It was some years after I’d met him that I learned his last name. He was always Mr. Rene and it seemed he existed nowhere but the theater.
“The theater,” in the time I knew him, was the Prytania, which he bought in the Nineties, though his family were cinema owners, for all I could tell, since God created the heavens and the earth.
It was so perfect when he bought the house. When I first began going to shows there, it was already in its second “counterculture” incarnation, showing first runs in primetime and “culties” late at night. It was in the plush red seats of the Prytania that I watched everything from 1900 to Rocky Horror to Koyannisqatsi and Zardoz. Long before I ever saw the place, rock concerts with silents filled the weekend late nights.
In the Nineties, he also bought and re-opened the State Palace on Canal Street, where he inaugurated a series of showings of classic films, from the grand re-opening party showing Doctor Strangelove, where he introduced me to his friend James Earl Jones, to the showing of the restored print of Gone with the Wind, across Canal from the theater where it had its New Orleans premiere. Just as with the Prytania, Mr. Rene knew you had to give audiences what they wanted, and classic revival series alternated with Friday night raves.
From the time he was a child, when his earliest memories were staring, goggle-eyed, at silent three-reelers at his father’s Imperial on Hagan Street, Rene Brunet was an unapologetic devotee of cinema. His family had been movie house owners since the earliest days of the 20th Century. He, himself, owned the Clabon, the Gallo, the Carver and the venerated Joy on Canal Street (a block up from the State Palace), home of the first New Orleans Film Festival. There was, sometimes it seemed, no theater he hadn’t owned at one time or another.
And, in every house, he was the host and impresario, taking tickets and welcoming each guest, eager to share his joy of celluloid frames passing the lamp at two dozen per second, ever delighted by the sheer magic of images moving across a two-story white wall in a dark room filled with people.
To the very end, Mr. Rene never passed up a chance to invite moviegoers into the dark, where the mystery he’d discovered as a child, lived. He was, is, and ever will be known as our city’s ambassador to the land of cinema.
Thank you, Mr. Rene, for all the years of wonder and delight. The house lights have dimmed. May the feature about to start be a blockbuster.
Notices:
Gambit Weekly
Times-Picayune
WWL