Fillmore May Rescue Damaged Theater : Repairs: Encouraged by restless children and determined residents, officials now hope to save what locals call ‘The Show.’

For 12-year-old Raelene Rodriguez and her sixth-grade friends, the Fillmore Theater was the thing to do, the place to see and be seen on Friday nights.

“The restrooms were rundown, and some seats were broken, and there were spider webs and stuff, but every week there was a good movie,” Raelene said. “That’s where I had most of my fun.”

When January’s earthquake hit Fillmore, causing $250 million in devastation, what parts of the aging theater that did not immediately hit the ground sustained major structural damage. Today, a jagged brick roof line and a replicated art Deco marquee peek over the scaffolding that nearly shrouds the shuttered theater and its neighbors on hard-hit Central Avenue.

“I miss it a lot,” Raelene said. “Now, I just stay home, or maybe go to Santa Paula with my parents.”

Since the quake, city officials have said the building might be damaged beyond repair--even if enough money could be raised to reconstruct it. But encouraged by restless children and determined residents, officials are now leading the effort to save what locals call “The Show.”

This week, Fillmore’s Redevelopment Agency sent an offer to the building’s owner to buy the property for an undisclosed price. If the offer is accepted, the agency would determine whether the building can be salvaged and how much that would cost.

Because the theater is an historic building, it cannot be demolished until a structural engineer’s report is sent to the state historic preservation office. City Manager Roy Payne and other city officials hope the state office tells them the building is worth saving.

The theater now belongs to longtime Fillmore resident Dale Larson. But Larson, who fulfilled a lifelong dream when he purchased the theater two decades ago, says that at age 76 he’s in no position to start over again.

Payne said if Larson accepts the offer, the city would not mind shouldering the costs of operating the theater with a corporation or nonprofit agency. A growing assortment of locals--banding together under the name “Save the Show”--say they are eager to assist in the city’s search for business partners.

“Socially, how many things are there to do in this town?” said John McKinnon, one of the local residents who is trying to keep the theater open. “It’s like an anchor. It’s been there forever.”

Actually, the theater has been there for 77 years. Dorothy Haase, executive director of the Fillmore Historical Museum, said the Barnes Theater, as it was first known, opened for business Oct. 2, 1916. The owner, Merton Barnes, himself a vaudeville man, booked vaudeville acts, speakers and stage plays in addition to movies at what one county newspaper termed “the finest theater in the county.”

Decorated in “cream white and soft green,” the theater boasted about 500 seats with “lazy back tilts” and a trap door in the stage for disappearing acts, according to newspaper advertisements and documents from the time.

“It was a railroad town,” Dale Larson explained. “The vaudeville troops would come in by rail, perform at the theater, and stay over at the Fillmore Hotel.” Like the movie theater, the hotel also suffered grave earthquake damage. It was demolished last month.

The theater changed hands many times before Dale and Marilyn Larson purchased it 23 years ago, determined to revamp the aging cinema and make a living out of showing motion pictures.

“My husband always wanted to have his own little movie theater,” said Marilyn Larson, now in her late 50s. “He always worked in (theaters) when he was a youth.”

In the early 1970s, after Dale Larson retired from the aerospace industry, the couple moved from an Orange County suburb to Fillmore with their two daughters and the deed to a rather dilapidated theater.

“We worked all summer on it,” Marilyn Larson remembered. “We put everything we had into it.”

Because she loved the look of the Ahmanson Theater in downtown Los Angeles, the couple set out to imitate it in Fillmore, painting the theater’s interior walls black, hanging red velour curtains over the screen and reupholstering the seats in the same red velour.

Six days out of seven they worked at the business of running the only movie theater for 25 miles around. “We booked our own movies and we were as selective as we could be,” Marilyn Larson said. Wholesome movies fared best. “We played as many Gs as we could, many PGs, and very few Rs. It’s a family town. You play a Disney, you pack the house.”

Ten years ago, the couple sold the business end to Harold Graves, a local resident, though they retained ownership of the property itself. Graves could not be reached for comment.

For the moment, the Larsons have given the city permission to demolish the theater if necessary. Dale Larson had still not received the purchase offer from the city by Thursday, but said he would happily take a look at it.

In the meantime, various local residents are hatching plans to assist the city if Larson does sign on the dotted line.

“It’s really a dying piece of Americana there,” said Wendy Basil, a former Hancock Park resident who, charmed by Fillmore’s size and quaint atmosphere, bought a nearby ranch a month before the quake.

Now Basil and her husband, John Lockhart, both public relations executives in Los Angeles, are trying to persuade a large theater corporation to help revive the movie house. Undaunted by the scheduled fall opening of a seven-screen theater in nearby Santa Paula, Basil and Lockhart believe they can sell the project to a theater chain.

“My husband and I were kind of jaded city people and this was kind of stepping back in time,” she said, recalling her one visit to the theater a week before the quake.

Other residents hope to persuade one or more of the community’s wealthier residents to invest a slice of their assets in the effort, or perhaps create a nonprofit organization that would eventually own and operate the cinema.

Paul Newman, a local screenwriter, searched for the words to describe why he cares so much about one building’s future.

“It’s hard to describe if you’re used to going to mall theaters,” he said. “But it had a small-town feel.”