Requiem for the Main Art: Goodbye to Metro Detroit’s ‘cool’ movie house

But the Main Art was home to titles outside the mainstream, smaller films that weren’t reliant on explosions or talking animals or cars equally fast and furious to get their point across.

The Main Art was not alone in the area in programming specialty films. The Maple Theater in Bloomfield Township shows similar fare, as does the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, while the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts goes even deeper and more specialized for the true cineastes among us.

It was the place you’d go to see cool movies, to be surrounded by cool film lovers, to feel like you were a little bit ahead of the curve.

It was comfortable and welcoming, with a city feel in a cozy downtown; it was easy to catch a movie and head out for dinner or drinks on foot before or after showtime.

It’s where I saw seminal films that were the building blocks of my movie fandom, a place I could always count on to serve my moviegoing needs.

Before it became an arthouse in the 1990s, the Main was home to mainstream films and Disney movies; its first showings were Cecil B.

My first successful trip to the Main was to see “The Usual Suspects” in summer 1995; a previous trip to see John Dahl’s “The Last Seduction” the year prior was foiled when my older brother and I got lost on the way to the theater.

On arrival, the old school movie house feel — it wasn’t a cineplex, wasn’t in a mall and had that glorious marquee above the main entrance — made it feel like I was a part of something special.

I remember seeing “Trainspotting” there in 1996, being blown away, and returning again to try to figure out what any of the characters were actually saying.

In 1999, the Main was one of a small handful of theaters in North America playing “The Blair Witch Project.” Lines wrapped around the building and every show — even weekday matinees — sold out.

The following summer, my brother and I — finally able to find Royal Oak on a map — saw the harrowing drug drama “Requiem for a Dream” on opening night at the theater.

There were countless other films, cool midnight screenings and special events I remember taking in there, from “Kung-Fu Hustle” to “No Country for Old Men” to “Enter the Void.” I saw a screening of “It Follows” which was introduced by director David Robert Mitchell, who grew up seeing films at the Main, having been raised in nearby Clawson.

In 2010, I stumbled out of a showing of “Tree of Life” and ran into my dad in the lobby; he had just been in the same showing, which felt more than a bit cosmic, given the movie’s themes about fathers and sons and the universe in general.

In April, the theater closed its doors for what it said was going to only be only temporary period but which proved to be final.

The distribution system for indies lends itself to simple On Demand viewing — you don’t necessarily need to see the small character-driven film about a girl trying to make it out of her rural Ohio hometown on as big a screen as possible — and with audiences still slow to return to big screen experiences, movie houses like the Main were left especially vulnerable as we wait for normal to return.

There were only a few of us there, but among those in attendance was Metro Times’ film critic Corey Hall, who was never shy about making his opinion known after a movie ended.

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