Main Street Theatre opened in Sauk Centre on March 30, 1939, on the site of an old feed store. Freeman and Helen Parson owned it for 37 years until June 28, 1976, when they sold it to Robert and Mary Douvier. Its opening film was The Young in Heart, starring Janet Gaynor and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Beverly Gray, one of the theater’s first ticket sellers, began working there in 1941 at age 18 during a run of Buck Privates starring Abbott and Costello, and she later worked at and managed the theater for more than 40 years. The original single auditorium seated 512, and in its early years the theater presented two shows nightly and changed movies three times a week. In the 1950s and 1960s, a stage in front of the screen hosted community events, including the announcement of the Dairy Princess for Pride of Main Street Butter Day, now known as Sinclair Lewis Days. On July 7, 1960, the world premiere of Elmer Gantry, based on the novel by Sauk Centre native and Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis, took place there, and Dorothy Thompson, journalist and Lewis’s second wife, attended. The theater added features such as air conditioning in the early 1960s and a crying room for parents with toddlers and infants. In 1979, new seating increased row spacing and reduced the original auditorium’s capacity to 288. A second screen was added in 1988, followed by additional auditoriums in 1993, 1997, and 2004, bringing the total to six screens. In 2005 the theater installed its first digital projector, and by 2013 more than 90 percent of movies were released digitally. Jesse Douvier, who had worked there since childhood, took over the business in 2016, and in 2017 the auditoriums were retrofitted again with rockers, bringing the original auditorium’s capacity to 220. Designed in the late 1930s, the building reflects Art Deco style, with a brick facade and neon marquee that emphasize vertical lines, while the marquee was meant to resemble an open book of Main Street, a reference to Sinclair Lewis. A recent grant from the State of Minnesota funded restoration of the building’s face in the Art Deco style.