Here is the short version.

We bought the old Michigan Theater building on main street in Escanaba Michigan in 2019. Why did we buy it? Glad you asked! We bought it because we had a crazy idea that Escanaba could use a cool old movie theater that showed all the good old movies you can’t see in theaters anymore. We believe that it is always better on the big screen.

We are slowly working towards building the ultimate retro movie experience. In the mean time we need to raise a bit of money. That is where Old Michigan LLC comes in. We will be using the profits generated by showing movies and selling popcorn to bring this theater back to life.

And that is the short story. If you want to learn more about the building, what we have done so far, details on what we plan on doing, or you just have nothing better to do, you can keep reading. If you have heard enough and you want to help out, come watch a movie. Can’t make it to a movie? No prob, just spread the good word my friend!

Why?

If you read “the short version” above, you kind of already know what is going on. We are on a mission to get this building restored to function and showing dope films. Before we get too far into that though, we want to tell you why we are doing this. The simplest answer we can give to “why” is as follows:

We want to help build the place we want to live.

Delta County means a lot to us and we believe that, all things considered, it’s a pretty great place. While walking down Escanaba’s main street we noticed that mixed in with all the beautiful architecture and amazing businesses there are quite a few vacant or deteriorating buildings, which made us a touch sad. How many times have you heard or said “I wish there was more to do around here.”? This is our way of answering that plea. We can’t do everything, but we can do something. The Michigan Theater is that something we can do.

Who are We?

You want to know more about who “we” are? Fine, but remember that you asked for it. Feel free to skip to a more interesting section.

“We” are Steven and Courtney, and we are a couple of nerds. By definition you wouldn’t be wrong with calling us geeks either, but for some reason the term nerd just feels like it fits better. You could probably guess what we mean, but I will spell it out for you.

We like good movies. Not just new ones, or high budget ones, but good ones, even if they are bad. Everything from Star Wars to Indiana Jones, Adam West’s Batman to Marvels Cinematic Universe, and Evil Dead to Blade Runner to Harry Potter and beyond. We could sit here and make a list of all of our favorite movies and why (and we very well may at some point), but I’m sure you get the picture. Now the movie theater thing makes a little bit of sense, doesn’t it? The sad thing is that many of the great movies that exist were designed to be viewed in a theater, and theaters don’t show them anymore. Okay, some movie theaters do still show those old movies, but they take a back seat to the new movies. These “old” movies are still good at home, but there is nothing like watching a well made movie in the setting it was created to be viewed in. It is especially sad for all these young folks who will never know the joy of watching a larger than life DeLorean disappear in flaming tracks! And it is a lot less fun finding out who Tyler Durden really is on a phone screen with ear buds plugged into your head. That all probably makes me sound like an old fart. I’m not, not yet. I love modern technology, I own 2 yo-yos after all.

We also like video games. But video games are like pizzas, some people like peanut butter and anchovies and others do not. Likewise, we find that some people like good old classic games, and other do not. We fall into the first category. Again, we are not old fuddy-duddies, but those old games are getting harder and harder to find in working condition. That is why we thought that an arcade would be awesome. When was the last time you played Millipede or Space Invaders in a dedicated cabinet? That’s what I thought. There is just something about a good old coin operated arcade cabinet that makes the game better than any app could ever be. We like new games too, but if we don’t advocate for the old ones in their rightful state, who will? We have a few of these games available to play at the theater. Also, if you are able to reliably get to the 4th screen on Space Invaders Deluxe, please let me know.

It’s not like we are 100% nerd though, we also do normal things like hiking, collecting comic books, bonfires, wild west reenactments, knitting, building Legos, reading books, etc. We have normal jobs and do most of the normal Yoopery things one does, like shovel off roofs, snow blow ourselves out of our houses, and eat pasties.

Another thing about us, a thing that made us love this movie theater so much, is that we love old things. It is fascinating to see the iterations of technology, the things that were the stepping stones to what we have now. We also love the mechanical ingenuity that people used to have, I mean, have you ever seen the inside of a wind up watch?! Those things are nuts!

