“THERE’S JUST SOMETHING MAGICAL ABOUT MOVIE THEATERS”
Reprinted from THE TEXAS SPUR, JANUARY 2021
Just how many surviving old movie theaters are there in the state of Texas, anyway? That was the question that started to pique Mike Robertson’s curiosity a year ago, when he first came across the Globe in Bertram, Texas, north of Austin.
Robertson’s a graphic designer with a longtime love of historic cinemas, and author of a novel,“This Is Where I Came In,”set in Texas in the early days of film.
He’s also an accidental pastor of an Austin church, and that partly figures into how he stumbled onto the idea of chronicling these distinctive, sometimes abandoned, gems of culture and architecture.
Robertson stopped into The Texas Spur offices a couple of weeks ago on a tour from the capital city out to the western counties of the Panhandle. He’d captured images of several Palace Theaters across the state and was eager to photograph the one in Spur, especially in light of its successful restoration.
In his church position, Robertson found that Mondays were a suitable day off. He would often make day trips and “drive a road I haven’t been on before,”often in close proximity to his Austin home. In pop. 1,396 Bertram, northwest of the city between Liberty Hill and Burnet, he saw the Globe. Quirky and tiny, the Art Deco structure was built in 1935 and reopened in 2015 as a live-music venue. He snapped a photo with his iPhone.
On another excursion he came across the Edna Theater in pop. 5,499 Edna, near Victoria in SouthTexas. As he captured his iPhone image, he wondered how many of these old movie houses still stood. He set out to learn.
Using resources like CinemaTreasures.org, he systematically planned day trips and brief tours. Sometimes his wife would accompany him on multi-day trips. It didn’t take long to exhaust the close radius of Austin and its exurbs, and he began to draft itineraries farther out. On a 3-day sweep of the Panhandle, he found and photographed 31 theaters—and still missed enough that he was back out in this part of the state in mid-January 2021.
While many movie aficionados make it a goal to tour the inside of theaters, or to view a film, Robertson’s on a faster track than that, taking only exterior shots. The swift, ready pace has allowed him to observe a great deal about the state, too.
“In some waysTexas towns are all alike,”he said. “But they’re really very different.”
His movie-house collection, numbering 188 as of the day of his Spur visit, has been uploaded to a website, texaspictureshows.
com. Without the experience of building publications and PowerPoints for church programs over the years, he might not have been able to gather and post so much material so attractively. And after he was ordained to the ministry, eventually accepting the request to pastor the then-tiny Sanctuary Church in Austin in 2016, he found a knack for motivational speaking that often took him on the road.
“All my best stories seem to start with saying‘yes’to something,”Robertson said. In this most recent inspiration, he’s considering a book on the history of these early movie houses. An opportunity to collaborate with a film historian from the University of Texas may be just the ticket. And he’s created a souvenir ViewMaster reel featuring several of the images.
“Seeing 188 theaters, some aare beauties, some are heartbreaking. Many are no longer there. That’s why I’m so thrilled that communities like Spur are showing an interest in their history.” Robertson’s sojourn in Spur was short, as he had to head down the highway to his next destination.
“Searching out these theaters has allowed me to see the variety of our state,”Robertson said. “There’s just something magical about movie theaters.”
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.
