Its name appears as a buzzing glow of four tall letters, blazing red atop a marquee: N A R O.
Naro Expanded Cinema’s art deco facade has helped to illuminate Colley Avenue’s main drag every night, bolstering the aesthetic and charm of Norfolk’s Ghent neighborhood for decades.
And nothing — its soon-to-be new owners assert — is going to change.
The place has too much “soul,” they say. It’ll be kept.
“I feel like we have a responsibility to the neighborhood to keep this place running, and we need to be here,” Kate Loftis said. “We need the neighborhood. The neighborhood needs us.”
Later this year, Loftis along with partner Theresa Schindler, longtime managers at the Naro, will take over the cinema business from owners Tench Phillips and Thom Vourlas, who’ve operated it for 49 years.
The men’s friendship has been the motor behind the little theater’s curtains for nearly a half-century, keeping the small business afloat and the films rolling on its single screen.
Their intro to film
Tench and Vourlas, now 75, were fast friends. They met in the eighth grade, both placed in the same advanced geometry class at Azalea Gardens Middle School.
They went to Norview High School together too. After graduation, despite going to different colleges, they played phone tag over landlines to stay in touch.
Phillips attended Georgia Tech. Vourlas went to North Carolina State University, but decided he wanted a major not offered there so transferred and graduated with an accounting degree from Old Dominion University. Phillips moved home after finishing in Atlanta.
Back in Norfolk, both needed a roommate. They started sharing a small apartment on Shirley Avenue in 1974. Vourlas had a job with a local restaurateur. Phillips worked at a movie theater. The rent got paid easily enough for them to afford a quick Thanksgiving vacation to New York City. The trip changed their lives.
They crashed in the city with a Juilliard student they knew and bought tickets to see an off-Broadway musical, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road,” starring Ted Neeley.
“So we go to this play,” Vourlas recalled. “And it’s just terrible, really. I mean, it was like a high school play.”
They left at intermission, disappointed and mulling where to go next. And their friend, the Juilliard student, offered a suggestion. He’d heard “Bergman films” were being played at the Little Carnegie Theatre near Columbus Circle.
“Bergman, huh?” Vourlas asked.
Yeah, the friend replied, Bergman.
“And I go,” Vourlas recalled, “Is that the lady in ‘Casablanca?’ ”
“No, no, that’s Ingrid Bergman. This is Ingmar Bergman.”
Bergman, a Swedish auteur, is considered one of the most influential directors. His movies are often described as bleak or melancholic and tend to explore the depths of human emotion.
“Swedish, huh?” Vourlas asked. “I got to read these movies?”
The Juilliard student led the way to the movie theater where they caught a Bergman double showing: his 1957 film “The Seventh Seal,” in which a medieval knight plays a game of chess for his life against Death, and his 1960 film “The Virgin Spring,” which follows the plight of a father after the rape and murder of his daughter.
Their experience was transformative.
Until then, Vourlas and Phillips had pretty much only known the gimmicks, sensationalism, shiny heroes, slimy villains and caricatures in movies such as “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Airport” and “Goldfinger.”
“But suddenly here were movies that you could talk about and discuss,” Vourlas said, “that you found deep meaning in.”
They traveled home discussing what they’d seen and later helped bring attention to Bergman’s work in Norfolk.
Intellectual destination
In the spring of 1976, what is now the Naro was then called the The Actor’s Theater and run by a group of local performers. But Vourlas and Phillips worked out a deal to rent the space for a limited run of special screenings. Over a few weeks, they showed six Bergman films. Enough tickets sold. It was a success.
“You know,” Phillips told Vourlas, “it’s not that hard of a business.”
He’d learned about the inner workings of the industry working at his movie theater job.
“Well with what you already know?” Vourlas speculated, “and … with my accounting background …?”
The two 27-year-olds took a risk. When the lease held by The Actor’s Theater expired, they secured the next one for themselves. In 1977, they took over operation of what is now the Naro on Colley Avenue.
The goal was to make the Naro a destination for entertainment and intellectual discussion, a place to analyze and discuss art and, from time to time, get lost in the drama of a latest blockbuster.
Their first week in business, the Naro showed “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” on alternating nights. A short time later, it sold out showings of French filmmaker François Truffaut’s 1975 film “The Story of Adele H.”
In any given year, theater listings were a mishmash of old and new, including crime documentaries, musicals, and foreign and independent films.
“Our ambition was not to expand and build a lot of screens, especially, because we wanted to stay in programming,” Phillips said.
Surviving ‘roadblocks’
The Naro had a virtual monopoly on classic movie showings and thrived in the late ’70s and early ’80s, later surviving “roadblocks,” Vourlas explained. First, it was satellite-delivered cable TV.
“We thought, ‘Oh, we’re dead,’ ” Vourlas said.
Then there was the rising popularity of VHS tapes. People could watch movies at their pleasure, any time they wanted, at home. Next came video rental stores and the rise of Blockbuster, and later DVDs and Blu-ray.
MacArthur Center mall, equipped with the 18-screen Regal Cinemas theater, opened in downtown Norfolk in 1999, and the Naro cinema owners were convinced they’d be put out of business.
This year, the MacArthur Center movie theater — shuttered — showed its final film on Jan. 29.
But the Naro, a 90-year-old landmark that first opened as The Colley Theater in 1936, continues to avoid the fate of the struggling national chains.
And once the paperwork is in place, Vourlas and Phillips will hand the reins to the managers they credit with keeping the business alive during its COVID-19 shutdown. Loftis has worked at the Naro for 11 years, Schindler for 44.
“People need somewhere that’s not their house and not their job,” Loftis said. “They need a third place to be.
“Naro is that, for a lot of people.”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com