“We” also quite often involves friends and family. You know what they say about restoring an old theater to its former glory, it takes a village. We definitely couldn’t have gotten this far on our own. Since I don’t have permission to put their names on the internet, I will refrain. Although they all deserve at a bare minimum a crisp high five. Thank you guys.

I think we will stop here before we end up telling you our bank account numbers or the type of underwear we prefer (spider-man briefs), but I think at this point you kind of get who we are, right? We are normal people just like you.

The Acquisition.

You are probably wondering how we actually came about purchasing the building, aren’t you? Well, one day in October we happened to be driving down main street on our way to see Ēddie at Ēddie’s Tattoo and Piercings Studio (fantastic place, fantastic people, couldn’t recommend them enough!) and we noticed that there was a for sale sign on the Michigan Theater building. We began talking about how awesome it would be to have a movie theater, not unlike people do. For some reason after we left Ēddie’s we were still talking about that cool old theater. We drove down there again and looked in the windows, not unlike people do. “I wonder how much they want for it?” one of us thought out loud. “Who knows, maybe we can actually afford it!” responded the other. The next day one of us, we don’t remember which, called and asked about a price, and then in the same phone call scheduled a showing. Now by this point, we had gone way further than a person normally does, or any sane person should. Even then, just having a showing, we had crossed a line from “just imagining how cool it would be” to “seriously considering purchasing it.” We could have crossed back over that line and walked away, but stepping foot in that building did us in. The dead pigeon in the corner didn’t even phase us, something about that building had latched onto our souls and began growing roots. It was like owning this building was our density.

Had we been told by our future selves that this project would be a major pain in the butt and soak up a lot of time and resources, we probably would have ignored the future us’s and continued plugging away at it. If we had the chance to go back with our current knowledge, we would probably do it again. It is a pain, but we still feel it is worth it. Once we had seen the building and decided that we for sure wanted it, we set to work on making it ours. Our initial thoughts were things like “People spend more on trucks, it shouldn’t be hard at all to get a loan for this” or “We have great credit and low debt, this will be easy.” We were very wrong. I am sure that some of you reading this will know that commercially zoned property is a little bit different than residential zoned property when it comes to financing. For those of you who didn’t know this, now you do. Also, banks are usually more open to loaning money for a building that has plumbing and heat that work. We may expound upon this whole adventure at a later date but for now, suffice it to say that we had no idea what we were doing or how much work would be involved. If we had the cash it would all have been simple, just buy it. But when you want a loan for a commercial building you get questions like “Where is your business plan?” and “When do you expect to open your business?” and “Can I see your income projections for the first four years?” We had not thought that far. We just wanted the cool building. But as they say, wanting things doesn’t make them happen.

We spent the winter of 2018-2019 learning how much we didn’t know. Okay, that is a lie…we spent that time learning like 5% of what we didn’t know. We did manage to sort out some of the finer details, and put together a decent business plan. We got help from the SBDC (good people over there) and did a lot of reading. It was a lot of hard work, and a lot of weekends spent at a desk instead of snowshoeing. By May of 2019 though, we had worked hard enough to get the loan, and in turn the building. The funny thing is, we thought we had worked hard up to that point. Isn’t it funny how things seem difficult until you do something more difficult, and then that first thing seems like a cakewalk?

Some Assembly (and cleaning) Required.

After we bought the building the first thing we physically did was clean it. That meant many long hours wearing particulate filtering respirators, more than enough dump runs, and quite a bit of scrubbing.

