Month: February 2015

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Everything That’s True

CREDIT: Photo by Fontaine Pearson

Photo by Fontaine Pearson

Darling, we are the light reflected 

Darling, we are the love we made 

Darling, nothing precious is protected 

We’re all trembling like a blossom 

With winter on the way. — Rob Jungklas 

Maybe it’s last week’s passing of Wanda Wilson, the singular and much-loved proprietess of the P&H Cafe, a woman who created and curated a beer joint that once made Midtown feel like a village of like-minded souls. It was a harbor, a place of sanity (and insanity), conversation, friendship, and laughter for those of us of a certain age.

Maybe it’s the rain and the long cold spell and the winter hanging on, but there’s an inevitable sadness that comes when you ponder the passing of people and things. Sometimes you just have to let it in.

Or maybe it was my discovery of Rob Jungklas’ “Everything That’s True,” a perfect and gorgeous song celebrating the temporal, inevitable human condition. Memphis singer Susan Marshall posted Jungklas’ song on her Facebook page and dedicated it to all the “beloved Memphians who have recently passed: Jimi Jamison, Jack Holder, John Hampton, John Fry, Sid Selvidge, Jim Dickinson, Di Anne Price, Mabon ‘Teenie’ Hodges, James Govan, and Wanda Wilson.”

Seeing that list in black and white was stunning. So many Memphis music and cultural icons gone in such a short time, so much light no longer reflected.

I found myself wanting to disconnect from the hive-mind of email and chatrooms and Twitter and Facebook for a while. I dug out some old books and hunkered down by the fireplace on Sunday, reading from Be Here Now, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and a battered Alan Watts tome — books that offer words and thoughts that lead one back to the center, to this moment.

Here. Now. All that we have.

And after thinking for a while, it came to me that the hive itself, the incessant connections we make with each other these days, is itself a gift — a way of learning more about the joys and pains of the human condition. The village is larger now; the beer joints are still there, but there are other paths to empathy, to sharing sorrows, celebrations, and memories, to being connected to those we don’t see often enough.

The deepest valley of the human heart knows winter is always on the way, even as spring approaches. It’s as certain as the throw of stars overhead on a February night. There’s a sadness there, but it’s a good sadness. And that too is a gift.

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Editorial Opinion

Haslam’s “Good Faith” Issue

As chronicled elsewhere, Governor Bill Haslam began this week of legislative special session in Nashville with the challenge of persuading reluctant members of his Republican Party to suspend their aversion

to what they call Obamacare and accept his home-grown version of Medicaid expansion called Insure Tennessee.

Prior discussions of the matter in the media have focused almost entirely on the mechanics of the plan or the political matters at stake or the financial incentives available to Tennessee (and its hard-pressed hospitals) should the General Assembly opt to give its statutorily necessary approval to the proposal. Those financial stakes are large indeed, amounting to somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion annually. But the political obstacles are large, as well: GOP talking points against Obamacare (the vernacular name for the Affordable Care Act) are so well established that the governor’s arguments for Insure Tennessee had to be couched in terms that drew the broadest possible distinctions between his Tennessee variant and the federal act.

Accordingly, Haslam made much of marketplace methodologies embedded in Insure Tennessee — including an alternative plan-within-the-plan for vouchers to pay for private insurance, as well as requirements for co-pays and modest premiums for those new insurees opting for coverage under TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid). And the governor catered to home-state Republican sensitivities by adding an anecdote to his prepared speech involving his past entreaties to President Obama, along with those of other Republican governors, to allow Medicare funding to be dispensed to the states via block grants for the states to dispense as they wished.

But much of the governor’s speech was taken up, too, with appeals to the legislators’ hearts as well as to their heads. Opponents of Insure Tennessee have been shedding crocodile tears at the plan’s provision for discontinuing Insure Tennessee after two years if either the federal government or the Tennessee Hospital Association default on promised funding. That would drop thousands of new insurees from coverage, the critics say. To this, Haslam offered the common-sense rebuttal that two years of coverage are significantly better than no health-care coverage at all.

And he offered his listeners a real-world anecdote about a Tennessean whose stroke, resulting from his inability to afford health insurance, had “landed him in the hospital, followed by rehabilitation” and taken him out of the workforce. “He was a hard-working Tennessean who wasn’t able to get the care he needed on the front end and that has real consequences for him and his family. Having a stroke wasn’t only devastating to him and his family, it could have been prevented, and not preventing it is costly to all of us.”

The governor then, having argued facts and savings and marketplace models, laid the matter to rest on the bedrock issues of values and good will: “I think this is also an issue about who we are. My faith doesn’t allow me to walk on the other side of the road and ignore a need that can be met — particularly in this case, when the need is Tennesseans who have life-threatening situations without access to health care.”

