The face of Denver arthouse film for the past 27 years has popped her last corn and seen her last cinematic Colorado sunset

When I walked into the Mayan Theatre on Wednesday and asked the young woman behind the concessions counter whether Robin Hyden was working that night, she nearly burst into tears.

Hyden, affectionately known as “The Chez Lady” for 27 years, is moving to Pennsylvania, this sweetly lugubrious worker told me. Hyden’s last day as a general manager will be Dec. 15.

I felt a pit in my stomach. The same pit I felt on Aug. 3, 2024, when I learned that in just five days, the disintegrating parent company known as Landmark Theatres would be shuttering the Chez Artiste and its three screens after 52 years in the University Hills Mall. This just two weeks after Landmark had unceremoniously condemned the 100-year-old Esquire Theatre to redevelopment with a dubious statement from President Kevin Holloway promising that “Landmark’s renowned Chez Artiste will remain open.” (It did not say “for another two weeks.”)

Just two months after that, Landmark Theatres itself would be offered up at auction – and there were no takers. The entire empire has remained in limbo ever since. 

Hyden joined the Chez in 1998, first helping with concessions, then moving into the box office (meaning she slid 5 feet over to a different cash register), then into the projection booth, and finally as general manager and all-around den mother to the cinema’s dozen or so young counterculture cine-smarties.

Since Landmark closed the Chez, Hyden has been helping to create new, blended families of ongoing employees at the Landmark’s only remaining screens in Denver – at the Mayan and in Greenwood Village.

Hyden is the friendly maternal public face of Colorado arthouse cinema. Her impending departure very much feels like yet another end to yet another era in local indie film.

Hyden, now 63, and husband Bruce Shamma are moving back to State College, Pa., where the once-and-future hipsters long ago ran a college record store they called Blue Train in honor of jazz great John Coltrane – aka “Bruce’s god.” 

Hyden’s sullen staff just threw her a sendoff the only way they know how – with a movie. After the final screening of the day, they locked the Mayan‘s doors and treated Hyden to a private, late-night screening of the film of her choice: “Rushmore,” Wes Anderson’s quirky comedy about a 15-year-old boy and his aging mentor (Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray) ridiculously vying for the affection of an elementary-school teacher.

The Mayan kids, as Hyden calls them, stay for regular late-night wisenheimer screenings. Like, say, “The Innocents,” a 1961 cult film that adapts Henry James’ 1898 ghostly novella “The Turn of the Screw” into a psychological horror story.

For me, this story starts in the halcyon days of June 2024. The Chez was showing perhaps my favorite movie (“The Deer Hunter”) on my only day off (Tuesday). Hyden took my $5 (yes, admission to the weekly classic film series is only $5). Then she helped the lone concessions clerk fill my popcorn and super-sized Coke Zero. Then she introduced the film to the large, mostly older daylight turnout, gave away a few prizes and encouraged a post-film conversation, where a crowd gathered around her in the lobby like the rock star she is.

My God, I thought: This woman is magnificent. Here she was the greeter, the provider, the enthusiast and the explainer. I had to know her story, so I approached her and asked for it.

She was immediately deferential, handing me the seed for a much better and fuller story. “In fact,” she told me, “there are four of us who have worked together here at the Chez Artiste for at least 24 years each.” The others were Lisabeth Montgomery Crow, Mara Norman and Michael Wesley. Together, they had put in 108 collective years at the Chez. 

“I must meet you all,” I said. We arranged for a group sit-down – once Hyden cleared it through corporate. Surely a formality.

Problem was: Corporate. Shut. It. Down. Now, why in the world would Landmark resist a glorious feature story about four loyal longtime employees who had built the Chez Artiste into a beloved neighborhood mainstay?

We found out exactly why on Aug. 3, when a tearful Hyden was instructed to post an impersonal closing announcement on the door that blamed “market dynamics and individual theatre performance.” You don’t want to be celebrating longtime employees just a few weeks before shutting down their place of employment.

