Another week, another newsletter.

Usually this is where I complain about New York City’s weather this summer, but recently it’s been rather calm.

That was until I left for work yesterday. It was beaming hot, sunny, and clear blue skies. But when I got to work it began pouring rain and thunderstorming. I just knew my subway ride home was about to be ruined by train delays. But then when I left work it was hot, sunny, and clear blue skies again. Surely it’s a good sign that New York City’s summer weather is just like Hawaii’s.

Let’s dive in.

Requiem For A Theater

Written by Aidan Barrett

Movie theaters are kind of like your older relatives – the ones you have a good relationship with, at least. Every so often during your childhood, you’d visit them and have a pleasant time, albeit in complete ignorance of just how much they were doing to entertain you. Just like with your grandparents or distant aunts and uncles, you don’t really notice that your local movie theater is nearing the end of its life, because their aging sets in slowly over time, and you’ve taken their presence for granted. You hear mentions of their health declining, feel sad for a few seconds, then forget and continue on with your day. And then, one day, they’re gone for real. And a rug you didn’t even know was beneath your feet this whole time is pulled.

The Barn Theater, located on the outskirts of Doylestown, Pennsylvania – less than a five minute drive from my house – permanently closed in early February of 2023. It was a standard 14-screen cinema, recognizable to locals by two gigantic “silos” positioned outside by the adjacent freeway, visible to any car driving past.

Although it was owned by several different theater chains throughout its life, the Barn died under the title of the “Regal Barn Plaza”. It’s worth noting that both the Barn and the Warrington Crossing (the other movie theater close to my childhood home) were both owned by Regal Cinemas: a funny coincidence, and also likely a contributing factor to the Barn’s closure.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent the Barn, which had already been suffering from rapidly diminishing attendance, into a temporary shutdown. Two years later, Cineworld (the parent company of Regal Cinemas), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, due to debt and the pandemic's damage on ticket sales. To get back on track, Cineworld needed to restructure and get their financial priorities straight. One strategy for this was cutting losses in real estate, as rent had risen 30% from 2019 to 2022, and many of their theaters simply weren’t turning enough of a profit to justify their maintenance. Long story short: 39 Regal theaters in the United States were chosen to be closed, and the Barn Plaza Stadium in Doylestown was one of them.

Given that the Regal Warrington Crossing, a 22-theater stadium with an IMAX screen, is so close by, I can’t imagine anyone at Cineworld shed a tear when making this decision. “The Barn was practically a ghost town even before COVID hit – and besides, we have a bigger, more popular theater only ten minutes down the road,” they likely thought.“ We’ll shut down the Barn, and the ten people who still frequent there will just go to the Crossing instead.”

As one of those ten people, I can confirm that this is exactly what happened. Ever since theaters reopened post-COVID, the Regal Warrington Crossing has been my new best friend. (I can at least commend Cineworld for investing in a full renovation of the Crossing to make it more appealing to general audiences. Giant LED banners… a bar, a coffee booth and a boba tea stand… the works.) However, not a week goes by where memories of the Barn don’t cross my mind.

Just like the passing of an old relative, the closing of a cherished theater causes you to reflect on the most precious aspects of their existence… those specific displays of generosity and comfort that were exclusive to them. Of course, there will always be a movie theater somewhere nearby, but there will never be one exactly like the one you grew up with – and that’s certainly true for the Barn.

For starters, there was the exterior of the building. Despite technically being connected to the Doylestown Pointe Plaza (a shopping center complete with supermarkets, restaurants and a gigantic Kohl’s), the Barn was isolated in its own little section at the very end, complete with its own parking lot. Nestled between the busy main road and a section of woods, it sat as a singular, almost monolithic structure that seemed to beckon to commuting passersby… tucked into the furthest corner of the plaza, but always waiting. And again, there are the silos, which, I mean, come on – a theater named “The Barn” that has goddamn silos next to it? It doesn’t get any more endearing than that!

Entering the Barn, you’d be met with a wide-open, cavernous, well… barn-like lobby that imbued the otherwise standard movie theater furnishings with a sense of grandiosity. Once your concessions were purchased, you’d pass a lone ticket checker and enter through the mouth of a very long hallway, stretching straight down to the other end of the building, with seven doors on each side leading into their own respective theater. The bluntness in this design – no turns or stairs, just a big-ass, mostly-empty corridor – made it incredibly fun to run up and down as a child, even when simply rushing back from the bathroom to your theater before the film started. Of course, I say mostly-empty, as there were indeed vintage candy machines that exchanged handfuls of Skittles and Jawbreakers for $50 in quarters. (You’d be shocked at the range in ages of customers this bargain appealed to.)