Indeed. It’s a matter of good faith and we agree with the Governor: That’s the nub of the issue.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Every man’s gotta cook his own steak.

CREDIT: John Klyce Minervini

When I arrive at Home Place Pastures, they’ve already started the butchery. On the table in front of me lies the steamship round: a 45-pound hunk of meat from below the hip joint on the steer’s hind leg. It’s big and primal, like something a caveman might eat, with a big, white femur bone that pokes out like a trailer hitch.

John Klyce Minervini

A hunk of fresh meat being cut from Home Place Pastures.

“That’s a pretty little roast right there,” says one of the men, poking at a bright-red seam of muscle with his wickedly sharp knife. “That’ll feed about 10 people.”

And I thought: What am I doing here?

Okay, back up. According to the USDA, Americans consume about 130 pounds of meat per person, per year. Interestingly, that’s down from a peak of 145 pounds in 2004. (Were we stressed about the Iraq War? Or maybe the final episode of Friends?)

Still, that’s a lot of meat — as of 2012, more than any other country. And the fact remains that most of us have no idea where it comes from. I mean, sure, we know there’s a cow at one end and a hamburger at the other. But what happens in between?

That’s what I set out to find. Because, first, I eat a lot of meat. As a food writer, it’s kind of an occupational hazard. But also, I eat meat when I’m not even really thinking about it. I order bacon with my eggs and ground beef on my nachos. It’s kind of a knee jerk. It’s something I need to work on.

In any case, I figured I owed it to the cows. You know? To actually look one in the eye and watch what happens, start to finish. I wasn’t exactly trying to scare myself into going veg — but, the idea wasn’t completely off the table.

John Klyce Minervini

Executive Chef Miles McMath

That’s how I ended up in a pickup truck with Miles McMath, bouncing down a gravel road in Hernando, Mississippi.

“You might wanna hold on,” says McMath, who in my opinion is driving faster than he needs to. “It’s gonna get a little bumpy.”

McMath is the executive chef at St. Jude. Seven years ago, he had the bright idea to start serving restaurant-quality, locally sourced food in a hospital cafeteria, and the whole thing took off. Recently, he was tapped by Southern Living as one of the 50 people who is changing the South in 2015.

He also happens to have a great hookup when it comes to local beef. McMath’s father-in-law keeps a herd of 30 Angus cattle on 60 acres in Hernando. When we drive up, we spot a mother and her newborn calf disappearing into the woods at the edge of the pasture.

“Check that out,” says McMath, pointing, “you can still see the blood on the ground where she gave birth.”

He’s right. The leaves are stained a dark red, and the calf — who hasn’t quite gotten the hang of walking — still has a bit of umbilical cord dangling between his legs.

Unfortunately, I never got to meet the steer we butchered. By the time I heard about him, he had already been hanging on a hook for two weeks. (“Dry-aged” meat is more flavorful and less messy to work with.)

John Klyce Minervini

To me, it doesn’t really make sense to say that an animal raised for slaughter is living a “natural” life. That said, these cows seem to have it pretty good. They get up when they want. They eat when they want. Although they are not given antibiotics or synthetic supplements, they do eat a bit of cornmeal for marbling.

“It’s like whisky,” says McMath “You can have a sip every now and then, and you’re not gonna get sick. But you can’t drink a whole fifth. It’s just not gonna work out.”

At the end of his life, our steer was given a bucket of feed. When he lowered his head to eat, McMath shot him between the eyes with a .243 caliber rifle. That may sound awful, but it’s actually calculated to be humane. Proponents say the cow loses consciousness before it can feel any pain.

Still, says McMath, it isn’t easy.

“With our kids,” he admits, absentmindedly patting a steer on the rump, “we got rules about which pigs and chickens you can give a name to. Once you start living with animals, it’s hard to say goodbye.”

John Klyce Minervini

Back at Home Place, they’ve nearly wrapped things up. A tidy pile of steaks — rib eye, porterhouse, the kinds of things you might actually find in a grocery store — sits on the table, ready to go. Although the process was a little overwhelming at first, I eventually found it fascinating, in a grim sort of way. The buzzing bandsaw. The enormous ribcage, like something from a dinosaur.

Now there’s just one thing left to do. Before I leave, McMath wraps a New York strip steak in butcher paper and hands it to me. He offers to cook it, but I say no. Because I know that if he does it, it’ll be perfect, and I don’t want it to be perfect.

I want to do this part myself.

Back home, I preheat a cast-iron skillet and rub my steak with kosher salt and cracked pepper. Then I throw it on the stove and let the magic happen. I nearly smoke out the kitchen — and believe it or not, that’s what you’re supposed to do. A very high surface temperature yields a yummy crust and a deep, rich flavor.

