Deposit Community Theatre and Performing Arts Center, located at 14B Front St. in Deposit. Photo by Mike Musante.
It's not easy being a 76-year-old movie theater in the Catskills. The movie palace in Deposit, which showed its first film in 1937, was a derelict structure with a caved-in roof in 1986 when a group of citizens decided to resurrect it as a neighborhood nonprofit theater.
Since then, the Deposit Community Theatre and Performing Arts Center has been gutted by fire (in 1994) and damaged by floodwaters (in 2006). In the winter of 2010 - 2011, heavy snows punched a hole in its roof.
Every time disaster struck, the community raised the money to save the historic structure, which is fronted with its original agate-blue Vitrolite Carrara Glass from Italy and topped by a towering seven-foot-tall red-white-and-blue marquee. This year, the nonprofit theater celebrated its 25th anniversary as a community-run theatre. And, fittingly, another crises looms.
The latest threat comes from Hollywood: By the end of 2013, film distributors will cease releasing movies on film. To continue showing first-run movies, theaters across the country must upgrade to digital projectors.
That's a tall order for small theaters in small Catskills towns. Last fall, the Walton Theatre raised $70,000 to make its transition to digital. This winter, Upstate Films, a nonprofit that runs two small arthouse movie theaters in Rhinebeck and Woodstock, has raised $165,000 towards the $180,000 cost of two digital projectors.
Carolyn DeNys, the co-manager of the Deposit Community Theatre and Performing Arts Center, says that the Deposit Theatre was well on its way to raising the $63,000 necessary to buy digital projection equipment when the snow caved in a part of the roof in 2011.
"We started three years ago," she said. "When we had almost $20,000 raised, we needed a new roof. We had a gigantic hole after that winter. So we had to put this campaign on hold. If you don’t save your theater with a new roof, you don’t have to worry about a digital camera."
After putting its projector money towards fixing the roof, the Deposit Theatre started again. This spring, DeNys hopes to raise the $63,000 to install digital projectors by June. So far, the group has raised $30,000 -- including $20,000 from the Mee Foundation in Binghamton and $5,000 from the O’Connor Foundation in Hobart. That leaves $33,000 to go.
"We have survived a roof cave-in, a fire, and a flood," DeNys said. "No project looks too small or too large."
Donations can be made to the Deposit Community Theatre through the mail. Send a check to Deposit Theatre, PO Box 318, Deposit, NY 13754.
