
From left, Laura, Marcia and Sharon Ferguson, Tom Babbitt, and (in front) Sandy Ferguson, pose in front of the Millerton Moviehouse — then called The Millerton Theater — in 1974. Photo courtesy of the Fergusons
MILLERTON — The Moviehouse on Millerton’s Main Street is iconic.
Built in 1903 and used briefly as a grange hall, it was soon converted into a movie theater with a second-floor ballroom. Some know that it fell into disrepair in the 1970s before being bought and restored by Carol and Robert Sadlon in 1977. Some fewer know that it was briefly a porn theatre. But it is a seldom told story that, for two years (the summers of 1974-1975), four teen-aged sisters ran the movie theater.
The girls’ father, M. Carr Ferguson, senior counsel in Davis Polk & Wardwell’s tax department, was teaching at the University of Iowa in the early 1960s when he was offered a position at New York University Law School. His beloved late wife agreed to the move on one condition: that they’d also have a place in the country.
One of their four daughters, Sharon, recalled: “Mom told me that she put a map out and placed a pin right where we lived. She then cut a string as long as what would have been 100 miles, and she just ran the string around. Anywhere within that space was okay. Turned out Lakeville was it!”
The Fergusons sent their children to PS 41 in the city and raised them in Washington Square, but summers were always spent up at the lake. As the children got older, however, it got harder and harder to entice them away from their social lives and the allure of the city. Then Mrs. Ferguson had an idea.
Mr. Ferguson recalled her saying, “We have to do something to get the girls up here, and we can get rid of the adult movie house at the same time.”
At the time, the Millerton movie house (called the Millerton Theater prior to 1978) was a porn theater.
In December 1973, The Lakeville Journal ran a story reading:
“‘Are you aware of the type of motion picture you are coming to view?’ Richard Masters asks this of everyone who comes to purchase a ticket for the XX-rated movies in Millerton, N.Y. Apparently some people have different expectations and do not realize the type films that are being shown.
“Richard and Barbara Masters, formerly employed at the Canaan Drive-in in Connecticut, took over as managers of the Millerton theatre on Monday Nov. 26. The Victory Theater Corporation, which bought the Millerton Theater back in June, can explain the run of sex-based movies.
“Jim Severin, spokesman for Victory, said. ‘No theater goes to X policy through preference, only through darn necessity.’ According to Mr. Severin, the Millerton Theater has lost over $5,000 since August: ‘at this point we’re just looking to meet house expenses. With X-rated films our take is a little bit better.’”
In the early ‘70s, Mr. Ferguson had a client in the United Artists theater corporation. That client was Egyptian-born Salah M. Hassanein, who began his career as an usher at a movie theater in New York and rose through the ranks to become president of United Artists Eastern Theaters and subsequently president of Warner Brothers International Theaters.
In the summer of 1975, The Fergusons decided they would rent the movie house from the Victory Theater Corporation with motivation that was two-fold: to stop the showing of the X-rated movies and to entice their four daughters to spend their summers with the family in Lakeville.
For the next two summers (1974-1975), the four Ferguson daughters, aged about 11-19 at the time, ran the theater.
“At the beginning, they didn’t like us,” said Marcia, referring to the men in town who had frequented the porn showings.
“At the beginning, bras and tampons got thrown into the lobby because it was four girls running the theater!” The sisters laughed, and Marcia continued, “Laura, my oldest sister, had the idea to take advantage of all the male attention and would get them to help sweep the lobby. The next thing you know, they were our ‘protectors.’”
The girls came up with all sorts of ways to entice the men to their advantage because, as it turned out, running the theater was a huge job.
“Laura, the oldest, was the manager,” explained Marcia. “Sharon sold tickets and made popcorn, and I was the projectionist.”
A young man in town, Jason Schickele, who had worked as the projectionist at the Mahaiwe and Colonial theaters, showed Marcia, 14 years old at the time, how to run the projectors.
“He was patient,” Marcia said, showing her again and again everything about the machine. “You were running celluloid,” she explained, “So you’d watch for the little dot in the right-hand corner called ‘the changeover,’ and when you saw that, there was a second dot. That’s when you had to change the film.”
She continued, “If there was a crack in it, you could fix it with just, you know, regular old scotch tape, but you’d have to run it with a little viewfinder so you could see where the problem was.”
She continued: “It was really fun to work those machines. I mean, they were elaborate. You would bang together the carbon. It might take a few times for it to light, but when it did, you couldn’t really look at it. It’s like looking at the sun. It was so powerful.”
“We had so many mishaps,” Sandy laughed.
