Shafts of sunlight poked through the roof.
Rainwater dripped everywhere. The facade outside was crumbling.
It was the early 2000s, and the prognosis for the Belcourt Theatre was grim.
The old theater, which opened in 1925, seemed to be lurching toward its grave. It had been good run, but when the membership number dipped to 300 lonely souls, the Belcourt seemed to be dying.
At its lowest point, Nashville movie fans got together and turned the Belcourt into a non-profit organization. Then somehow, like a movie monster, the Belcourt Theatre wouldn’t die.
Decay, the weather, ownership changes, cultural shifts, funding nightmares or a deadly virus couldn’t strike the death blow.
A century of life has passed by outside those theater doors, and the Belcourt Theatre has stood as a Hillsboro Village escape hatch to all of it.
Today, while the lobby of the old movie palace gleams in the afternoon sun, no light gets in through the roof. There is now a Belcourt newsletter than reaches 60,000 fans. There are 8,000 members. The place became so cool it attracted famous fans like Priscilla Presley, Margot Price, Nicole Kidman, Emmylou Harris and John Prine.
The prognosis is so strong, the Belcourt’s Executive Director Stephanie Silverman can speak with confidence.
“The myth of the dying theater is never the truth,” she said. “It is a communal experience. We all have kitchens, but we still go to restaurants.
“Adaptation is the only way to survive.”
Through the years, the Belcourt has fallen apart and the people who love it have put it back together.
Belcourt Theatre managing director Stephanie Silverman is ready for a new day at the theater in Nashville on Nov. 29, 2007.
Is the Belcourt haunted?
The Belcourt wasn’t even the theater’s name when it opened on May 18, 1925 by owners M.A. and Joseph Lightman.
Its seats were made of Spanish leather.
A ghostly legend was born about an employee who died shortly after the 1925 opening, a haunting that still is said t to happen today.
Over the years, people have seen “a woman figure wandering the hall as if she’s working here,” said Teddy Minton, the Belcourt’s public historian and archivist.
It was called the Hillsboro Theatre in the early years, and its first projected film had no sound. “America” by D.W. Griffith launched the movie portion of the programming. Silent films only lasted two years.
There was a long run as a community playhouse/children’s theater from 1927-1964. The Grand Ole Opry took over for a two-year stint. From 1934-36, the Opry’s live radio show was recorded there, and featured country music stars DeFord Bailey and Uncle Dave Macon.
Once the Opry moved to the Ryman Theater downtown, community theater commanded the stage for more than 30 years. The playhouse productions featured local people in the cast, helping to launch the careers of actors like Dinah Shore and Frank Sutton and directors like Delbert Mann and Fred Coe.
There were no movies from 1927-1958.
Belcourt gives birth to twins
The old building got a face-lift, a name change and a programming shift in 1964.
Almost 40 years after it opened, the Belcourt Theatre had a new facade and a new purpose: to screen arthouse films from around the world. The first movie was French/Italian thriller “Purple Moon” directed by Rene Clement.
The arthouse model, however, didn’t hold.
It wasn’t long before the Belcourt was a discount theater, where, for a cheaper ticket price, fans could see movies that had already had their first run.
Films about country people featuring country music, called “Hick Flicks,” dominated the mid-1960s. “Convoy,” “Dixie Dynamite,” “Hot Summer in Barefoot County” and “The Exotic Ones (also known as “The Monster and the Stripper”)” were all the rage.
In 1968, the Belcourt became the first twin cinema in Tennessee. The Tennessean headline: “Hillsboro’s Belcourt announces twins.” Two theaters with a common lobby was a mind-blowing concept in the late 1960s.
Historian Minton said the biggest Belcourt crowd likely came in 1973 when the Marlon Brando film “The Last Tango in Paris” was scheduled to screen in July. The film has sexually explicit scenes. After a ruling by the U.S. Supreme court said the film wasn’t pornography, the Belcourt jumped at the chance to screen the film.
“They were sold out for weeks with lines wrapped around the block,” Minton said.
Hundreds of people line up outside the Belcourt Cinema on July 27, 1973, to see the first showing here of the X-rated movie, “Last Tango in Paris,” starring Marlon Brando. Many of those who showed up were turned away when the show was quickly sold out. The film is being shown here in its unedited version. Another show was also sold out and an estimated 800 to 900 were turned away at the box office.
