TACOMA, WAsh – Loyalty of fans. Love of films. Labor of volunteers. These phrases describe how Tacoma’s Grand Cinema was founded and continues to operate. Ten years ago the theater opened as a nonprofit, community-owned art house.

Today, the cinema draws an estimated 100,000 filmgoers a year, said Michel Rocchi, president of the theater’s board of directors.

The theater’s a key fixture in the city’s cultural landscape. David Graybill, president of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, calls it a “pioneer in establishing the foundation of the mix of cultural activities” in the downtown area. He said its “well-rounded entertainment offerings” are “a very attractive part of the total mix.”

The Grand has become an anchor for what Graybill calls “a renaissance” of the neighborhood surrounding it. “They were up there in that cinema before the revitalization came up the hill to meet them,” he said, referring to new housing and the upgrading of commercial properties in the area in the last several years.

But the Grand had a previous life under a different name. When that first incarnation faltered, local moviegoers, fiercely loyal to the foreign and independently made American films shown at the theater, stepped in to save the cinema.

Among the labors of love performed by those early fans:

Throughout the summer of 1998, Paul Jacobson, a retired Tacoma Community College instructor, and Joanne Francis, a self-described “freelancer in life,” strapped on sandwich boards touting the theater and strolled through the weekly downtown farmers market handing out fliers and chatting up passers-by.

“We were so excited about it we never stopped talking about it,” said Francis, who wrote a history of the theater’s early years in a self-published booklet titled “The Grand Cinema Story.”

Elodie Vandevert, a former dean’s assistant at Pacific Lutheran University, volunteered her time to make popcorn and clean the theater. She, Jacobson and Francis were all members of the Grand’s board of directors.

But perhaps the most significant labor of love was undertaken in 1997 by Penelope Richards, the board’s first president. Film companies wanted payment guarantees before they would supply movies to the theater, Richards said. If revenues didn’t cover the costs of film rentals, Richards pledged to make up the difference out of her own pocket.

Now the theater is close to a million-dollar-a-year operation. Projected gross income for this year is $933,000, up from $850,000 in 2006, said executive director Phil Cowan, who added that it’s operating comfortably in the black. (The theater has 10 staffers, with an annual payroll around $240,000.)

Budget projections at the beginning of the year estimated the theater would take in $30,000 more than it would spend by the end of 2007. It surpassed that figure in July, said Rocchi, the board president.

Before the Grand Cinema became a nonprofit, the theater was the commercial, for-profit Grand Tacoma Cinema. Before that, it was the Tacoma Odd Fellows hall, built in 1925.

The Odd Fellows had long departed when entrepreneur Paul Doyle rented and renovated the building into a three-screen, 315-seat cinema, which opened in 1995.

But Doyle went into debt renovating in a letter to the Tacoma City Council, he wrote that he had invested nearly $400,000 in the project and didn’t have enough money to cover the costs of renting films, according to reports published in The News Tribune at the time.

Soon the money problems led major art-market distributors, such as Miramax and Sony Classics, to stop sending movies, which meant the theater couldn’t show the latest hot art-house titles. By 1997 Doyle said he was going to shut down unless either the City of Tacoma or fans of the Grand saved it. Enter Richards. Enter Francis. Enter Jacobson. Enter Vandevert. Enter a lot of people who regularly attended movies there.

Before Doyle’s cinema, Tacomans who loved art-house films traveled out of town to watch them.

“I had always gone to foreign films in Seattle, and I was delighted when the theater opened,” Richards said. No way did she and other Grand fans want to see those old high-mileage days return.

“We were just passionate about making sure that this type of movie was going to be shown in Tacoma,” said Megan Warfield, an office worker with the state Department of Ecology, who was a Grand fan and later served as board president. “In the early days that was the only thing that held that place together.”

In 1997 the theater’s membership organization, Grand Tacoma Cine Club, reorganized itself into a nonprofit group, and Doyle turned the theater over to the club. Thus, the Grand was transferred not sold. The theater’s debt remained with Doyle. (Membership at that time was around 50. Today it’s 810, said Cowan.)

