Olympia Film Society to reopen the doors to the Capitol Theater this weekend

The Olympia Film Society will welcome audiences back to the long-shuttered Capitol Theater starting Sunday.

The acclaimed documentary “Summer of Soul” and the Nicolas Cage drama “Pig” will be showing, and the smell of popcorn will again be wafting through the air, though audience members might get only a hint through their masks.

“We couldn’t be happier to welcome people back,” said Audrey Henley, the film society’s executive director. “I’m excited to see a movie on the big screen.”

That said, this won’t be the reopening the film society had planned. The rising numbers of COVID-19 cases in Thurston County led not only to the postponement of what was to be the opening-night event — a screening of “Napoleon Dynamite” with stars Jon Heder and Efren Ramirez — but to a requirement, announced earlier this week, that all audience members be fully vaccinated.

“All staff and all volunteers are vaccinated,” Henley told The Olympian. “What goes for the staff and the volunteers goes for the patrons as well. We hope this is a temporary way of operating, but we’re going to slowly walk into 2022, looking both ways before we cross the road.”

Both Harlequin Productions and The Washington Center for the Performing Arts also announced this week that they will require audience members to be vaccinated — or that they provide a negative COVID test result taken within 72 hours of performance times.

The film society isn’t offering the testing option. Unvaccinated people who have tickets for upcoming events can get refunds, Henley said.

Social distancing also will be the rule at the Capitol Theater, which will sell only 84 tickets for each screening. (The theater seats 762.) Seats will be assigned when tickets are sold to ensure 6 feet of distancing.

“No programming is worth getting sick over,” Henley said. “Every risk that we can manage helps us feel comfortable operating again and having the public in the theater again.”

The film society can afford to keep crowds small in part because of a $175,000 Shuttered Venue Operators Grant it received in July. The grant also allowed the society to rehire staff members laid off last year and make improvements to parts of the heating and air conditioning system.

Henley and the theater’s board came to the decisions about vaccinations and testing in part because many of its members and volunteers are at high risk of complications from COVID, and in part because the Capitol Theater is a historic building with less modern ventilation systems and crowded bathrooms.

The popcorn, which has won several awards from the Weekly Volcano, was another factor in the decision to sell so few seats. Moviegoers are required to be masked, of course — except when they’re munching. “In a movie, it’s like 98 minutes of eating popcorn,” Henley said.

The theater’s restrictions are the tightest ones in Olympia, but they aren’t unique in the state. The Rose Theater in Port Townsend also is requiring that all audience members be fully vaccinated and selling a reduced numbers of tickets.

As the situation with the virus shifts, the film society’s rules will shift, too, Henley said.

“We are selling for concerts off into the future in hopes that we will start to see infection rates get lower and vaccination rates increase,” she said, “but there might be some changes coming. We might see cancellations and reschedulings again.”

The “Napoleon Dynamite” screening with Q&A, originally scheduled for April 2020, is now on the calendar for Oct. 22.

Before that is the Banff Film Festival, set for Sept. 9 and 10.

Meanwhile, Henley is over-the-moon excited about “Summer of Soul,” which chronicles the joy and power of the Harlem Cultural Festival, an often-overlooked music event that happened during the summer of 1969, when the eyes and ears of much of the nation were focused on Woodstock.

She calls the film, opening at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Capitol Theater, “my movie of the decade,” and she’s far from the only one to lavish it with praise.

“ ‘Summer of Soul’ is a breathtaking chronicle of Black culture in a pivotal moment,” said NPR critic Eric Deggans, who lauded the film’s “heady remix of interviews, ideas and music,” including performances by such legends as Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Sly & the Family Stone.