Nicki Wilson was shocked when her local newspaper reported in March 2023 that the Triplex Theater, an independent four-screen movie house in Great Barrington, Mass., was shutting down after almost three decades in business.

The Triplex, the only theater in town, was a much-loved fixture, attracting moviegoers from all around the Berkshires, even on winter nights when not much else was open, Ms. Wilson said.

“I couldn’t imagine living in a town without a movie theater,” she said.

Ms. Wilson wasn’t the only one who felt this way, and after a communitywide campaign the Triplex reopened in November 2023 in a much different form. No longer is it dependent on ticket and popcorn sales. The Triplex has become a nonprofit organization relying on donations, grants and plenty of volunteer labor. And instead of leaning on the next Hollywood blockbuster, the Triplex focuses on what the community wants to see.

“In an independent theater, you can show what you want,” said Gail Lansky, vice president of the Triplex’s board. “You can show retrospectives. You can show foreign films. You can do film festivals. Free Saturdays for kids”

Certainly not all nonprofit theaters are doing well, but the model has worked, at least so far, in places like the Berkshires, where a devoted and well-heeled clientele is willing and able to support the arts. Two nearby nonprofit movie theaters in New York, the Moviehouse in Millerton and the Crandell Theater in Chatham, have attracted sizable fan bases. Across the country, more than 250 movie theaters are nonprofits, said Bryan Braunlich, executive director of the Cinema Foundation, a movie-industry group that provides research for cinemas.

“We are definitely seeing a trend of communities rallying around their local theaters,” he said.

And movie theaters have needed saving. Since 2019, the number of screens operating in the United States has declined 12 percent, to 36,369 as of 2023, said David Hancock, chief analyst in media and entertainment at the research firm Omdia. The popularity of at-home streaming over the past decade was a factor. Before the pandemic, audience numbers were already waning, but Covid nearly dealt the industry a death blow, as consumers got used to staying home and became pickier about what movies they went to a theater to see.

“People certainly came back, but much more slowly,” said the Triplex’s former owner, Richard Stanley. “Ultimately, I saw the handwriting on the wall and decided I had to close.”

When a theater shuts down in town, it’s not just a problem for film buffs. Because of their unique architecture, with sloped floors and few windows, they are hard to convert to other purposes and often leave prominent spaces empty.

Becoming a nonprofit allows theaters to draw on different revenue sources, like film festivals, and the hope is that a theater catering to the people of a town will build a loyal and supportive base.

This doesn’t happen overnight. That was the case with the Belcourt Theater in Nashville. A community group had raised millions of dollars to operate and renovate the 1925 movie palace, which briefly served as the main stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

“All of us who work in the theater remember the days when we’d show ‘Badlands’ to four people, and now we show ‘Badlands’ to 150 to 200 people,” said the Belcourt’s executive director, Stephanie Silverman, referring to the director Terrence Malick’s debut feature from 1973.

Those who rallied around the Triplex are hoping for the same. When the theater opened in 1995 on the site of a burned-down lumberyard, nearby shopping centers had sucked the life out of Main Street and Great Barrington was struggling economically, said Mr. Stanley, Triplex’s former owner.

Main Street is a very different place today, largely because of an influx of tourists and weekenders, and the Triplex “was a very pivotal, really core thing that brought people to town,” said Betsy Andrus, executive director of the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce.

By 2023, two other multiplexes in the Berkshires, in Lanesborough and North Adams, had already shut down. But Ms. Wilson believed there was hope for the Triplex. She called Mr. Stanley to ask if there was some way to reopen the theater.

“I asked what we could do, and he said, ‘Well, pay me $1 million and you can buy the theater,’” she said.

Ms. Wilson didn’t have $1 million to spare, but she did have plenty of friends. In April 2023, she invited her neighbors to her living room to discuss saving the theater. The group, which called itself Save the Triplex, created a GoFundMe page and a website to raise money. The response was overwhelming, said Hannah Wilken, who had spent many weekends at the Triplex with her friends as a teenager and was involved with the fund-raising.

