Jordan Stancil is fifty-two, he used to be a United States foreign service officer, he taught at university level after that, and he now spends his working life worrying about projector bulbs, audio calibration, seat upholstery and whether enough people will come out on a Tuesday night in a Chicago neighbourhood to justify keeping four auditoriums warm.
That is the story here, and the cinema is the setting rather than the point.
The career switch is the part that stops people, because the two jobs look like they belong to different men. A foreign service officer spends years being posted to places, learning how a country actually works underneath what it says about itself, writing reports for people far away, sitting in rooms where nothing is decided quickly. An independent cinema operator spends his days on a main street haggling over a lease, standing in a lobby at nine at night counting the house, and trying to persuade a distributor to give a single-screen house in a residential neighbourhood a film that the multiplex twenty minutes away already has.
What links them, in Stancil’s case, is not a management theory. It is a family business he grew up inside and left.
His great-grandfather founded the Rialto Theater in Grayling, Michigan, back in 1915, when a small northern town having its own picture house was ordinary rather than remarkable. Stancil worked there as a young man, in the way that children of family businesses work in them, which is to say without imagining it as a career. Then he went and had a completely different one, in diplomacy, and then in teaching.
The return was not a nostalgia trip. He went back to the Rialto and rebuilt it as a working business, and that is the thing that changed the trajectory. It worked well enough that he did it again, opening a second Michigan location earlier this year in Big Rapids. He owns the Rialto outright. It is his family’s building and his to fix.
And then he took on something considerably larger and considerably riskier, two states away, in a city where he is not the local boy from the family that has always run the picture house.
The 400 sits at 6740 North Sheridan Road in Rogers Park, the dense residential neighbourhood at the far northern edge of Chicago’s lakefront, the kind of area where a commercial strip serves people who live within walking distance rather than people who drive in. It opened in 1913, though some accounts put the building a year earlier, and it did not open as a cinema in the modern sense at all. It was the Regent, a vaudeville house with around 725 seats.
It became the 400 in 1930, under a local theatre chain, and then it spent the rest of the century being whatever the business required. It was the 400 Twin. It was the Village North. It was the Visionary for a short and unhappy period. In 1995 the single auditorium was carved into four rooms, seating roughly two hundred, two hundred, two hundred and a hundred and fifty, which is what happened to a great many grand old single screens in that era and which is the reason so many of them survived at all. Multiple screens meant multiple showtimes, and multiple showtimes meant the building could pay for itself.
For most of its run it was known as the oldest continuously operating movie theatre in the city, a claim worth handling carefully rather than repeating flat. Its own timeline includes a stretch when it went dark and came back in 2009 under a new name, which complicates the word continuously, and Chicago has plenty of older theatre buildings still standing, just not ones that kept showing films for that long. The honest version is that it was widely reported as the city’s longest-running movie house, that the claim rests on the continuity of the business rather than on the age of the bricks, and that it is a reasonable description rather than a settled record.
Then in the summer of 2023 it closed.
The reason given was not mysterious and it was not local. The operator at the time, whose company also owns the building and the retail strip it sits in, said the business was doing about half of what it had done before the pandemic. That is the number that has closed cinemas all over the world. Audiences came back for the big events and did not come back for the ordinary Wednesday, and a four-screen neighbourhood house lives entirely on ordinary Wednesdays.
A dark cinema on a commercial strip is not a neutral thing. It is a hole. The businesses on either side of it built their evenings on the trade of people walking out of a film at ten at night wanting somewhere to eat, and the moment that stops, the restaurant’s late covers stop with it. A closed theatre with its lights off also does something harder to measure to how a street feels after dark. The 400 sat like that for roughly two years.
Stancil’s arrangement with the building is the detail that reporting has been inconsistent about, and it matters, so it is worth being precise. He is not the owner of the property. The most detailed account of the deal, published in the local daily press in the week the cinema reopened, says he signed a five-year lease late in 2025 and is the operator. An earlier national radio profile described him as having purchased the theatre, which appears to be loose shorthand for taking it on, and a preservation group’s write-up used the language of new ownership.
Those are not the same thing, and the difference is not pedantry. An owner can borrow against the building and can take a twenty-year view of a roof. An operator on a five-year lease is renting the chance to prove a business works, and every dollar he spends on the room is a dollar spent on someone else’s asset. It makes the pace of the renovation a financial decision rather than a taste decision, and it explains a great deal about the order in which he is doing things.
He reopened at the end of July, two years after the last film, and he opened two of the four auditoriums rather than all four. Sound and picture came first. The seats, which are the thing people complain about loudest, are scheduled for later. He has talked about eventually reimagining the lobby in a deco style, which is an ambition rather than a plan. Asked what the work was costing, he declined to give a figure beyond saying it was more than he would like.
