If Tom Kiefaber loses his Senator Theatre on Wednesday, the day the revered art deco movie house is slated for a foreclosure auction, it would mark the closing chapter in a two-decade odyssey filled with equal parts Hollywood glamour and backroom sniping.
The Senator under Kiefaber's watch has been a saga of mounting debt and last-minute bailouts, of political deal-making and business hardball - played against a backdrop of the last of Baltimore's grand movie palaces.
But whatever happens this week, many agree that if Kiefebar loses the Senator, it will not be because he has not fought hard enough.
Passionate. Indefatigable. Relentless. Start talking to movie types, Baltimore officials, even banking and real estate executives about Kiefaber, and those adjectives keep coming up. Since taking over the Senator in 1988, Kiefaber has struggled almost without break to keep alive the last remaining vestige of a cinema chain his grandfather started nearly a century ago.
But even some of Kiefaber's closest allies, people who adore the Senator, admit he can be his own worst enemy. He can be difficult to deal with, they say, especially if your take on what's best for the Senator doesn't quite mesh with his.
"In some way, he's the kind of guy you want to have in your corner," says Gabriel Wardell, a former program director for the Maryland Film Festival who is executive director of the Atlanta Film Festival. "He has defended the Senator vigorously, but his 'by whatever means necessary' way of doing so, it sometimes rubs people the wrong way."
Some also suggest that Kiefaber's financial acumen does not match his passion - a significant problem given his seemingly quixotic fight to maintain the 67-year-old Senator as one of the country's last privately held, first-run vintage movie houses.
Baltimore-based 1st Mariner Bank, to which Kiefaber owes $1.2 million, scheduled the foreclosure auction earlier this month, citing $91,000 in missed payments. On Friday, Kiefaber received a notice that the total, including legal fees and other charges, was up to $106,586.
A movie fanatic
"He brings a love for the movies that is just hard to find. He is a fanatic," says Aris Melissaratos, the former secretary of the Department of Business and Economic Development under Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. "If we could get him equally passionate about managing the finances, I think we would have the whole package."
Around Baltimore, Kiefaber is known not simply as the guy who owns the city's most treasured movie house, with its giant screen, lavish interior and unrivaled sound system.
He is also renowned as the guy who lectures his audience (either in person or via tape) on proper decorum and other matters before each film. He has created his own forecourt of the stars, installing commemorative sidewalk blocks outside the Senator when it hosts a major event. And, in the finest tradition of cliff-hanging movie serials, he has developed a habit of pulling the theater back from the brink of financial ruin, often at the last minute.
If he still owns the Senator as of Thursday, it will be the second time in seven years that he has rescued the theater from foreclosure. In 2000, the nonprofit Abell Foundation threatened foreclosure; a year earlier, it had combined with the city to lend the theater $565,000. That time, an unidentified investor came up with enough money to prevent the theater from being sold. In 2002, 1st Mariner lent Kiefaber $1.2 million to shore up the Senator and to begin operations at the Rotunda, which had been closed by its previous owner.
Kiefaber and the Senator also faced foreclosure in 1993. Developer David Cordish came to the rescue, helping Kiefaber and his then-partner, J. Hollis Albert III, refinance their debt and pay off $562,00 in costs connected with construction of a Staples store across the street from the Senator.
Kiefaber "always seems to be behind the eight ball in terms of getting what he really needs," says state Sen. Joan Carter Conway, a Kiefaber ally in whose district the Senator lies, "but he always seems to be able to work through it."
Sitting in a home he maintains as an office across York Road from the Senator, Kiefaber, 54, acknowledges that his passion sometimes gets the better of him. But he believes he has earned a little forbearance for having fought so hard to maintain what many Baltimoreans - not to mention movie and theater professionals around the country - acknowledge is a civic treasure.
A crusade
"Somebody, somewhere, if they're candid with you, is going to say, 'Let's face it, Tom gets a little over-the-top at times, gets a little wild-eyed, starts swinging his arms around'" is how Kiefaber puts it.
"I'm saying there's a reason for that. Years ago, I was not like that. When I started this odyssey, I was not like that. It's been counterproductive, but it is something that is part of the story."
For Kiefaber, whose maternal grandfather founded Baltimore's once-dominant Durkee Theater chain, his struggle to keep the Senator running as Frank H. Durkee Sr. intended has become a crusade.
"To look at the Senator as some sort of isolated, troubled, privately owned, debt-ridden problem," Kiefaber says, "is absurd."