After about five minutes, I pull the steak and let it rest. I’ve heard a rumor that grass-fed beef is chewier than grain-fed, and that it has a sharp, astringent flavor. Fortunately, that turns out not to be true. My New York strip is delicate and buttery, as good as anything I’ve had in a restaurant.

I’ll say this: It was different. And not just because of the faint mineral notes I thought I detected in the meat. As I sat at my kitchen table, slowly slicing and chewing, I thought about the calf I’d seen in Hernando, the one who was learning to walk.

Why do we eat meat? Is it because we’ve always done it? How do we justify it — except to say that it tastes good, and we can? I’m not saying it’s wrong — I’m just saying it’s worth thinking about. In the end, every man’s gotta cook his own steak.

Categories
News News Feature

Thanks, Obama!

Last week, I joined the nine-million-plus Americans who have Obamacare.

My premiums are less than I paid with employer-sponsored health insurance, my deductible went from $2,800 to zero, and I can stick with the same primary care doctor.

Thanks, President Obama!

The opportunity to have affordable health insurance separate from a job allows me and many others to pursue more meaningful work. For the first time in my life, I can explore being not just an employee but an entrepreneur. (Or as Mitt Romney would say, a maker, not a taker.)

Nearly five years after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law and after months of dithering over whether to get on board, Governor Bill Haslam has come up with Insure Tennessee, his too-little-too-late version of Obamacare.

Of course, Haslam would never call it that. But without Obamacare, it’s unlikely that the nation’s richest politician (net worth: $2 billion) would have devised a health insurance plan for the working poor.

Thanks again, Obama!

On Monday, Haslam convened a special session of the state legislature to consider Insure Tennessee. The two-year pilot of Insure Tennessee wouldn’t start until 2016. That means the state would forfeit even more than the $2.4 billion it’s passed up so far by refusing to accept federal dollars for Medicaid expansion, which was a key part of the Affordable Care Act.

Insure Tennessee is aimed at those who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or $16,242 for an individual. Haslam’s administration estimates that 200,000 Tennesseans would be eligible for Insure Tennessee.

Even if I stood to benefit, I wouldn’t be impressed.

Said Haslam when he announced his plan: “This plan leverages federal dollars to provide health-care coverage to more Tennesseans, to give people a choice in their coverage, and to address the cost of health care, better health outcomes, and personal responsibility.”

See that last part about personal responsibility? If you thought Haslam was motivated by any Christian obligation to be his brother’s (or sister’s) keeper, those two words should disabuse you of that notion. This right-wing blather about personal responsibility is a smokescreen, part of a nasty narrative that falsely insists those who accept government assistance or subsidies in any way are reckless ne’er do wells.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that expanding Medicaid would cost Tennessee $1.7 billion over 10 years, most of which would come after 2017, when the federal government’s contribution drops to 95 percent, then 94 percent in 2018, 93 percent in 2019, and 90 percent from 2020 on.

Under Insure Tennessee, state hospitals would cover that 10 percent gap. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because patients with insurance mean more money for hospitals.

But here’s something you should know. According to a New York Times analysis, Tennessee spends at least $1.58 billion each year on incentives for businesses. That’s right, Tennessee would spend far, far less on health care for the working poor than it does on tax incentives, sales tax refunds, and corporate income tax reductions to lure companies to the state. If corporations are indeed people, then Haslam is the most compassionate man on the planet.

But if people are people — including the 918 lives that would have been saved in 2014 with Medicaid expansion — then the refusal to embrace Obamacare is cruel, mean-spirited, and immoral.

It is unconscionable that, just now, Haslam’s administration will give to Tennesseans the care and attention it’s been giving to businesses for years.

But with a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled state house and senate, Insure Tennessee is the best we will get — and it’s far from certain that the legislature’s Tea Party contingent, which is virulently anti-Obama anything, will support it.

Open enrollment for Obamacare continues through February 15th. If you don’t enroll by February 15th, you probably won’t be able to get insurance through the federal exchange this year, unless you get married, have a child, lose a job, or experience some other qualifying life event.

Go to getcoveredtenn.org to schedule an appointment with an enrollment counselor who can walk you through the process.

And once you’re enrolled, you know who to thank.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Mummenschanz at GPAC

Physical theater becomes more commonplace all the time. Cirque du Soleil has become enormously successful, and groups like MOMIX and the Pilobolus dance company have toured the Memphis area. But before all of these groups were a twinkle in their founders’ eye, there was Mummenschanz.

In 1976, an unusual three-year-old Swiss performance company that had been touring America went on The Muppet Show, and without uttering a single word, introduced a generation of young viewers to experimental theater, mask play, and a strange new derivation of Commedia dell’arte.

