COMPLIMENTARY! TAKE ONE! FREE! Roxy Owner Mike Blakesly Has Brought Hollywood To Forsyth For 33 Years
Owner Mike Blakesley stands beneath the Roxy Theatre’s classic marquee in Forsyth. Maintaining the sign’s 54 neon tubes takes extra effort and expense, but he gets a vibrant, nostalgic look for his trouble. [Photo by Craig Larcom]
By Craig & Liz Larcom Mike Blakesley of Forsyth was a theatre owner waiting to happen. He just didn’t know it. Start with his passion for movies. Deep? Even after 33 years of running the Roxy Theatre, when Mike and his wife Lynn take a vacation, they often choose to go to the movies. “Why do you go to a movie when you work in a movie theater?” ask his mystified friends. But when you relish movies as much as this man does, you do not love the movies any less when you are away from home. “We like movies! We really like movies,” says Mike. And Lynn nods in agreement. Besides, on vacation you can sit back and enjoy the show without answering the phone or watching the crowd or worrying about whatever. Movies and Mike go way back. “I was doing movies when I was a kid,” he says. He messed with the equipment, too. “I was always fascinated with projectors and tape recorders and stuff like that, so my grandpa had a 16mm projector that I used to set up in my room and show movies on it,” he says. Bit by bit, his skills grew. As a teen, Mike had a buddy whose parents ran the town’s drive-in theater where he learned to run theater projectors. When a friend who worked at the Roxy quit, Mike stepped into the job, earning the princely sum of four dollars a night. For three years Mike had an inside view of the movie business. So he knew what to do when his boss decided to sell the theater in 1979. He and his brother-in-law Tom Clifford, both projectionists, teamed up and bought the Roxy. But rather than truly stepping into the role of theater owners, the duo proposed to keep the place just long enough to update it and sell it. As planned, the partners replaced the original carpet, painted the exterior, added sound-absorbing wall coverings, bought a new projector and sound equipment, the works. But a funny thing happened on the way to the quick profits. Mike had so much fun bring(Continued on page 39)