Joe Masher inside his Wilton Mall theater.
The Spectrum theater on Delaware Avenue in Albany is expected to reopen on April 24.
ALBANY — We can breathe a sigh of relief. The Spectrum theater has a new operator and will reopen, assuming things go to plan, in less than a month.
That new operator is Scene One Entertainment, the company owned by Brunswick native Joe Masher, who told me he hopes to reopen the iconic Delaware Avenue movie house April 24. His version of the theater, he added, should immediately feel familiar to those who remember the Spectrum as it used to be.
“My intention is to bring the heart and soul back to the Spectrum,” Masher told me early Friday morning, speaking by phone from Amarillo, Texas. “I want to bring back everything that made the Spectrum special.”
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First and foremost, that means great independent movies you can’t stream at home. But it also means locally made baked goods available at the concessions counter; homespun advertisements for mom-and-pop businesses shown before the movie; and art made by local hands hanging on the walls.
In other words, the Spectrum will no longer feel like an Anywhere, USA movie experience. It will feel like Albany again.
As many of you will know, the Spectrum was operated for decades by Keith and Sugi Pickard, Scott Meyer and Annette Nanes, a partnership that grew the theater from a single-screen cinema into a multi-screen landmark. In 2015, though, the group turned operations of the theater over to Landmark Cinemas, a Canadian chain that gave the homespun theater, predictably enough, a corporate feel.
There was a fair amount of grumbling about the gradual loss of character, of course. Still, it came as a shock when Landmark announced in February that it would not renew its lease and the cinema would close, seemingly another bit of bad news for the city.
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The Spectrum, after all, isn’t just a movie theater. It’s vital to the city’s sense of place and to have it go dark would be a blow to the regional psyche. You might as well lock up Washington Park and walk Nipper up to Saratoga Springs.
Masher said he’s seen “millions, OK maybe just thousands” of movies at the Spectrum and credits it and its defunct predecessor, the 3rd Street Theater in Rensselaer, with forming his love of movies — a love that became his career. Masher, you see, was the longtime Bow Tie Cinemas chief operating officer before launching Scene One last summer.
And while Scene One operates 10 cinemas nationally, including locations in Texas and Colorado, along with Wilton and Schenectady, Masher described taking over the Spectrum as uniquely sentimental and “really, truly an honor.” Under a newly inked lease-to-own agreement with the Pickard group, Scene One will purchase the theater for an undisclosed price; Masher said a full renovation is on the horizon.
The Niskayuna resident wants the Spectrum to thrill the next generation of movie lovers, just as it inspired him. And yes, he’s aware of the doom-and-gloom predictions about the movie business, the claims that streaming has made theaters irrelevant. Blah! He doesn’t buy any of it. There’s still value in the communal, he believes. There’s value in sharing an experience with strangers.
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“Just because you have a kitchen doesn’t mean you don’t want to go out to eat,” Masher said. “As long as we have good movies that people want to see, we’ll be busy.”
Somehow, I’ve written more than 500 words without mentioning that Masher is also the new owner of Huck Finn’s Playland, the North Albany amusement park formerly located along Route 9 in Newtonville. Masher now owns the Ferris wheel and rides he rode as a kid.
But lest you think Masher is intent on reviving every Albany business that tugs at his heartstrings, know that the avid record collector started to go on about how much he missed the old Blue Note Records on Central Avenue before stopping to stress that he had no plans to buy and reopen the store. (We’ll see.)
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In any event, Masher is gearing up to open Huck Finn’s Playland for the summer season on May 4. On reopening day at the Spectrum, Masher plans to show the most successful film ever to screen there, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” along with “Polyester,” the first movie to play at the theater when it opened in 1983.
Masher, as it happens, was among the audiences who came to see that John Waters film that year. He was a teenager, assumedly never imagining he’d own the theater 41 years hence — keeping an Albany institution alive and helping us breathe a little easier.
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