Doreen Sayegh’s Cranford Theater, the last indie and family-run cinema in Union County, New Jersey, is about to turn 100.
Sayegh, who owns the five-screen cinema in Cranford, near to New York City, will mark the centennial with a throwback screening of Padlocked, the silent film that opened the theater’s doors on November 29, 1926, with an accompanying organ player.
But while honoring the legacy of her family in the exhibition business since the 1980s, Sayegh is just as committed to transforming the Cranford Theater with new programming and experiences to keep bringing customers through the door for the foreseeable future.
“I want us to honor this incredible history while continuing to evolve and ask, what can the next 100 years look like?” Sayegh tells The Hollywood Reporter.
As a child, she learned the cinema business alongside her father, Jesse Y. Sayegh. He ran an independent chain of movie theaters in New Jersey during the 1990s — when cinemas had far less competition for customers — and purchased the twin-screen Cranford Theater in 1997 from Cineplex Odeon and a year later reopened the indie cinema as a five-screen venue.
“I sold my first popcorn at 8 years old, I could barely see over the concession counter,” she recalled, and sold her first movie tickets at age 11, before moving up the ranks as an usher, a box office cashier and eventually as a theater manager. Sayegh’s father, while retaining ownership of the building, sold the indie theater business in 2010, and she remained with the new owner, Bud Mayo’s Digiplex Destinations.
But in 2019, after two other operators after Digiplex ran the theater, Sayegh, while showing a potential new tenant around the building, realized she wanted to make a go as its latest theater operator. “I was standing on the roof, looking out at the [Cranford] downtown and, I thought, ‘You know what? I want to do this. This is the right place for me,’” she recalled.
So, with her father’s support, Sayegh completed new renovations to reopen the cinema complex in Nov. 2019, in time for the Christmas holidays. It wasn’t long, however, before the COVID-19 pandemic undid her best-laid plans.
“By the time we got to March, the night before we closed down, we had maybe seven people in the building, and four of them were employees,” Sayegh recalls of that dark time. But, determined, she insists the pandemic was never to write the end of the story for the Cranford Theater.
Instead, Sayegh got creative by, for example, handing through car doors fresh popcorn and candy to families pulling up at her front door to be consumed at home. And she transformed a parking lot she rented into a drive-in theater. “I was worried. You don’t know what’s going to happen,” she recounted of the new venture, which included an alert on her cellphone that sounded every time a ticket was sold.
“I remember the day I was in the parking lot, in the heat and my phone started dinging as soon as the tickets went on sale. And then it just stopped,” Sayegh added. Suddenly, she feared only a couple of tickets had been sold, and her drive-in was a bust.
So Sayegh rang her web hosting company to ask what had happened, only to be told surging ticket demand had crashed their servers. “You’re sold out. You sold out in 90 seconds, for three nights,” the report came back.
The drive-in theater soon went to six nights a week of featuring classic movies on its outdoor screen. “That was so special to me because it really was such a terrifying time. And because the tickets were selling themselves, I didn’t have to worry about selling them. I focused my energy and our efforts on donations, fundraising and the community. Because at the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself in this position of ‘How do I help?’ I just couldn’t sit back and do nothing,” Sayegh recalled.
Her creative efforts for the drive in included a 2020 showing of Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory where golden tickets were hidden at local Cranford businesses and those that nabbed them earned free admission to the screening.
Of course, amid the rise of streaming movies in the home coming out of the pandemic, followed by the 2023 Los Angeles writers and actors strikes, getting film lovers back into the Cranford Theater remained a challenge. “That was definitely a tough time, because our goal is to get people off their couches and into our seats to enjoy movies together on the big screen,” she remembered.
To accomplish that, Sayegh knew the years of just opening the doors of a cinema and selling drinks and popcorn as people bought tickets were long past her industry. So she continued to think outside the box for new business opportunities.
“That’s what we do here, try to create events around a lot of our films or classic films, and create ways for people to get excited and off their couches and into our theater to watch movies together and experience that together,” she explains of diversified programming like comedy shows, piano recitals, film festivals and indie film screenings.
And just when that effort was paying dividends, Sayegh faced another major setback in April 2025 when part of the ceiling in her theater collapsed. Luckily, the building had few people in it at the time, and everyone was safely evacuated.
“No one was hurt,” Sayegh recounted about that fateful night. “That was most important to me, because that would have changed the whole story. And the fact that no one was hurt meant I knew I was going to rebuild.”
Doreen Sayegh renovated and reopened the Cranford Theater in Union County, New Jersey.
Courtesy of Doreen Sayegh (2)
After a seven-month closure, the now 99-year-old movie house reopened on Nov. 26, 2025 with marquee lights lit up and neon signage glowing. And among recent film offerings are movie shot locally as the Garden State enjoys a Hollywood production boom underpinned by film tax credits and other state incentives and local hires.
Sayegh has shown New Jersey-shot pics like an advance screening for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, Steven Soderbergh’s supernatural thriller Presence, which was shot in Cranford, another thriller, Mother’s Instinct, starring Anne Hathway and Jessica Chastain, and Maybe I Do, featuring the late Diane Keaton and William H. Macy.
“I love it when you have new visitors to our town, cast and crew coming in and they go out into our community and they grab a cup of coffee and a bite to eat,” she explains.
Sayegh is also excited about upcoming Thanksgiving dates in her theater for another New Jersey-shot picture, Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky.
That drama recounts the making of the 1976 Sylvester Stallone-starrer Rocky, a triumph-of-the-underdog saga that for Sayegh echoes the story of the Cranford Theater and recent efforts to keep the lights on the marquee lit up during the pandemic and a ceiling collapse.
“The story of Rocky is so rooted in perseverance, resilience and continuing to fight when the odds are against you, and in many ways those themes resonate with the Cranford Theater’s own story and everything it has survived over the course of 100 years,” she said.
Sayegh also puts her staying power down to her father’s influence, which instilled core values like honoring deals, treating people with respect and booking movies based on audience demand and not personal taste.
And she looks forward to carrying on the legacy of a family-owned indie cinema business.
“My father represents where it all started. I’m carrying that forward today, and now my five-year-old daughter, Natalia, is growing up in the theater much the same way I did. She is already watching and learning what it means to welcome people, take care of a theater and, most importantly, serve a community. I would love to see her running the show one day, although ultimately that will be her story to write,” Sayegh added.
