If you grew up in Corbett, you saw your first movie here. You probably had your first date here too, in the balcony, and you probably remember the smell of the place: popcorn, radiator heat and seventy years of red velvet. The Rialto is a 620-seat single-screen theater on Main Street, and from 1986 to 1996 it sat dark with a leaking roof and a For Sale sign in the box office window.

It is not dark anymore. Since July of 1996 the Friends of the Rialto, a volunteer group of about forty townspeople, have run it as a nonprofit community theater, showing classic films, hosting the high school choir and the community band, and fixing it one piece at a time. This page is our way of keeping the town (and the folks who moved away) up to date on how it's going. It's going pretty well. Come see for yourself.

1927. The Rialto opened in October of 1927 as a combination vaudeville and picture house, built by a local businessman who, according to the newspaper clipping in our lobby, wanted Corbett to have "a theatre the equal of any in Columbus." It had a stage with a fly loft, dressing rooms in the basement (still there, still damp), an orchestra pit, and a pipe organ to accompany the silent pictures. Opening week featured a five-act vaudeville bill and a silent feature. Admission was a quarter.

1929 to 1930. Sound came in. The Rialto was wired for talking pictures in 1929, which put the organist and the pit musicians out of work more or less overnight, as it did everywhere. Vaudeville acts kept coming through until about 1932, then the Depression finished them off and the Rialto became strictly a movie house.

The 1930s and 40s. The glory days. Double features, newsreels, cartoons, Saturday serials for the kids, dish night on Wednesdays (bring home a free plate, collect the set). The great neon marquee that everyone photographs went up in 1938, replacing the original flat sign. During the war the Rialto sold war bonds in the lobby and held scrap drives on the sidewalk. Older folks in town still talk about seeing the newsreels here.

The 1950s and 60s. A wide screen was installed for the new CinemaScope pictures, which meant cutting into the original proscenium (we're still a little sore about that). The organ was sold off in 1958. Television took its bite, but the Rialto hung on with first-run pictures and a Saturday kiddie matinee that a couple of us on the board remember very fondly.

The 1970s and 80s. Slow decline. The building changed hands twice. The roof started leaking in the late 70s and was patched, not fixed. When the twin cinema opened out by the highway in 1984 the writing was on the wall, and the Rialto showed its last picture in February of 1986 and closed. For ten years it sat empty. Pigeons got in. The plaster in the balcony came down in sheets. There was serious talk of tearing it down for parking.

1994 to 1996. A group of us started meeting in the back room of the library in the spring of 1994 and asked a simple question: what would it take? The answer turned out to be: a lot, but not as much as a parking lot's worth of regret. The owner agreed to sell the building to the newly formed Friends of the Rialto for a very fair price. We got a small grant, a loan, a great many bake sales and a lot of donated labor, and on the Fourth of July weekend, 1996, we turned the marquee lights back on and showed a movie. It was standing room only. Half the town cried. We're not ashamed to say it.

In order, because the order matters. You can't do anything else until the water stops coming in.

Still to come: balcony seats, replastering and repainting the auditorium ceiling (the original stencil pattern is still visible in places, and we've had it photographed), the stage rigging, and the big one, below.

The Rialto opened with a theater pipe organ in 1927, and its pipe chambers are still there behind the ornamental grilles on either side of the proscenium, empty since the instrument was sold in 1958. (We have traced it as far as a roller rink in Indiana in the 1960s, and then the trail goes cold. If you know anything, write to us.)

This spring we were offered a theater organ from a closed movie house in Michigan, roughly the same size as our original: two manuals and about eight ranks of pipes, with the drums, cymbals, bird whistle and all the other noisemakers that make a theater organ a theater organ. The instrument is in storage and is ours if we can move it, restore it and install it, which a professional has estimated at around $60,000 all told. That is the largest single project we have ever taken on. We have about $11,000 in the organ fund as of this month.

Why bother? Because a theater organ playing a silent picture is something almost nobody under sixty in this town has ever heard, and once you have, you don't forget it. We'd like to show silent films the way they were meant to be shown, with a live organist, right here, where it happened in 1927. Our goal is to have it playing for the theater's 75th anniversary in October of 2002. Help us out.

Fridays at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7:00. All seats $3. Popcorn $1, and it's real butter. Every one of these is a 35mm print on the big screen, the way it was made to be seen. Bring the kids to the ones marked with a star; they have never seen a movie like this and they're going to be surprised how much they like it.

No show Nov. 12 (the community band's fall concert is on our stage that night) or Nov. 26 (Thanksgiving weekend). Prints are booked from the studios' classics divisions and a title can occasionally change if a print isn't available; we'll post any changes here and on the marquee.

Sponsor a seat. $100 puts a small engraved brass plate on the back of a seat: your name, your family's name, a memorial, or "First date, 1954." (Yes, that one's real, and yes, they're still married.) About 300 of 620 seats are sponsored. Stop by the box office any show night and we'll have the form.

Give to the organ fund. Any amount. The Friends of the Rialto is a registered nonprofit organization and your donation is tax-deductible; we'll send a receipt. Donations may be dropped at the box office any Friday, or e-mail us and we'll tell you where to send a check.

Volunteer. We need ushers, ticket-takers, popcorn-makers, painters, people who know old wiring, people who know old plaster, and people who can write a grant application. Work days are the first Saturday of every month, 9 a.m., coffee and donuts provided. No experience needed except for the wiring and the plaster.

Come to the movies. Honestly, this is the big one. A full house on Friday night is the whole reason we did this. Bring somebody who's never been.

The Friends of the Rialto is a nonprofit volunteer organization formed in 1994 to save, restore and operate the Rialto Theatre in Corbett, Ohio. We have a seven-member board, elected each January, about forty regular volunteers and a mailing list of around four hundred. Nobody is paid. This home page is kept up by the publicity committee (two of us, one of whom had to learn HTML from the library book, and it shows).

Other pages about old theaters and old movies we've enjoyed on GeoCities.us: The B-Movie Bunker, Reel Talk: Jen's Movie Reviews, Neon Nights: Old Signs of the Mother Road (they'd love our marquee) and Piano Tuning Explained, because when the organ comes we're going to need someone who understands old instruments.