Film Journal March 2018

He continues, “Our plan this year is to do reserved seating and
to upgrade seats. We know all about recliners, but the other part of
that is that we intend to obtain liquor licenses—at least wine and
beer—in every location where we can. With that, we also intend
to offer a menu of ‘good’ food. Not in-theatre dining, not gourmet
foods in most cases, but food and beverage choices that complement
a one-stop shop at a reasonable cost for families.”
Costs were certainly reasonable back in 1994, and options on
snack and content much more limited, Mayo recalls. “We did not
have to be as much of a curator of content as we are today. Our
business was to take whatever came down the pike, put it up on
the screen, making moviegoing a family-friendly atmosphere.”
In addition to Clearview Cinemas’ signature fireplaces, “we had a
phone on the concession stand that allowed people to call home,
because there were no cellphones in those days. You could call
your babysitter and call a cab, whatever you needed to do... Our
business has since evolved, and it is much more exciting today than
it was then. Thankfully, we have a great team behind it all, many
of whom were with me at Clearview, Cinedigm and at DigiPlex
Destinations,” Mayo notes, mentioning his other ventures. “They
are allowing me to be a true chairman of the board now, as opposed
to somebody keeping the weeds [away].”
With “many, many years of experience in dealing with a combination
of audiences and demographic data, which is far more available
to us today than it certainly was in the Clearview days,” New
Vision Theatres aims for the best results in each location, Mayo
says. “So, the challenge is different. In some ways it is greater and
in other ways made easier by the availability of information and
content choices that simply were not there before. DigiPlex Destinations
was an evolution, and certainly a major step forward. After
that, all we did was to take some 26 DigiPlex sites and folded them
into Carmike Cinemas. We had a much bigger platform to work
with content, reaching 150 Carmike locations.”
Mayo’s time at Carmike opened another opportunity for him
when AMC Entertainment became interested in those very locations.
“As a member of the senior team at Carmike, I was very
much aware of all the discussions, and really understood that at the
end of that year it was time for me to retire,” he contends. “I was
very happy to be able to do that, to go on a few boards, and at least
keep my finger in the pie of business and try to bring my experience
to the table. And to play a little more golf, which I am terrible
at,” he chuckles. Tennis, sailing and spending time with nine
grandchildren also beckoned Mayo. “There’s a classic ‘Yeah, this is
what I want to do’ phase. But, little by little, conversations started
to come to me about the divestiture of certain theatres. ‘You could
easily assemble a team,’ I was told, ‘and financing would be, for you,
a very easy thing to do.’ All of which was true,” he says. After trying
to resist initially, Mayo admits to changing his mind. “Maybe we’ll
buy a few theatres just to keep some good people employed, and
let’s see where it goes from there.”
The rest is (exhibition) history, as they say. “I was heavily
recruited to put a bid in for the entire package… I was
encouraged actively by AMC and Carmike, and by the
Department of Justice, because of my history and reputation in
the business. All those things told me, ‘Okay, if I can get my
team to sign up for this, and become chairman and not a CEO
of the venture, then why not?’ I will put a package together, get
the right financial backing, and then let’s see if we can pave this
and build from there. It turned out a bit of a rollercoaster, to
be honest. We were on again, off again as a bidder, ultimately
getting back after we thought we had lost the bid.”
Mayo recalls receiving a call in the parking lot after grocery
shopping with his wife. “If we are the only group you talk to from
now on, of course, we will get back in the saddle,” he told the
people on the other end of the call. “We did just that and closed
in April last year. Only to find that we entered four or five of the
worst months the industry had seen in a long time. What a great
way to start! That told us a lot about our financial partners—that
they were big boys, and that they understood what we were going
through in transition to a platform that we had to create from
scratch. After all, we did not have a business in place.”
“We had a bunch of theatres, and we had to scramble,” Mayo
says of the good-news/bad-news scenario that followed. “Putting
a platform together from scratch means you can cherry-pick the
vendors and the choices of software and hardware to do something
that gives you the maximum amount of flexibility in the 21st
century.” Doing just that, “we really started running this business
in September, for the first time as New Vision Theatres.” Some
locations do go back, way back with Bud Mayo, however, such as
the Rialto in Westfield, New Jersey, where corporate headquarters
are located. In a further nod to continuity, New Vision’s accounting
department is based in Columbus, Georgia, near the former
Carmike offices. “Well, all our theatres are my favorites, as they
represent opportunity. Some are performing better. As every circuit,
we have our battleships. Three or four of those, and we expect to
have five or six more theatres that really anybody in the country
would want to own.”
Mayo was able to weigh in on which theatres to acquire during
the bidding process. “We did not take the entire package as it
was presented.” In some cases that may have been a disadvantage,
especially not knowing some of the AMC locations, of which six
ended up with New Vision. “Let’s take each building,” he says of
the process, “and strip it down to exactly what it is. What kind of
product has been successful there? What can we do that would be
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