Community group saves theater
The water damage and crumbling facade made the Belcourt a bit dangerous in the 1990s. The place was shut down a couple of times due to code violations.
The first community-led revitalization project began in 1999 with BelcourtYES!, a non-profit group that included Tom Wills.
Wills, a film historian and noted philanthropist, “put up his life savings to buy the building,” Minton said.
To enhance the coolness factor, the Belcourt held a concerts for music stars Mary Gauthier and Nora Jones, which created buzz in Nashville’s artist community. Donations began to flow.
In 2007, BelcourtYES! had raised enough money to buy the place from Wills.
“That’s when we focused on making repairs,” Minton said.
Cracks can be seen in the gold arch that frames the stage at Belcourt Theatre, here on Nov. 29, 2007.
One 2007 overhaul came in the front office. Stephanie Silverman took over as executive director. She came out of the live theater world in Chicago where she worked on marketing and directing a dance company.
What she learned quickly about the non-profit theater business: “It’s a weird beast,” she said. At the time, there were only 15 such theater organizations in America, she said. She remembers going to the Sundance Film Festival the first time and feeling energized by the arthouse, non-profit film community.
The key, she said, was to get “authentic curation,” meaning someone has to know the audience and which films will attract that audience. The brains behind the curation belong to Toby Leonard, who has been setting the Belcourt film schedule since 2000.
The film that hinted at a prosperous future was “Moonrise Kingdom,” a Wes Anderson comedy that premiered in 2012.
“We sold out screening after screening,” Silverman said.
By 2016, the rennovations were all but finished, and the Belcourt was a shining movie palace again.
The 90-year-old Belcourt Theatre, here on May 31, 2016, is getting a makeover and is scheduled to reopen in July.
If there was one movie that reintroduced the Belcourt as a smart, cool, artsy place to gather for movies, it was “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” The inspiring life story of children’s television host Mister Rogers breathed life into the old building.
The documentary about Fred Rogers made Nashville the third-highest grossing theater in the country, Silverman said.
“It was one of our first big financial booms,” Minton said.
But the troubles weren’t over.
Would you go to the Belcourt drive-in?
The biggest threat to the Belcourt’s existence came in 2020.
COVID took away the audience. How do you operate a theater when people weren’t allowed to gather?
“COVID put us in a crisis,” Minton said. “Will cinema survive this at all. We were in an existential financial crisis.”
That’s when Silverman and her crew came up with the idea to convert the building into a drive-in theater. They moved the whole operation outside, showing movies on a portable big screen.
Thirty or so cars parked in the Belcourt lot as the staff brought popcorn outside to the cars.
Movies by Alfred Hitchcock filled the parking lot. The Belcourt screened “The Birds,” “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest.”
And somehow, the love for movies, no matter where they were shown, kept the theater alive.
Employees got paid, and the COVID crisis faded.
Then, another bomb. The Writers Guild, Screen Actors Guild and other unions went on strike in the spring and summer of 2023. Actors stopped promoting their movies. Movie sets shut down. Fans stayed home.
“We couldn’t catch a break,” Silverman said.
“Oppenheimer,” the Christopher Nolan epic about the making of the atomic bomb, began to bring audiences back. An interesting note: The Belcourt wanted to reinforce its arthouse cred, so it didn’t run “Barbie,” which was released on the same day.
There was no “Barbenheimer” crossover box office bonanza at the Belcourt.
An old-fashioned good time
The Belcourt is a singular movie experience in Middle Tennessee. There are no other old-fashioned arthouse cinemas until you get to Memphis or Knoxville.
Erin Thompson serves up popcorn for customers at Belcourt Theatre in Nashville , Tenn., Friday, Oct. 3, 2025.
The Belcourt features two big theater halls named for pivotal years in the movie house’s history, the 1925 and 1966.
There’s a small screening room upstairs and an education room where they hold seminars. This past summer, for example, there was a seminar on “Hick Flicks” and another on “Nashville Queer (Film) History.”
They are proud of their fresh popcorn and craft beers.
Maybe the biggest source of pride is the way the movies are presented. The Belcourt has a rectangular projectionist’s room that will make any movie fan nostalgic.
There are real canisters of 35-mm film that must be fed, expertly, into the reel-to-reel projector.
After 100 years, the Belcourt has learned just how films are supposed to be shown.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Belcourt Theatre thrives with artistic, foreign films, docus
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
