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Fifty miles east of Kansas Megalopolis, here&#x92;s how a number of small-town folks experience movie incessantly:</p><p>They walk from their homes to a downtown restaurant, and after supper they stroll down Pipeline Street to the Davis Theatre. It&#x92;s a beauty, once a livery building, resplendent from a flicks palace transformation circa 1934 and careful restorations.</p><p>Even the drinking-glass block concession stand, backlit in coral neon, is something to see. First-run movies are $7, and concession prices are a double instead of a shock.</p><p>The movie house has longtime, loving owners, a married twosome who greet devoted patrons night after night. To this day, the theater is a emblem in the real-life plot of Higginsville.</p><p>How could such a thing even exist in 2012? It might not for long. While the Davis has beaten the odds dig now, it can&#x92;t defy a new antagonist: digital technology.</p><p>Movie studios are phasing out 35 mm dusting. Digital movies are vastly cheaper to copy and distribute. But that means theaters must have digital mat to screen regular and 3-D movies, a cost of $70,000 or more per screen. Fran and George Schwarzer are indeed loving owners who also attraction their town, but they aren&#x92;t wealthy.</p><p>Total price tag to digitize the theater&#x92;s opulent auditorium and three smaller rooms: $300,000. The couple started spreading the unsightly news that the Davis would have to close. But at a town meeting last summer, residents couldn&#x92;t move the thought of it.</p><p>&#x93;No, no, no,&#x94; Michelle Wahlers-Anderson remembered saying. &#x93;That&#x92;s not okay.&#x94;</p><p>With the Schwarzers&#x92; blessing, they hatched a plan &#x97; a long rifleman. They&#x92;d band together to save the movie house, raise funds for the twitch to digital and ultimately operate a nonprofit community theater for movies and performing arts. They started last June and formed a fundraising bundle, Friends of the Davis Theatre 4.</p><p>Then along came the Reader&#x92;s Pr &#x93;We Hear You America&#x94; contest, providing new hope. Backers of metropolis projects across the country submitted entries, and online voting will affect the winners. The grand prize is $50,000. Higginsville&#x92;s online voting drives have vaulted it into split second place. </p><p>Wahlers-Anderson grew up in town and saw her first movie, &#x93;E.T.: The Extra-Human,&#x94; at the Davis. Her parents and aunts and uncles all went.</p><p>&#x93;It was a big see to,&#x94; she said. &#x93;As a teenager, the Davis was my Friday and Saturday nights. It&#x92;s a part of me. I have children now, and my oldest is 14. I seem to be comfortable with her going there with her friends. I don&#x92;t have to worry.&#x94;</p><p>Vicki Thompson knows how she feels. Thompson and her soften are in their 60s and go to the Davis for date nights. Like a lot of folks in town, she had her first job at the theater, selling tickets when she was 13. Now she takes her grandkids there.</p><p>&#x93;I have to say that the Davis has the richest popcorn of any theater anywhere,&#x94; she said. &#x93;George swears that Fran developed her own rubric.&#x94;</p><p>Since June, Friends of the Davis Theatre 4 has raised about $15,000 through bequest drives, benefit concerts, a Halloween carnival and, yes, bake sales. The efforts are powerful for a small town, but the total is far short of what&#x92;s needed. Townspeople are pushing heartless to boost its standing in the Reader&#x92;s Digest contest. Voting ends Walk 1. Higginsville&#x92;s population is about 4,700.</p><p>&#x93;We&#x92;re thinking we can do this in stages,&#x94; said Colleen Prince, president of the Friends of the Davis Theatre 4.</p><p>The first goal is to pull in $90,000 to digitize the main auditorium &#x97; the Grand Lady &#x97; and to neaten up it ready for other performing arts events. It already has a stage and sweeping fringed curtains with a monogrammed &#x93;D&#x94; on each panel.</p><p>The Davis isn&#x92;t alone in fa the digital switch, which has been on the horizon for several years. Of the 39,000 movie screens in North America, about half have been converted to digital. Whatever theater casualties turn up dawn on will take place in the next two years as the industry ends the use of 35 mm film.</p><p>Lesser-town theaters across the country have found ways to make the conversion or are in the middle of trying, said Brad Bills of Independent Film Services in Leawood. The most in all probability casualties will be theaters with a small number of screens in larger markets, he said. &#x93;It&#x92;s an enchanting phenomenon,&#x94; Bills said. &#x93;People in small towns do not paucity to see their movie theater close.&#x94;</p><p>For the Davis, going nonprofit doubtlessly would have been a good plan from the start, Fran Schwarzer said. The pair never intended to make a big profit, and they haven&#x92;t. Mostly, she said, they break even.</p><p>The Schwarzers became almost-unanticipated theater owners in 1998. The Davis had served as a concert venue since the 1980s and was about to terminate. One plan was to raze the building for a parking lot. Higginsville needed someone to remain alert up.</p><p>&#x93;We didn&#x92;t know anything about owning a theater, except for my selling tickets when I was 15,&#x94; Fran said. &#x93;I can about sitting across from the banker and he said, &#x91;What if this doesn&#x92;t work?&#x92; It was like Mr Big threw cold water in my face. I never considered that it wouldn&#x92;t effort.</p><p>&#x93;We understood from the beginning that this was a service. You figure if you didn&#x92;t do another thing in your survival, at least you did this; you made a difference in the community.&#x94;</p><p>From her childhood Fran recalled the murals of palm trees on the corridor wall. During the restoration they eventually found them under seven layers of paint, wallpaper and paneling. The Schwarzers installed new chairs in the auditorium and aired out the accommodation from 750 to 500. They saved several rows of the 1950s metal and constitution chairs at the back of the room.</p><p>In 2004, the Schwarzers expanded into the space next door and added three smaller theaters. On a new Saturday night, one was showing &#x93;The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,&#x94; which is where Geri and Dennis Stewart were headed after saying hi to George in the put one's weight behind.</p><p>Fran was selling tickets that night, and teenagers were in the concession abide by resign. George sets up the movies for screening, but his &#x93;real&#x94; job is as a Facetious Adam's ale plant operator.</p><p>An artist and interior designer, Geri Stewart occupied a photo of the main auditorium&#x92;s interior from an old newspaper clipping to replicate the Goliath exotic flowers, long gone but fondly recalled, on the front wall to the leftist and right of the screen. It&#x92;s easy to see, said King of the Friends organization, how losing the theater would leave a hole in the community, a historical erosion and a present-day one.</p><p>Last summer, when the final &#x93;Harry Potter&#x94; moving picture was released, a crowd of 150, many in costume, gathered at the community center for a &#x93;Hogwarts&#x94; sumptuously. Then they paraded a block and a half to the Davis for a midnight showing.</p><p>Rather cool, King thought at the time. The movies &#x97; and their big house &#x97; brought people together.</p><p>&#x93;It feels like almshouse,&#x94; she said.

Source: Kansas City Star

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