PRINEVILLE — By the end of the month, it should be known if there will be yet another sequel in the 75-year story of Prineville’s Pine Theater.

Reopened five years ago, Crook County’s only movie theater is in the final days of a campaign to raise $80,000 to buy two digital projection systems, an essential investment if the theater is to continue showing first-run films. Hollywood studios and distribution companies are phasing out the familiar spools of 35 mm film in favor of digital — a significant cost savings for the makers and distributors of movies, but a financial burden for small theaters like the Pine.

The Pine has turned to the community, seeking contributions online through Kickstarter and with the “horseshoe campaign,” where a minimum $400 donation is recognized with an engraved horseshoe to be set in concrete in the lobby of the theater. As of Friday, owners Ali and Oniko Mehrabi had roughly $20,000 left to go, according to Oniko Mehrabi.

“If we don’t make it, we’re not taking off for Hawaii with it,” she said. “The simple fact is, I haven’t stuffed my mattress with $80,000 over the five years we’ve been opened.”

As Oniko Mehrabi tells it, she and her husband never aspired to own their own movie theater.

Upon moving to Prineville, Oniko Mehrabi planned on staying home with their young son, Michael, but on the side she dabbled in a few real estate investments in the downtown area. Talking with Prineville attorney Jim Van Voorhees one day, she complained that after being closed for 25 years, the Pine Theater had become an eyesore. Van Voorhees asked Oniko Mehrabi what she’d do if she owned the theater, only later revealing that he owned the building.

Van Voorhees had once hoped to reopen the Pine as a performance hall for live theater, but challenges over the city’s fire code stopped him. Over the years, the building deteriorated.

“It was a mess. The roof leaked; there was stuff growing in the carpet. It was not an attractive piece of property,” he said.

Van Voorhees had turned down a handful of buyers who’d planned to turn the Pine into something other than a theater. Satisfied the Mehrabis had the right idea about what to do with the building, he agreed to sell.

“It was truly a divine accident,” Oniko Mehrabi said.

The accident quickly turned into a full-time job. Ali Mehrabi quit his job and set to renovating the Pine, opening the doors in late 2007. In 2011, the Mehrabis added a second screen.

Adding a second screen was not in the Mehrabis’ original plans. The years since they opened the theater have been a sometimes bumpy education in how the movie business works, Oniko Mehrabi said, and she counts the decision to add the second screen as one of the toughest and most costly lessons.

In many instances, Hollywood distributors won’t send a theater a movie unless it can commit to regularly screening it for four to six weeks, Oniko Mehrabi said. With a single screen, the Pine Theater faced the choice of featuring a single film long enough for everyone in Prineville to see it multiple times, or getting such movies weeks after theaters in Madras, Redmond and Bend.

The transition to digital was already underway when the Mehrabis bought the Pine Theater but has recently accelerated. Looking to move the switch forward, Hollywood studios helped many of the larger theater chains pay for their costly digital projection systems but offered nothing to smaller operators like the Pine Theater, Oniko Mehrabi said.

Though they initially viewed the theater as simply a business, through the fundraising push the family has learned how the theater fits in to the lives of their neighbors. Oniko Mehrabi riffs off several of the stories she’s heard in the last few months — the Facebook employee who decided to buy a house in Prineville rather than Redmond because there was a place he could take his family to the movies, the employees of the Prineville Les Schwab Tire Center who passed the hat to purchase a horseshoe, and the Madras woman in her 90s who sent an “inspirational” letter describing her experiences working at the theater decades ago.

“It’s so much more important than Ali and I and Michael,” Oniko Mehrabi said. “It’s the community. We’ve had so many people that have moved to the community that don’t know this theater was ever closed.”

Van Voorhees said having a movie theater up and running again in Prineville has been a boon for businesses of all sorts. Back in the 1980s, his family would often journey to Bend to see a movie, spending a good bit of their time and disposable income outside Prineville.

“If we went there, to justify the cost of gas in our minds, we’d go to all the big box stores in Bend,” he said. “A lot of people did that. It drew a lot of retail out of the community.”

Van Voorhees said he understands there are people in the community uneasy about the idea of a for-profit business seeking donations to keep its doors open, but he views the theater differently. The Pine Theater can be compared to the recently-added flight between Redmond and Los Angeles, he said, which only came about because area residents and businesses agreed to buy $350,000 worth of tickets up front.

Prineville City Council president Steve Uffelman said Prineville’s small population and lack of through traffic makes for a challenging business environment even in the best of times. Since its reopening, the Pine Theater has helped draw residents downtown, he said, and once there they’ll often get a meal at a nearby restaurant or do other shopping.

“I find having that available to the community pretty darned important,” he said. “It’s community. It’s fine to watch movies at home on the TV, but to see it on a big screen with other people, it’s just the social aspect of it.”

Crook County Sheriff Jim Hensley said he remembers going to the Pine Theater as a child, and the stir created when the sights and sounds of the counterculture came to Prineville with the screening of the “Woodstock” documentary while he was in high school.

By the time Hensley got his first job in law enforcement with the Prineville Police Department in the early 1980s, the theater had closed, and the teens he met on patrol often recited the same complaint: there’s nothing to do in this town; we need a movie theater.

“This town really needs something like that, and if that was to leave, here we go again,” Hensley said. “We’re going to have to drive 20 miles to the nearest theater, at the best, which is in Redmond. I think it would be a tragedy to lose that, for the kids’ sake and for families, and for this community.”