Still, something wonderfully organic happened on that closing day, when regulars, students and former employees gathered to sign a memory book, trade memories, talk film, eat cake and commune as a signature late-summer Denver sunset rolled with the parking lot as its movie screen. It was a proper family funeral, and it was plain to all that Hyden was the grieving matriarch.

“The loss of the Chez runs particularly deep, as its manager, Robin Hyden, has been so dedicated for years to the presentation of a wide variety of classic films,” a Chez Artiste regular and self-described classic film devotee named Jim Hermanson wrote to me.

“Apparently, her negotiations with the Landmark bigwigs in California were often tough and divisive. But Robin stuck it out, and managed to bring to a faithful Denver audience films they just never would be able to see on the big screen otherwise.” He further credited Hyden’s “faithful and enthusiastic employees” for their brilliant lobby displays and entertaining pre-show clips that rolled before each showtime.

For a century, local film lovers have watched with helpless umbrage as our movie palaces have risen and fallen. Names like the Aladdin, Orpheum and Vogue forever lost to time and redevelopment. Some, like the Paramount, Ogden, Bug and Federal live on as multi-event venues. Any drive-in not named The 88 is a memory. 

The trend is irreversible: Nearly 5,000 movie screens have disappeared since the pandemic, more than half of those in 2022-23. The cause is undeniable: Audience viewing habits have changed. Movie ticket sales fell by 23.5% in 2024. In part because studios are now releasing high-budget films on streaming platforms within a week or so of their theatrical premieres.

The writing is on the wall. And Hyden has read a lot of writing on a lot of walls in her story-filled lifetime.

A people pleaser

Robin Hyden was born in Pasadena, Calif., to a painter mom and a doctor dad who finished up his residency in 1967 and immediately moved the family back to its midwestern roots in Iowa. And not to the bucolic part, but rather to the brutal part (her word) on the plains. “Anywhere I went after that was better than where I came from,” Hyden says with a laugh.

After that was Colorado Springs, where Hyden studied English literature at Colorado College. Over the next dozen years, she worked a lot of what she calls slacker jobs, which were really caretaker roles in customer service, which completely suits her pleasing personality.

She met her husband when she moved to San Francisco and got a job at Tower Records, where Shamma was a smartypants with an MBA who really just wanted to own his record store. Which they did together in College Station, where Hyden worked toward a master’s degree at Penn State. Their intentions were perfect, but their timing was not.

“We rode the whole CD thing to the very end,” she said. “But when music downloading started, we could see the (aforementioned) writing on the (aforementioned) wall.” They sold Blue Train and headed west, where Denver was booming in 1998. Shamma was quickly hired as a buyer at the new Virgin Megastore on the 16th Street Mall, and Hyden, by then a 35 year-old mother of two, took a part-time gig at the Chez that changed the direction of her life.

In 2003, Shamma found, bought and ran a place called Video Station, a beloved independent video rental store in Boulder. It was known for its extensive collection of films and highly knowledgeable staff – like Shamma. But by 2017, writing again met wall, and the store was closed.

Hyden, meanwhile, was immersing herself in the stimulating, challenging and often hilarious world of arthouse cinema, and she loved (mostly) every frame of it. Even though the ecology, programming and vibe of the industry completely changed over her 27 years from arty to indie to a necessarily compromised corporate philosophy that goes something like: “Yes, we are showing ‘Wicked’ at the Mayan, too, if that’s what allows us to show ‘Bugonia’ in the little theater upstairs.”

Hyden didn’t start working full-time until the Chez needed a new person to operate its venerated film projectors in 2010. “That whole period was just so amazing,” Hyden said – “and I was really good at it.” For exactly one amazing year, when digital made film projectors obsolete. Ho, hum: More writing, more walls.

But Hyden was promoted to management, where she found her place … and her bliss.

