It cost $385K and took a decade, but Pilot Mound residents insist the show must go on
The furtive glances, the nervous moment when they touch hands with their date — a night at the movies was once a rite of passage for residents of a small Manitoba community.
“I think everybody in my generation — I’m 60ish — we all remember having our first date in the Tivoli Community Theatre,” Sharon Currie said.
But a decade ago the lights in the Pilot Mound, Man., theatre were flicked off. The smell of stale popcorn was lodged in the rafters, until those rafters themselves were dismantled.
Currie, like so many others, didn’t want to draw the curtains on Pilot Mound’s theatre. They wanted a place for the community of almost 700 people to gather, somewhere to hold those formative first dates.
After years of effort, they rolled out the red carpet for the new iteration of the Tivoli Community Theatre last month.
“My grandson was sitting with a little girlfriend there on the first movie,” she said. “I thought that was really cool.”
Hollywood in Pilot Mound
It cost some $385,000 to bring Hollywood to Pilot Mound — located around 147 km southwest of Winnipeg — once again. It took a dedicated volunteer crew nearly 10 years to raise that much.
But it was worth it, said Currie, who is board chair with the theatre.
“We’re trying to keep everything we can in our community so that we can keep our young people here, and we can attract more young people to come,” she said.
“Because we don’t have the money, we have a huge volunteer base.”
She’s right about that. This is a community where volunteers run the canteen and clean the dressing room at the local recreation centre. Nobody is getting paid.
It’s place that convinced old-timers to bare it all for a fundraising calendar, a community that caught wind of an arena being sold up north, so they bought it, dismantled it, transported it and built it up again — but they made it larger, and did it mainly with volunteer labour.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone they found a way to reopen their theatre, now in the corner of the Pilot Mound Millennium Recreation Complex.
“We all really want to have a nice, safe, close venue” to watch movies, Currie said.
“We also have an older population that want to get out and they want to mix with their peers as well, but they don’t want to drive 45 minutes to the nearest theatre,” she said. “When you do that, you’re taking away business from your community.”
The original Tivoli opened in 1945, replacing a theatre that was atop a hatchery. The cinema was rolling for decades, even when the owners retired in the early 1990s and volunteers took over.
By 2010, the building was showing its age. The theatre was barely breaking even and didn’t have the money to do repairs and acquire a digital projector, Pat Sutherland, another board member, said.
Closing was ‘probably the best thing’
“It was an old, decrepit building with horrible smells, poor lighting, horrible heating, poor projector and sound equipment,” he said.
Closing the theatre that year was “unfortunately, probably the best thing we could have done to quit wasting that good money.”
The board focused on fundraising. They ran barbecues, raffles and trivia nights. Two kids donated the proceeds they made from selling vegetables.
“You could never take your foot off the gas because you had to keep going,” Sutherland said.
It took longer than expected, but they got it done. The community can now watch digital films at the new Tivoli every weekend, sitting on seats from the old Winnipeg Arena.
Source: First flicks and first dates: Pilot Mound presses play on reopened theatre | CBC News