Mummenschanz

In one memorable bit, two actors in black tights sat side by side, each of their faces covered in amorphous blobs of clay. From his blobby nothingness, one performer sculpted a neat beard, then a nice mustache and some fluffy eyebrows. His less dexterous companion tried to copy the look, but without much success. As the face sculpting grew competitive, both actors morphed into terrifying bird monsters and flapped around, terrorizing one another until their faces collided and and stuck together, turning the two, into a single mess of sticky entanglement. It was silly, sublime, and unlike anything else you were likely to encounter on ’70s TV.

The troupe’s unusual name is derived from the German word for “mummer,” a performer combining mime and mask play. But long before The Lion King or War Horse, Mummenschanz was also exploring the boundaries of puppet work. The latest tour is a retrospective of highlight performances from the company’s 40-plus-year history.

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Cover Feature News

Only in the Movies and Memphis

Friday nights are a movie theater’s bread and butter, but on Friday, January 9, 2015, the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill theater was closed to the public. The lobby was still bustling, but on this night it was with a crowd of dressed-up VIPs sipping champagne, munching on movie-themed hors d’oeuvres, and talking about the old days. Malco Theatres has been welcoming Friday-night moviegoers for 100 years, and it was time for celebration.

Naturally, Malco treated its extended family to a movie. There were four to choose from, tracing the century-long evolution of films that had brightened Malco’s screens and drawn patrons through the doors of dozens of theaters: from Hollywood’s miracle year, 1939, The Wizard of Oz; from the post-studio system 1960s, The Sound of Music; from the auteurist 1970s, The Godfather; and from the dawn of computer-generated imagery, 1994’s Forrest Gump. (For the record, The Godfather was the most popular choice among the partygoers.)

“We as a species are biologically driven to go to the movies,” says Jeff Kaufman, Malco’s senior vice president of film and marketing. “We spent 25,000 years living in caves, being told stories by firelight. That’s how our species evolved. You can see cave drawings all over the world that are thousands of years old. That communal experience that our forefathers had translates into what we do today in the movie theater.”

Experiments with moving pictures date back to the mid-19th century, soon after the invention of photography. In the 1880s, watching a movie was a personal affair. You put a coin in a Kinetoscope machine and peered into the eyepiece to see short films of vaudeville acts or scantily clad women dancing. The first public exhibition of a projected film in America was in New York City in 1898. The 1903 film The Great Train Robbery caused a sensation with a startling innovation: a plot. “The first theater in Memphis was opened in 1905 by Charles Dinstuhl, next to his candy store on the corner of Washington and Main. It was called the Theatorium Theatre,” says Vincent Astor, historian and author of the 2013 book Memphis Movie Theatres. “It was an actual nickelodeon with a large number of seats in front of a screen. It was a storefront, but it was the first storefront converted to show movies.”

Soon, theaters like the Optic and the Majestic dotted downtown. “Memphis has always been a big theater town,” says Astor. “There were a handful of [vaudeville] theaters in the 19th century. Several of them ended up being used for films when it was profitable to do that.”

Short subjects still ruled during the first decade of the 20th century, but films gradually became longer. The first to reach what we now consider feature length was the 1906 Australian crime epic The Story of the Kelly Gang. European cinema led the way until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, which coincided with a flowering of film production in a formerly sleepy California town called Hollywood.

M.A. Lightman Sr. holding Stephen Lightman with M.A. Jr.

In 1915, Nashville native and Vanderbilt University graduate M.A. Lightman rented a storefront in Sheffield, Alabama, and opened a movie theater called the Liberty Theater. By then, the modern movie theater business was taking shape. First, theater owners from the informal vaudeville circuits banded together into multi-state chains, then the movie studios themselves, like Warner Brothers and Paramount, got into the business in what’s called today a move toward vertical integration. But there was no shortage of independently owned movie theaters in America. “The theaters came and went. There were different circuits that owned different theaters, and they changed names a lot,” says Astor.

Entrepreneurs like Lightman leveraged their successes into opening more theaters. By 1919, his Sterling Amusement Company owned three theaters in Alabama. He soon sold those theaters and entered the Little Rock market. M.A. Lightman’s father, Joseph, was in construction, and in 1925, the two got together to build the Hillsboro Theatre in their native Nashville. That theater is still around today as the Bellcourt Theatre, an independent art house cinema. The family arrangement was not unusual. “There were a bunch of families, many of them Italian, who owned theaters everywhere,” says Astor.

Malco (M.A. Lightman Company) got its name in 1926. The Lightman family business spread across Arkansas, and then, in 1929, they crossed the river. “The Linden Circle was their first theater in Memphis,” says Astor.

