Short of Cash, Brattle May Be Forced To Close

If the Brattle Theatre does not raise enough money this fall to keep its projector bulbs lighted, one of Harvard Square’s most renowned silver screens may tarnish in the dark.

The 52-year-old art-house theater must succeed in raising $400,000 by the end of the calendar year, or it will have to stop screening permanently, according to Creative Director Ned Hinkle.

The Brattle Film Foundation, which currently rents the theater and schedules films, organized the two-year Preserve the Brattle Legacy Campaign, which ends this December, to help build a solid financial foundation.

According to Hinkle, the Brattle has been “struggling financially for 15 to 20 years.”

Recently, though, the theater’s finances have sprung even greater leaks.

Hinkle and his staff completed extensive renovations to the theater in 2001, casting it into a debt that was itself exacerbated as fewer people went movie-going that fall.

“There was a huge drop in audiences after September 11” from which the theater is still recovering, Hinkle said.

The Brattle has also been suffering from a 40 percent decrease in ticket sales over the past two years—largely as a result of competition, Hinkle said. The Kendall Square Cinema is a multiplex with similar programming, and Internet-based companies like Netflix and VideoOnDemand.com give viewers one reason fewer to buy a ticket.

And, for the Brattle, which acquires many of its reels outside the mainstream, rising prices place another straw on the camel’s back.

“It’s getting costlier and costlier to do the kind of programming the Brattle does,” Hinkle said. As a result, he said he places a premium on the theater’s unconventional charms.

“We’re seen as Boston’s unofficial film school,” Hinkle said—a “classroom without a classroom.”

The theater frequently invites speakers to introduce films or host after-show discussions. Its directors sometimes distribute essays by noted critics during screenings.

Hinkle said he is committed to preserving the Brattle’s history of unconventional film programming. The organization became nonprofit in 2001, a move that Hinkle said he believes “[speaks] to what the Brattle is known for.”

The Brattle’s dramatic legacy began in 1946, before it started screening films. Jerome T. Kilty ’49, a student actor who considered Harvard’s dramatic societies too exclusive, placed an ad in The Crimson inviting fellow students interested in forming a theater group to join him. The ensemble that resulted bought Brattle Hall, the large brick building on Brattle St. that now houses the theater.

During the 1950s, the theater began showing repertory films instead of live productions.

Hope, a 1955 Radcliffe graduate who declined to give her last name, said that, in the cinema’s nascent days, she and her college friends used to “dress up and go out to see ‘Casablanca.’” The Brattle during that time “showed everything that wasn’t mainstream Hollywood,” she said. “It was a breath of fresh air.”

Those who frequent the theater today say they would be disappointed to see it halt its art-house reels.

“It would be terrible for the Brattle to close,” said 40-year Cambridge resident Kathleen Weiler. “Everyone who has been here a long time will be sad.”