Here is the short version.

We are Courtney and Steven. We bought the old Michigan Theater building on main street in Escanaba Michigan in 2019. Why did we buy it? Glad you asked! We bought it because we had a crazy idea that Escanaba could use a cool old movie theater that showed all the good old movies you can’t see in theaters anymore. We thought that it would be really cool if you could go to this theater and sit down with a beer and some pizza and watch one of those good movies. We also thought it would be even better if before you watched that movie you could play some retro arcade games with your homies. On top of all of those things, we want to contribute something meaningful to Delta County. The Michigan Theater has been a part of our community for over 90 years now, and we would like to see it take an active role again! This is what we are working on right now, and in the mean time we need to raise a bit of money. That is where Old Michigan LLC comes in. We will be using the profits generated by the merchandise sales from this website to help with the restoration process. So you can help bring this dream to life, AND have a dope shirt to show you how cool you are!

And that is the short story. If you want to learn more about the building, what we have done so far, details on what we plan on doing, or you just have nothing better to do, you can keep reading. If you have heard enough and you want to help out, check out the store! Ain’t got no money? No prob, just spread the good word my friend! If this is the least interesting thing you have read in the last ten years, and you are surprised that you are still reading, or that you think that I use too many commas, and have run on sentences, then you probably have a lot in common with my senior year English teacher, including that she probably thinks this idea is awesome.

Why?

If you read “the short version” above, you kind of already know what is going on. We are on a mission to get this building restored to function. Before we get too far into that though, we want to tell you why we are doing this. Without yet taking the time to refine this, or going into great detail, the simplest answer we can give to “why” is as follows.

We want to give back to our community so that together we can all thrive.

We were both born here in Delta County, grew up here, went to school here, live here, and plan to stay here. The U.P. means a lot to us and we believe that all things considered, it’s a pretty great place. While walking down Escanaba’s main street we noticed that mixed in with all the beautiful architecture and amazing businesses there are quite a few vacant or deteriorating buildings, which made us a touch sad. We feel that what we are doing will revive one of them while preserving some of our culture and providing a much desired service all at once. How many times have you heard or said “I wish there was more to do around here.”? This is our way of answering that plea.

Who are We?

You want to know more about who “we” are? Fine, but remember that you asked for it. Feel free to skip to a more interesting section.

As previously stated on this page “we” are Steven and Courtney, and we are a couple of nerds. By definition you wouldn’t be wrong with calling us geeks either, but for some reason the term nerd just feels like it fits better. You could probably guess what we mean, but I will spell it out for you.

We like good movies. Not just new ones, or high budget ones, but good ones, even if they are bad. Everything from Star Wars to Indiana Jones, Adam West’s Batman to Marvels Cinematic Universe, and Evil Dead to Blade Runner to Harry Potter and beyond. We could sit here and make a list of all of our favorite movies and why (and we very well may at some point), but I’m sure you get the picture. Now the movie theater thing makes a little bit of sense, doesn’t it? The sad thing is that many of the great movies that exist were designed to be viewed in a theater, and theaters don’t show them anymore. They are still good at home, but there is nothing like watching a well made movie in the setting it was created to be viewed in. It is especially sad for all these young folks who will never know the joy of watching a larger than life DeLorean disappear into flaming tracks! And it is a lot less fun finding out who Tyler Durden really is on a smart phone screen with ear buds plugged into your head.

We also like video games. But video games are like pizzas, some people like peanut butter and anchovies and others do not. Likewise, we find that some people like good old classic games, and other do not. We fall into the first category. That is why we thought that an arcade would be awesome. When is the last time you played Millipede or Space Invaders in a cabinet? That’s what I thought, and doesn’t it sound great? There is just something about a good old coin operated arcade cabinet that makes the game better than any app could ever be. We are nerd enough to have been collecting cabinets for the last few years, and we are excited to share them with the Escanaba community once the theater opens for business! And if you were wondering if it is totally awesome to have an arcade in your house, the answer is yes. Yes it is.

Its not like we are 100% nerd though, we also do normal things like hiking, collecting comic books, having bonfires, participate in wild west reenactments, knitting, three wheeling, learning about history, building Legos, reading books, standard stuff. We have normal jobs for the area and do most of the normal Yoopery things one does like shovel off roofs, snow blow ourselves out of our houses, and eat pasties.

Another thing about us, a thing that made us love this movie theater so much, is that we love old things. We love all that old stuff that was popular for a while, and then people seemed to forget about. Or the things that were the stepping stones to what we have now. We also love the ingenuity that people used to have, I mean, have you ever seen the inside of a wind up watch?! Those things are nuts! This also ties into our fascination with history and how what we have got the way it is. This section could grow out of control quickly since it is such an amazing topic, so we will end it here before we start discussing the history of sewing machines or something.

