Screening Room abruptly closes for 'offseason'; artists scramble for new venues

Downtown’s Screening Room, which rebranded itself as a niche performance space and first-run movie theater three years ago, closed on Friday, a move the operators said was temporary for the “offseason.”

But in an email to a Tucson musician who booked a show at the venue, Screening Room officials said that the theater had “a financially difficult summer and we simply cannot operate any more.”

Officials with the Screening Room could not be reached Friday to comment. The theater’s phone is disconnected and officials did not return email inquiries.

Kent Edwards, whose Grand Cinemas took over operations of the 120-seat theater in summer 2014, sent an email Friday to the nonprofit Arizona Media Arts Center that owns the building. In it, Edwards, who recently moved to Texas, said he was temporarily closing the theater during the “offseason.” He did not indicate when it would reopen, according to Mia Schnaible, director of marketing and development for the Arizona International Film Festival.

Arizona Media Arts Center puts on the film festival and its founder, Guilio Scalinger, first opened the Screening Room in 1989 as an incubator for independent filmmakers before launching the festival the following year.

The Screening Room’s closure has left at least one Tucson musician scrambling to find a new venue for an event. Musician and composer Chris Black was set to have a CD release show at the Screening Room on Sept. 8. A fellow musician told him about the closing on Wednesday and after several attempts to reach theater officials by phone and email, he got an email from a booking agent with the theater late Thursday confirming the closing.

“It’s such a shame because it’s such a cool place,” said Black, the founder and artistic director of the alt-classical music DIY composing project ChamberLab, which brings together musicians of various genres to compose alternative classical music.

Black held the first-ever ChamberLab show at The Screening Room in 2010 and said the space was a perfect fit for smaller events like his.

“It was an alternative-sized venue for lots of things that you didn’t have around town,” said Tucson publicist and concert promoter Carl Hanni. “I thought it was a wonderful space.”

In June 2014, Edwards said his Grand Cinemas company, which operated the now-closed Grand View 4 on West Valencia Road, Oracle View near the Tucson Mall and Tower Theatres in Marana, pumped more than $100,000 into renovating the Screening Room, adding a state-of-the-art screen and seats, an expanded snack bar and an HD digital cinema projector similar to those used by larger multiplex operators including Harkins and Cinemark.

Black said his Sept. 8 show will go on as planned at a location to be determined. He has a couple downtown options to consider, he said.

Black is releasing his new CD “Lullabies and Nightmares,” works Black composed for ChamberLab and recorded by Gabriel Sullivan (XIXA). The Sept. 8 acoustic concert will feature the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and True Concord Voices, and orchestra musicians who were part of the CD recording, including flutist Mindi Acosta, bassoonists Daniel Hursey and Cassandra Bendickson, violinist Samantha Bounkeua, Jessica Campbell on bassoon and contrabassoon, oboist and English horn player Cat Cantrell, and cellist Anne Gratz. Black will narrate and play double bass.