The CTS Theater - Wangsaphung, Loei, Thailand

In the center of Loei province, between rolling hills of patchy forest, sits the little market town of Wangsaphung. The town feels sedated under the hot season sky, even after a freak two-day spell of cool air blew in from the east. A typhoon over the South China Sea, say the papers.

Loei is an in-between province: neither completely of Isan, or the North, yet straddling the two fairly evenly. A few lifetimes ago, it was tied in to Luang Prabang's trading network, an affiliation which gives it the feel of a Lao principality as much as it does anything Thai - at least when you get down to the root of it. But I didn't come to Wangsaphung, or Loei in general to dissect its cultural past, riveting as it may be. It was the pop-cultural present that lured me in - functioning-stand-alone-movie-theater style.

A movie poster is tacked to a telephone pole at Wangsaphung's main intersection. Everybody in town has to cross that intersection at some point, so on its own minute scale, it's as good as having a 20 foot billboard at Times Square. The Hughes Brothers' latest fiasco, "The Book of Eli" is advertised as having a 4 day run.

Wangsaphung, 42130

The # 1 reason to visit Wangsaphung!

There he is! The man behind the magic, as well as the ticket counter. The visionary of central Loei. He's second to none! Number one! Ladies and gentlemen, Wangsaphung's very own ring master-cum-movie theater proprietor: muh..muh..muh..muh..muh..muh..Mr. Chern Kasemboon: founder, owner and operator of Wangsaphung's Chern Theater Systems (CTS Theater)

Mr. Chern, native son of Wangsaphung, was awakened to the joys of film young, stamped on his conscience to never fade away.

"There were two old wooden theaters here when I was a kid," recounted the theater owner. "Both of them were like second homes to me. Running my own was a goal I kept in mind all my life until the time was right for me to act on it."

In 1999, after many years of managing a branch of Siam Commercial Bank in Loei City, Mr. Chern invested 7 and a half million baht in his childhood fantasy. The CTS Theater was the result, a humble yet welcome addition to a little town where such luxury has long been absent.

The man literally laughed when I asked him how business was: "It's like this," he started. "I've got a handful of regulars in town who support me because they understand the difference between watching a bootleg DVD at home and watching a movie projected onto a screen from 35 millimeter film. Loyalists like that turn out for every movie that comes through. Once in a while we'll get a big movie that people are really interested in, which might draw 20 people or so to a single show. I'm not getting rich doing this. I've got one employee who runs the projector and a cleaning lady who wipes the place down every day. After paying them off and splitting the revenue with the distributors, I just cover my costs. But I'm not going anywhere. This is what I do."

As our conversation went on, it became clear that the profit motive was never part of Mr. Chern's agenda for building his theater, only that the people of his home town should profit culturally from it.

The projectionist hanging out in the lobby before show time

Lobby

Newspaper movie sections serve as coming attraction posters in the lobby of the CTS Theater

Happy family

Lobby life

A grand total of four turned out for the 12:30 screening of the "Book of Eli." It was a Sunday. Three of the patrons came together - a young married couple and their young son. It dawned on me, while loafing in the lobby like a hairy apparition, how unusual of an experience this kid was getting by going to the movies. In much of Thailand, particularly in rural areas and small towns, movie theaters are a technology of the past. The collective act of movie-going is not an event many young people are going to be familiar with, trumped, instead, by the internet and other more personalized forms of media. But that could be changing in the coming years.

On their web-site, Major Cineplex Group, the country's leading theater operator, has proclaimed that the Thai population is "underscreened" at the national level, leaving room for expanded movie exhibition services. That sounds about right to me, and it'll be a plus for smaller towns and cities to get new theaters where there currently are none. The down side of that is you know who will be leading the charge, spreading their corporate image and leaving a trail of sameness along the way; a sameness which, it should be noted, everybody seems to be happy with. Won't more Chern Kasemboons of the world please stand up?

A family of three waits for the show to start

Oscillating fans supplement the A/C in the auditorium.

