By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — For the Remarkable Theater, the show did not go on this year.

Despite securing approval twice from the Board of Selectwomen — for spring and fall seasons — of drive-in movie nights at the town-owned Imperial Avenue parking lot, the screenings never materialized.

In May, the selectwomen granted the nonprofit theater its first permit to screen movies at the lot from June 26 to Aug 23. However, no movies were shown during that period. Despite that, the selectwomen in August granted the theater’s second request for a permit running from Aug. 28 until Nov. 3. 

Again, with expiration of the group’s second 2023 permit last week, not a single movie had been screened.

The future of the group, which hosted three previous seasons of drive-in movies, appears uncertain. Multiple attempts to reach Douglas Tirola, the theater’s artistic director who appeared before the selectwomen twice this year to secure permits for the movie venue, were unsuccessful.

“The Remarkable has had two permits approved by the Board of Selectwomen this year and the process of getting insurance and putting up a screen has never happened either time,” Selectwoman Andrea More said Friday.

Officials from the Remarkable Theater and the Levitt Pavilion have clashed in the last few years over use of the Imperial parking lot, primarily on issues of overlapping schedules, noise from one venue disrupting the other’s programming and parking.

At the August Board of Selectwoman’s meeting, Tirola said the Remarkable Theater had never shown a movie when the Levitt staged a concert, and Levitt representatives said they never asked the Remarkable not to hold a screening.

Tirola said at the time the lack of certainty in confirming the Levitt’s schedule severely hampered the Remarkable’s ability to plan its own slate of movie screenings and community fundraisers.

Assistant Town Attorney Eileen Lavigne Flug said in August the problems between the two groups were a matter for them to resolve and not the town’s issue. But the selectwomen’s resolution approving the permit said the Remarkable Theater would have to “coordinate with other organizations who utilize the Imperial Avenue Parking Lot,” under conditions of the permit.

Tirola told the selectwomen in May that the theater’s pop-up drive-in format was a temporary measure designed to help achieve its long-term goal of opening a brick-and-mortar theater downtown.

“The goal is still to have one,” he said.

The Westport Cinema Initiative, the organization that created the Remarkable Theater, was established in 2011, according to the theater’s website. 

Its mission is to give employment opportunities to disabled adults, and to bring a movie theater back to Westport after several others were shuttered.

The Fine Arts movie theater group which at one time had four theaters in Westport, closed in 1999, according to Historic Buildings of Connecticut. Two of the theaters were located in the building that now houses the Barnes & Noble bookstore, and before that, Restoration Hardware.

The Westport Cinema Initiative hosted film screenings at various spots in town when it first was created, with the Remarkable Theater drive-in format beginning in 2020 as the COVID -19 pandemic hit. Since then, the Remarkable Theater held three seasons of drive-in movies in the Imperial lot from 2020-22.

Although the theater’s website still said, “Coming Soon, Fall 2023 Season,” as of Sunday morning, Nov. 5, and “Check back for new movies & dates,” with its permits expired and weather turning inhospitable, the final curtain has come down for the drive-in this year.

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.