Downtown Fayetteville’s Cameo Art House Theatre is for sale after nearly 24 years of serving as the city’s “alternative cinematic experience,” as it describes itself.
The Cameo, at 225 Hay St., was one of the pioneering businesses that opened in the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of downtown Fayetteville’s long-running revitalization efforts. Its grand opening was Oct. 7, 2000, with the U.S. premiere of “Shadow of the Vampire,” starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe and Carey Elwes, The Fayetteville Observer reported at the time. Tickets were $75.
Since then, the Cameo has continued to be a downtown destination attraction, with foreign and independent films that don’t make it to Fayetteville’s other movie theaters, plus popular mainstream films, special screenings, film festivals, live music and comedy shows, and other events.
People interested in purchasing the Cameo should contact co-owner Nasim Kuenzel at nasim@cameoarthouse.com. She said she and her husband, Chris, plan to complete a deal by the end of the year.
They are open to various options, Kuenzel said, from selling just the theater business, to selling the business plus the whole building. It includes two auditoriums, digital projection equipment, the theater lobby, and a rental loft apartment. The Kuenzels are willing to advise the new owners through the transition, she said. She declined to specify an asking price.
In addition to the Kuenzels, the Cameo has four employees, she said.
Theater will shut down if no one takes over
If the movie theater doesn’t get a buyer, it will close, Kuenzel told CityView on Tuesday. She and Chris are in their mid-60s and are ready to retire. “There’s so much we have not done,” because so much time was spent “taking care of it as our third child. I feel like our child has graduated by now and needs to get its own thing going,” she said, laughing.
“We want to go to film festivals now. We want to go to other theaters,” she said. “We want to do everything we can to help out whomever comes next, and that would be the most fun we can have.”
If the Cameo Theatre closes, the Fayetteville area will be left with four other movie houses: the locally owned Omni Cinemas 8, the AMC Fayetteville 14 and the AMC Market Fair 15 (both owned by the AMC Theatres chain), and the Millstone 14 in Hope Mills (owned by the Stone Theatres chain).
Nasim Kuenzel said she, Chris, and their business partner, Eric Lindstrom, first thought in the 1990s about opening an art house movie theater because the theaters in Fayetteville didn’t show many independent and foreign films.
“That was the mission — to bring all of that,” Kuenzel said. “So it was definitely needed, because everybody had to go to the Triangle to see movies that would otherwise not be seen in Fayetteville.
“But then what we kind of saw throughout the years is that we had people from Wilmington and the Triangle and other places just to come to Fayetteville, to go to our movies, to sit in our theater. And it was just so heartwarming, heartwarming,” she said. “They actually would tell us, you know, ‘We’re from Cary, but we just came here because we love the theater.’”
They bought the former Dixie Theater in 1998 — which the Cameo’s website says first opened in 1914 to screen silent films — and set about renovating.
“The fact about it was that when we bought the building, there was hardly anything left in it,” Kuenzel said. “So we had to redo everything, pretty much, from, you know, roof, all the way to plumbing, electrical. It was just an empty shell, pretty much.”
The Cameo has room for 125 patrons in its main auditorium, where the old-school wooden seats were styled after those of the famous Fox Theater in Los Angeles, Kuenzel said. The upstairs auditorium, called the Loge, accommodates 38 in deep leather chairs.
Opportunity to grow the business
Lindstrom — who later stepped back from the theater, but still has ownership in the building — and the Kuenzels are architects. With their day jobs, they were unable to put the time in to bring the theater up to what Nasim Kuenzel thinks is its full potential, she said.
She is hopeful that a new owner will be able to put more time into the theater to boost its usage and revenue.
“We see that building, with what it has right now in it, to be at least a 12-hour-a-day working machine,” Kuenzel said. “Unfortunately, we’re not really utilizing it the way it could be. And we’re hoping that it could be having children’s film festivals during the day, and then regular movies at night, and then perhaps comedy shows at night and lectures and concerts in between. And I mean for companies to use it as their meeting spaces.
“It just needs to really have its door open all day,” she said. “And we hope that there are young people like the way we were 24 years ago, that would want to make that happen and keep it going.”
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.This story was made possible by donations from readers like you to the CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
