🎬 Cable Car Cinema

Cable Car Cinema and Cafe was a 100-seat, single-screen independent movie theater and restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island. Raymond Bilodeau opened the cinema in 1976 in a former truck garage on North Main Street at the foot of College Hill, and the business formed long-term relationships with the neighborhood's Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Commercially unsuccessful at first, it eventually attracted a loyal community of cinephiles. It became known for its loveseat-style seating, and for screening foreign, independent, experimental, and classic films. It was renovated in 1989 to include a café, which became an attraction in its own right, and again after ownership changed hands to Daniel Kamil and Emily Steffian in 2008. In 2014, it was one of the first theaters to screen the controbersial film The Interview. Due to competition from streaming services and multiplexes, the owners decided to close in 2018 when they could not come to an arrangement with RISD, the building's owner, to buy the building for themselves.