At the same time, movies were undergoing the first of what would be many technological upheavals: the introduction of sound. “The Jazz Singer actually played at Ellis Auditorium,” says Astor. “One of the reasons for that was, at the end of the 1920s, when sound came in, it was just as profound a change as has been the change from film to digital. You had to do it. There were theaters like the Majestic where the owners closed the theater rather than spend the money to convert to sound. Several of the really early sound pictures were at the auditorium, because it was easier to truck in the equipment and put it on the big stage and show the film and then truck it out again, because it was designed for that, and the size didn’t matter. It was cheaper to do that instead of converting another theater.”

During the Depression, the movie theater business was one of the few industries that thrived. Tickets were cheap, and people needed escapist entertainment. In 1935, Malco opened the Memphian Theater on Cooper. It would become a Midtown neighborhood icon and a favorite of Elvis Presley, who famously rented the entire theater for late-night screenings with his friends in the ’60s. Later, it became the first Playhouse on the Square; today, it’s Circuit Playhouse, which still hosts films for the Indie Memphis film festival.

This was the age of the movie palaces, with ornate, 1,000-seat theaters like Lowe’s Palace, the Strand, and the Princess packing in people for first-run Hollywood fare. In 1940, Malco bought a former vaudeville theater at the corner of Main and Beale Street called the Orpheum and transformed it into the growing chain’s flagship property. Malco would have its corporate offices there for many years.

The Arrival of Television

But change was again brewing in the theater industry. The major Hollywood studios had been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission for years regarding their vertically integrated system of movie distribution. The market power that came from owning a huge number of the theaters that showed their films often forced the hands of independent owners like Malco. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in United States vs. Paramount Pictures that studio ownership of theaters constituted an unlawful monopoly. The ruling weakened the power of the Hollywood studios and consequently led to fewer movies being produced.

In 1951, Malco opened the Crosstown, a state-of-the-art, 1,400-seat theater next to the Sears Building. The neon sign atop its marquee was 90-feet tall and employed more than a mile of neon tubing. It was the crown jewel of the 63-theater Malco empire that stretched from Kentucky to New Orleans. But it would be the last of the movie palaces built in Memphis. Hollywood, still reeling from the antitrust ruling, faced a challenger for the eyes and minds of America: television.

“Television scared them to death,” Stephen Lightman, grandson of M.A. Lightman and current president of Malco told what is now Inside Memphis Business (formerly Memphis Business Quarterly) last December. “They thought it was the end — people weren’t going to go out of the house; they were going to sit at home and be entertained.”

Hollywood responded by trying to create a film experience in the theater that was not possible in the living room. TVs were square, so widescreen became the standard for film. Stereophonic sound completely blew away the tinny din of the TV speaker, and early experiments in stereo vision led to the short-lived 3D fad, which produced a few classics like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. “The movie business has always been in flux,” says Astor. “Since the end of the second World War, they have always had to try and one-up something technological.”

The movies continued to be popular, but the margins in the theater business were shrinking. With their high overhead costs, the movie palaces went into slow decline. The late 1950s were the golden age of the drive-in, an innovation that had begun in the late 1930s but exploded in popularity with the newly mobile teenagers of the baby boom. With the drive-ins came a new wave of movies designed for cheap thrills that featured rock-and-roll, motorcycles, shabby monsters, and scantily clad babes. “That’s why movies became more exploitive — they had to figure out a way to get people out of the house,” says director Mike McCarthy, whose Time Warp Drive-In series has become a popular staple at Malco’s Summer Drive-In. “If there wasn’t enough sex and violence in the house, there was some at the drive-in.”

David Tashie, Stephen Lightman, Jimmy Tashie, Bob Levy

Integration and the Birth of the “Multiplex”

M.A. Lightman passed away in 1958, leaving the business to his two sons, M.A. Lightman Jr. and Richard Lightman. With the civil rights movement spreading across the South, the brothers would oversee the racial integration of their theaters. African-America patrons had historically been confined to separate balconies, but one day in 1962, without fanfare, and after consulting with the Memphis Bi-Racial Committee, the Malco on Beale sold orchestra-level seats to a single African-American couple. The next week, two couples were admitted, and within a month, the colored balcony had become a thing of the past.

Since before the antitrust ruling, films would be released first in prestigious movie palaces, where they’d play until returns started to diminish, then be shunted off to smaller, neighborhood theaters. But as the 1960s waned, the squeeze was on. “Theater attendance had been going down for years, and the neighborhood theaters were among the first to go,” says Astor. “They had become esoteric. They were not playing to a general audience. They were playing to a neighborhood, which was mostly staying home and watching television.”