Even people who hadn’t been to the theater since before Covid felt a visceral connection to the place. “We just started getting inundated with people saying: ‘I want to help. I want to donate. Sign me up,’” Ms. Wilken said.

The actress Karen Allen, who owns a fiber-arts store in town, turned over memorabilia from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which she starred in, for an auction. A major boost came when the photographer Gregory Crewdson donated $225,000, after selling copies of a signed limited edition of his work.

Within a few months, the group had raised $246,000 — enough to pay the first year’s mortgage. Mr. Stanley liked the idea of keeping the Triplex alive as a nonprofit run by the town’s residents and gave Ms. Wilson’s group a five-year mortgage to buy the theater.

The campaign has benefited from the large and devoted Berkshires arts community, which regularly draws celebrities to town. Bill Murray showed up at the Triplex to discuss “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” the Wes Anderson film in which Mr. Murray played the title character, and Joan Baez was there for a showing of a documentary on her life. Arlo Guthrie discussed the 1969 movie “Alice’s Restaurant,” which had been filmed nearby. Not all the events have made money, but enough have done well to keep the Triplex going.

Movie theaters remain a dicey business, and for the Triplex to survive long term it will need a lot more money. The four screening rooms need major renovations. And although an active board oversees the theater’s operations, it had just two full-time paid employees until this month. (A third full-time employee starts later this month, and the theater also has part-time help including the people who sell tickets and popcorn.) Ms. Wilson, the board’s president, hopes to hire more people, but for now the theater still depends largely on volunteers.

“The challenges are real,” said Ms. Lansky, the board’s vice president. “Everybody knows that an independent theater cannot rely on tickets and concessions alone.”

Nonprofit theaters also tend to be a low priority for film distributors, Mr. Hancock of Omdia said. That means they can’t always show the latest Hollywood blockbuster and must find other ways to keep up audience enthusiasm and a continuing commitment from the community members to donate money and volunteer their time, he said.

“The model can work, but only if the cinema is valued by the local community,” Mr. Hancock added.

Still, those behind the Triplex’s revival believe an audience is out there. Sitting at home and watching movies on Netflix just isn’t the same thing, said Ben Elliott, the creative director at the theater and one of its few paid staff members.

Mr. Elliott grew up in Great Barrington and regularly visited the Triplex as a child. One of the things he missed during Covid was the sound of conversations in the lobby after a movie ended.

“Being together in a physical space is something that’s becoming rarer and rarer, and holding on to that, I think, is important for communities across the country,” he said. “It’s also, for us, the most viable way to keep a theater open.”

The post One Fix for Ailing Movie Theaters? Becoming Nonprofits. appeared first on Our Story Insight.

After fleeing criminal charges in Tokyo two years ago, the former Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn waged a public campaign attacking the Japanese justice system, arguing that conditions in the country’s prisons were designed to “lead you to despair.”

Now, Michael Taylor, the American who engineered Mr. Ghosn’s dramatic escape, is experiencing those harsh conditions for himself, his legal team says, as it campaigns to have him returned to the United States.

Mr. Taylor, the former Green Beret who spirited Mr. Ghosn out of Japan in a speaker box, has suffered frostbite because of a lack of heating at Fuchu Prison in suburban Tokyo, where he is serving a two-year sentence, his lawyers say .

Mr. Taylor, 61, and his son, Peter, 28, who aided the escape, pleaded guilty in June in a Tokyo court after having been arrested in the United States and extradited. They are now awaiting approval from the Japanese authorities as they seek to serve the rest of their sentences in an American prison.

While Michael Taylor may be one of Japan’s highest-profile convicts, his experience in its penal system is not unique. Japan has come under scrutiny at home and abroad for its treatment of prisoners and detainees, with critics pointing to inadequate medical care and an almost ubiquitous lack of heating and cooling that can lead to life-threatening illness.

