One Last Clown Show at the Fuck You Factory

I landed dick-first in Dallas in 1995, and by ’97 I was working at the Granada Movie Grill. I did a little bit of everything there, first as a food runner and then as a bartender. I never waited tables. Anxiety and a general bad attitude prevented me from being a successful server.

Back then, a 27-year-old kid from Northern California named Brian Schultz owned the dump, having bought the theater out of bankruptcy in 1992 with his partner, Milledge Hart.

According to a 1997 D Magazine profile, Schultz graduated from Chico State at 20 with degrees in theater arts and finance, and claimed he fell in love with the dine-in concept after wandering into a restaurant-movie house in Bethesda, Maryland. Schultz boasted to the press about fixing "management and control issues," elevating a hot-dog-and-beer menu into a "full restaurant experience," and renting the room out for corporate seminars (as well as unauthorized live broadcasts of Mavericks, Stars, and Cowboys games). In reality, and rather shrewdly, he used the profits generated outta that glorious old building on Lower Greenville as his lab rat while laying the tracks for the multi-screen North Dallas expansion that became the first Studio Movie Grill up at UA Prestonwood Creek.

Goddam, I loved that place, though (the Granada on Greenville, to be clear, not those soulless Studio Movie Grills that followed, where the whole experience felt like eating room-temperature donkey sliders while sitting in untethered office furniture). I loved the Granada because it had an old, funky soul and a generally weird vibe. It was cool but also a little off, and so was every single person who worked there.

We were a crew of Gen-X era misfit weirdos who found an island where we actually fit and had fun. I would regale you with names and stories, but there were also many, many, many drugs. So many drugs. Those of us who lived to remember sometimes have trouble with the details.

Some details are burned into me. In addition to my regular evening and weekend shifts running and bartending, I worked “receiving” shifts on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. This required meeting the vendor trucks in the back and hauling a week’s worth of groceries, supplies, and stock into their various refrigerators, containers, and vaults across the theater and its various inclines and random floor crags. There was a standard kitchen walk-in freezer closer to the front of the house. Then there were a couple of trunk locker-style meat freezers lined up against the back wall, behind the screen at the back of the house.

I was often the only one in the entire building aside from my manager bing-bonging on a calculator in the front office. For hours at a time, it was just me and the building and the ghosts within. And I would often reflect on the history within those walls, in moments where I’d pause from the literal back-breaking work of being the one dude tasked with receiving an entire theater-restaurant's inventory of, well, everything.

The regular shift work was also a physical beating. The air was a permanent fog of fryer oil, bathroom bleach, and cigarette-sooted carpet. The stairs were never engineered for Chuck Taylor-shoed servers to sprint up and down in the inky black—especially while trying to stay quiet enough not to step on a Boogie Nights needle drop you could anticipate in your sleep after what felt like an 18-month midnight-movie run. To this day, you can’t think about the Alfred Molina “Sister Christian” scene without your arms springing up in muscle memory, balancing a pizza and chicken wing pyramid in one hand and three pitchers of half-flat Shiner in the other (see: the aforementioned “full restaurant experience”).

But after the customers went home and the doors locked, the asylum belonged to the inmates.

The best nights were build nights. The new film prints would arrive in heavy metal canisters, and our manager had to physically splice the reels together on the platter and screen the movie to make sure the cuts held and the framing didn't jump.

Seven or eight of us would stay after to keep him company, haul a few pitchers of beer up to the balcony, pass a bong around in the dark, and watch whatever second-run print we were building for the weekend.

I still remember sitting up in that balcony at 3:00 AM with my friends, absolutely blazed out of our heads, watching Keanu Reeves watching Al Pacino gobble scenery in The Devil's Advocate. Looking down over that empty, cavernous room, you could almost sense every bit of the Granada’s history and its magic. Or maybe that was just the weed and half-flat Shiner that was now completely and totally decarbonated.

Either way, we weren't getting rich and we didn't own the deed. We just loved the building, and the moments and memories we were making with each other.

24 years later, in October 2021, I walked back into that same room to see IDLES.

By then, Mike Schoder had been running the Granada as a live music venue for nearly two decades. The guy booked some great bands over the years, sure. Still, the people holding the paper on that building have always pushed the physical box past what it was meant to bear.

The rumor that night was they oversold the room. Whether the clicker at the door crossed the legal fire code or not, the place was packed past the point of human sanity. You had a thousand bodies wedged into a space built in 1946 for movie seats. The air conditioning couldn't touch the wet heat of the crowd. The oxygen vanished. Before the show even started, I could feel the entire weight of the packed room pressing down as the Snuffer’s cheese fries I’d inhaled 30 minutes earlier began working their way back up.