“I feel like I’ve just given a quarter-of-a-million-dollar gift to the City of Tacoma,” Doyle said at the time.

After the transfer, the cinema closed for a few weeks and reopened in April 1997 as simply the Grand Cinema.

Why the name change and the closure?

“To convince people we were a separate entity,” Richards said, adding that at first, “many of the distributors thought we were just a front” for Doyle. Her agreement to personally assume the cinema’s financial risk was one way to prove the organization wasn’t connected with the previous owner.

“I felt very secure doing that,” Richards said. “I thought it was fixable. It wasn’t like there wasn’t a customer base. It was just so poorly run.

“Right off the bat it started to be turned around,” she said. “We didn’t have to wait months for people to start showing up.”

Ticket sales increased. With Richards signing the Grand’s checks, the bills were paid promptly. Distributors took note and began to let the Grand have their hits. The Japanese-made “Shall We Dance” was one of the first. It played for weeks.

After 18 months, Richards said she was freed of her personal obligation for the Grand’s debts. She said she was never out-of-pocket for so much as a dime.

Although the financial situation was improving, upheavals among the management were just starting. The cinema has had four managers since its founding.

“It got a bit hairy,” said Jacobson who became chairman of the board in 1998 and served three one-year terms. Most of the people on the board of directors were film buffs, but none had any experience running a theater, and that inexperience caused friction.

Paul Holt, the Grand’s first manager, said he and the board “butted heads a couple of times.”

“I wasn’t the only one who ran into this. I think everybody who’s ever held that post at the Grand has at some point clashed with the board,” said Holt. “I don’t even know that it’s so much that it’s people who don’t know how to run a theater as it’s just too many fingers in the pie.”

Holt left in 1999 to pursue a writing career and was succeeded by Phil Whitt, whose tenure was stormy; he resigned twice. In 2004, a few months after Whitt’s departure, the board hired Erik Hanberg to manage day-to-day operations and Shawn Sylvian as artistic director, a newly created position.

Hanberg and Sylvian quit within weeks of each other in 2006. But they founded the annual 72-Hour Film Competition, in which teams of local filmmakers make short films in a short time frame. The competition has grown in popularity, with more and more amateur Steven Spielbergs making minimovies in the community. This year 32 teams participated.

And, in their final year, Sylvian organized the theater’s first Tacoma Film Festival, now also an annual event. Fifty-five films, shorts and features were screened at last year’s festival. This year’s edition will run Oct. 4 through 11, and there will be at least 40 films on the schedule, said Cowan, who was hired last December to replace Hanberg and Sylvian.

Although the board sets policy and the executive director is responsible for day-to-day operations, it’s the cinema’s approximately 250 volunteers who keep the place running. It was that way in the beginning. It’s that way today.

“If we don’t have volunteers, we don’t run,” said Roshni Robert, the Grand’s volunteer coordinator.

With only a small paid staff, the theater’s volunteers do everything from tearing tickets to making popcorn to cleaning bathrooms to sweeping the floors between shows. They get free movie tickets for every shift they work, so their unpaid work falls in the labor of love category.

Jennifer DeHart, who volunteered for two years before getting hired recently as a paid house manager, said the first time she walked in the door, “I fell in love with this theater.”

The best part about volunteering there? “Meeting people.” Volunteers like to ask moviegoers how they liked the films they’ve just seen and discuss the pictures with them. “And you’re helping the theater, helping it survive,” DeHart said.

Most of the volunteers are middle-aged, but there’s a growing number of young people joining them. Sonia Lupher, 18, a recent graduate of the Tacoma School of the Arts, said she started volunteering at 16.

“The most rewarding aspect,” she said, “was meeting and chatting with the people that work there,” all of whom are knowledgeable about film.

“I really felt like I was expanding my knowledge about film while I worked there,” Lupher said.

Moviegoers at the Grand feel the love as well. Ted Baer, a Tacoma dentist who says he attends movies “as often as I can,” said, “The attraction is it seems like it belongs to Tacoma. There is a sense of ownership.

“You feel like it’s kind of a throwback to the way theaters used to be in terms of it seemed like they were independent rather than just a franchise.”