From Jayson Wall:

My passion for cinema started innocently enough as a young child walking through the camera section at a K-mart store in Covina, CA. I was no more than six years old when I saw a display of Super 8 home movies, thinking they were GAF View-Masters. I asked my Mom if we could buy one for my View-Master, but I was quickly told they were “movie films.”  By Christmas of that year, I had a handful of Super 8 films that I would run on my parents’ Bell and Howell dual 8 mm silent projector in my room. From there my love of cinema art and technology continued to grow. 
 

During my formative years, the family would do many yearly vacations in Las Vegas, staying at the original MGM Grand Hotel. For a kid who loved classic films, this hotel was a fantastic place to be---better than Disneyland. I quickly discovered the movie theater down on the arcade level, which showed only classic MGM features, along with Tom and Jerry cartoons, in 35mm on the big screen. The overall experience of seeing these films on a big screen was powerful—being exposed to great American films from Hawks, Ford, Wilder, Hitchcock, Davis, Wells, Minnelli, and many others at this young age lit an inferno which has continued to burn for all types of cinema today. 
 

My first job in the industry was as a teenager at our local hometown theater. A family-owned, single-screen second-run house with 421 seats, built in 1970.  I wasn’t your normal high school employee selling popcorn and cleaning the theater (which of course I did.) Instead, I became the person who ran the projectors and was taken under the owner's wing to learn more about the business overall as I continued to show interest in it. 

My career in the film industry started in Post-Production at New Line Cinema. From there I moved into restoration, preservation and mastering for a few different companies, culminating in my work at The Walt Disney Studios.  Restoration project highlights include Mary Poppins, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Pollyanna, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy, Davy Crockett, various Wonderful World of Color TV programs as well as all thousands of hours of historical footage on the building of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. From there I moved over to Apple as they launched Apple TV+ where I created a brand new theatrical post-production, content delivery, and international screening operations group at Apple. This group later became a major component in the Oscar campaign for CODA, which ultimately won the Academy Award for Best Picture. 
 

After a run of amazing experiences and opportunities for the past 25 years in the industry, in November of 2022 I decided to leave Apple to pursue my next dream, and my original love – to own and operate a movie theater. 
 

My wife Jenna and I have been married for 15 years. She has an undergraduate degree in art history from Princeton and an MFA in film from USC, and she is presently a freelance film and TV editor. We have two children, a boy and a girl, who are 11-year-old twins in the 6th grade.  
 

My love of that original silent Super 8 projector as a 6-year-old never ended, as I graduated up to collecting 16mm films in college, hosting screenings in my apartments for friends. Today,  I own over 275 feature films in 16mm , along with countless short subjects, cartoons, newsreels, and trailers, plus we still do scheduled screenings in our home theater for friends and family today. I think it is safe to say that our twins are probably the only 11-year-olds in the 2020’s who have watched countless dye transfer Technicolor 16mm prints of Disney nature docs, MGM Musicals, and Elvis movies. 

The Wall family is a group of cinema lovers committed to bringing high - quality films from Hollywood to the community of Hutchinson, as well as sharing our passion for the collective theatrical experience.  As they say, ”Get More Out Of Life, Go Out To A Movie”---and  we can’t wait  to continue this tradition at the State Theater.