In true movie fan fashion, once it was clear that no more customers were showing up, Mr. Chern joined the rest of us in the auditorium to watch the film.

The Amarin Revisited - Loei, Thailand

It had been a full year since last I set foot in Loei, ample time for the cold heart of economy to wreak havoc on an aging picture house. Loei City's blue-hued dream factory - ye olde Amarin Theater - became a source of regret for your dedicated narrator, being one of the few functioning stand-alones that I neglected to catch a movie in when I had the chance. It's a stickler of a policy, I admit, but one I feel strangely committed to all the same; even on a few occasions when my own tolerance threshold was knowingly put to the test. Compulsion makes me enter! Compulsion, plain and simple.

The Amarin Theater by day

The Amarin, thankfully, never sank to such abysmal depths, so was never any cause for concern. But the looming chance that it might simply go kaputsky; out of business; relegated to memory and then rubble piles or some other grim fate, made its patronage a priority in my book. Somebody's abandoned dream, crumbling, cinderblock by concrete cinderblock, into an urban fabric that's steadily on the decline.

The Amarin by night, a beacon of film

Dystopian bloggers aside, the world isn't always as cruel as it's cracked up to be. After all, the Amarin Theater is still open for business: Loei's cultural aorta, its cinematic ventricle, a beacon of something to do in an otherwise run-of-the-mill little town.

A silent lobby...

...waiting for movie fans..

...before the start of the film.

At 10 minutes before the 8PM start of "Confuscius," starring Chow Yun Fat, the owner of the Amarin Theater, Phanida, holds out hope that at least a few of the Loei faithful will find the time and interest to take in a movie. "Business is not good," she admitted, seated behind the ticket window glass. "Every now and then we have a decent day, but not when a Chinese movie is showing. Chinese productions don't really have the same drawing power that they used to."

I waited and waited, hoping to document a theater lobby abuzz with action. I mean, come on! Who wouldn't be intrigued by the latest in state-sponsored film propaganda from China? And isn't Chow Yun Fat still the King of Cool twenty years after being one of the top box-office draws across Asia? Apparently not.

The ticket taker and Isan movie theater aficionado. We spoke for a half hour about old movies and movie theaters. He used to work for an Isan-based movie distribution company and recalls every theater in every province of the region. A kindred spirit through and through.

A man decides whether or not to watch "Confucius" at the Amarin Theater.

To watch or not to watch?

The exchange

Phanida, the owner of the Amarin Theater, behind the ticket window.

It was a slow night at the Amarin's box-office, with a turn-out of less than a dozen, myself included. Phanida and the other theater staff were warm and accommodating, nonetheless, welcoming the photo session and happy to talk movies and the theater business in general.

Dating only to 1977, the Amarin was the second movie theater venture undertaken by Phanida's family. An elder sibling built the now-closed Peth Rama back in the late 1960's. When questioned about the Amarin's future in the face of paltry ticket sales, Phanida smiled, playfully balled up a fist and waving it in the air exclaimed "we're fighting on!"

-->
-->

The Suwan Rama Theater - Chiang Khan, Loei, Thailand

The Suwan Rama Theater is the first case I've encountered where the owner sees value in his "antique" theater, even after it's days of showing films have passed. It marks a realization that, if nothing else, history does have an economic value to some.

Thanks to the preservationist resolve of the Chiang Khan community (or maybe the long-stagnant economy), the town looks much as it did one hundred years ago, with about 80 percent of the houses and commercial buildings made of old teak wood. Its antique flavor has turned Chiang Khan into a hip tourist destination. Following suit, the Suwan Rama Theater has been converted into a mini-museum of itself.

For many years, Chiang Khan's position on the Mekong River gave it an advantage in the river trade. It is the first Thai town with a port on the Mekong after the river reconnects with Thailand to form the border with Laos. That means that any product that was shipped down the Mekong from northwestern Laos would reach the Chiang Khan port before any other point on the river. Hence the growth of the town a hundred years ago. That's my own speculation, but it seems right, right?