My chest locked up, and a massive panic attack hit me so hard I thought I was going to fall out right in front of my friends. I quickly excused myself, beat cheeks through the crowd and out the door, missing the show entirely in favor of not letting the universe explode in my head.

Which brings us to this week, and the utter clown show playing out in the pages of D Magazine, whose clownishness is only outmatched by its predictability.

Schoder announced he’s shutting the Granada down in April 2027 and selling the building to Travis Talmadge, the co-founder of a New York "social wellness" chain called Bathhouse. The two of them hopped on a Google Meet with a reporter to explain themselves, and the resulting interview reads like two rich guys blaming richer guys for forcing them to get rich.

Schoder spends the first half of the interview crying about how Live Nation and AEG ruined the concert business. Then he pivots to scolding Dallas music fans like a disappointed dad, asking how many tickets the people complaining online actually bought in the last year, before whining that young kids today don't drink enough overpriced bar booze to float his P&L.

Then, the man brings up the IDLES show. Asked to name his favorite memory from 22 years of owning the Granada, Schoder picks that exact night, getting all misty-eyed describing Joe Talbot parting the crowd like the Red Sea.

The sheer depth of the wrinkles on the balls on this guy.

First off, the show he’s romanticizing from the safety of the side-stage was an unbreathable, oversold meat grinder that gave at least one paying customer a panic attack on the floor.

Second, and way more important than my personal nonsense, you have to be completely deaf to the actual music to invoke IDLES while selling your historic rock club to a luxury bathhouse. IDLES is a band whose entire existence is a furious working-class scream against gentrification, privilege, and hollow capitalist bullshit. And Schoder is using them as his cool-guy exit music while he hands the keys over to a dude who plans to gut the theater and install a hundred-person sauna and cold-plunge pools for an upscale brunch crowd that is becoming more nonexistent by the nanosecond.

Let’s also be honest about the recent state of the Granada's calendar. Schoder talks like he was booking IDLES and The War on Drugs every Tuesday. I scan local concert listings every single week looking for shows to catch. While the Granada pulled in good touring acts here and there, a massive chunk of their schedule is padded out with tribute bands. No shade to those musicians as everybody has to fucking eat, but most of that roster consisted of bands you’d hire to play a friend’s wedding. If Live Nation and AEG outbid you for the real touring acts, I’m sorry, that’s your competitor and that’s your business problem, not a moral failing of the Dallas music fan. Ya fuckin’ dick.

Even with a calendar full of cover acts, I still showed up.

Right now, I’m unemployed. I don't have a lot of expendable income lying around. In fact, I have absolutely zero. Yet last month (almost a month to the day before Schoder dropped his press release), I took what little spare cash I had and bought tickets to take my son to see a Blondie tribute band at the Granada. I picked it because it was an all-ages show, it was convenient, and I wanted my kid to experience the history of that room.

Sitting in there with my son, I pointed up at the balcony and told him the whole story about 1997. I told him about hauling pitchers in the dark, about the misfits I worked with, and about staying until dawn on build nights watching The Devil's Advocate. I passed the lore of that building down to the next generation while putting my scarce dollars directly into Mike Schoder’s motherfucking register.

So when Schoder gets in a magazine and smugly asks, "How many tickets did you buy to the Granada in the last year?" I have an answer. I bought two tickets, 30 days ago, on an unemployment budget. I brought my kid to a show. He brought his excuses to a regional media outlet. Get fucked sideways, you finger-pointing fuckstick.

What really makes me sick about this whole victory-lap-that-should-be-an-apology-tour interview is who gets left out of it. Schoder expects a medal for taking "less money" from the spa guys than he would have gotten from an apartment developer. Talmadge brags that he isn't using Bitcoin mining rigs to heat the pools anymore. Congratulations. Here’s your fucking medal and the medal is me standing in the middle of Lower Greenville with my middle finger up, not going to shows anymore.

Not once in their entire public therapy session sponsored by D Magazine does either man mention the current staff. What happens to the bartenders, the barbacks, the box office kids, the sound techs, and the door guys who kept the Granada and Sundown running while the owners worked out their real estate deal? Those people are losing their jobs so the boss can cash out and play pickleball. And before them, it was workers like me and my friends in ’97 who kept that building alive when it was a drafthouse. We had an awesome time doing it and we looked cool as hell.

For 80 years, whether it was a neighborhood movie house, a weirdo drafthouse, or a rock club, the Granada offered entertainment for everyone. Now that’s dead. In its place, we get luxury for some people, dressed up in the nauseating language of "community" and "wellness.”

I guess I’m mad but not surprised. Dallas gonna Dallas. This is our actual culture. Fake it until payday and then fuck everyone who got you there and blame everyone but yourself. Ok, cool. Just don't expect the people who actually worked, bled, and spent their last dollars in that room to buy the bullshit you're selling on the way out the door.