Cable Car Cinema & Cafe

Sounds like my kind of place maybe not a “MOVIE PALACE” but cool in another way.Also it has a great name and location.

Gerald, I have spent the better part of the day perusing the fascinating comments that you have submitted regarding the past and current movie houses of (mostly) Rhode Island. While I will probably never visit most of these places – though I did spend a weekend in Woonsocket many years ago and have visited Newport on several occasions – your vivid descriptions – and vintage pictures – of the old movie palaces and the communities they served was most enjoyable. It also revived memories of my own early cinematic experiences when growing up in Greenpoint Brooklyn.

This is one of the reasons why this is such a wonderful site.

Keep up the good work!

That no-splice caveat is for archival film prints and certain distributors, such as Rialto. This is a good move.
Let’s hope they get correct screen masking, aperture plates, lenses to show 35mmm films in the various aspect ratios correctly and un-cropped CinemamScope.

The previous reference to The Revival House is relevant as the owner/operators of this closed theater are now the new owner/operators of the Cable Car. It is currently undergoing major renovations during the summer of 2010 and it is rumored they might be adding a second film projector to show the old films again. (The film distributors no longer want film houses to splice the films and thus one projector is a major handicap to show old films.) It is slated to reopen August 16th or 17th.

“….is this a flat floor auditorium?”

Almost. Very slight incline.

Yes, go to http://www.flickr.com , enter “Cable Car Cinema” in search, and you will find a few. It’s not much to look at inside.

Here is a vintage photo of the Cable Car Cinema building when it was M. Burns Motor Transportation in 1962:
View link

The do get some first-run films, generally of the off-beat type. Currently playing is a first run of Stay Until Tomorrow, made by local filmmaker Laura Colella. I plan to see it tonight. They showed the documentary Why We Fight as a Providence first-run. The French Film Festival, run here by Brown University, is a nice annual event. They are hosting part of the Latino Film Festival starring Friday. In the café they always have walls covered with posters of films that are presumably coming attractions. Some of them in fact never come. Entertainment Weekly last year named this one of the top ten theatres in the nation. But it does have a haphazard aura…part of its slovenly charm.

Rhode Island has another cinema-café, the Revival House in Westerly. While it doesn’t have theatre-type seating (or couches!) and employs DVD projection rather than 35mm like the Cable Car, it does have wider-ranging programs of new, old, and harder-to-see films. Check the Revival House page and their website.

On January 16, 1977 there was a short piece in the Providence Journal about Ray Bilodeau, who had recently opened the Cable Car Cinema less than three months before. In it Mr. Bilodeau complains about smallish audiences, losing money on the venture, even going broke, not being able to get films from some of the major distributors because of oppressive guarantees, and other problems.

It wasn’t until well into the 1980s, under the ownership of his brother Al Bilodeau and subsequent management by Al’s son and Ray’s nephew Eric Bilodeau that the cinema began enjoying some apparent success, due in no small measure to the enormously profitable café portion of the cinema, which is open all day, even outside of film screening times and caters to the abundant number of students from RISD, which abuts the cinema-café. The café generates interest in the films; the films bring money to the café. In some ways this is not a cinema with a café but a café with a cinema. Which is just fine.

Opening of the Cable Car Cinema

An article in the Providence Journal of September 16, 1976 reported the projected opening of the Cable Car that was set for October 20. The piece quoted a description of the new cinema by owner/creator Raymond Bilodeau as being a place of “rugged architecture and elegance.” The place seems actually to have opened, quietly, around October 30, 1976 when the first feature shown was Luther, a film in the American Film Theatre series which had previously been shown in Rhode Island. The cinema, formerly a garage, was to have armchairs, love seats and sofas and a seating capacity of 130.

In fact, the theatre had a seating capacity that was more like 175 initially and was reduced to about 130 about fifteen years later when the place was modified to accomodate café tables to the right of the open projection booth and a kitchen was carved out of one of the former two bathrooms and part of the rear of the auditorium.

For the record: across Power Street from the little Cable Car Cinema “block,” on the same side of South Main Street, used to stand the Talma Theatre. The Talma was not a movie house, to my knowledge, but was used by The Players, a Providence theatre group, from 1909 until 1932, when they moved to the Barker Playhouse, converted from an old church, on Benefit and Transit Streets. The Talma was torn down and the spot is a parking lot. I believe the Talma may have been called the Lyceum at one time. The Barker Playhouse remains.