Sea View Theater To Remain Open — Video Store to Close

From left, John Mount and employee John Yerly at the Sea View Video Store

The oldest single-owner business in Eastsound will remain open, thanks to John Mount’s decision to take the Sea View Theater off the market. That’s the good news.

However, the adjoining video store will close in two days, at the start of 2010, as a result of declining video rental revenues. “The video store is dragging us down to the point where it’s not affordable,” said Mount.

The video building doesn’t lend itself to be a different business, Mount says; “It’s not a particularly separate entity from the theater.” And so the employees and the inventory of the video store are “up in the air,” while Mount decides the best use for the building he opened in the 1980s to answer the demand for at-home movie viewing. While he fleshes out the details for the video store, Mount is keeping his options quiet.

He put the Sea View Theater on the market earlier this year, but reconsidered earlier this month. He has been pleased by the number of people who have expressed their appreciation for keeping the theater open.

Mount opened the Sea View Theater, built by Fred Nichol, in 1960.  He’d come to Orcas Island in 1952, after serving a stint in the Navy. His two sisters lived here, and his parents had purchased property in West Sound. His sister, Carol Clark, still lives on her Crow Valley farm. Mount worked for the phone company and wondered if a movie theater would “go” up here.

B. Marcus Priteca, the official architect of vaudeville magnate Alexander Pantages’s theater empire (including Seattle’s Paramount and Coliseum Theaters) took an interest in providing the theater plan, although it was the smallest theater he’d ever designed, Mount related. Although Priteca was nationally recognized as an expert in modern, high-quality theater design, he never charged for his work on the Sea View. Instead he planned a fishing trip on Orcas Island with Mount, but Priteca passed away before the trip could be arranged.

Mount has seen almost every movie that has come to Eastsound audiences since “Pollyanna” first was shown on Nov. 4, 1960. “I’ve seen a lot and forgotten all – except a very few,” says Mount; the most memorable were “The Hunt for Red October” and the Disney films, because they drew in the best crowds.

Because the Sea View has a stage, it has been used by the school and local theater groups for performances in earlier days, back in the days when A Street was a two-track dirt road and the American Legion was the Sea View’s neighbor.

The fact that the Sea View often shows movies right after their first-run release is due to Theater Manager Ingrid McClinton’s work, Mount says, “She’s doing a splendid job. She deals with the movie studios and their sales agencies on an individual basis and bargains and barters to set dates” for the movies shown at the Sea View.

“There are not very many single-screen theaters left in the U.S.,” Mount says.

It may surprise some to know that the old reel-to-reel projection of movies is still the norm, as are 35 millimeter film prints that are delivered weekly via UPS.   Nowadays, the Sea View uses a “platform” system rather than the vertical reels, which required switching reels every 15 minutes.  (And for techies, a xenon bulb is used instead of a carbon arc). Still, a projectionist is required to run the movie, and either Mount or McClinton is at the theater for every movie showing.

Although digital projection is available, the investment costs are prohibitive, Mount says, ranging around $70,000.  Still, a digital booth offers a lot of opportunities, such as a satellite link to carry real-time events that may interest private parties in renting the theater.

Until that happens, or someone offers him $3,000,000 “or better,” Mount says with a twinkle in his eye, he’ll be upstairs at the theater on A Street, tending what he calls his “Fifty-year-old sack of rocks,” and what we call the Sea View Theater.