Small-Time Is Big-Time for Carmike Theaters : Entertainment: The chain prospers by locating outside big cities and maintaining consistency.

The movie heroes for theater operator Michael W. Patrick aren’t in Hollywood or New York, but in places like Rapid City, S.D., and Hopkinsville, Ky.

Moviegoers there have helped Patrick’s Carmike Cinemas Inc. grow big by thinking small, as in small town.

The Columbus-based company shuns the big cities, preferring to build and acquire theaters only in the so-called secondary markets.

“You’ll probably never see Carmike Cinemas there (in California) as long as people think there’s something magic in the dollars that come out of California,” said Patrick, the company’s president and chief executive.

Nashville, Tenn.; Charlotte, N.C., and Des Moines, Iowa, are about the biggest cities where Carmike has theaters.

Just as Carmike’s locations are almost exclusively in Middle America, the chain’s screen fare is decidedly middlebrow. Patrick made the point, sizing up a recent visitor by asking with mock suspicion: “You don’t like those art films, do you?”

Patrick has doubts about how such urban-oriented features as the movie biographies of Malcolm X and Jimmy Hoffa--among the blockbuster films scheduled for release later this year--will play at Carmike theaters. But it’s a safe bet “Home Alone 2” will be a Carmike favorite.

Patrick’s avoidance of the major movie markets is rooted more in the bottom line than in disdain for the cultural elite.

Since the company was formed in 1982 with the leveraged buyout of Martin Theaters, Carmike has grown to own and operate 1,521 screens.

For the first nine months of this year, revenue climbed 10% to $121.8 million from $111.1 million last year. However, earnings fell to $4.1 million from $5.3 million, reflecting an industrywide box office slowdown in July.

By focusing on a particular market, Carmike has been able to perfect a formula that might not work as well elsewhere.

“The motion picture theater business is really a regional retail business. It’s a question of knowing your market and knowing it well,” said Christopher P. Dixon, an industry analyst at PaineWebber Inc. in New York.

“As you move into the major markets, it’s a very different set of dynamics,” Dixon explained. “You’re dealing with areas that are much more concentrated. You don’t have a large parking lot or an eight-to-10-screen multiplex. You do have much higher rents and higher expenses.”

Patrick said the numbers show why he leaves the big cities to such industry giants as United Artists, Cineplex Odeon and AMC Entertainment Inc.

Central to the company’s growth has been an aggressive strategy of acquiring theaters. More than 1,100 of Carmike’s theaters have been bought from other companies, with 107 screens acquired this year alone.

A map of the United States with colored pins marking Carmike properties and those of the company’s competitors hangs in Patrick’s office. The map serves as sort of a shopping list as Carmike waits for other companies to signal they’re ready to sell, either because they need cash or want to get out of a small market.

“We know who has everything in the country, what’s their strategy,” Patrick said. “It’s so much easier for us to buy something from somebody that wants to sell.”

Frequently other chains will make acquisitions in large cities that include surrounding smaller towns as part of the deal, Patrick said. The companies often are eager to shed the small-town properties, he said.

That’s when Carmike moves in.

“They have no interest in the secondary market. If they bought Atlanta, and they got LaGrange (Ga.) with it, they don’t want LaGrange,” he said.

Once under the Carmike banner, the company seeks to conform the newly acquired theater to the company standard. When a moviegoer walks into a Carmike theater, the popcorn should taste just as salty and the seats just as soft, be it in Arkansas or Oklahoma.