favorite music. It’s like I spend my life saying ‘hey, you’ve got to see this.’”
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