The AMC theater chain pioneered the “multiplex” concept, opening a four-screen theater in Kansas City in 1966. Staggering movie start times across the screens allowed the same-sized crew to sell tickets and serve refreshments to four times as many patrons. The Highland Quartet, which opened in 1971, was the first Malco multiplex. It was the final nail in the coffin of the movie palaces. “It got to the point where the smaller theaters just weren’t making money,” says Astor. “In order to fill the big theaters, the Malco and Lowe’s Palace became black exploitation and kung fu theaters.”

The 1962 marquee for the Summer Twin Drive-In in Memphis

The early 1970s also saw the evolution of the contemporary blockbuster mentality. Studios were cutting more prints of their biggest movies and sending them out everywhere at once. With multiplex screens proliferating around the country, that meant that everyone who wanted to see a movie could see it pretty much immediately. Instead of being spread out over the course of months, the financial returns for films was more front-loaded, and opening weekend became more important.

In June 1977, one month after Star Wars hit theaters, the Malco Ridgeway Quartet opened in East Memphis. Downtown was hollowing out, and Malco sold its namesake theater and moved its offices to the multiplex. Astor, who had gotten a job at the Malco after falling in love with its crumbling granduer during a screening of True Grit, recalls, “When it was sold to the Memphis Development Foundation, I was retained, the only Malco employee to stay, because I knew where the fuses and the skeletons were. I had done a lot of research on the history of the theater, so they kept me.” The newly rechristened Orpheum returned to its live theater roots and remains a downtown landmark.

“Selling the Experience”

Over the years, Malco Theatres has survived multiple takeover attempts, but today, 100 years after M.A. Lightman’s Liberty Theater, it remains family owned, and is thriving. Every night, Malco opens the doors to 349 screens in 33 locations. “We’re sure happy we didn’t sell, because any investment we had made with the money would probably not have done as well as the movie business,” Stephen Lightman told Inside Memphis Business.

The movie business today is, as always, in a state of flux. “There aren’t too many businesses that have the responsibility to recapitalize themselves twice over the course of a business lifetime,” says Kaufman, Malco’s film and marketing SVP. “Theatrical exhibition went from slanted floors to stadium seating, so we had to recapitalize the insides of the auditoriums. Then it went from 35mm to digital, so we had to recapitalize the [projection] booth. It was a lot of money and a lot of effort.”

“Malco, as far as digital was concerned, went for it whole hog,” says Astor. “The most complicated digital installation you can do is at a drive-in, and Malco did it on four screens.”

But there’s another side to the digital revolution: High definition big screens and surround sound are not just found in theaters any more but in living rooms. And beginning with VCRs in the 1980s, DVDs in the 1990s, Blu-Ray in the 2000s, and now Netflix and digital streaming in the 2010s, audiences have access to an unprecedented variety of motion-picture content. These trends have some pundits preparing obituaries for the theater industry.

But Malco has heard that rhetoric before. Despite the doomsayers, total domestic box office in 2014 topped $10 billion. Industry-wide, the number of theatrical tickets sold has remained pretty constant over the past 25 years. The average American sees four movies in the theater per year. “The MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] says that about 10 percent of the people buy about half of the tickets,” says Kaufman.

To keep those folks coming back and attract new patrons, the industry has deployed all of the tricks it has learned over its history. 3D technology made a quantum leap forward. New audio technologies, such as Dolby’s Atmos system, offer unprecedented sound quality. And the design of Malco’s multiplexes now echoes the movie palaces of old.

The Malco Paradiso theater in East Memphis

“Marcus Lowe, in the beginnings of his great success, said ‘We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.’ That’s really the case with Malco,” says Astor. “They’re selling the experience. All of their theaters might not be as beautiful as the Paradiso, but it’s still the whole experience. It’s the movies, the special effects, the food, everything. And the presentation has always been their strongest point.”

Kaufman says it’s Malco’s commitment to quality that has sustained them: “It’s not brain surgery, but it is attention to detail on a lot of different levels. Theaters these days are more akin to the kinds of theaters we grew up going to. They’re visually arresting, they’ve fun to go to. It’s not just a box with four screens like you saw in the 1960s and 1970s.”

Inside those theaters, the fare has become more varied. Digital projection has enabled live, high-definition streaming of events. Malco offers its theaters for use by film festivals such as Indie Memphis and has helped give Memphis’ independent film scene a home. And as an increasingly educated filmgoing public wants to experience the classics with a big audience, Malco has partnered with McCarthy and Black Lodge Video for the popular Time Warp Drive-In series.

Larry Etter, Malco’s senior vice president of food services, says, “I’ve lived in Memphis since 1970, and I think Memphians are spoiled. Until you get outside of Memphis and watch movies in other facilities, you don’t realize the quality of the product that the Malco family, the Lightmans, the Tashies, the Levys have put together for their communities. They really think the quality of presentation is paramount. If you’re paying for it, you deserve the very best.”

