At 93, R/C Theatres is one of the oldest family-owned cinema chains in the country, but its technology is anything but old school. Founded in 1932 in Baltimore, Maryland, by Maurice A. Cohen, this regional chain has weathered decades of industry changes, gaining a well-earned reputation along the way for excellence in technological presentation.
Now a 14-location chain spread across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, R/C Theatres spent its first several decades as a handful of locations, most of them in Maryland. In the 1960s, Maurice’s son Irwin R. Cohen took his family’s involvement in cinema exhibition from a passion project to a full-time endeavor, uniting his locations under the R/C Theatres banner and expanding into Virginia.
“My father felt that film was everything, that it was the backbone of the company,” recalls Scott Cohen, Irwin’s son and the current president and CEO of R/C Theatres. At just 13 years old, Irwin would take the train up to Washington, D.C., to meet with distributors on weekends. Some decades later, his son would also grow up in the industry. “In the summer, a lot of kids went to camp,” says Cohen. “I got farmed out to theaters.” Summer holiday weekends were spent at one or another of the family’s drive-ins, where Scott would make pizza boxes, pick up trash, or learn how to operate a carbon arc projector.
In high school, after the passing of his grandfather, Cohen took on more responsibilities at one of the family drive-ins. “I’d come home at two or three o’clock in the morning. My friends were asleep in my driveway waiting for me, so I’d visit with them for a few hours. I just said, ‘There’s got to be more to this than just going around fixing things, painting fences and cutting grass and repairing projectors, making popcorn, plumbing—whatever you needed to do.”
After growing up in the industry, Cohen needed a sabbatical away from it; he spent some time in college, then took a part-time job as a hot tar roofer. The job paid well, but the experience of falling off a roof and getting burned (“once or twice”) convinced him to join his father in the family business, where he learned the parts of the trade that didn’t involve backbreaking manual labor. Cohen joined the business officially in 1977 as the film booker and became CEO and president in 2005. Now, he’s passed that knowledge on to two of his daughters, who currently work at R/C Theatres: Shelbi Gutowski, director of business strategy, and Samantha Cunningham, film booker.
Cohen recalls that when he was coming up in R/C Theatres, there “wasn’t this corporate mentality. It wasn’t, ‘I need this percentage.’ It wasn’t Harvard MBAs. I watched as corporate America grew, and theaters went from family-run businesses to trading on Wall Street.” While cultural norms were changing all around him, another element of the industry’s evolution became a particular area of interest for Cohen: technology. “For him, it’s really about the picture and the sound and being on the forefront of the technology that’s available,” says Gutowski. To that end, R/C Theatres holds a unique place in cinema history: Their Reading, Pennsylvania, location was one of the first cinemas in the country to fully transition to digital projection. As one of the beta sites for digital projection technology, says Cohen, “we were one of maybe only 10 theaters in the country that played the first digital Star Wars.” They were also in the first wave of exhibitors Disney approved to screen 2008’s Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert in 3D, more than a year before Avatar would set off a craze for the technology.
Cohen recalls the morning after the grand opening of one of R/C Theatres’ Florida locations: “I’m reading the paper, and this critic is tearing us up. Like, ‘What are we, Chrysler, with this Corinthian leather?’ He thought the decor was kind of hokey. And then he goes on to say: ‘But when the lights turned down, none of that other stuff mattered. I have never experienced a presentation like the one this theater offers.’”
Since getting ahead of the curve on digital and 3D, R/C Theatres was an early adopter of 4K laser projection technology and Dolby Atmos. Currently, their premium footprint includes two Imax screens, two auditoriums with D-Box immersive seating technology, and four locations with their own RCXtreme premium format, featuring 4K laser projection, Dolby Atmos sound, ButtKicker reverberating seats, and a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling screen. They have also made the all-important conversion to recliner seating, which Cohen predicts will be 100 percent complete “within the next year or so.”
“I’ve heard my dad say before, ‘It’s like an auditorium that you would get in L.A. or New York City, but with a small-town feel to it,’” says Gutowski. “That’s true of all our different locations, which is neat because we’re in all sorts of different towns. We’re all different sizes. Every theater is unique in its own way, but there’s still that feeling [of community] that customers get at all our locations.”
Just as R/C Theatres welcomes its community through its doors, it’s an active part of the communities where it operates. Both as a chain and operating as individual locations, R/C Theatres works with local chambers of commerce; sponsors local sports leagues, including the Chowan County Cantaloupes, a team formed for the benefit of the Boys and Girls Club; hands out popcorn samples at 5Ks; hosts group screenings for area nonprofits; works with schools on back-to-school initiatives; partners with Macaroni Kids, which publishes news and events for kids and families, on monthly ticket give-aways; and more.
Another key element of that community feel, and one that’s “vital to where we are today,” says Gutowski, is “the longevity of many of our theater managers and key corporate employees. Some of our GMs have been with us for 20–35 years or more, which in today’s environment is rare. Our CFO and COO, David Phillips, has been with the company since 1980 and our VP of operations, David Campbell, has been with us since 2005. Both are integral to R/C Theatres’ continued growth and success.”
Moving forward, says Gutowski, R/C Theatres aims to open a new theater every year. “We want to grow, but grow smartly, because we are a very nimble and gritty team.” Getting that initial visit can be tough, she admits, especially given the chain’s use of mostly grassroots marketing. “What we’ve found is that once we get customers through the door, they see the experience. The recliner seats, the RCX. Even our standard format is really high-quality. People see that, and it comes through.” That high quality comes at a competitive price point and at a theater that feels family-run rather than part of a corporate chain, making R/C Theatres even more valuable to its customers.
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