A little about us...
We are Carmen and Ian Brown, married for fourteen years, and this autumn we are packing a station wagon and setting out on the adventure of our lives: fifty states and at least one hundred movie theatres in eight months. We are starting at Mile Marker Zero in Key West in early September and driving all the way through until the credits come up at CinemaCon in Las Vegas the following April.
Unlike Doc and Marty, where we are going, we definitely need roads.
We are driving because the best of the cinema has never fit inside an office. In every state there is an owner, a projectionist, an usher keeping the screen alight, and we want to shake their hands, sit in their seats, and react to a movie with a room full of strangers, the way we always have. They built it. We are coming to celebrate it.
The cinema has always been part of our story, long before this road trip began. For Ian, it started the day his dad took him to see E.T. (1982), and part of him never came down from that flying bicycle. Thirty years in the cinema industry later, that hasn't changed. Carmen grew up in Italy, and after we met, cinema quickly became something we shared. In fact, our early days together were built around it.
Within a year we had left our jobs and started a touring cinema: a 35mm projector, a screen, and surround sound in the back of a van, taken to any church, castle, or village hall in Scotland that would have us, bringing new releases to towns that had lost their picture house. We spent every day on the road, and we learned to love and appreciate the hush that falls over a hall full of strangers the moment a town gets its cinema back. We still hold hands every time the lights go down.
That van grew into a company, Indy Cinema Group, and after years of growth, the company eventually found a new home with Fandango, with its offering now known as Fandango1. Today, Ian leads Cinema Solutions and Carmen leads Cinema Partnerships for Fandango1.
But building a company was never the whole story. Like Carl and Ellie, we kept a jar marked "Adventure" and this trip is just the beginning of us breaking it open.
See you at the movies,
P.S. If you are a cinema on our route, write to us. We would love for you to save us a seat.