Rather, he insists, his theater's plight is symptomatic of restrictive booking practices - known in the trade as clearance - that can block theaters from getting a film if another nearby theater is showing it and of nearby redevelopment efforts that have floundered until late.
Kiefaber said he has gotten no financial assistance from the city since 1999, when he received a $180,000 grant to replace the Senator's 60-year-old air-conditioning system.
"The state has been tremendously helpful, but the city has not put any funding into anything I'm doing for seven years," Kiefaber said.
'Unfortunate, unfair'
"That's an unfortunate and unfair characterization of the city's efforts to be helpful," said Deputy Mayor Andrew Frank, adding that the city has come to Kiefaber's aid four times in the past 10 years, that it guaranteed half of the $1.2 million loan from 1st Mariner and that it remains interested in putting the Senator on sounder financial footing.
"Most businesses would define that as being enormously helpful," Frank said. "We give him enormous credit for what he's done with the Senator. And it would give us enormous pleasure if he's able to work things out and continue operating it as the owner."
Others in the industry say Kiefaber is embroiled in a doomed, if noble, mission: operating a single-screen, independent movie house that can compete with the suburban multiplexes.
Kiefaber's approach has proved popular among some area moviegoers, who have been known to camp overnight for the Star Wars, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings films. But it leaves less margin for error when booking movies for the Senator.
"What's happening is not a negative reflection on Tom or his business practices," says Fred Schoenfield, who has kept the single-screen Commodore Theatre in Portsmouth, Va., open by putting a dining area in front of the movie screen.
"It has more to do with the fact that the whole economy has geared away from single-screen theaters. Single-screen theaters have a very hard row to hoe."
That was not the case when Durkee opened the Senator in October 1939. At the time, Baltimore, like most large cities, had scores of movie theaters, each with one screen. But the advent of multi-screen theaters in the 1960s, along with a growing preference for mall theaters with easy parking, slowly killed off the city's movie houses. Today, only three remain in operation - the Charles, the Rotunda and the Senator.
When the Durkee chain sold its remaining holdings in 1988, Kiefaber and two partners bought the theater - which still was operating as a first-run house - for $2.2 million. Real estate agent Herbert Davis and businessman J. Hollis Albert III left the partnership in 1991 and 1995, respectively.
"As it turned out, I didn't make any money. In fact, I lost money," Davis says. "But I was enthusiastic to see this iconic theater preserved and was impressed with Tom's dedication. I never intended to stay in. I was just there to facilitate the acquisition."
From day one, Kiefaber spoke of adding new screens to the Senator - not by changing the historic structure, which he regards as almost inviolate, but by expanding onto adjacent property. He even had names for the two new, smaller theaters, both recalling former Baltimore movie houses: One would be called the Ambassador, the other the Blue Mouse.
Although he still hopes to expand the Senator, financial considerations have put those plans on hold. Kiefaber did, however, expand in a manner of speaking when he took over operation of the two-screen Rotunda cinema in 2002. Having those additional screens gave him greater leeway in booking films, allowing him to shift movies from the Senator to the much-smaller Rotunda as attendance drops off.
Profit or not
He also has spoken often about turning the Senator into a not-for-profit operation as a way of getting tax breaks and soliciting more in charitable contributions from theater supporters. A couple of years ago, the plans seemed ready to be finalized.
But after consulting with various experts, Kiefaber decided against such a move, concluding that it would probably end the Senator's days as a first-run movie house. Not-for-profits usually run art house or repertory films, so as not to compete directly with nearby for-profit theaters.
Instead, Kiefaber is investigating ways to run the Senator as a for-profit but with nonprofit components - morning screenings for school children, for example, or other educational and civic uses.
"Having the theater itself as a nonprofit may not be the answer," says Brenda Blethyn Blom, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law who was brought in by state economic development officials to explore turning the Senator into a nonprofit.
"The issue is, how do we get the conversation going that can both maintain it as a venue for these fabulous first-run films and create the sort of community-building, nonprofit opportunities that can live in a symbiotic relationship?"
Others note that running the Senator as a nonprofit would have included putting ownership in the hands of a foundation, taking it away from Kiefaber.
"I think when faced with the reality of losing control, Tom went a different direction," said Frank, the deputy mayor.
Still, all Kiefaber's plans rest on coming up with the roughly $106,600 he owes 1st Mariner. The bank's in-house counsel, Eugene A. Friedman, said the bank could be demanding that the entire amount be paid because the loan was in arrears.
