Fariborz Maseeh is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a pioneer in micro-electromechanical systems.
He made a fortune on the $750 million sale of a software company he founded to Corning Inc. a decade ago, and now manages several hedge funds and other assets through his Picoco LLC in Newport Beach.
He’s also a neighborhood guy who’s adding another title to his resume: theater impresario.
Maseeh’s neighborhood is Corona del Mar, and his theater is The Port.
The old movie house just off East Coast Highway is scheduled to reopen on Friday with a new look and mission. Maseeh—who has spent more than $1 million renovating the place—hopes to win fans and customers with an approach that’s part art-house sophistication and part community roundtable.
Offerings
The Port plans to feature relatively brief runs of independent and foreign films interspersed with other offerings. Maseeh envisions the theater and its stage becoming a place for lectures, recitals and community discussions, too.
The plan calls for plush leather seats and regular cinema fare—popcorn, soft drinks and the like—along with some finer foods that are healthier, as well as fruit juices, wine and beer.
The idea of taking the menu up a notch struck Maseeh several years ago, after he began a renovation of The Port. He didn’t expect that job to take five years, though, and several other theaters have moved to fill that niche. The recently reopened Island Cinema at Fashion Island is one. Michoacan, Mexico-based Cinepolis has a location in Laguna Niguel with leather seats, a dinner menu and cocktails.
Maseeh has taken the recent trend into consideration and decided to match the competition on food and build a reputation on the quality of the movies and other events at The Port while keeping tickets in the $10-to-$15 range. He’s also seeking to make a virtue of another challenge: a lack of dedicated parking for the theater.
“It will be a place that people of the community can walk to and have a different content almost on a daily or weekly basis,” he says. “It will be high content—dynamic programming rather than one movie for several weeks.”
Opening Lineup
The lineup for the soft opening scheduled for Friday gives a preview of Maseeh’s vision. It calls for a screening of First Position, a documentary about ballet dancing that has won a passel of awards at film festivals but taken in less than $1 million at box offices in the U.S. The other movie on tap is Bernie, which has stars Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine in a dark comedy that’s been critically acclaimed but racked up relatively low ticket sales of less than $8 million in a first run through mainstream theaters earlier this year.
The single-screen Port won’t have the same box-office pressures that face big chains. It will open with 150 seats, a relatively modest hurdle to clear as the place attempts to strike a chord in Corona del Mar.
It’s been a long road for the old theater, which had been closed for nearly 10 years before Maseeh bought it in 2007. He originally planned to preserve its façade while turning it into an office. He eventually decided to restore it as a movie house in response to community sentiment—and immediately ran into problems.
“It was in difficult shape—the more we got into it the more problems we discovered. At the end of the day we only kept three walls. Everything else is new, every pipe, wire, the concrete slab.”
That’s the price Maseeh paid for adding the title of impresario to his resume.
“Worth the Effort”
“It’s been worth the effort,” he says. “I want to make sure that this is a place that, when my neighbors in Corona del Mar want to go to see a movie, they can walk in the neighborhood and have a nice place to go.”
Maseeh also has a hunch about the marketplace.
“Right now, with Netflix and the content becoming commoditized, you can see anything at your house,” he says. “But there is something about the social aspect of going to see a good film.”
