First, I want to thank all of you who reached out to say, “hell yes! buy that church!” and next, I want to ask you for between one and fifty thousand dollars. Unless one of you has a spare million, in which case I’ll take that, and the rest of you can stand down until phase two of the project.

It has been one week since R and I decided to buy (this) abandoned church and turn it into a movie theater (St. Catherine’s Cinema). Our goal for the week was to find out three things of the twenty million we need to find out before actually, maybe, possibly going through with this insane idea. I am proud to say that we crossed two out of the three off our list – proud because they’re my two things. R, “didn’t get to his.” He claims to have a legitimate excuse but then he doesn’t have a blog to share it on now does he? (j/k he’s shooting a pilot for an actual television network). R’s task was to call the town judge – Judge Brian – to find out a series of things I assume he’s figured out. They should probably be about the law, but I’ll leave that to R. 

My tasks were to get in touch with two people – a guy who installs movie theaters in unconventional places and the realtor who listed our church.

I was super concerned about the first task because of obvious reasons. Who knows a guy who installs movie theaters in unconventional place?! Why would that even be a thing in the first place?

Turns out it is, and I do.

• “Oh I guess I could call my friend Mark,” I told R, mostly as a way to remind him to call his future friend Judge Brian.
• “I’ll call Judge Brian. I’ll call him tomorrow,” R said, because he knows all my tricks. “What does Mark do?”
• “Well, a lot of things, but he used to be the technical director for the Tribeca Film Festival, so he did things like build movie theaters in strange places from scratch.”
• “Well that’s convenient.” 

 And boy was it! Within the first 30 seconds of my call with Mark he told me that this was an awesome idea, that equipment is way cheaper than you’d think, and that we should do it, and quickly. Here are some other interesting things that I learned:

• If you’re a non-profit, film-related organization you can apply for grants aka money.
• Old movie theater seats are free to dirt cheap. In some cases people will pay you to take them away.
• Old movie theater screens are dirt cheap to very cheap. They probably won’t pay you to take them away, but if they did it would almost be too much to handle, so it’s fine. 
• Digital projection is the way to go, and not just because it’s cheaper by tens of thousands of dollars.

 Mark then sent me a spread sheet with some estimated costs of things. It’s missing some things we need to add in like costs to build a stage so we can do performances and screenings and costs to divide out a front room off the main hall so we can sell popcorn. Sorry, so my parents can sell popcorn. That is what both of them text-offered in response to my first post, within 5 minutes of each other. And to think, for all these years they had no idea that they shared a life-long desire to sell popcorn at a movie theater… Love…

So to make the math simple (for me) I’ll estimate cost of movie theater and general space build at 250K. Add that onto the cost of the building (roughly 500K), and you’re at 750K. So then why do you need my spare million dollars? you’re thinking.

Because of my second call. The call to the realtor who listed our church.

Peggy was as delightful as they come. When I told her about my plan she said, “That’s great. We could really use a movie theater like that.” She also confirmed that the property is zoned for mixed use (commercial and/or residential) and that the buyer was willing to negotiate but looking for a fair offer on the current price. Apparently our church is currently owned by an elderly woman who has fallen ill, requiring her to sell before converting it into a home and store. I really, really hope her name is Catherine for even more good karma, and also because I’m not changing the name of our church if it isn’t.

Then Peggy dropped the bomb. “Yes, the current owners gutted the building, so there is no plumbing or electric currently.”

• “So there are no bathrooms or lights at all what-so-ever?” I asked.
• “Right,” Peggy said, “And no A/C or heat either.”

So…about that spare million you were inching toward giving me?