"We have full rights to accelerate the balance, but we are saying simply pay the past due, we will accept that," he says. "We'd like this to succeed and for the loan to be paid. We don't want to be the owner of the theater."
Raising money
On Tuesday, Kiefaber told listeners of WYPR-FM's Marc Steiner Show that he had raised nearly $40,000. The Senator's Web site, www.senator.com, includes a link where people can contribute via the Paypal Internet service. As of last night, according to a counter included on the site, the amount had increased to $65,100.
Kiefaber says he is optimistic about his chances of raising the money. There is no shortage of people - in and out of town - who wish him well.
"I don't know anything about the economics of it, how it's run," says Barry Levinson, a director and Baltimore native who premiered his 1982 film, Diner, at the Senator. That event was commemorated in the first of the sidewalk blocks installed outside the theater.
"All I know is, I would hate to see the Senator cease to exist as a place to show films," Levinson says. "You'd hate to see that site turned into some kind of drugstore." "If you lose Tom, you won't have that big cheerleader for the Senator," says City Councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr., whose Northeast Baltimore district includes the theater. "He has that sense of passion, he's an in-your-face type of person for a worthy cause."
Oscar-nominated actor Edward Norton agreed.
"You have to admire the guy for hanging in there," says Norton, a Columbia native who has brought several of his films, most recently The Illusionist, to the Senator. "There are certainly easier ways to make a buck than running an independent theater. ... When someone loves it as much as he does, there ought to be a way for the community to rally around him."
Unhappy filmgoer
Not everyone is in Kiefaber's corner. During the Steiner show Wednesday, a listener identifying himself as Jeff called in to express his frustration.
"I'm tired of Tom Kiefaber crying for money to support the Senator Theatre when he abuses his audiences by subjecting them to his personal opinions and railing against other theater venues and even media personalities that he has a disagreement with," he told Steiner.
"I hope he loses the Senator and someone more responsible takes over."
As the caller suggested, some people do not appreciate his pre-film lectures, during which he has been known to take potshots at competing theaters (such as the Charles, whose operators' use of clearance has kept some films from playing the Senator), local media (including The Sun, which he has frequently chided for not covering stories involving the Senator to his satisfaction), even groups that would seem to be his allies.
Dan Krovich, former programming administrator for the Maryland Film Festival, recalls the time he was asked to speak to a Towson University film class meeting at the Senator. Kiefaber, involved in some disagreement with festival officials at the time, insisted that Krovich not mention what he did for a living.
"It became a little weird, because that's why I was there, as a programmer for the Maryland Film Festival," says Krovich, now festival director for the Atlanta Film Festival. "He's very passionate, and I think that passion is one of the reasons why the Senator is still around. I also think sometimes that passion can cloud his judgment."
Others describe a generous and supportive ally. For years, he has held Christmas-time screenings of It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, with proceeds going to the Maryland Food Bank.
Support, popcorn
James Hamlin is president of the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative, a group looking to revive West Baltimore's once-vibrant arts district. Among its projects has been memorializing the fabled Royal Theater, a national showcase for African-American entertainment that played host to Pearl Bailey, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Nat King Cole before it was torn down in 1971. The group has sponsored several fundraising concerts, for which Kiefaber has served as consultant. He even provided the popcorn.
"Here's a guy who takes time and comes over here and helps support us," Hamlin says. "Whenever we need him, he's always there to assist us."
If he loses the theater now, Kiefaber says, it will happen just as things seem to be going his way. Clearance will stop being an issue this summer, he predicts, when Landmark Theatres opens a seven-screen cinema at the Inner Harbor.
Potentially, Landmark could prevent the Charles from showing films, leaving the more-distant Senator able to show films the Charles can't.
"From my perspective, he's been a very articulate and persuasive spokesperson for independent and historic theaters, the issues affecting them and how they can help create a community identity," says Kennedy Smith, former director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's National Main Street Center.
Single-screen theaters, after decades of decline, have been experiencing a resurgence in the past two years, she says, "and frankly, I credit Kiefaber a lot for that."
For his part, Kiefaber is grateful to accept such credit. But it will not mean much if he loses the Senator.
"You know that old saying, about keeping the patient alive while hoping for a cure? Well, that's what we've been doing," Kiefaber says. "It's been 7,000 days of struggle."
chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com
john.woestendiek@baltsun.com