Why Did the ArcLight Fade Away? Inside the Sad Final Chapter of the Pacific Theatres Chain

It hosted premieres and made cameos in “Entourage” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Surely it had to be profitable? If it could fail, then moviegoing itself was in peril.

He has run the company for nearly 30 years, and it was his exacting vision that created the ArcLight experience.

Before each show, the ushers — cinephiles themselves — would ritually note that the picture, sound and room temperature had been set to precise specifications.

The Dome and ArcLight Hollywood may reopen — more on that later — but Pacific Theatres really is gone.

Variety spoke to many who know Forman in some capacity or other — family members, industry figures, and employees .

William Forman was a fantastic success, and handed his son, Michael, a real estate empire with holdings in the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii and across Southern California.

The parent company — the Decurion Corporation — owns hundreds of millions of dollars of commercial property through its real estate arm, Robertson Properties Inc.

When the time came to work at Decurion, he found it mundane and pointless by comparison.

He returned to the company, feeling an obligation not to squander the family legacy.

He would work with many more consultants and gurus to put those ideas into practice.

Ungard helped refine the course and co-authored a book with Forman called “The Practice of Self-Management,” which relies heavily on ideas of mindfulness in order to develop awareness and empathy.

One of the values Forman emphasized was “uncompromising excellence”: “If we can’t be proud of it, we don’t want to do it.” Another was “clock building” — that is, managing the company so that it could endure for future generations.

One employee said that when he first started, he was reluctant to give up two hours a week to sit in a class on personal development.

But he was informed it was the most important thing he could learn on the job.

Michael Forman had turned over the reins to his son in 1994, but continued to advise the company as its chairman until his death in 2019.

Over the years, he used the company to give nearly $700,000 to a younger woman — not his wife — with whom he was having a long-term relationship.

The goal was to build something within Pacific that would be shielded from Pacific’s culture, much as General Motors had done with its Saturn division.

The ArcLight Hollywood set a new standard for film presentation, but it was not an instant hit.

“Chris was pretty amazing in his leadership,” Gozdz said.

The company was planning to start that process when the pandemic hit, according to multiple sources.

According to a lawsuit filed by Graycor Construction, the general contractor, Pacific approved nearly $5 million in overages, but then refused to pay about $3.5 million of that.

Like nearly all theaters across the country, Pacific stopped paying rent to its landlords in March 2020.

Multiple sources said that several of the leases were unfavorable to Pacific, and it did not make business sense to try to arrange a repayment plan.

Two sources also said that Pacific, unlike other theaters, had failed to make its last regular payments to film distributors.

It’s at least conceivable that Pacific could have reorganized and come back as a smaller, cheaper operation.

Of the 17 theaters in the Pacific and ArcLight chains, the company owns the land under just two of them: the Pacific location in Chatsworth and the ArcLight Hollywood.

“Based on the theater landscape, and the uncertainties, and the challenges even pre-pandemic, I think the company just made a decision,” said one former employee.

“The ArcLight was Chris Forman’s contribution to the industry,” he said.

Forman may be able to pull that off.

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