Hang me for my past and get it over with.. another thing I distaste is people who hold others for their past(and it's only this forum that does it). I only come here because there's only one main bitcoin forum.
I'm not hanging you for your past. The questions that I asked are relevant to how viable your project will be. Have you even checked whether you can legally solicit donations for this project. In some places you can't do that for a private, for profit venture but a community group which registered as a legal entity would be able to do it.
People thinking something is a good idea doesn't necessarily make a project viable and sustainable. People might want a local theatre but would they attend it often enough for operating it to be viable? Have you checked into whether the cost for you to show films will be based on the seating capacity of the theatre, a flat licence fee for a set period of time, a set number of sessions, or some other method?
Before you even start raising money for this project, you need to go and have a look at the building. You have no idea at this point what condition it's actually in and trying to gauge that from photos is a bad idea.
If you're saving $500 every two weeks, that will only give you about $13,000 in twelve months. That leaves a hell of a lot more money which you need to raise and you're basically asking people to give you money in order for you -personally - to buy and own the theatre.
Have you thought about the level of donation for which you're going to give "free movie tickets for life"? You need to because every free ticket is income you're foregoing and you're going to need the majority of your patrons to be paying customers in order to meet your overheads, let alone to provide you and your fiance with any income.
If this was my project, these and the various building related issues (you're seriously not going to get any kind of inspection report done on the building before you buy it?) would all be part of my feasibility study. If the previous owners didn't have the money to tart the place up then there's every chance that the building and/or the equipment has been neglected in other ways and if there are safety compliance issues or structural integrity issues you need to know about them before you even consider buying the property. You don't want to scrounge together the money to buy the property only to find that it needs a lot more than just a cosmetic face lift and not have the funds to bring it up to scratch.
Are you sure that the $2000 Epson projector is digital cinema quality and that the screen at the theatre is compatible with that format?
On the downside, the initial costs for converting theaters to digital are high: $150,000 per screen on average. Theaters have been reluctant to switch without a cost-sharing arrangement with film distributors. A solution is a temporary Virtual Print Fee system, where the distributor (who saves the money of producing and transporting a physical copy) pays a fee per copy to help finance the digital systems of the theaters.[13]
While a theater can purchase a film projector for US$50,000 and expect an average life of 30–40 years, a digital cinema playback system including server/media block/and projector can cost 3–4 times as much, and is at higher risk for component failures and technological obsolescence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema#CostsThe ad says that the theatre equipment is included in the $175,000 purchase price but it also says that everything is for sale AS-IS. You'd need to establish the condition of the equipment and whether it needs any money spent on it - if there's something wrong with some of the equipment you could be up for serious money to repair or replace it.
