Creditor Takes Ownership of Baldwin Movie Theater

The largest creditor of the financially beleaguered Baldwin Theater in Los Angeles, Economic Resources Corp. of Lynwood, said it has assumed ownership and management control of the nation’s only black-owned theater showing first-run movies.

The theater, however, will remain black-owned under Economic Resources, which has invested more than $400,000 in it since opening in 1981. Baldwin was quietly put up for sale last fall after a series of financial and legal setbacks.

Deluged With Offers

“We were forced to foreclose on our position,” said Kenneth T. Lombard, senior vice president at Economic Resources, a nonprofit economic development corporation that has been instrumental in developing an industrial park near Watts. “We weren’t comfortable with the existing situation . . . (or) the types of offers we were receiving for the theater.”

Lombard said Ernest E. Simms, a 41-year-old Harvard University MBA who served as president of Royal Entertainment--the concern that owned Baldwin--has resigned. The theater is being managed by Economic Resources and Simms’ former business partner, Nelson Bennett, who has managed several Southern California theater chains.

Although the Baldwin was deluged with offers of financial help from community residents as well as with purchase bids from brokerage companies and investment firms, none apparently was substantial enough to put Baldwin back on its feet.

“If we had accepted any of those offers we would not have been wealthy men,” said Bennett. “We probably would have left still owing money.”

Although hit movies drew sizable audiences to the theater at 3741 S. La Brea Ave. near Baldwin Hills, the lingering financial fallout from a bitter 1981 lawsuit and a costly lease arrangement proved too big a burden for the owners to shoulder. The setbacks threatened Simms’ and Bennett’s dream of bringing more such theaters to the black community.

While there are a handful of black-owned theaters around the country, the Baldwin is the only such theater that shows first-run films, according to Bennett.

As a result, the Baldwin has been the focus of intense interest from both the powerful community of Southern California theater owners as well as the largely black, middle-class Baldwin Hills area that supported Simms’ and Bennett’s efforts to renovate what was a dilapidated, 39-year-old movie house and turn it into a first-class facility.