Stardust Drive-In fundraiser gets Hollywood ending

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This article was published 08/07/2015 (3782 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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As Manitoba’s few drive-in theatres struggle to stay afloat, one of them is celebrating a major victory today.

In a month-long crowd-sourcing campaign that ended Wednesday afternoon, Morden’s Stardust Drive-In Theatre raised more than $30,000 to help purchase digital projectors. The equipment is necessary to keep the business running as the movie industry transitions away from traditional 35mm film.

The campaign nearly didn’t reach its goal, short $8,000 on its second-last day. But in the final 24 hours of the fundraiser, donations poured in to bring the final total to $31,975 from more than 400 backers.

Co-owner Marlene Nelson said she was “ecstatic” at the result.

“This has saved it. This has made it so that everything is within reach to be able to go ahead to convert to the digital format,” she said. “It’s making it a reality.”

Nelson, who bought the theatre in 2002 with her husband and two brothers, said the Stardust is a piece of community history, and a Morden institution at more than 50 years old.

“It’s just worth a lot,” she said on Tuesday, before it was clear the theatre would meet the goal. “It’s an old building, and a lot of people who walk in there who haven’t been there in a lot of years, they say, oh, it hasn’t changed. And they say it with a smile.”

Nelson’s daughter, Kayla, works at the theatre and put the campaign together.

“I was just jokingly saying I almost had to tie a string around her ankle,” Nelson said. On Tuesday, Nelson remembered the first time her daughter had ever been to the Stardust — it was before the Nelsons owned it, and they were seeing Titanic.

“There was my mother, me and my daughter. She remembers us going into the concession, and she couldn’t see over the counter at that point,” Nelson said, laughing.” She remembers the lights … she doesn’t even remember the movie anymore.”

The Stardust is one of only three drive-ins in Manitoba. The other two are Flin Flon’s Big Island and Killarney’s Shamrock, although the Shamrock is also fundraising for digital equipment and its future is far from certain.

Nelson said the theatre isn’t out of the woods yet. The full cost to purchase and install the new equipment is around $90,000, and, even with other fundraising, her family has raised just over half of that. But Nelson said the business will bear a chunk of the price as well, and hopes to have the projectors running by the end of the summer.

But for now she said she’s just celebrating this victory with the community that made it possible and wanted to thank all the backers who helped along the way.

“The messages I’ve been getting, everybody is just so positive, so upbeat. I’ve had people come up and give me hugs,” she said. “… ‘Thank you’ just doesn’t even seem like enough.”

aidan.geary@freepress.mb.ca