Osio Cinemas, after long feeding local culture with discerning films, closes.

Osio Cinemas, which abruptly closed Monday after years of underwhelming attendance, was Monterey’s bastion of independent film, foreign language film, documentaries, anomalies, one-offs, experiments and arthouse numbers.

Its place in the cultural life of Monterey and beyond – especially since mainstream multiplexes exist elsewhere, including a new one being built at the Dunes Shopping Center in Marina – seemed safe. It was good to know it was there, cycling each week through its rosters of worthy films, even if we didn’t actually go as much as we told ourselves we would.

And now it’s gone. People are left to lament and commiserate on Facebook, and employees are left to find new jobs. Was it a casualty of forces beyond its control? Was it complicit in its own demise?

Mark Borde, who heads up a group of investors that operates the theater under an LLC, points to the former. He lists a litany of factors in the theater’s closure, including debt that grew as a result of “not enough business downtown” to an expensive conversion of digital projectors to fewer advertising dollars budgeted to their brand of independent films.

He told the Weekly in 2012, after investing in the conversion to digital projectors, that he thinks Osio’s hardships are not unique, and that they are part of a concerted effort by Big Movie.

“I have a theory that the endgame down the line is like anything in big business: Get rid of the moms-and-pops and big business will control all of the films,” he said. “That’s what keeps me up at night.”

And it should. At one time, movie studios owned and operated their own movie theaters and showed only their own films in them. But in 1948, in the case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that they couldn’t do that because it’s a violation of antitrust law. The big picture for big business is to kill off competition and consolidate power.

But that part about “not enough business downtown” seems incongruous with the recent revival of Old Monterey via news tenants like the re-vitalized Golden State Theatre, Turn 12, Bull and Bear, and Alvarado Street Brewery, as well as stalwarts like Crown & Anchor and Cibo’s Ristorante. Above Cibo, 22 luxury apartments are almost completed – right across the street from Osio. Parking is plentiful.

Lori Lochtefeld, co-owner of Golden State Theatre, has reached out to Borde, expressing interest in talking with him about future plans for the equipment and the space, but not buying and running it.

Osio had issues. Even after that expensive digital projector upgrade, when my wife and I took our little girl to see The Lego Movie, one of the speakers was blown out and fuzzy. When I went to tell an employee, they claimed there was nothing they could do except refund our money.

I looked at him like: “Do you know what it’s like to pull a kid from a movie they’re enjoying? You think promises of coming back when the speaker is fixed will quell their screams?”

We watched the rest of the movie, promising to watch it again at home when it became available online.

Borde says that he valued community events, those things that endear a venue in the heart, like parties and local film screenings and Q&As. And there is evidence supporting that.

But some event organizers report that they couldn’t get responsive communication from the theater about their events. (Borde is based in Los Angeles.) And one said they wouldn’t book there until the management paid more attention to restroom cleanliness.

But Osio could be forgiven all that because it was special.

Osio was where you went to see movies that would baffle mainstream audiences, like Charlie Kaufman’s Synechdoche, New York or Kevin Smith’s Tusk.

“Tusk is the most bizarre movie I have ever seen,” wrote movie reviewer Dan Hudak of the film. “That’s not hyperbole.”

Osio was where you went to see activated documentaries like Merchants of Doubt, which unveils a cottage industry of bogus scientists whose job is to obscure the truth about climate change or toxic chemicals.

Osio was where you went to see rigorously smart and fearlessly emotional films like the Roger Ebert documentary (and love letter to filmdom), Life Itself.

It’s where you went to be challenged in the best possible way and, often, rewarded for accepting the challenge. But maybe that’s not where movie culture is right now. Blame HBO.

HBO changed the current, putting on shows so good it kept people home to catch Sex and the City, The Wire, The Sopranos. Then came the digital marriage of convenience between TV (or computer monitor) and the internet, with AppleTV, Hulu and Netflix. And now, broadcast TV has stepped up its game. That’s a lot of competition.

And that’s one of the reasons Borde proffers for Osio’s closure. It rings right. He couldn’t change people’s viewing habits fast enough: the convenience of online content, the wind force of massive advertising dollars, the passivity of intellectual thought.

Painter David Ligare didn’t speak on Osio, but he might have been speaking to the intellectual climate that starved it when he recently said to me: “We need a renewed desire for knowledge.”

Instead, what’s going on in Big Movies? Disaster and car crash flicks, each one bigger and more incredulous, appealing to our childlike yearning to smash things. Cynical celebrity career-move movies that bank on our adulation of people we don’t know. The proliferation of superhero movies has reached a new low. Ant-Man? Really?

Does Hollywood think they can throw any facsimile at us and we’ll jump up, undiscerning, and try to catch it with our teeth?

Well, the Fast and the Furious “franchise” is on number 7, The Expendables is thinking about grinding out number 4, while the still-alive Terminator series (let’s just call it that now) is just nostalgia.

In the end, Osio couldn’t compete. It was what it was: an indie movie house that catered to a small, fervent and adventurous audience, a small outpost of scrupulous filmdom, a cinephile meeting spot, a lone bird flying the other way. It had its followers, its believers, but the vast majority of the flock was flying away from it.

Osio’s issues were not so big. Its magic was bigger. It brought people together in common cause: good films on a big screen. Good films deserve that. We deserve it. Don’t we?