The 1995 decision to cut the room into four is also, indirectly, what makes his approach possible. A single-screen house is all or nothing: the auditorium is either finished enough to sell seats or it is not. Four rooms let him open half the building, take money at the door, and keep the other half as a construction site behind a closed corridor. Anyone who bought a ticket in the first weeks was paying, without especially thinking about it, for the rooms they could not get into yet. That is a slow, unromantic way to restore a theatre, and it is the only way most of them ever get restored.
That is an operator talking, not a restorer. A restorer opens when the building is finished. An operator opens when the building can sell tickets, and fixes it out of revenue.
Which brings us to the prices, because they are the most revealing thing in the whole story.
An evening ticket at the 400 is eleven dollars. Afternoons are eight dollars fifty. Children pay six. And on Tuesdays, everybody pays six dollars. In a major American city, where a ticket at a chain multiplex commonly runs half again as much or more before anyone has bought anything to drink, those are deliberately, almost aggressively low numbers.
The arithmetic of that choice is brutal and it is the reason so few people make it.
Of the money taken at the box office, a large share goes straight back out to the film’s distributor, and on a new release in its opening weeks that share can be the majority of it. What the cinema actually keeps from the ticket is a fraction. The costs it has to cover with that fraction are fixed and do not care how many people turned up: rent, insurance, power to run projection and air handling, cleaning, and staff who have to be there whether eleven people or a hundred and eleven come through the door.
So a low ticket price only works one way. It has to bring in enough extra bodies that the total margin, plus what those bodies spend at the concession stand, where the theatre keeps most of what it takes, covers a cost base that the ticket alone never will. A six-dollar Tuesday is not generosity and it is not a loss leader in the supermarket sense. It is a bet that the constraint in a neighbourhood cinema is not price sensitivity in the abstract but habit. Eleven dollars is a decision. Six dollars is not really a decision, and a cinema that people stop deciding about is a cinema that fills up on a wet Tuesday in February.
That bet is also the argument for why a diplomat might be unusually suited to this. Not because of anything glamorous, but because the job is mostly reading a place accurately and then waiting. Working out what the people who live within a mile of a building actually want to see, rather than what a national booking chart says they want, is a form of local intelligence. Negotiating a lease with a landlord who has already watched one operator fail in the space is a negotiation where both parties know the other’s weak position. Getting permits, inspections and licences through a city government is sitting patiently in a queue of bureaucracy without taking it personally. None of that is film knowledge. All of it is the day job of a foreign service officer.
He has also stood for elected office in his home state at one point, which tells you he is comfortable asking a neighbourhood to back him, and running a small cinema is very largely that.
The reopening itself went the way everyone involved hoped. People queued outside. Neighbours who had grown up going there came with their own children. One resident’s line, reported in the local press, was that it felt like nothing had changed, which is the highest compliment a returning institution can get and also a slightly complicated one, given that a fair amount of what had not changed was the reason the place closed.
And this is where the story needs its counterweight, because an opening week tells you almost nothing about a business.
An opening queue at a beloved reopened cinema is the easiest full house that venue will ever have. It is made up of goodwill, curiosity and local press, and every one of those is a one-off. The month that matters is not July. It is the fourth or fifth ordinary month, when the novelty is gone, when the two remaining auditoriums still need finishing, when a distributor has given the good film to somebody else, and when the six-dollar Tuesday either has a crowd in it or does not. Plenty of reopened cinemas have had a triumphant first weekend and closed again inside two years, and the five-year lease is a fairly precise measure of how long the experiment has to prove itself.
Stancil, to his credit, has not pretended otherwise. He has been open about the costs being higher than he wanted and about the work being unfinished, which is not how somebody sells a fairytale.
What he does have that most people attempting this do not is a track record in the same specific business. The Rialto is not a pitch deck. It is a building in Michigan that was struggling and now works, run by the same man, and the second Michigan site opened because the first one earned it. That does not guarantee the Chicago house survives, because a college-town cinema in Michigan and a four-screen house on a city lakefront are different animals with different competitors. But it does mean the person holding the lease has already learned the unglamorous parts, which is the thing that usually sinks a first-time operator with more affection than experience.
There is a version of this story that is entirely about the building: a 1913 vaudeville house, dark for two years, lit up again. That version has been told about a lot of cinemas and it is generally told with the lights turned down low.
The more useful version is about a man who had a career that took him a long way from a small northern Michigan town, and who came back to the only trade his family ever had, and then decided the way to make that trade work was to charge less than everyone else and fix the room as he went. He is not preserving a monument. He is running a shop that happens to be a hundred and thirteen years old, and he is doing it on a lease, in someone else’s building, on somebody else’s street, at prices that only work if the neighbourhood turns up out of habit rather than out of sentiment.
The doors opened. People came. Everything after that is Tuesdays.