A REEL ENDING: CURTAIN CLOSES ON VARSITY

BY SETH LEWIS (Editor In Cheif) / Sept, 4 2001
Brigham Young University's Daily Universe

In the end, students voted on the Varsity Theatre's fate with their wallets, and the 37-year-old campus cornerstone lost. For all its nostalgia, mystique and long lines snaking through the Wilkinson Student Center, the theater will stop showing movies - yes, even the G-rated ones - beginning this semester.

When the theater quit screening edited films in 1998 because of potential legal trouble with production companies, ticket sales plunged, prompting school officials to rethink the theater's existence. "We wanted to let students tell us through the tickets, 'Do you still want this?'" said Carri Jenkins, Assistant to the President over University Communications.

Indeed, sagging interest in such films as "A Little Princess" and "Cinderella" doomed the Varsity, but Jenkins insists the school's decision was not solely dollar-dictated. Instead, she said, with the university increasingly squeezed for space, school officials thought the theater would be better suited for lectures, ward talent shows and comedy nights.

"Money is not the driving force here," Jenkins said. "It really is: How can we use this space best for our students?" Even more, the Varsity Theatre has outgrown its purpose as easy-access entertainment for students.

"At the time the Varsity Theatre was created, there were only a few movie houses in town," Jenkins said. "There were no movie rentals. It's a completely different world now than it was in 1964."

And with the proliferation of "dollar theaters" - such as Movies 8 in Provo - the Varsity lost its appeal as a cheap date. "There are so many choices in the valley for students and others to choose from," WSC director Jerry Bishop said.

Still, the Varsity remained wildly successful well into the 1990s filling one movie niche that never vanished: students' interest in edited R-rated films. In 1997, for instance, "Jerry Maguire" played to sold-out audiences for two weeks. Later that year, when the movie returned to the theater for the third time, students still waited in line for three hours for tickets. And lines for other rated-R flicks such as "Air Force One" routinely stretched outside the WSC.

But when Sony asked the university to stop screening its edited films, BYU balked. Sensing the potential for lawsuits, the school contacted production companies seeking formal contracts for editing films, Jenkins said.

Ultimately, nothing was finalized in writing. "Based on that," Jenkins said, "we didn't feel comfortable editing their movies." That was only part of BYU's anxiety.

Criticism had swirled for years about the moral juxtaposition of a school owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints showing films that often flouted church standards. "That was certainly something that had come up," Jenkins said. School officials then put the Varsity Theatre on a "trial period," Jenkins said, that would gauge student interest in clean classics and G-, PG- and PG-13-rated films.

The theater - which the university expects to pay for itself - failed to turn a profit, even after WSC administrators used focus groups and brought back popular films such as "The Princess Bride." "There is no question that the interest and attendance declined when the university made the decision to no longer show edited movies," Bishop said.

But the Varsity's viability is far from over. The theater will be booked days, nights and weekends, hosting all types of activities - and maybe even a class or two, Jenkins said. "It's not that it's going to be boarded up and shut down by any means," she said.