Brattle Theatre Executive Director: Outpouring Of Community Support Was Like 'It's A Wonderful Life'

When the hundreds of thousands of dollars in unprompted donations began to pour in to keep her Brattle Theatre afloat through the pandemic, Ivy Moylan couldn’t help but cry.

“And I’m not a cryer,” she insisted. “Within hours, I felt like we were living our own ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ experience with the outpouring of support from the community, and the number of people ready to fight alongside us to make sure that the Brattle was there on the other side.

On Monday, Moylan and her Brattle counterpart (and husband) Ned Hinkle joined Boston Public Radio as part of the show’s series on local businesses emerging from the pandemic. Moylan is the executive director and Hinkle is the creative director of the independent movie house.

Like most other small businesses, the Brattle was forced to shift attention away from most in-person service back in March of last year, though they continued to offer private screenings to small parties. Hinkle said the pivot to virtual screenings and online curation was a relatively straightforward one, even if they were missing out on cash flow and the stream of familiar faces.

“What the Brattle does is curation,” Hinkle explained. “And so moving that curation online is not that difficult — it just misses the whole audience-in-the-theater aspect of it, which is a huge part of moviegoing.”

“We kind of knew one of the big limitations of streaming services is making recommendations to you,” he continued. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, your Netflix queue is only giving you Netflix movies, and sometimes that’s not what you want to watch. So we started quickly doing something we’d call #BreakYourAlgorithm.”

Starting July 2nd, audiences will once again return to the 235-seat Harvard Square theater. Their first showing will be the 1942 golden-age classic ‘Casablanca.’

“Obviously we’re biased,” Hinkle said. “We run a movie theater … but I really do think that seeing a film with an audience — especially something like ‘Casablanca’ — is vital to experiencing the movie the way it was meant to be seen, let alone seeing it on the big screen.”

WATCH: Moylan on the outpouring of community support