Categories
News News Feature

Passion for Truth

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Carnita Atwater is passionate about many things: education, her museums, and her community among them. Her African American International Museum Foundation has already produced the Buffalo Soldier’s Museum, Black Memphian Collection, the Tuskegee Airmen Museum, the African American Hall of Fame, the Black Invention Museum, and the Blues Museum of Memphis among others.

Her latest exhibit is called “Sammy Davis Jr. — The Truth,” based on “Mister Show Business” himself. The exhibit is at the downtown Cossitt Branch library through February.

Larry Kuzniewski

Carnita Atwater

Why Davis? “When I first started researching Sammy Davis Jr., I have to admit I did not care for him,” Atwater says. “But through my research and through collecting artifacts from his estate, I have a new-found respect and love for this man. He was definitely a cutting-edge person.”

When the state of California put Davis’ estate up for auction in 2001, Atwater was one of the estimated 800 people in attendance. More than 500 Davis items sold including gold records, photographs, clothing, and personal documents. The auction brought in nearly $500,000, short of Davis’ $5.3 million debt. Atwater didn’t buy anything, but managed to get a word in with the man who collected the majority of the items for sale.

“Jokingly, I told him, ‘When you decide to sell his artifacts, make sure I’m the first person in line,'” she recalls. “He agreed. So he called me after several years and asked if I still had an interest in buying the collection. Within 15 hours, I was flying out there to buy the artifacts.”

So why the title, “The Truth”? “If you study him, you’ll see he was more than just an entertainer or dancer,” she said. “Sammy Davis Jr. is such an important person in our history. Not just African-American history but internationally. This man was known around the world. I think people will be elated to see all the artifacts that are in this collection — his honorary degrees, his clothing, invitations to the White House, marriage certificates, photos from his marriages. I think visitors will see things they wouldn’t ever see, not even at the Smithsonian African-American Museum.”

Atwater has big plans for 2015. The former North Memphis resident and Frayser High School graduate wants to revitalize the place she once called home, the New Chicago area. She has purchased land in the community and is ready to get going: “When my family moved to Memphis, my mom purchased a home in New Chicago, which was a prominent area during the heyday of the Firestone Tire Company. That’s something that’s close to my heart. I want to revitalize that area. First, building the African-American business district, having a cultural school, and possibly a community college.”

Her long-term vision also includes an African-American History Museum. “I think it’s imperative that we go beyond civil rights. I want to tell the story from a historical perspective of the African-American and African experience,” she says. “I would pick up what the National Civil Rights Museum does not address.”

Atwater has managed to keep a low profile, which is by design: “This world is not about me; it’s about how I serve my community. I have always left my options open to whatever God has in store for me.”

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Wharton Priorities Revealed in State of the City Address

“Sound and strong.”  That’s the overall state of the city at the beginning of 2015, according to Memphis Mayor A C Wharton in his annual State of the City address last week. 

Wharton looked back at 2014 during his speech last Thursday at the Hattiloo Theatre but also gave Memphians a glimpse of his plans for the coming year.  

That year could be cut short for Wharton, of course, depending on the outcome of October’s mayoral election. So far, Wharton’s front-running opponent in the race is Jim Strickland, a Memphis city councilmember. 

Strickland formally rebutted Wharton’s speech after it concluded. He noted many here don’t feel safe in their communities and that, he said, “is the state of the city many of our residents are living through.” 

Nevertheless, Wharton has time on the clock as mayor, and here are his big three ideas for his time remaining:

1. Fighting Crime — In his speech, Wharton said he will emphasize “old-fashioned community policing and new, cutting-edge technology.”

On the old-school side, Wharton said he’ll activate neighborhood leaders, especially in areas with high violent crime, to work at the “grassroots level” to reduce crime. 

On the high-tech side, he said the city will add police car dash cameras, automatic vehicle location technology, and body cameras for officers this year. 

Also, new officers are on the way to move the Memphis Police Department ranks closer to the “optimal force of 2,500.”

“We have increased the budget for the Memphis Police Department by nearly $40 million. We have intensified our anti-gang programs. We have toughened sentences for violent crimes. We have targeted crimes in apartment complexes, and we are fighting gun crimes by young offenders,” Wharton said.

In Strickland’s speech, he said he would have a “100 percent commitment to Blue Crush,” work with state legislators to get higher penalties for violent criminals (and hold parents accountable for violent crimes committed by their children), and work with community leaders to help children “who are picking the wrong path.”

“Crime needs to be the absolute focal point for the future adminstration, and I will, like a laser beam, focus on that in the next four years,” Strickland said.

2. Minority Business — Wharton said it was “simply unacceptable” that only one percent of business receipts in Memphis are with minority businesses. 