I think we will stop here before we end up telling you our bank account numbers or the color of our underwear, but I think at this point you kind of get who we are, right? We are people just like you.

The Acquisition.

You are probably wondering how we actually came about purchasing the building, aren’t you? Well one day in October we happened to be driving down main street on our way to see Ēddie at Ēddie’s Tattoo and Piercings Studio (fantastic place, fantastic people, couldn’t recommend them enough!) and we noticed that there was a for sale sign on the Michigan Theater building. We began talking about how awesome it would be to have a movie theater, not unlike people do. For some reason after we left Ēddie’s we were still talking about that cool old theater. We drove down there again and looked in the windows, not unlike people do. “I wonder how much they want for it?” one of us thought out loud. “Who knows, maybe we can actually afford it!” responded the other. The next day one of us, we don’t remember which, called and asked about a price (original asking price was $65K), and then in the same phone call scheduled a showing. Now by this point, we had gone way further than a person normally does. Even now, just having a showing, we had crossed a line from “just imagining how cool it would be” to “seriously considering purchasing it.” We could have crossed back over that line and walked away, but stepping foot in that building did us in. The dead pigeon in the corner didn’t even phase us, something about that building had latched onto our souls and began growing roots.

Had we been told by our future selves that this project would be a major pain in the butt and soak up a lot of time and resources, we probably would have ignored the future us’s and continued plugging away at it. If we had the chance to go back with our current knowledge, we would probably do it again. It is a pain, but we still feel it is worth it. Once we had seen the building and decided that we for sure wanted it, and although not suggested we could definitely afford it, we set to work on making it ours. Our initial thoughts were things like “People spend more on trucks, it shouldn’t be hard at all to get a loan for this” or “We have great credit and low debt, this will be easy.” We were very wrong. I am sure that some of you reading this will know that commercially zoned property is a little bit different than residentially zoned property when it comes to financing. For those of you who didn’t know this, now you do. We may expound upon this whole adventure at a later date but for now suffice it to say that we had no idea what we were doing or how much work would be involved. If we had the cash it would all be simple, just buy it. But when you want a loan for a commercial building you get questions like “Where is your business plan?” and “When do you expect to open your business?” and “Can I see your income projections for the first four years?” We had not thought that far. We just wanted the building. But as they say, wanting things doesn’t make them happen.

We spent the winter of 2018-2019 learning how much we didn’t know. We did manage to sort out some of the finer details, and put together a decent business plan. We got help from the SBDC (good people over there, love em!) and did a lot of reading. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of weekend spent at a desk instead of snowshoeing or going out. By May of 2019 though, we had worked hard enough to get the loan, and in turn the building. The funny thing is we thought we had worked hard up to that point. Isn’t it funny how things seem difficult until you do something more difficult, and then that first thing seems like a cakewalk?

Some Assembly (and cleaning) Required.

After we bought the building the first thing we physically did was clean it. That meant many long hours wearing particulate filtering respirators, more than enough dump runs, and quite a bit of scrubbing. Now some people may think that we were just polishing a turd. Those people may be correct. In the end though, it was all worth it.

Since the building had been more or less vacant for so long, there was a lot of things left all over the place. There were couches and recliners piled up in the front of the auditorium. There was rope, discarded gloves, old fuses, boxes of things, buckets of other things, old broken construction tools, what looked like street light lenses, you name it. Among the cooler items we found abandoned in the building were bits of old film, old match books, an old news paper, and some old film reels. Possibly the least desirable items we had to discard of were the petrified remains of old birds. Yeah…

Pigeons found a hole in the air vents on the roof and made their way into the building. Unfortunately the poor birds must have found out rather quickly that there was no food or water inside, and after a while they must have realized that they couldn’t remember how they got in. Rest in peace pigeons. We did not know how they were coming in though, until one day we heard cooing coming from inside the air ducts. The day after the vent cooing, we were greeted by that bird inside the auditorium. Ever try to make a flying animal go through a door sized opening while it is in a room thirty feet high being yelled and waved at by a couple of humans? I know that sounds easy, but it is not. Needless to say, we found those holes and covered them back up. The Michigan Theater has been pigeon free ever since.

Aside from pigeons we found one other species of bird remains, a seagull. That poor fellow we found at the bottom of the chimney. I wonder if he fell down there by accident, or if he had committed some bird crime and was tossed in there by his angry peers. Or maybe this feathered creature was a sacrifice to the chimney gods in an attempt to appease them. I do not think we will ever know.