Since the building had been more or less vacant for so long, there was a lot of things left all over the place. There were couches and recliners piled up in the front of the auditorium. There was rope, discarded gloves, old fuses, boxes of things, buckets of other things, old broken construction tools, what looked like street light lenses, you name it. Among the cooler items we found abandoned in the building were bits of old film, old match books, an old news paper, and some old film reels. Possibly the least desirable items we had to discard were the petrified remains of old birds. Yeah…

Pigeons had found a hole in the air vents on the roof and made their way into the building. Unfortunately the poor birds must have found out rather quickly that there was no food or water inside, and after a while they must have realized that they couldn’t remember how they got in. Rest in peace pigeons. We did not know how they had gotten in, until one day we heard cooing coming from inside the air ducts. The day after the vent cooing, we were greeted by a bird inside the auditorium. Ever try to make a flying animal go through a door sized opening while it is in a room thirty feet high being yelled and waved at by a couple of humans? I know that sounds easy, but it is not. Needless to say, we found those holes in the air vents and covered them back up. The Michigan Theater has been pigeon free ever since. Well, the inside.

Aside from pigeons we found one other species of bird remains, a seagull. That poor fellow we found in the clean out at the bottom of the chimney. I wonder if he fell down there by accident, or if he had committed some bird crime and was tossed in there by his angry peers. Or maybe this feathered creature was a sacrifice to the chimney gods in an attempt to appease them. I do not think we will ever know.

You may think that just sounds like a lot of undesirably hard work. It was hard work, and it was also pretty cool. It was fun peeling back the layers of the building’s history and finding old cool things.

The warmer the days got, the more the smells thawed out. The main smell was a musty one, like somebody locked up a bunch of old and let it sit for a long time, festering in stale air. Days of propping the doors open with fans helped a little bit, but not enough. Finally we realized that the fabric on the walls was giving us this wonderful aroma, like a giant stinky scent diffuser. You know what kind of wall fabric we are talking about, right? That ripply movie theater wall fabric that makes the sound better? Yeah, that stuff. We decided that there was no hope in saving it since it was practically disintegrating and smelled worse than great uncle George’s WWII canvas pup tent. So we did what any sensible American would do and we ripped it all off and threw it away! We were not expecting what we found under it either. Turns out the original walls were of beautiful plaster work that got covered up (in the 70’s probably). We also learned that whoever decided to paint the walls prior to covering them up may have been color blind. I am severely sorry if it was you and you are reading this right now…it is the truth though… You can see the before and after below in the high resolution professional grade photos (that was sarcasm folks, we know those photos stink as bad as what they depict, but its all we got, sorry).

Once the walls were rockin’ their birthday suits, the smell quickly dropped to an easily tolerable level. There are rumors however…that if there is a full moon during spring’s first thaw…and you go into the theater alone after midnight…you can still smell the fabric…as if it were still hung on the walls…

Before we had torn the fabric down we had full intentions of replacing it, because it looks pretty dern good. After seeing the original plaster underneath though, we are leaning towards restoring it to what it used to be like (which means a different color scheme of course), because that also looks pretty great. What do you think?

We have done some other stuff too, like patching leaks on the roof. Phil Swift would have loved that one. If you don’t know who he is, give it a google. If you do know, then take a guess as to what we used to patch some of those leaks. If all that sounds like too much work, I don’t blame you.

We changed all the light bulbs in the auditorium. I will let you ponder how that is done for now. It took us a minute to figure it out.

We cleaned, patched, and bolted down all the auditorium seats too. Before we did that, if you bumped the back row they would domino all the way down to the front. And yes, it was a pain to un-domino them.

We got the building up to fire code. That entailed installing exit signs, doors that actually open, smoke detection, and fire extinguishers.

We wired in the projector and sound systems. That, was even more fun than changing the light bulbs.

We rewired all the concession lighting and stripped the paint off the concessions counter.

I will have to write more about all of those things sometime. Each one of them was quite an adventure on their own, let alone all together. Sometimes you get too caught up on what still needs to happen and you forget to look back at what you have already done. The theater has quite a way to go still, like, quite a way, but not as much as there once was.

The Plans.

For the most part we got the building reasonably clean, and as fixed up as made sense until the real renovations started. That left us with the exciting and action packed task of working on more business stuff and securing funding for the project!

