How Indie Theaters Are Bringing the Silver Screen to Your TV Screen

June 11, 2020·26 min·2 clips

How did a historic Boston theater facing closure during the pandemic pivot to a virtual screening room overnight?

The theater starts as memory. The cold open walks through the train ride, neon, popcorn, a red curtain, and the small grief of losing moviegoing during isolation. Coolidge has weight here: a nonprofit independent movie house opened in 1933 and tied to Boston since the Great Depression. Then the story turns practical. Catherine Tallman describes the pivot that began when an independent film distributor asked if the theater could show films virtually through its website. The answer came quickly. Coolidge launched with two films, then more distributors came in as the setup started working almost overnight. Jobs changed just as fast. Tallman says the team became a digital exhibition company, with three staff members going from cinephiles to tech support. The hard part was the reversal. Instead of getting a file, selling tickets, and paying the distributor share, the theater had to send customers through separate distributor links. That meant confusion. The team rebuilt parts of the website, explained the new steps, and helped patrons through technical snags. People still showed up. Tallman says nearly every ten-dollar transaction included an added donation from someone trying to help. Megan Keeney Anderson listens closely and reflects the speed of the change, along with the work of keeping people connected while they were apart. The episode does not treat the pivot like a miracle. It treats it like work: messy, fast, and necessary when the room itself vanished. The last beat sends listeners back to Coolidge Corner Theater's website, where the virtual screening room keeps films available.

As heard by us

A focused operator story about how an indie theater turned curation and customer loyalty into a virtual screening room.

The Growth Show turns Coolidge Corner Theater's shutdown pivot into a grounded operator story. Catherine Tallman describes how the Boston nonprofit, long built around in-person curation, moved into a virtual screening room after an independent distributor asked whether the…

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You want a real example of a theater turning crisis into a working digital model.

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