Columbus has rich history in movie business

Nearly a century of Columbus’ supporting role in the motion picture industry appears to be all but over.

Thursday night when the pending sale of Columbus-based Carmike Cinemas to AMC of Leawood, Kan., was announced, you could almost see the credits rolling across a big screen.

Roy Martin Sr. … Roy Martin Jr. … E.D. Martin … Carl Patrick … Michael Patrick … Roy Martin III. They all worked behind the scenes to put Columbus — in many ways the antithesis of Hollywood — in the movie game.

Friday morning, Roy Martin III, known as Buddy, saw the screaming Ledger-Enquirer headline: “AMC PULLS THE TRIGGER ON $1.1B CARMIKE BUYOUT.” The deal, in the works for nearly a year, is expected to close before the end of this year.

“It’s the end of an era,” said Buddy Martin, who is 73 and has been out of the industry for about two decades.

It all started when Roy Martin Sr. purchased an existing nickelodeon theater on Broadway in downtown Columbus.

“It was 1912, 1914, I am not really sure,” Buddy Martin said. “… I think it was called the Benita, but I am not real sure about all that, either.”

But there is one thing Buddy Martin is sure about — the way the movie exhibition business was going to make a profit was forged in the early days by his grandfather.

“He was the first one to stick popcorn and drinks in there,” Buddy Martin said. “At the time, that made a lot of people mad. It was too nice a place to do that.”

Popcorn and drinks are a large part of the foundation of Columbus’ role in the movie industry — or at least it was where the profit could be made. Roy Martin Sr. grew that one downtown Columbus theater into a Martin Theaters, which owned and operated movie houses and drive-ins across the Southeast. By the time Roy Martin Jr. sold Martin Theaters in 1969 to Atlanta business tycoon J.B. Fuqua, it had grown to more than 200 screens in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky. Mostly in small towns, Martin Theaters also operated in bigger places like Atlanta, Nashville and Chattanooga.

“In that deal were two television stations,” Buddy Martin said. “Fuqua wasn’t after the movie theaters as much as he was after the television stations.”

It was a $30 million deal, Buddy Martin remembered.

“I think they paid $20 million and took about $10 million in debt,” Buddy Martin said.

The company was sold at the time because there were eight third-generation children who were heirs, Buddy Martin said.

Many of the acquisitions Martin Theaters had made over the years occurred after the primary owner had died and the business was in an estate, Buddy Martin said.

“Those were almost always a mess,” he said. “And we did not want to have eight heirs trying to run the business.”

That sale to Fuqua also provided the bridge for Carl Patrick Sr. to expand his role in the movie exhibition business. He had married into the Martin family and went to work for Martin Theaters.

“Old Roy Martin liked him,” Carl Patrick Jr. said in his father’s 2007 obituary.

By 1969, Patrick was an executive with the Martin chain. He eventually was elected president and chief executive officer of Fuqua.

By 1982, Fuqua Industries was selling the theaters. Carl Patrick Sr. and his sons Carl Patrick Jr. and Michael Patrick put up $250,000 of their own and borrowed $25 million to buy the then 250-screen Martin Theaters from Fuqua Industries. The new company was named Carmike for Patrick’s two sons.

“The No. 1 game for us was survival,” Carl Patrick Sr. said in a 1990s Ledger-Enquirer interview.

Trying to become fit enough to survive, the company had to capitalize on its strengths. And thus the company’s strategy of focusing on secondary markets — small and midsized cities — was formed.

“It was not that we wanted the secondary markets. When we bought Martin Theaters, its weakest theaters were in larger markets. It had not held onto the bigger markets,” Patrick said. And at the same time, the other leading theater chains were “zeroing in” on the largest markets, Patrick said.

While Carmike was building its business, Buddy Martin, after a stint in the construction industry, returned to his theater roots. He owned Martin Cinemas of Kentucky, which owned and operated about 40 screens in Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. In the mid-1990s, he sold that business to Regal Cinemas, a Tennessee-based competitor of Carmike.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, Carmike was in an acquisition mode. In the mid-1980s, Carmike opened a state of the art corporate office in downtown Columbus at the corner of 13th Street and First Avenue.

By 1999, the company had more than 11,000 employees and generated almost $500 million in revenue.

Then it came to a screeching halt.

In 2000, the company filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection. Michael Patrick was leading the company at the time and remained in control until January 2009 when he was removed by the Board of Directors.

David Passman was brought in to lead the company and it remained headquartered in downtown Columbus.

“I would say it was quite troubled. It was very heavily debt-laden,” Passman said of the company in a March 2015 interview with the Ledger-Enquirer. “We probably had a leverage ratio of six times, meaning six times our earnings was in debt. And that’s pretty heavy.”

The state of the company led Passman to access the alternatives.

“Among those alternatives were put the company up for sale, try to go it on our own, or split the company up into pieces and try to make a go of it,” he said. “You split the company up into pieces, for instance, you could sell a bunch of theaters, raise cash, reduce your debt, and then be a leaner, meaner organization.”

That’s not how he has rebuilt it over the last six years.

“It took a very short period of time for me, along with the COO and CFO of the company, and the full support of the board of directors to determine that the company was not being led properly, not that the company was in trouble structurally. So, we changed the direction of the company on how it was led.”

When Buddy Martin read of the sale of what started as his grandfather’s company, he said he had a couple of thoughts.

“My first one was about that headquarters downtown and the people who work there,” he said. “Then my second one was, ‘I wonder if I am going to still get a free movie pass.’”

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 5:50 PM with the headline "Columbus has rich history in movie business."