The warmer the days got, the more the smells thawed out. The main smell was a musty one, like somebody locked up a bunch of old and let it sit for a long time, festering in stale air. Days of propping the doors open with fans helped a little bit, but not enough. Finally we realized that the fabric on the walls was giving us this wonderful aroma, like a giant stinky scent diffuser. You know what we mean right? That ripply movie theater wall fabric that makes the sound better? Yeah, that stuff. We decided that there was no hope in saving it since it was practically disintegrating and smelled worse than great uncle George’s WWII canvas pup tent. So we did what any sensible American would do and we ripped it all off and threw it away! We were not expecting what we found under it either. Turns out the original walls were of beautiful plaster work that got covered up in the 70’s, and that somebody decided to paint them in possibly the most hideous way one could imagine. You can see the before and after below in the high resolution professional grade photos (that was sarcasm folks, we know those photos stink as bad as what they depict but its all we got, sorry).

Once the walls were rockin’ their birthday suits the smell quickly dropped to an easily tolerable level. There are rumors however…that if there is a full moon during spring’s first thaw…and you go into the theater alone after midnight…you can still smell the fabric…as if it still hung on the walls…

Before we had torn the fabric down we had full intentions of replacing it, because it looks pretty dern good. After seeing the original plaster underneath though, we are leaning towards restoring it to what it used to be like (which means a different color scheme of course), because that also looks pretty great. What do you think?

The Plans.

For the most part we got the building as clean as it was going to get, and as fixed up as made sense until the real renovations started. That left us with the exciting and action packed task of working on more business stuff and securing funding for the project! Here we will expound upon what was stated in the short version at the top.

Our current plans for the Michigan Theater are to renovate it and reopen it. Although it has morphed and changed a bit from its original concept, that has been the plan all along. We were actually hoping to be moving along smoothly last year, maybe even opening for 2021. Things happened though. 2020 didn’t end up being the greatest year to plan on opening up a movie theater, as I am very sure you all understand. But we didn’t give up, we just extended our timeline and trudged on. And here we are now!

When the theater actually opens, it will be as a second run theater. As we explained above, movies (especially ones from 2010 and earlier) were meant to be seen in a theater! That is what was in mind during every aspect of their creation and where you will get the most out of them. Not to mention, there are a ton of amazing movies from before the turn of the century that the younger generations of today don’t even know about. We hope to change that. Nerds as we are, we already have a list of movies going that we plan to show, a list that would make any cinephile all warm and fuzzy inside. We will be restoring the main portion of the auditorium to its former Art Deco glory, which even in its deteriorated state is rather awesome. People really spent the time to make things purdy back then. We would also like to have some alternative seating options such as couches and recliners.

As for the lobby, the plan is to open it all up as much as possible. Gotta have room for all of them killer arcade titles man! By the time this happens we should be able to have a minimum of 20 of the best games you would ever find in an 80’s arcade in the lobby area. We will also make sure to have little tables next to each cabinet, so you have somewhere to put your drinks and snacks when you are on an 8 hour game of Millipede. We will also continue collecting games, so that when you all decide one is boring and you don’t want to play it anymore, we can swap it out with another game that you would prefer to play.

The current floor plans we are toying with also have an area upstairs that would be able to be reserved for things like birthday parties, quinceaneras, a moment of solitude, bar mitzvahs, secret meetings to decide the fate of Middle Earth, whatever! We may even put some games up there too if there is room. Eh?

I know, you guys have been reading all this just to learn about what I am about to tell you. So here it is; We will be updating the bathrooms! Yes! We will post a video or something showing the current ones, but lets just say they didn’t think bathroom space was that important back in 1930. Maybe they still had an outhouse out back, I don’t know, but the bathrooms are SMALL. We will fix that. We will renovate those bathrooms so good, they will still seem high tech in 90 years when some poor suckers buy the building to put in a retro hologram theater.

Concessions? Oh baby, you’re going to love them! When we came up with the concessions we wanted to have available we sat down and asked ourselves, “What would I want to have at the movies?” Many of the answers to this were things that you can not get in a movie theater unless you drive about 500 miles south. Things like pizza, beer, chips, wine, and even fresh cookies and cupcakes. And of course, to avoid angry mobs, we will also have the classics that you all love like popcorn, candy, pretzels, etcetera.

As far as a timeline, we have our sights set on 2026. That is of course subject to change, hopefully for the better, but in the mean time we will keep plugging along! This will be quite the project and we are excited to see what you all think about it! We don’t think it will be long until we transition from this being “our theater” in the sense of Steven and Courtney, to it being “OUR Theater” in the sense of the community, and we are looking forward to that! With that in mind we will do our best to keep you all informed on what is going on. And if you seriously read this whole page and made it to this sentence, then I congratulate you on your ability to stay focused. You probably also read other boring stuff, like the dictionary or the Spanish instructions that come with ear buds, don’t you?