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74  GUIDE TO YELLOW SPR INGS  |  2020 – 2021 By LAUREN “CHUCK” SHOWS In September 2020, the board of the Little Art Theatre announced that the theater would close temporarily through the end of the year in response to the ongoing coro- navirus pandemic. The theater had reopened in July after an initial four-month closure. Though the future is uncertain, the theater aims to reopen some time in 2021. In the meantime, the News presents the rich history of the local theater. * * * In June of 1929, the News reported that several local businesses had pooled resources to show weekly free movies outdoors on Little Art’s big birthday— Local theater celebrates 90 years Short Street. The silent films were well attended by villag - ers, who at the time would otherwise have needed to travel to Springfield, Xenia or Dayton to see a picture show. News records don’t account for what sparked villager and business owner Dick Denison’s idea to establish Yellow Springs’ own movie theater the fol- lowing year — but one can speculate that the success of those outdoor screenings might have helped inspire Denison to begin what would become the 90-year story of what we know today as the Little Art Theatre. Terry Fife, a professional historian and Little Art board member, has spent the last year-and-a-half knitting together the pieces that make up that story. In July, she shared the story with the News, filling in the large gaps in this reporter’s own News archive research. Village embraces new theater The story begins with Dick Denison believing, as Fife said, that “talkies” — that is, movies with sound — “were the way of the future.” Despite the popularity of the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer,” in 1927, Hollywood studios — unlike Denison — weren’t convinced the fad would last. In 1929, less than 1,000 of the country’s nearly 23,000 theaters showed sound movies. In October of that year, Denison signed a one-year lease with the Yellow Springs Opera House, located on Dayton Street, to begin showing films with sound. The News reported that Denison had purchased “two duplicate picture machines of the latest talking kind.” The Opera House screen- ings, held five nights a week, were a success, and in December of 1929, Denison purchased the current site of the theater — previously Bales Chevrolet — on Xenia Avenue. Opening a new business during this time was risky — the United States was only a few months into the Great Depression. Denison had a leg up on other area theaters, however, as this one would be established from the get-go as a state-of- the-art, sound-ready theater. “In places like Dayton, Xenia and Springfield, the movie theaters weren’t built for sound — they would need to refurbish in order to rewire everything for talkies,” Fife said. “But Denison had the foresight to take the little space, wire it specifically for sound, and begin a thor- oughly modern movie house.” In late February of 1930, the Little Theatre, as it was first known, showed its first movie: “The Love Doctor,” starring Richard Dix. It wasn’t long before the community wanted a hand in the selec- tion of the films screened. The offerings — like “Tarzan, the Ape Man” and The Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” — weren’t always up to snuff for a group of concerned Antioch College students and faculty and workers at the local camp of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era public work relief program, which was located at John Bryan State Park. In 1935, those concerned launched “The Antioch Movie Project for the Selec- tion and Showing of More Interesting Movies in Yellow Springs” to, as the News reported, “bring a series of high-class movies to the PHOTO: ANTIOCHIANA, ANTIOCH COLLEGE The Little Art Theatre, circa 1960. Though the theater’s name changed in the ‘50s, its sign read “Little Theatre” into the 1980s, even after a sign upgrade in the 1970s.