Sky Cinemas owner brings big-screen magic to Santa Fe redevelopment site

SANTA FE — Two Hollywood stars from two different eras marked the grand opening of Sky Cinema’s restoration of a historic single-screen theater in midtown, with Ryan Gosling’s “Project Hail Mary” debuting on Friday and Judy Garland’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz” accompanying the new release on Sunday.

It’s a fitting start for Sky Cinema Owner Bill Banowksy’s latest venture, marrying his core belief in the power of films, new and old, to create community in front of the big screen with a redevelopment project the City of Santa Fe hopes will bring an underserved area into the future.

“We want to be part of rejuvenating midtown, or maybe creating midtown,” Banowsky told the Journal. “We’re taking advantage of this opportunity in the middle of the city that seems unprecedented in the history of Santa Fe — to have so much property available, controlled by the city, with a plan to create a place where people can live and play and eat and go watch movies.”

Sky Cinema’s sister theater is one of several new leases within Aspect Media Village, a 23-acre film-focused initial phase of Santa Fe’s Midtown Master Plan, which envisions a mixed-use development across a total of 64 acres that were once home to two universities: the College of Santa Fe, and later, The Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

“The creation of all these retail groups at the same time really provides a lot of synergy for each of them,” said PE Real Estate Holdings Principal Phillip Gesue, who is spearheading Aspect Media Village, where new restaurant Tender Fire Kitchen opened across from the restored cinema last Saturday.

The 130-seat “Sky Midtown,” as Banowsky calls it, is a reimagining of The Screen, a former arthouse theater where film students gathered from the late 1990s through the late 2010s to watch and discuss movies with Hollywood legends like the late Robert Redford.

Sky Cinemas Program and Marketing Director Peter Grendle ran the old campus theater for about a decade before he met Banowsky, who asked him to run his 11-screen Railyard location after The Screen shut down in 2020.

“We’re reopening it as a single-screen arthouse theater,” Grendle said, “so it’s really kind of full circle for me, oddly enough.”

Though he hasn’t measured it, Banowsky said the theater’s screen has long been rumored to be the largest in Santa Fe, if not the state. Before holding a soft opening for Sky Midtown earlier this month, he made sure it was equipped with a Dolby Surround 7.1 sound system and installed stadium-style seating with extra legroom.

Like Sky Railyard, Banowsky also plans to expand the menu in the small, vibrant main lobby to include food and local beer options that go beyond the typical offerings found in movie theaters of old.

“If you look at the history of movie theaters, they function more like carnivals with high-priced popcorn, right?” Grendle said. “But that carnival atmosphere has kind of fallen by the wayside and is not very popular anymore. We have a lot of amenities that really enforce a much classier, more respectable atmosphere. We want to respect the intelligence of our patrons and truly show them the best way to see a movie.”

At the end of the hall leading to the theater, Banowsky and his staff are also sketching out plans to convert an old film editing bay into a 25-seat screening room to host special screenings and lectures, in keeping with the educational history of the space.

Screenwriter and director Joan Tewkesbury, who lives in Santa Fe, will be one of the first lecturers to teach screen writing there.

“A second screen gives us enormous programming flexibility,” Banowsky said. “If we had just one screen, we would be limited because we would have commitments with film distributors about playing their films every day in the full schedule. Now, having this second screen gives us so much breathing room to do so many more things.”

While the main screen will continue to feature new releases, Banowsky intends to reserve time for film history there as well, saying that “bringing back classic Hollywood films is a winner” in an era of major media consolidations and shorter theater release windows.

Later this month, he plans to screen the 2005 film, “Jarhead,” with Santa Fe resident and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter William Broyles Jr., who wrote the film’s adapted screenplay.

Broyles told the Journal the movie’s first-person perspective on the first Gulf War is timely in light of recent events in the Middle East.

“There’s a scene I really love in it where all of these Marines in training are watching ‘Apocalypse Now’ — that scene where ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ is playing as they’re flying over the village,” Broyles said. “I remember being in the editing room at the time with Walter Murch, who also edited ‘Apocalypse Now,’ and there was this very strange lineage, where every generation’s anti-war movie becomes the next generation’s recruiting film, and basically we learn nothing.”

Banowsky’s belief in the power of classic films seemed to show promise last Saturday, when a crowd of Santa Fe residents filled most seats in the newly restored theater for a showing of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the 1981 film that launched the uber-popular “Indiana Jones” franchise.

Despite the age of the film and the actor who portrayed the pulp adventure character 45 years ago, the crack of young Indy’s whip and wit hadn’t lost its snap for a modern audience, who laughed and gasped at all the classic bits.

Mike Harris, a 50-year Santa Fe resident and former city councilor who worked on the Midtown Master Plan, was coming out of the restored theater with his cousin-in-law, Marie, after the show.

“The resolution that I and others worked on starting in 2016 is really what you’re seeing happen now,” he said. “These wheels grind pretty slow, but it’s happening. That’s a great thing.”

John Miller is the Journal’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.