Pictured above is the window of the sound room. This is different from a soundtrack room (see the Thepbanterng post on 4/21 for more details). As late as the early 1970's rural Thai audiences preferred movies that had to be dubbed, rather than sound films. I presume this was because the "dubbers," as they were known, could speak local dialects and thus communicate better with local audiences, rather than the central Thai dialect that was spoken in Thai sound films. Dubbers became celebrities in their own right, with the best able to play many roles in one film and accurately synthesize such variant sounds as galloping horses, sword fights, thunder and gun shots.

(More details on Thailand's "dubbers" can be found in Dome Sukwong's book A Century of Thai Cinema.)

Balcony overlooking the street. In the past, hand painted murals advertising the day's showing were hung over the railing of this balcony.

The facade and front portion of the Suwan Rama was made of wood, in defiance of a law that was passed forbidding wooden cinemas as fire hazards. The auditorium, however, was brick and cement.

The front portion, where the lobby and concessions used to be is now a restaurant/museum. The auditorium is a badminton court.

Looking towards what used to be the balcony. The Suwan Rama had a total of 700 seats.

In here they used to sell movie tickets and candy. Now they sell food and nostalgia.

16 millimeter projector and some other memorabilia. The silent films of yesteryear were almost always shot in 16 millimeter film.

An old slide projector. It was used to project advertisements from local businesses onto the big screen. Revenue from these ads covered the taxes that were levied against the films.

Old wooden seats memorialized in what used to be the lobby. While I was eating there some tourists from Bangkok posed for photos in these seats.

Movie posters, mostly from the 1980's.

Lobby card for the film "The General's Daughter."

Lobby card for the movie "Tiger of the Mountain"

An old ticket stub preserved in lamination.

This is Mr. Phayungsak, owner of the Suwan Rama restaurant/theater museum, posing in front of some old lobby cards and other bits and pieces of his theater's past. Phayungsak built the Suwan Rama Theater in 1970 and closed it in 1990 - a relatively short but sweet run as a theater proprietor. As a child, his father ran an older theater in town made of bamboo and mud, which has long been destroyed. Phayungsak told me that Grandma Yamjid, owner of the Thepbanterng Theater in Nong Khai, is his aunt; a family of theater entrepreneurs.

All in all it was pretty cool to see an old theater in Thailand that's still keeping its memory alive. When it's possible and practical, I think it's important to put some resources into preserving old structures like this. In Thailand, as in the rest of Southeast Asia and most parts of the world, these old movie theaters were often the the most socially central places around. Communities convened around them, businesses sprang up around them and their influence ran deep. I hope that theaters like this increasingly get put on the list of cultural heritage sites in Thailand, so they will be preserved and future generations will be able to learn from them.

PSA for The Amarin Theater -- Loei, Thailand

With political tensions on the rise once again in Thailand's capital, wouldn't it be nice for all you politically unaffiliated Bangkokians to escape the potential carnage and take a trip up to the provinces? If you concur, why not hop on a bus to the idyllic province of Loei.

The Loei countryside is brimming with natural wonders, like Phu Kradeung and Phu Reua mountains -- just aching for your concrete-weary feet to traipse along their slopes. Or venture down to the charmingly rustic riverside town of Chiang Khan, where the mighty Mekong first reconnects with the Thai border after a long journey through the Lao hinterlands.

If it's entertainment you seek, look no further than Loei City, where you can take in a flick at the beautiful Amarin Theater, Loei's last and only movie theater. For just 60 baht you can slump down comfortably in the cushy plushness of the Amarin's recently upgraded seats and release you mind with a bit of projected bedazzlement.

The Amarin Theater, in the heart of Loei City.

Relax contemplatively in the well-maintained lobby...

...where stylish 1970's design will bring a twinkle to your eye.

Enjoy some snacks from the concession stand.

Red and Yellow got you down? Don't take sides, take it easy.

Back the blue -- The Amarin Theater: proudly serving the people of Loei since 1977.

(Amarin tranlates to the god "Indra")