Our current plans for the Michigan Theater are to renovate it and reopen it. Although it has morphed and changed a bit from our original concept, that has been the plan all along, and will likely remain the plan. We had originally planned on completely renovating the building and being open in 2021. Things happened though. 2020 didn’t end up being the greatest year to plan on opening up a movie theater, as I am very sure you all understand. The cost of renovating the building all at once was also a bit of a hamper, because the estimated cost was over a million dollars. Even if grants paid for half, that is a lot of money. We are now on a slow and steady path rather than a quick and pricey one.

We currently show movies every once in a while to help offset the costs of owning and repairing such a building. When the theater gets to a point where it can operate year round, it will be as a second run theater. That just means it shows “old” movies. As we explained above, movies (especially ones from 2010 and earlier) were meant to be seen in a theater! That is what was in mind during every aspect of their creation and where you will get the most out of them. Not to mention, there are a ton of amazing movies from before the turn of the century that the younger generations of today don’t even know about. We hope to change that. Nerds as we are, we already have a list of movies going that we plan to show, a list that would make any cinephile all warm and fuzzy inside.

We will be restoring the main portion of the auditorium to its former Art Deco glory, which even in its deteriorated state is rather awesome. People really spent the time to make things purdy back then. We would also like to have some alternative seating options such as couches and recliners. The auditorium renovation will be a bit down the road though, so let’s just leave it there for now.

As for the lobby, the plan is to open it all up as much as possible. Gotta have room for all of them killer arcade titles man! We will also make sure to have little tables next to each cabinet, so you have somewhere to put your drinks and snacks when you are on an 8 hour game of Millipede. The lobby is in the same boat as the auditorium in that it will be a while before we do anything major. Aside from paint and maintenance, those two rooms will probably stay how they are for a while.

The current floor plans we are toying with also have an area upstairs that would be able to be reserved for things like birthday parties, quinceaneras, a moment of solitude, bar mitzvahs, secret meetings to decide the fate of Middle Earth, whatever! We may even put some games up there too.

The bathrooms? Well, that is going to be our first major project on the building. In fact, you can check our progress on that project at the Project Tracker page. Right now they don’t work, and we would really like them to. We know you guys want that too.

The second project we plan to work on is the HVAC system. Heat and AC would allow us to operate year round, which would be off the freakin’ chain!

Concessions? Oh baby, you’re going to love them! When we came up with the concessions we wanted to have available we sat down and asked ourselves, “What would I want to have at the movies?” Many of the answers to this were things that you can not get in a movie theater unless you drive about 500 miles south. Things like pizza, beer, chips, wine, and even fresh cookies and cupcakes. And of course, to avoid angry mobs, we will also have the classics that you all love like popcorn, candy, pretzels, etcetera. Now, you probably got really excited reading that, just remember you are reading the “plans” section. We don’t have the fun stuff yet, just the normal stuff.

As far as a timeline, your guess is as good as ours. Just kidding, mostly. Like I mentioned above, we are open for movies here and there. We plan to keep that up and add to it. From here on out it should be steady progress toward the vision we have of the ultimate movie watching experience. We do not have a date for when we think the theater will be done because, well, we don’t ever think it will be. Once we hit the plans outlined here, we will probably set new goals to achieve. Basically, we want it to keep getting better and better forever, until it is so awesome that this layer of space time can’t support it and it has to move into a higher dimension.

Oh, almost forgot to mention the facade. We recently learned that underneath the paint on the front of the building is colored stucco. We learned that when we went to repaint the front. We decided not to repaint the front. Instead, we are going to strip the paint and go back to the original colored stucco. Why not? We plan on restoring the marquee to its past glory. Which part of its past? The part that had neon. The marquee originally was only light bulbs, and we think the neon was added in the 50’s. Despite how cool it would be in its original state, the neon is really dope, so that is the version we want to restore it to.

This theater will be quite the project and we are excited to share it with all of you. With that in mind we will do our best to keep you all informed on what is going on. And if you seriously read this whole page and made it to this sentence, then I congratulate you on your ability to stay focused. You probably also read other boring stuff, like the dictionary or the Spanish instructions that come with ear buds, don’t you?

For real though, thank you for reading this!

-Steven