Indeed, fewer people than ever were going to the Barn before it closed… but for my close friend Billy and I, this only made our trips there more fun. Less crowds meant shorter lines at concessions. Emptier showings meant more freedom to riff out loud during the film. The experience of our Barn visits from 2017 to 2020 was lightning in a bottle, paradise, the irreplaceable circumstance of a huge theater showing all the latest new movies with barely anyone ever showing up to interrupt us. If movies feel like churches to some people, the Barn was a sacred monastery to Billy and I: a remote, sacred haven within which you could, more often than not, hear a pin drop.

Some of my most memorable first-time watches were in the Barn. I remember seeing Jojo Rabbit, Uncut Gems and Little Women there, all on the same day. I remember visiting the Barn with Billy for a showing of Doctor Sleep, only to get sick from food poisoning twenty minutes into the movie and leave in Billy’s older sibling’s car. And, most vividly, I remember seeing a lukewarm satire titled The Hunt at the Barn in March of 2020, the week before all theaters were anticipated to close in response to rising COVID cases. As Billy and I exited through the front doors, I figured it would be my last time in the Barn for a while. I had no way of knowing it would be my last time ever.

Your perspective of your parents and older relatives is dominated by your experience with them, which is to say, a very limiting scope. When you’re a kid, you regard them as beings that mainly exist to help you grow up, barely considering that they had a life before you, even if you obviously know that they did. When those seminal figures are gone, it’s only through mourning them that you start to understand how much they lived through. As you think about just how many decades they survived – how many wars and technological advancements and eras of music they’ve witnessed, the sheer breadth of people other than you who likely impacted them – the full scope of their life sets in with stunning, incomprehensible swiftness.

The Doylestown Barn Theater opened in 1967, as part of a regional chain run by the founder of Budco Theaters, Claude “Buddy” Schlanger. (Hell of a name, I know.) Schlanger was very optimistic about the potential held in public shoppings centers, intentionally opening the Barn in a somewhat barren location along Route 611 with the hopes of it blossoming into a hopping location for crowds of all shapes and sizes.

With white-and-red paint, a more intentional barn design, and a silo off to the side, the Barn started as a one-screen theater that played Dr. Zhivago on its opening night. A year later, it added another 400-screen theater to become the area’s first “twinned theater”. By the late seventies, there were five theaters in the Barn. Up through the eighties and nineties, the Barn occasionally served as an event space for organizations like the Girl Scouts and a local church. In 1997, AMC Theatres purchased the Barn, only to tear it down. Regal then swooped in and rebuilt the Barn to include fourteen theaters, as well as add two new stucco silos outside as a tribute to the past.

Throughout its fifty-six years of life, the Barn had three different owners, underwent six different makeovers, and screened new films from the mid-1960s up to the dawn of the 2020s. Audiences of all ages living in the same area I grew up in attended this theater for over half a century. And I didn’t know any of this until after it was already shut down for good.

When I had first learned that COVID killed the Barn, I was sad… but, perhaps out of pragmatism, more worried to see how Cineworld’s bankruptcy would affect Regal’s Union Square location in New York City, which I was frequenting during my university years. (Despite it initially being listed on the chopping block, it would miraculously be spared.) It’s obvious why more of the buzz over this announcement was centered on locations in major cities, but looking back, the closure of the Barn – this tiny theater that, in all honesty, barely had any regular customers by the end of its life – stings just hard (if not harder) than a Regal Union Square closure would have. Doylestown may not be the Greatest City in the World, but it was home to a place that sheltered me and a close friend of mine for three of the most formative years of our lives.

As I write this post, the Barn is still standing, but evidently a shell of its former self. The large red capital letters of the front REGAL sign have been taken down, leaving faded stains in their place. The lot is entirely vacant; the glass doors and windows leading into the lobby are boarded up; the poster slots outside are all empty. I’ve often wondered about what the inside looks like now, but my father informed me months ago that the Barn is going to be torn down soon, so I can’t imagine there’s much left inside. Depending on when you’re reading this, it might already be gone. I have no idea what’s going to be built in its place, but if the brand new Whole Foods Market in the Doylestown Pointe Plaza is any sign, it’ll be something more modernized and in-demand for twenty-first century Pennsylvanian suburbanites.

