Relighting the Lantern

“I sort of double as a physician.”

We had been having trouble getting hold of Joe Davis since learning that he had purchased the Magic Lantern Theater and was planning a late-July reopening, and that’s all he had to say to us when we finally connected, just hours before press time.

Uh, sorry, guys, I was saving lives over here.

Dr. Davis didn’t seem to care that an entire office of film nerds wanted the inside dirt on the resurrection of Spokane’s most loved, most troubled projection house — a place the city’s entire art house set reveres as a kind of cinematic Brigadoon. (It fades from sight, the legend grows; it opens and closes, inevitably, yet again.)

Our first question — our only question, really — was what Davis planned to do to end that nasty cycle and keep the damn place open and running.

He started answering before we even asked. “My vision of it is to not just be a movie theater but to be a destination,” he said. “We got a nice coffee maker. We’re going to serve beer and wine, Madeleine’s deserts.”

The atmosphere he conjures jives nicely with boutique theaters like McMenamins Bagdad Theater & Pub in Portland. Davis said he got the idea from “lounge-y” theaters in Washington, D.C., while attending medical school at Georgetown.

Amenities are wonderful, but you still have to put asses in seats, which has proved difficult for past Lanterns. The theater has always relied on the area’s film stalwarts; that’s never been enough to keep it open. Even movie buffs plus the sizeable Community Building/Saranac contingent couldn’t keep the latest incarnation open.

Davis seems to realize that he needs a broader clientele than the Lantern has traditionally reached. His plan for doing this is multi-fold. “Isabella’s is going to run our weekly shows in their menus,” he says, adding “probably Zola as well.” And he’ll be reaching out to other bars too.

He wants to involve college students at the class level, taking professors’ screening lists and tailoring movie nights throughout the semester to various curricula. He’d also like to involve them at the filmmaking level as well. “I’d love film festival-type things with student involvement,” he says, “so they can watch their films and connect that way.”

Ultimately, Davis feels it’s going to come down to “word of mouth.” He wants to cast a wide-enough net, though, so that the word will spread past the communities that already know and love the Lantern. That’s something previous owners were never able to accomplish.

But why would Davis want to take on the enormous task of opening a theater while also finishing up his medical residency? (We watched Season One of Grey’s Anatomy, so we know, like, just how tough this whole medical thing is.)

Davis’s answer is, basically, for the love. “I film-make,” he says. “That’s my passion.”

The Magic Lantern is tentatively set to reopen on Friday, July 24. The first month’s films should be booked and available by next week.