Marcia continued: “Jason saved our bacon so many times. We would have a full house, having sold all these tickets, and the thing would break, and I’d be completely panicked. Then he’d come over and help us.”
When asked which years they ran the theater, there’s a lot of back and forth about whether it was ‘74-’75 or ‘75-’76.
“I try to set the memory of that time by the movies that we showed because Salah gave us second-run movies. We were a couple of weeks behind,” said Sandy.
“It was movies like ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ ‘Young Frankenstein,’ ‘Jaws,’” said Sandy, with Marcia jumping in: “One of the really popular ones was when they gave us ‘Gone with The Wind.’”
“That was the very first movie we showed,” Mr. Ferguson interrupted, returning to the busy kitchen from another room in the house. He went on to proudly say, “These girls had it running at a profit for those two summers.”
The girls had constantly evolving, entrepreneurial ideas of how to make it a sustainable business, and the theater was a success.
“We placed ads in the paper all the time,” said Marcia, “like ‘Thursday dollar night.’ When it rained, if we woke up and it was raining, we’d call the summer camps and say, ‘bring the campers,’ and we’d go run whatever we were running.”
“We made a profit,” Marcia continued. “And at the end of the two years, I got a stereo system.”
In returning to the origin of the idea, Marcia said: “Mom was in it to get us home for the summer. I mean I was 14 so I was gonna be home anyway, because we didn’t have money for camp. We were not camp kids. This was our camp.”
When asked why they didn’t continue, Mr. Ferguson said that after the two initial summers, they floated the idea around of buying the theater. He explained that he “wanted to buy it, but Marianne [his wife] said, ‘Carr, the kids are graduating. They’re not gonna run it. I’m not gonna run it. You’re not gonna run it.’”
The space lay empty again until Bob and Carol Sadlon purchased it in October 1977, renovating and opening it once again in 1978.
“There’s such a wealth of documentation now with our phones,” said Carol Sadlon when asked about the state of the theater when she and her husband purchased it. “But it’s too bad there isn’t more of the way it was then.”
She went on to say: “It was a single theater with 300 seats. There was no heat, no air conditioning. It was in just terrible condition.”
She said: “Laura [Ferguson] and I had a wonderful conversation years ago, as I recall, because we were both very interested in the preservation of theaters like the Moviehouse, of course. [The Fergusons] have so much enthusiasm, and it really is just extraordinary what they were able to do.”
Several of the Ferguson women have gone on to have lives in performance. Marcia recently retired from the theater department at the University of Pennsylvania and has performed in numerous films and in theater; Sandy (now Huckleberry) is an artist with the Boston-based artists’ collective Mobius.
The Moviehouse again closed its doors in March 2020, until its highly anticipated reopening by David Maltby and Chelsea Altman, who have managed to honor the Moviehouse’s history while bringing a new energy and vision to the space.
SHARON — Angela Derrick Carabine, 74, died May 17, 2025, at Vasser Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was the wife of Michael Carabine and mother of Caitlin Carabine McLean.
A funeral Mass will be celebrated on June 6 at 11:00 a.m. at Saint Katri (St Bernards Church) Church. Burial will follow at St. Bernards Cemetery. A complete obituary can be found on the website of the Kenny Funeral home kennyfuneralhomes.com.
Sam Waterston
On June 7 at 3 p.m., the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington will host a benefit screening of “The Killing Fields,” Roland Joffé’s 1984 drama about the Khmer Rouge and the two journalists, Cambodian Dith Pran and New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, whose story carried the weight of a nation’s tragedy.
The film, which earned three Academy Awards and seven nominations — including one for Best Actor for Sam Waterston — will be followed by a rare conversation between Waterston and his longtime collaborator and acclaimed television and theater director Matthew Penn.
“This came out of the blue,” Waterston said of the Triplex invitation, “but I love the town, I love this area. We raised our kids here in the Northwest Corner and it’s been good for them and good for us.”
Waterston hasn’t seen the film in decades but its impact has always remained present.
“It was a major event in my life at the time,” Waterston said of filming “The Killing Fields,” “and it had a big influence on me and my life ever after.” He remembers the shoot vividly. “My adrenaline was running high and the part of Sydney Schanberg was so complicated, so interesting.”
Waterston lobbied for the role of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for years, tracing his early interest to a serendipitous connection while filming in England. Even before Joffé’s production was greenlit, he had his sights set on playing the role. “I knew I wanted the part for years even before it was a movie that was being produced.”