Since being sentenced last year, Mr. Taylor has been kept in an unheated cell, sitting on a thin mat that offers little protection from the cold cement floor, said one of his US-based lawyers, Paul Kelly.

Mr. Taylor’s frostbite developed while he labored in a prison factory, Mr. Kelly said. Fuchu inmates are not allowed to wear gloves at work, he added, and they are required to wash their hands multiple times a day in cold water as part of the facility’s hygiene regimen.

A prison doctor diagnosed Mr Taylor with frostbite in January, according to Mr Kelly. His fingers had turned red and were starting to blister, the lawyer said.

Mr. Taylor is not able to speak directly with his family or his US legal team, but he described the diagnosis to one of his Japanese lawyers during a recent jailhouse visit. The lawyer reported Mr Taylor’s condition in emails to his family and Mr Kelly.

“We’re distressed,” said Lamia Taylor, Mr Taylor’s wife. “This is serious now. This is a health issue.”

Contacted by The New York Times, Japan’s department of corrections said that it could not comment on individual cases but that prisoners were provided adequate clothing, blankets and medical care for cold conditions.

A spokesman for the US Embassy in Tokyo declined to comment on Mr. Taylor, citing privacy considerations, but said that the United States had “long expressed concern to Japanese authorities about inadequate heating in prisons and detention centers, and continue to encourage the authorities to improve conditions.”

In recent weeks, as Mr. Taylor and the other prisoners have been restricted to their cells to prevent the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, he has had more access to blankets, allowing his condition to improve, Mr. Kelly said.

Still, Mr. Taylor’s experience highlights longstanding concerns about the Japanese prison system, which local activists have criticized as unsafe and overly punitive.

updated

Feb 4, 2022, 9:47 am ET

Yuko Shiota, a spokeswoman for the Center for Prisoners’ Rights, an advocacy organization that campaigns for prison reform in Japan, said that prisoners were often diagnosed with frostbite, sometimes so severe that it could lead to amputation.

“They say they have an insufficient budget, and the problem has not improved,” she said of the lack of prison heating systems.

In the 2020 edition of its annual report on global human rights, the US State Department noted that in Japan “some prisons continued to lack adequate medical care and sufficient heating in the winter or cooling in the summer.”

Mistreatment of foreign prisoners and detainees in Japan has been thrust into the spotlight in recent years by several cases in which a lack of adequate medical care led to serious injury or even death.

Last spring, a young woman from Sri Lanka died in a detention facility in Nagoya after officials there repeatedly refused to grant her requests to be transferred to a hospital. A government investigation into her death declined to assign blame but recommended reforms to the center’s medical procedures.

In fleeing Japan in 2019 just before New Year’s Day, Mr. Ghosn cited his belief that Japan’s justice system would never give him a fair trial. He was out on bail after having been arrested multiple times on charges of financial wrongdoing — charges that he called a product of corporate intrigue backed by the Japanese government.

Mr. Taylor and his son helped him plan and execute his escape, part of which included being hidden in a box that was put on a flight first to Turkey and then to Beirut. Mr. Ghosn has remained in Lebanon, free from the threat of extradition, and he has been trying to rehabilitate his image.

The Taylors returned to the United States, where the father shared with the news media his story of helping Mr. Ghosn flee. The American authorities arrested the Taylors in the spring of 2020, acting on an extradition request from Japan.

They spent months battling the extradition, arguing in court that prison conditions in Japan amounted to torture. But they were handed over to Japan last March and put on trial three months later. Mr Taylor was given a sentence of two years, and his son received one year and eight months. Peter Taylor is being held in a different prison.

In October, the United States approved the Taylors’ application to serve out the remainder of their sentences in the US prison system. But the Japanese government is “dragging their heels,” Mr. Kelly said.

An official from Japan’s Ministry of Justice said that the transfer process typically took at least a year.

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

The post American Behind Carlos Ghosn Escape Is Ailing in Japanese Prison, Lawyers Say appeared first on Our Story Insight.