Fourteen movie theaters in Vermont are still operating, albeit on a shoestring. On Nov 9, 2024, The Big Picture Theater and Café in Waitsfield closed. Merrill’s Roxy Cinema in Burlington closed a week or so later. The theater in Manchester, VT closed in 2019. The Flagship Cinemas in Rutland closed in 2020 due to the pandemic and never reopened. The Latchis in Brattleboro and the Opera House in Bellows Falls are two of the fourteen still fruitfully operating in the state.
In fact, both are thriving, and part of the reason is that the management and boards saw the handwriting on the wall: No movie theater can thrive today ONLY as a movie house. And that’s where Angela Snow, the subject of this profile, (and many others) comes in. With the closing down of so many movie theatres, the term “a cinema desert” has been coined, insofar as first-run theaters are concerned and she and Jon Potter, executive director of the Latchis and the two non-profit Latchis boards are doing something about it.
As Potter told this writer, “We in SE Vermont are very lucky. The Latchis is still very much alive – the hotel had a hugely successful year, October, 2024 being nearly full the entire month with record breaking income. Ann Latchis is still engaged here – the great-granddaughter of the patriarch Demetrius Latchis, whose sons built this theater to honor their parents and their Greek heritage in 1938. Two engaged boards (Latchis Arts and Latchis Corporation) of roughly 20 community members total are overseeing the finances as well as programming and business development. We found we have to diversify programming in those remarkable theaters. After Angela Snow was The Latchis Arts Board president (with a college education in film followed by almost twenty years of making films) we realized we had the person right here to help us move a big project forward. We hired her as Project Manager. We coupled her experience overseeing the logistics of big films and tv shows, with the expertise of Latchis Arts board member Tony Bacon, a TV editor and movie theatre lover. We have also just wrapped up an outstanding summer and fall for the Latchis Hotel, including a record-setting October. That success helps us buy the time we need to chart an exciting future for the Latchis Theatre.
“First-run Hollywood movies will always be a big part of what we do – but our future calls us to add more and more special films, live events and community programs to the mix; something we've always done here; we just have to do more of it. We've begun to put that into play this summer and fall, including a three-month stretch from early August through Nov. 10 during which we had a special event or program in one of our theaters 75% of the time.”
Angela was born in Brattleboro in 1985, the daughter of Dan Snow, drystone waller extraordinaire from Dummerston, and Connie Cline, the first teacher at Neighborhood Schoolhouse. “There was no TV at home. I was an only child so I created my own rich world of make-believe. As I got older I ‘helped’ my Dad with his stone projects and played among the artistic places he made with native stone.” Initially home schooled, she went to Hilltop Montessori, then to Marlboro Elementary. Then she and her Mom moved to St Louis, Missouri where, “when I was 8 years old I got my first video camera. I attended Crossroads College Prep School, graduating in 2003. Being 5’9”, I played basketball, soccer and tennis but my real love was studying art. I took my work in AP art history, Spanish and English seriously. I did photography for our yearbook.
“In 2003 I went to Columbia College in Chicago, an art school, with a major in film. Our's was the last class to shoot on film and edit with a razor blade. I graduated in 2006 with a B.A. in Film Directing and moved to Los Angeles.
“Through the help of my Dad’s client here in Vermont - a Hollywood screenwriter - I got an internship with Laura Ziskin, the producer of the ‘Spiderman” movies at the time and got to work on the Sony Studio Lot. While establishing a career in the TV industry, I worked for a documentary film company and was a production assistant on the Academy Awards - you know, doing exciting things like going to get people coffee and taking out the trash. I worked different TV show and movie jobs 1-4 months at a time, including MTV Movie Awards and Ron Howard’s film Angels and Demons.
“Then I formed my own documentary production company: “To The Moon Productions”. I was joined by Josh Gibson, a friend I had met at Columbia College. He had all the film equipment and technical knowledge. We travelled to mainland Greece and Crete to make two promotional films for tour companies. We also made a feature documentary film “Mortality of Dreams” filmed in the jungles of Peru. With another filmmaking partner, Ian Issitt, I made a second feature documentary “World Circus” which we filmed across Europe, including an act from Cirque du Soleil at the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo. Recently, my production company did three videos sponsored by ThinkVT (Vermont Tourism), the VT Department of Labor, BDCC, and others to showcase people who had not gone to a four-year college in their field, but were working fruitfully in all kinds of exciting fields. In 2009, for example, I worked for the Democratic National Committee and was Production Coordinator on Obama's inauguration ball in 2009. I organized the production assistants, set up dressing rooms, vehicle rentals etc.”
“In 2008, I was pretty embedded into a good circle of production crews. A boss I'd worked with on the Oscar's brought me on for the Democratic National Committee and then to DC to work as Production Coordinator on Obama's Inaugural ball in January, 2009.”
Angela then moved to Brooklyn to work as Production Manager and Producer for different production companies on shows for Discovery Channel, The Cooking Channel, National Geographic…. Jobs took her traveling, including to the Caribbean islands and Hawaii. In 2015 she met Avery Schwenk, former part-owner of Hermit Thrush Brewery, and they married and now own a house here in Brattleboro.
Enter The Latchis Theater. Angela joined the Latchis Arts Board in 2019 when it was brainstorming how to use a recent sizable bequest that was made to Latchis Arts. Jon Potter explains: “This gift spurred the boards to consider how we could use the money to ensure the longevity of The Latchis beyond that of a movie house. Even though The Latchis was, after Covid, back to 70% of its typical income from movies – and a burgeoning success with the hotel – we needed to rethink our approach to programming and the use to which we put the theaters beyond just movies. We had to make new ways to engage our community beyond first-run movies – an outdated business model.” Latchis Arts board member, and now president, Tony Bacon spearheaded the need for the Latchis to no longer just show films but be arbiters of experience. We wanted to bring the community out of their living rooms and into the Latchis. That meant upgrading the new sound and projection in Theatre One, and the bigger endeavor of a complete upgrade and redesign to Theatre Four, the small theatre to the left of the ticket booth in the lobby.
The boards hired Angela as a project manager. The Latchis had already been renting out Theatre Four and others, for private activities such as video gaming, birthday parties, special screenings requested by small groups.…. That had been so successful that we saw it as a future model. We hired architect, Jonathan Saccoccio, to rethink the layout of Theater Four.
“ We’re designing the space half with classic luxury movie theatre seats and half with ‘club seating’ with tables and lounge seating As well as a paint upgrade, an upgraded projection, sound system, and screen – all would bring the whole room alive in new ways. The Latchis Board is still thinking about the condition of Theater Two upstairs. For now our focus is Theater Four. We’ve hired Matt Maranian of the shop BOOMERANG in Brattleboro as the interior designer to propose new wallpaper, new seating, lighting and fixtures – the works."
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.