What followed was not just critical acclaim, but also a political awakening. “The film gave all of us an intimate acquaintance with refugees, what it is to be a refugee, how the world forgets them and what a terrible crime that is.”
In Boston, at a press stop for the film, two women asked Waterston a pointed question: now that he knew what he knew, what was he going to do about it? “I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m an actor, so I thought I’d go on acting.’ And they said, ‘No, that’s not what you need to do. You need to join Refugees International.’” And join he did, serving on the organization’s board for 25 years.
Both Schanberg and Dith Pran, whose life the film also chronicles, were “cooperative and helpful … in a million ways,” Waterston said. Upon first meeting Pran, Waterston recalled, “He came up to me, made a fist, and pounded on my chest really hard and said, ‘You must understand that Sydney is very strong here.’ He was trying to plant something in me.”
There were more tender gestures, too. Schanberg used the New York Times wire to relay that Waterston’s wife had just given birth while he was filming in Thailand, adding to the personal and emotional connection to the production.
Though “The Killing Fields” is a historical document, its truths still resonate deeply today. “Corruption is a real thing,” Waterston warned. “Journalism is an absolutely essential part of our democracy that is as under siege today as it was then. It’s different now but it’s the same thing of ‘Don’t tell the stories we don’t want heard.’ Without journalists, we are dust in the wind.” Waterston added, “Democracy is built on the consent of the governed but the other thing it’s built on is participation of the governed and without full participation, democracy really doesn’t stand much of a chance. It’s kind of a dead man walking.”
When asked what he hopes the audience will take away from the screening, Waterston didn’t hesitate. “This is the story that puts the victims of war at the center of the story and breaks your heart. I think that does people a world of good to have their hearts broken about something that’s true. So, I hope that’s what the impact will be now.”
Tickets for the benefit screening are available at www.thetriplex.org. Proceeds support Triplex Cinema, a nonprofit home for film and community programming in the Berkshires.
Scott Reinhard, graphic designer, cartographer, former Graphics Editor at the New York Times, took time out from setting up his show “Here, Here, Here, Here- Maps as Art” to explain his process of working.Here he explains one of the “Heres”, the Hunt Library’s location on earth (the orange dot below his hand).
Map lovers know that as well as providing the vital functions of location and guidance, maps can also be works of art.With an exhibition titled “Here, Here, Here, Here — Maps as Art,” Scott Reinhard, graphic designer and cartographer, shows this to be true. The exhibition opens on June 7 at the David M. Hunt Library at 63 Main St., Falls Village, and will be the first solo exhibition for Reinhard.
Reinhard explained how he came to be a mapmaker. “Mapping as a part of my career was somewhat unexpected.I took an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS), the technological side of mapmaking, when I was in graduate school for graphic design at North Carolina State.GIS opened up a whole new world, new tools, and data as a medium to play with.”
He added, “When I moved to New York City, I continued that exploration of cartography, and my work eventually caught the attention of the New York Times, where I went to work as a Graphics Editor, making maps and data visualizations for a number of years.”At the New York Times, his work contributed to a number of Pulitzer Prize winning efforts.
In his work, Reinhard takes complex data and turns it into intriguing visualizations the viewer can begin to comprehend immediately and will want to continue to look into and explore more deeply.
One method Reinhard uses combines historic United States Geological survey maps with “current elevation data (height above sea level for a point on earth) to create 3-D looking maps, combining old and new,” he explained.
For the show at Hunt Library Reinhard said, “I knew that I wanted to incorporate the place into the show itself. A place can be many things.The exhibition portrays the exact spot visitors are from four vantage points: the solar system, the earth, the Northwest Corner, and the library itself.” Hence the name, “Here, Here, Here, Here.”
He continued, “The largest installation, the Northwest Corner, is a mosaic of high-resolution color prints and hand-printed cyanotypes — one of the earliest forms of photography. They use elevation data to portray the landscape in a variety of ways, from highly abstract to the highly detailed.”
This sixteen-foot-wide installation covers the area of Millerton to Barkhamsted Reservoir and from North Canaan down to Cornwall for a total of about 445 square miles.
For subjects, he chooses places he’s visited and feels deeply connected to, like the Northwest Corner.“This show is a thank you to the community for the richness that it has brought to my life. I love it here,” he said.
The opening reception for the show is on June 7 from 5 to 7 p.m. On Thursday, June 12, Reinhard will give a talk about his work from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the library.“Here, Here, Here, Here” will be on display until July 3.
Scott Reinhard’s 16-foot-wide piece of the Northwest Corner is laid out on the floor prior to being hung for the show. L. Tomaino
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