To be fair, many buildings in the Pointe Plaza have been replaced or rebranded, and more than a few of them – such as an Applebee’s, the cornerstone of tasteless Americana – had it coming. It’s not unusual for towns to change. For crying out loud, my childhood home (which I’m currently residing in as I hunt for jobs) hadn’t even been built until the 1990s. If the extinct Barn were repopulated by another business, I could at least pass by and cherish the memories evoked by the mere sight of its nostalgic, historic structure. The looming fate of its complete and total evisceration, however, leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

In the fall of 2024, I took an Advanced Screenwriting course during my senior year of undergraduate college. The screenplay I wrote during the semester, titled Over-Time, was a straightforward sci-fi horror movie in the vein of The Thing and Attack the Block: a crew vs. monster flick where a gang of minimum-wage employees in the shopping center of their Pennsylvania small town are pitted against deadly insectoids that hatch from underground. One of the characters, a teenage smart-ass named Dante, works at a near-derelict movie theater in the back corner of the shopping center, which serves as the setting for the second half of the story. The name of the theater in the script – and this will really shock you – is “The Barn”. The screenplay mainly serves as a way for me to vent about the frustration of shitty part-time jobs, but it also serves as a quaint little tribute to the cinema I owe so much to. Small towns can be suffocating and annoying, but their histories are nothing to sniff at. And while the Barn may be facing its imminent destruction, it can at least live on in the gory, formulaic story I wrote as a twenty-one-year-old. I’m not sure that constitutes a proper memorial, but it’s the best I can do.

For now, the Barn remains standing alongside 611, both its silos eroded by time but erect nonetheless. A gigantic sign beside the theater, used back in the day to advertise all the new titles showing there, now has two simple messages spelled out in sparse letter cards. On one side: “EAST OWNS WEST”, a cheeky nod to the rivalry between two of our local high schools. On the other: “THANK YOU DOYLESTOWN”, a message directed to all of its patrons, past and present, who kept it alive from 1967 to 2023. I’m grateful to have been one of them.

The Rec Room is our good friend killer writer Aidan Barrett’s weekly column. Aidan discusses all the Hollywood highs and lows with a spin of his own style on his weekly substack Development Hell. Subscribe now for free.

Milk Crate Records: Japanese Shoegaze

Welcome to Milk Crate Records, your one-stop-shop for tunes from all over the sonic universe. This is Max’s weekly column where he’ll ramble and suggest musicians you hopefully don’t know yet. Headphones recommended for the proper digestion of this section.

Earlier this week I was hanging out with my good friend Pierce. While I was telling her I was doing a music based column now weekly, Pierce looked me dead in the eyes and uttered two simple words: “Japanese Shoegaze”. So here we are.

I first stumbled upon Japanese shoegaze as a subgenre in spring of 2023. Since then, I’ve navigated through a fair share of subgenres. Most of the songs I’ve found were produced––and also more culturally relevant––between the mid-2000s and early 2010s.

#1: “Memories of the past” by Oeil

Full of crunchy melodies, hazy vocals, screaming reverb, and drums being hit so hard you can practically feel it, “Memories of the past” is a track I’ve been re-listening to a lot throughout this summer. It’s edgy, atmospheric, and dare I say bittersweet. I’m obsessed with the constant jangle of the guitar near the end of the track too.

The whole album, Dream Within A Dream, is incredible. The album was lost on myspace.com of all places for about a decade. I actually first stumbled upon Oeil with their song Myrtle, which they added to the re-release of this album. Myrtle sounds like if indie bedroom music was made in the 1980s but it isn’t nearly as texturized as this jam. Listen to the whole album, but you gotta do it on a day you’re not really enjoying. This album is medicinal.

#2: “Star Is Mine” by Purple Bloom

I don’t really remember how I found Purple Bloom, but if I were to guess, it would have been in the comment sections of a YouTube music video with a title that my keyboard of the Western world can not type.

Purple Bloom’s “Star Is Mine”, to me, is peak dream-pop shoegaze. You have these really angelic vocals fused with melodic drums and these shining, twinkling synths. The track feels like you’re listening to it on an iPod with those plastic earbuds that hurt your ears while you sun bathe by the bay. Your friend, driving their 1993 Suzuki Cappuccino, is on their way to come pick you up. You both are about to steal slushies from the local 7/11. And your Japanese.

#3: Glass Bird by Bertoia

Similar to Oeil, Bertoia is another band that started in the late 2000s in Tokyo. But Oeil has over 24,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Bertoia has only a mere 678 monthly listeners. And all 678 of them know what’s up.

Bertoia’s song “Glass Bird” always initially hits me as the Japanese equivalent of Slowdive. You have the ethereal, but slow, melodic vocals. There’s the upbeat drumming. Rattling guitars packed so tight with reverb and distortion you don’t know what instrument you hear. And finally that subtle, warm bass line.

That’s all for this week on Bum Sums! If you enjoyed reading and think a friend would too, forward them this email and beg them to sign up. If you want your own weekly column, or any other fun ideas, contact us. We want to make this the best community building newsletter out there. Stay tuned for more stories next week.

Written by Max Van Hosen.