To increase that number, he proposed a new division of city government, what he called the Division of Minority Business Services. The agency would “manage all city agencies and services related to minority businesses” and create partnerships with groups like Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the Memphis Area Transit Authority, and other agencies that receive city grants. 

“Our ultimate goal as a result is to put in place a process that is just as entrepreneurial as the entrepreneurs we hope to create and support,” Wharton said. 

But Strickland said Wharton already has this authority, and minority contracts have actually fallen during his term. 

“The mayor is the sole contracting authority for city government,” Strickland said. “That means he controls all contracts. They all have to come through city hall. Minority contracting with the City of Memphis has actually decreased over the last two years.”

3. Poverty — Wharton’s overall plan to fight poverty is to promote prosperity. 

His “Blueprint for Prosperity” was revealed in May and came with one major goal: to reduce poverty in Memphis by 10 percentage points in the next 10 years. 

The blueprint is a massive document designed by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology. It is crammed with data and theory, but Wharton said last week that he will begin implementing the plan over the next six months.

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Volunteers Take Census of City’s Homeless Population

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

It’s around 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning, and the temperature is hovering in the high 30s. But it’s warmer inside the Memphis Area Transit Authority’s (MATA) North End Terminal, and that’s where a homeless man named Anthony has found respite from the cold.

Jane Hooks, who helps house the homeless through nonprofit Promise Development Corporation, is sitting on a bench next to Anthony, clipboard in hand, asking him a series of questions for the annual Community Alliance for the Homeless (CAFTH) Point In Time (POT) head count.

Over three days last week, more than a 100 volunteers combed every Memphis neighborhood by car and by foot in an effort to get an accurate head count of the city’s unsheltered population. It’s required biannually by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but CAFTH performs the count each year.

Bianca Phillips

Volunteer Jane Hooks surveys a homeless person at a MATA terminal.

The final count — of both sheltered (those in temporary housing or homeless shelters) and unsheltered (those who spent the previous night sleeping outside) — will be available on Thursday, when CAFTH will announce their participation in a new ambitious national campaign to house all chronically homeless people by 2016.

“Our goal is to have no homeless veterans by 2015 and no chronically homeless people by 2016,” said CAFTH Executive Director Chere Bradshaw.

Called Zero 2016, the campaign is a follow-up to a previous national homeless housing program that Memphis participated in. That campaign, 100K Homes, aimed to get 100,000 homeless people into housing nationally, and Memphis volunteers set a goal of housing 100 people. The goals were reached, locally and nationally, this past July.

The POT count isn’t just for statistics’ sake. Volunteers interview each homeless person to determine whether they qualify for available housing, and that will help CAFTH toward its Zero 2016 goal.

“We ask questions, and we score them. And depending on how you score, you’re added to a list. And then those with the highest need get served first as housing becomes available,” Bradshaw said.

Back at the MATA terminal, Anthony, 48, tells Hooks that he was just released from prison the night before, after serving five months. He had nowhere to go, so he slept on a bench at the terminal. He tells her he’d been homeless on two separate occasions prior to going to prison.

On that Friday, the volunteers in Hooks’ group only found three homeless people at the MATA terminal and no other homeless people on a walk through parts of downtown. Bradshaw said she had a similar experience with her volunteer group, which also surveyed downtown and the Lamar/Airways area.

She’s hopeful the overall count will be lower this year, as a result of the successful 100K Homes Campaign.

“I think there are less people,” Bradshaw said. “Court Square Park was empty, and we went down to St. Mary’s, but the people there had already been counted [by another volunteer group]. And I went to the Lamar/Airways area, where we found a lot of people in a 2012 count, but we didn’t see them this time. It makes me hopeful.”

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Fly on the Wall 1354

Check-fil-A

Talk about a business model with legs … and thighs … and wings. Last week’s Board of Adjustment meeting found board members reviewing a variance request by what appears to be a payday loan establishment that offers customers a little something extra. And by “a little something extra,” We mean, of course, chicken.

The aptly named Chicken & Checks is planned for Elvis Presley Boulevard. So you can cash your payday loan check and buy some chicken with it? Or do you get a wing plate and biscuit with every check cashed? No matter how you slice it, that’s Memphis to the bone. May God and Jack Pirtle have mercy on our souls.

Taxkreig

This tax preparation business leaflet caught your Pesky Fly’s eye because an unfortunately placed shadow makes the superhero mascot look like a cartoon Hitler in tights.

Just Ghostbusted

Memphis native and SNL cast member Leslie Jones has been tapped to star in the gender-flipped reboot of Ghostbusters. We can only hope her presence will bring shooting to Memphis, because no giant statue deserves to be brought to terrifying life half as much as the Statue of Liberation at World Overcomers Church, aka “Freedom Jesus.”