I mean, working at a movie theater is just plain fun. It attracts eclectic characters worthy of a Rian Johnson mystery. You get to spend your days talking movies – and getting paid for it.

In the less supervised days, Hyden’s crew all wore nametags that matched their favorite film characters. Hyden’s alias was “Varla” – which, you surely know, comes from the 1965 exploitation film “Faster. Pussycat, Kill! Kill!”

“Occasionally, a customer would say, ‘Thank you, Varla,’ after I served them their popcorn,” Hyden said with a laugh.

Of all her responsibilities large and menial, Hyden says her favorite was probably being on the popcorn popper while slammed with customers. “I could shovel corn like nobody’s business!” she said. “That’s very important when you need to move a line.”

(Only the legendary Mayan Manager Myra Rios was faster!)

Hyden will always cherish the glory days when arthouses like the Chez Artiste were the neighborhood town hall. Like in 2000, when “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” drew lines all the way back to Sprouts, which back then was a Savers thrift store, on its way to $217 million at the box office and four Oscars. Or when, if you can believe it (or remember), the documentary “The March of the Penguins” was such a hit that it ran at the Chez for nine months.

The turnover at cinemas like the Chez and the Mayan is surprisingly low, and the workers become like family – only the kind where opinions and differences are respected and encouraged. Importantly, Landmark’s bookers – Mark Valen and Mike DeLorenzo  – were open to collaboration, said Hyden, whose suggestions often turned into programming. Hyden takes personal pride in suggesting a 50th anniversary screening of “Yellow Submarine,” a showing of “Harold and Maude” to mark the Chez’s own 50th birthday, and her recent bucket-list get: An April “Filmmaker Focus” series honoring David Lynch, who died in January.

Hyden says she was a pretty ordinary moviegoer when she was growing up, but meeting her husband opened her mind like a blooming film flower. Hyden adopted a programming mantra that regulars came to depend on: If Hyden suggested a film, that was her promise it would be accessible to them.

“I think my favorite films I programmed were: ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’ (1977, directed by FW Murnau); ‘Night of the Hunter‘ (1955, Charles Laughton); ‘Pather Panchali’ (1955, Satyajit Ray), ‘Tokyo Story’ (1953) and ‘Late Spring’ (1949, both Yasujirō Ozu); and ‘Brief Encounter’ (1945, David Lean). These are the films I was anxious for people to know – or, if they already knew them, to connect over our mutual love for them.”

Her final signature screening will be 1940’s “Shop Around the Corner” at 7 p.m. Dec. 10 at Greenwood Village. That is a 1940 romantic comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch starring Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart. “We always show that as our holiday film,” she said. “Last year’s screening was the most wonderful experience. The audience all came together emotionally — we were laughing together and having a ball. It was one of those magical movie experiences that just has to happen organically.”

That was Hyden – just as Hermanson told me so in that email.

“Her talent seems to be knowing what audiences will love without them even knowing that it existed,” he wrote.

It’s killing Hyden to leave all of this behind – the bonds, the post-film chats over corndogs at Sputniks. But it’s time. She’ll be closer to family in Pennsylvania, and she gets to leave behind the uncertain industry storm clouds that now obscure those glorious parking-lot sunsets at the Chez.

“We lost five screens when Landmark closed the Esquire and the Chez,” Hyden said, “and no one really picked up the ball in terms of all those little films and foreign films that no longer have a home. I felt like it was a golden opportunity, but instead we lost a little more of what made us special.”

But even 1,500 miles away, Hyden will remain connected to her Colorado peeps through the power of cinema itself.

“I think art is a spiritual experience, whether you’re listening to jazz or symphony or looking at a painting or seeing a play or reading a novel,” she said. “And when you experience a film with others, it deepens the meaning of that film. It makes it universal. It’s all about being human and what it means to be human. Film is a bond unlike anything else.”

And that’s as clear as the writing on the wall.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com.