posted 12-11-2014 07:38 PM                    

quote:

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Speaking of the AMC Ward Parkway. What a theater - lol. First a twon, then a 6, then a 12, then a 20, and finally, a 22. However, when Cinemark opened the Palace on May 7, 1999, Ward Parkway (once the crown jewel of AMC) had a 60% drop in attendance. It is now slated to close later this fall.

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posted 12-14-2014 09:43 PM                    

quote: Buck Wilson

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This theater did not end up closing, and 14 years later, is now a 14 plex. I want to say they basically cut off a large chunk to stay profitable. Perhaps the upstairs section? It's in a shopping mall IIRC. They have kept the place updated, run first-run material if not a bit split with other theaters in the area... Leather recliners, etc. So that makes it 2 --> 6 --> 12 --> 20 --> 22 --> 14. Wonder how the building is laid out at this point after all those changes and if the original 2 are at all intact.\

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posted 12-15-2014 02:46 AM                    

quote: Terry Monohan

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United Artists Theatres was so money hungry on the West Coast in the 70's and many other places they just put a big wall down the middle of the downstairs and balcony upstairs and made 4 cheap cinemas out of one large theatre. It was the worst you had ever seen with sound leaking in every show box. At least today many of these places that are still around after UA sold them off them for fast cash have had this movie UA building twin horror removed.

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posted 01-01-2015 03:05 PM                       

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa

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nothing was done to rearrange the seats after house was twinned and one had to sit in a very awkward angle to watch movies.

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There was a beautiful neighborhood theatre in Brooklyn -- The Beverly -- originally run by Century Theatres; it was "quad-ed" in the manner that Claude describes, leaving the seats aimed at the wrong place, i.e., the original screen position, but even worse, the room was split down the middle with the new wall build smack between the two projection port windows. They didn't even move the (dual) projectors - just left them in the exact same position, reaiming them to the far left or far right position of the new screen.

So in the one "new" theatre, the projection port was in the very farthest right-hand corner of the back wall, and in the other "new" theatre, it was in the farthest left-hand corner of the back wall, aimed now at the new, much smaller screen which was nowhere near the center-line of the throw. The images on both screens were severly distorted with weird keystoning. The aperture plates were these bizarre-looking trapazoidal shapes to make the image look square on the screen, but that couldn't disguise the fact that there wasn't a straigh line anywhere in the image you were looking at. When the credits rolled, they fanned out from one side of the screen to the other, changing the tilt angle as they moved from the bottom to the top.

Because the original side walls of the theatre were angled in toward the stage from the rear to the screen, in each of the new quad rooms, the center split wall was straight while the original side wall was angled. The result was that there were so many unnatural angles in the room that it could give a person vertigo just walking down the slope floor to your seat, which of course when you sat down, was facing the wrong direction.

In the two balcony rooms, they didn't bother to build a real floor over the orchestra, so the first seats started about half-way back from the screen which was hung at the original screen position, with this huge expanse of dead space between the first seats and the screen. If you sat in the very first row of either of the two upstairs rooms, you were already half the theatre length away from the screen; if you sat in the back row, yes, you were as far away as you would have been from the screen in the original single screen configuration, BUT the screen was now 1/4 the size -- were were looking at a screen relative to the size of your TV screen at home.

The original single screen was not a particularly wide room so now with the center split, it was like you were in a long tunnel with a small screen at one end. Sound in this long tunnel was what sound usually is in a long tunnel -- one long echo chamber with dialog that was TOTALLY unintelligible. Who wouldn't stay home to watch TV?

Should I mention that all four rooms boasted of screens that were 2:1 -- scope AND flat were each projected at 2:1.

And of course to prevent a patron from remembering the beauty of the original single screen room with its considerable wall details, every exposed surface, cieling, side walls, even the floor if I remember correctly, EVERYTHING as painted flat black.

As much as I hate to see a theatre go under, this place couldn't die fast enough for me. Mercifly, this abortion of a quad closed soon after the conversion; it's been a bank for decades now. Even though it's actually where I bank, I will not go into this branch just on principle.