They are the two last holdouts of downtown San Luis Obispo’s Chinatown located on Palm Street, a block from the mission and the downtown’s main commercial corridor of Higuera Street. The side-by-side spots that stand vigil are Mee Heng Low, a 95-year-old family-run chop suey restaurant and music venue, and its next-door neighbor, an independent cinema called the Palm Theatre.

In addition to a wall, a bench and a bike rack, the two share clientele (and sometimes employees). They’ve had to link arms to weather the simultaneous storms of COVID-19 and hotel construction, the main blockers of the public’s access to them in recent years. 

“I hung out at the Palm and at the restaurant for years, and I’m here to hopefully contribute,” said Mallory Harris, who’s worked concessions part time at the Palm for the last six months. “When you have a small and pretty tight arts community like we do, you do what you can.”

While the restaurant gains notoriety (and new customers), the theater continues to struggle, giving rise to the question: Are the days of San Luis Obispo County’s last independent art house cinema numbered?

“I certainly hope not,” said Jim Dee, owner of the Palm Theatre. “We’ve been open [for] 35 years, since 1988, but things have been changing drastically from about 2005 on. A younger audience started disappearing, devoting a lot of time to being on a computer, phone or another screen. That has taken away from time here.”

Movie theater closures locally, nationally

After the pandemic hit, Dee said, he experienced the same phenomenon as most movie houses both large and small around the country: lengthy closures followed by limited openings, expensive ventilation system installations and a general decline in the number of people who still go out and see a movie.

“Coming out of the pandemic has been tough. It’s been challenging,” he said. “Friends of mine who run theaters across the country, they’ve either had to shut their doors or… 80% to 90% are 1685208063 nonprofits. They exist on donations and grants. They can’t survive with just people coming through the door.”

Many theaters like the Palm didn’t make it at all. In March 2022, Business Insider reported that Comscore, a firm that tracks media data, estimated that about 500 of the United States’ approximately 5,500 movie theaters were closed. In the Central Coast region, the Osio Theater in Monterey closed in March 2020, and the Santa Ynez Valley’s only movie theater, Buellton’s Parks Plaza Theatre, shut down its projectors permanently in July 2021.

“Sometimes it comes down to a check-in call with other [theater] owners just to say, ‘You OK? You hanging in? ’” Dee said. 

The Palm is hanging in there as a for-profit commercial theater, which means the operation relies solely on ticket sales and concessions. Dee, 71, who is celebrating his 50th year working in movie theaters in San Luis Obispo this year, said that while streaming and the pandemic provided the headline-grabbing struggles, it’s really “losing the younger audience” that’s dictating the pace of the business.

“I somehow think of the film ‘Black Swan’ as a [turning point],” he explained, citing the 2010 Natalie Portman film as one of the first moments he could gauge changes in his audience’s behavior. “One night we were a quarter full for the 9:15 p.m. show, and I thought, ‘Hmmm.’ What happened from there, it went to an older audience.”

He noticed how much he’d come to rely on a certain demographic when college students stopped coming to the Palm in large numbers: “You get a movie now with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, and you know that’ll do well,” he said with a chuckle. “But that number, they’ve sort of dwindled. You’ve got a small room, and you’re enclosed. The older audience were our bread and butter.”

After a half-century, does Dee have any more moves left to keep it going? He just might.

Students return to the movies

This school year, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s film studies classes were hosted on Monday afternoons at the Palm. It’s there that many students enjoyed a true movie house experience, some for the first time in their lives, according to Cal Poly English department chair and film studies instructor Douglas Keesey.

Before a screening of “The Shining” for Keesey’s class, he told SFGATE that the privilege of going to the movies together is not lost on his students after years of interacting in isolation.

“If you think about it, students who are college freshmen now, they might not have had a moviegoing experience growing up, and they definitely didn’t through COVID. Everything — even their learning — had to be on their laptops,” he said. “So, for some, they’re actually in a theater seeing movies for the first time.

“It makes a huge difference. … You laugh as an audience; you feel things as an audience. You hear conversations. Things sound different. It’s all completely different.” 

The Cal Poly professor said his love for movies started when he was a teenager growing up in San Jose. He recalled spending the summer of 1977, the year “Star Wars” came out, working in a big theater in his hometown. He said he saw the movie so many times he would sometimes close his eyes and just listen to the music or dialogue. Other times he would try to drown out the sounds and just focus on the costumes and the movement.  

“I think that’s where a deep and profound appreciation of movies — and seeing them in the theater and having that experience — came from.” 

‘I don’t think we take it for granted’

Around 4 p.m. on the third Monday in May, students started to line up at the Palm. They bought tickets and hung out in line at the concessions stand picking up a Coke and some of the movie house’s famous popcorn, which is popped fresh for shows and topped with generous amounts of real butter (to the taste, of course).

Inside the Palm’s main auditorium, the group was familiar and convivial, the din of dozens of individual conversations intertwining within the space. There were giggles, the snap of popcorn, the shake of an icy Coke and the grunts and ’scuse mes of people scooting by to find a saved seat next to their friends.

The moment to pause and actually be in a room with one another wasn’t lost on the students. “I’m lucky — I grew up in Oakland going to the Piedmont Theatre,” said Sophia Pattison, who is studying to be a broadcast journalist. “As a freshman in 2020-21, we didn’t have this, so to be able to be back in a theater, seeing movies — for class — it’s something that’s super cool, and I don’t think we take it for granted.”

Mary Carli, a friend of Pattison’s and an agricultural business major originally from Sacramento, decided to attend the screening even though she isn’t in the class. “This is such a good experience to get out and do something different,” she said. “It is nice to just see people out and to interact, to share one experience.”

Palm owner Dee says moments where the theater is packed with a willing audience are few now. But at the same time, he says he’s hopeful that something will click to bring people, younger audiences especially, back to the movies and his theater. Something, he said, still exists in people: the need to have a shared experience or just even take a break from all that life brings — together in the dark.

Instructor Keesey agrees: “Whether it’s laughing at a comedy or watching a drama unfold or feeling the rush of a romance or even the difference in sound or noticing something you’ve missed a thousand times watching on a smaller screen, there’s nothing that replicates this,” he said.  

‘Let’s go to the movies’

Looking ahead to the immediate future, Dee said he’s cautiously optimistic that people will find themselves in line at the Palm again soon.  

“It’ll be a big summer,” he said, noting that Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” (June 23) and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” (July 21) are much-anticipated independent releases.

To Dee, there’s always something new, something to look forward to, and that’s what he said keeps him going after a half-century. “Despite what’s going on right now, I’ve had a fantastic run showing movies,” he said. “I’m fortunate. I really think it has [changed], losing the younger audience, but I also know things change the other way too.”

He paused. Then he recalled running into Roger Ebert at the Toronto International Film Festival, his favorite fest, a handful of times: “You know, with him, it was always, ‘Let’s go to the movies. Let’s go have this experience.’”

Just before the opening credits of “The Shining” rolled over the film’s dark, meandering score by Wendy Carlos, Cal Poly professor Keesey provided an introduction to the movie, discussing director Stanley Kubrick’s choices that made the film both “lighter and longer” than any horror movie to date.

“It was completely different,” he said, explaining how much Stephen King, the author of the novel that was the film’s source material, hated the final celluloid outcome. “In the end though, it was his biggest commercial hit. And that’s because of two words: Jack and Nicholson.”

Together, the student audience laughed as the house lights dimmed.