Cinema Preservation Group

Cinema Preservation Group is the hinge of the entire history, the business from which Storage Unit Auction List, and therefore everything after it, descends. It is also the business the evidence describes in two quite different ways.

The company's own records describe vintage audio arbitrage. The company researched historic movie theaters across the country, tried to track down the owners of the buildings that once housed them, and bought the old audio equipment left inside to sell on to private collectors. Maddison Lake sought to replace the business for two reasons: the margins were thin, and the vintage audio market would eventually dry out because only a limited amount of the equipment had survived.

The archived public site, captured between 2010 and 2013, describes something else. Cinema Preservation Group offers financing on 35mm film projection equipment, helping owners open movie theaters or upgrade existing projection equipment with a small down payment and low monthly payments. Both accounts are documented, both are almost certainly true, and together they explain the name in a way neither does alone. The years 2010 to 2013 were the crisis window of American exhibition, when distributors forced the conversion from 35mm film to digital and thousands of single-screen and independent theaters faced an equipment bill they could not pay. A business that knew which theaters held what equipment, and where the owners were, sat at both ends of that transition: it could finance the equipment a surviving theater needed, and it could acquire the equipment a closing theater was abandoning.