Karl:
What was the inspiration for a theater in Billings anyway named the Babcock?
Matt:
So my understanding is, so it, I'm trying to remember the specific name, but it was the, I wanna say the Billings Opera House. It was on the other side of the tracks downtown here. And it burned down in the early 1900s. At that point, it stirred Mr. Babcock to essentially say “what if we were to take that opera house and build something more immaculate, more ornate?” I think the original idea was for it to be seven stories total, with apartments and retail and lots happening within this structure. So they began rebuilding that, and then a couple years after the Opera House burned down, they opened the Babcock Theater. They started with just the two floors that currently exist there now with the apartments and then the retail on the ground floor.
But really the big piece of it was this immaculate Opera House, essentially what they had envisioned, and the industry was shifting and changing in the early 1900s a little bit, but it had a real significance and real beauty for the region, and for the area, is one of the largest theaters at the time. So you get all these touring acts as Billings was a stop in between Minneapolis and Seattle. Essentially Billings was a place that you had to make sure that you stopped here, and so it had two balconies and seated about 1400 people at the time, about double what it seats now.
It was a pretty substantial big deal at the time. I think, like a lot of these historic theaters, as the industry was evolving and not just, (a taste for opera), but just what do you do with these, really community centers that so many people have so many memories of. Vaudeville was a thing. Film started to become more and more of a presence, and what we see specifically with the Babcock, but I think with a lot of historical theaters, is that you slowly start to turn these into more and more cinema-forward kinds of spaces.
Then, in 1933, the theater burned down - the current Babcock burned down, again and they rebuilt it, pretty quickly, and in 1934 reopened, and had even more kind of insider thought around “Cinema's more a piece of what we're doing”, even as stage shows, vaudeville remained a piece to the puzzle for them as far as how this theater was gonna function. Then in 1955 is when they did the remodel that we're currently living with at the Babcock.
The Skouras styling of the theater, in which there were multiple theaters that the Skouras Brothers brought their architectural insight and thoughts and hopes and dreams to, and really turned it into what it is. So you'll find theaters styled like the Babcock. There's only a couple of 'em that are actually open in the country, but I bring that up because that was really a pivot point for this theater specifically to say, now we're gonna do cinema like that's gonna be the thing. And really where it became a movie house for the community. So as far as Billings goes, really from 1955 on, the main memory most people have with that theater is cinema.
Obviously in the last couple decades there's been concerts there and things. Those memories continue to grow. But really, when it became that movie palace that our country has lots of them that people are trying to figure out, not just what their story is, but maybe more significantly what their future is.
Are you getting a range of people checking in and saying, “This is not going to go away. We're gonna make this happen again.”?
Yeah. I think we have seen so much generosity of spirit and some financial donations as well. I do believe it's because of Arthouse's commitment to that space. We were planning to be there for a few more decades in the way that we were budgeting ourselves and thinking about our work here in Billings. We were gonna be there for a while, and so this probably potentially sped some things up just as far as okay - we have things we need to address.
And in an historic building like this, once you start picking at one thing, you reveal 10 other things that then reveal 10 other things. And before you know it, we've just, we need to do this guys. And so we've got a board meeting next week, an incredible board of directors, and I think there's some good conversations to have in the future.
