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Topic: What's the latest theatre to close or open you have heard about? (part 2)
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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-29-2019 03:00 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
Seat counts for a Dolby Cinema screen of only 125 seats or less, even in NYC with its high ticket prices, is pretty ridiculous. Our local AMC IMAX with Xenon screen has 559 seats across 18 rows. Obviously they're standard size seats. The screen is acceptably big for a premium priced house.
The AMC Lincoln Square IMAX is 475 seats, 12 rows, most of which I feel are too close to the screen. Still equipped for both 70mm and laser, AFAIK. I recently saw Apollo 11 there and even though it wasn't shot in IMAX, it was a pretty good presentation. I remember in the early days of that theatre, you could see the seams in the screen in bright scenes, which used to annoy the hell out of me, but now it's seamless.
NYC Dolby and IMAX prices ARE absurdly high, but with the AMC subscription program, if I see just one Dolby or IMAX film a month, I'm already saving money. They're going to raise the price after my first year is up, but still well worth it - I'll break even after one film a month.
The seat counts are limited by the physical dimensions of the theatre. At least in the Dolby and IMAX screens they don't make the stupid mistake of putting an aisle down the middle, thereby destroying all the ideal seats.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Yeah, I miss 1000+ seat theaters like the Astor Plaza, although I went to the Ziegfeld more often even though it didn't have quite as many seats as the Astor Plaza (still over 1000 seats though). I really miss the Northpark 1-2 in Dallas, especially the #1 house.
I also went to the Ziegfeld more often than the Astor Plaza, although they never would have played the same film at the same time. Ziegfeld was 1150 seats and had a 52' screen and the Astor Plaza was 1530 seats (although one of the theatre sites claims it was only 1440) and had a 61' screen, but for some reason, the Ziegfeld screen always seemed larger to me. I always preferred the downstairs screen at the Orpheum (86th St) to the Astor Plaza, so I more often went there.
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Harold Hallikainen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 906
From: Denver, CO, USA
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 04-12-2019 06:02 PM
San Francisco Theaters that opened and closed long ago... See article for several photos.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/The-birth-of-a-Market-Street-cinema-district-13760256.php#photo-17168328
The birth of a Market Street cinema district: Celebrities, crack dens and a coda
Photo of Peter Hartlaub
Peter Hartlaub
I remember feeling happiness and shock a few years ago after receiving an invitation to a critics’ screening of “Rogue One” at the Dolby Laboratory headquarters at 1275 Market St. in San Francisco.
The last time a moviegoer could pay to see a film on the city’s busiest avenue was 2000 or 2003 — depending on whether we’re including porn films. Entering a new Market Street movie theater in the 2010s was like running into a live mastodon, or discovering an unknown Jimi Hendrix studio album after five decades.
But there it was, on the western end of San Francisco’s once-thriving theater row: a hidden cinema being used for private screenings. A faint pulse of life on the largest entertainment artery in the city’s history. .
San Francisco gained status as a theater town quickly in the 1800s, with classical music, opera, comedy, freak shows, roller skating and whatever else could sell a ticket in the grand wooden structures scattered across the downtown area.
The April 18, 1906, earthquake and fire burned the eight leading theaters in San Francisco to the ground. Gone in a matter of hours were the Columbia, the Grand Opera House and the California Theater.
Although the inferno decimated nearly all of downtown, one large San Francisco theater, on Market Street at Seventh Street, emerged nearly unscathed. The American Theater, a new “Class A” structure with no wood framing, was still under construction when the earthquake hit.
The American opened on Jan. 20, 1907, with opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, whose performance was delayed several hours because her train derailed in the Sierra Nevada. The marketing for the 1,400-seat theater was crafted toward the easily triggered, which was arguably the entire city at that point.
“Built of steel and reinforced concrete,” the first Chronicle advertisement read. “Safe and absolutely fireproof.”
The theater was an immediate success, which led to imitation. The wealthiest theater owners started building their own grand stone and steel structures up and down the same street.
“As soon as the flames had been extinguished, managers were already making their plans for bigger and better theaters than the ones which had burned down,” read a Dec. 20, 1906, Chronicle article reporting on plans for a new theater district that would easily eclipse the pre-quake scene.
Market Street after the 1906 earthquake with the Flood Building at Powell (in background).
Photo: The Chronicle 1906
The Esquire Theatre (954 Market St.) opened in 1909, the St. Francis Theatre (965 Market St.) in 1910 and the Alcazar Theatre (a block off Market at 260 O’Farrell St.) in 1911, all featuring comedians, opera and vaudeville.
The cinema age arrived in 1915, when the Alcazar booked D.W. Griffith’s epic “The Birth of a Nation,” which was a surprise hit. The Chronicle reported that “record attendance is being broken daily,” with 25,000 seeing the production in the first week, to the obvious panic of all the nearby vaudeville houses.
As moving pictures quickly overwhelmed the live theater scene, a half-dozen Market Street theaters with more than 2,000 seats opened, including the State Theatre (1917), Warfield Theatre (1922), Golden Gate Theatre (1922) and the Orpheum (1926).
When the Fox Theater, twice the size of the largest of its neighbors, opened on June 28, 1929, it was billed in San Francisco as the entertainment event of the century. Dozens of Hollywood stars were transported up the coast by train, including Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
FOX THEATRE (1929): When the Fox opened on Market Street not long after this photo was taken, the 4,500-seat theater was one of the most impressive in the world before its grand opening.
Photo: Chronicle Archives
The unnamed author of The Chronicle’s front-page coverage was so compromised by the spectacle, the resulting story read like a telegraph dispatch, or just a bunch of random adjectives pulled verbatim from the reporter’s notebook: “A dazzle of color — the overpowering brilliance of a million lights — beauty, beauty, everywhere,” the story began. “More lights — music — more beauty, girls so beautiful it brought a catch in one’s throat to look at them — more lights — fireworks — more beauty.”
The story read like the beginning of an exciting new era. But that was the clear peak for the Market Street cinema district. Just a few months later, the stock market would crash, slowing theater construction considerably.
There were at least 15 cinemas on Market Street in the 1930s, and too many of their collective 26,000 seats were empty. Exclusive film rights of the era meant only one theater at a time could show a big movie. While the Warfield was playing an exclusive run of “Gone With the Wind” to packed houses in the first half of 1940, the cavernous Fox had “The Fighting 69th” with James Cagney.
The Fox suffered more than other theaters. A series of crimes and bizarre accidents gave the theater a cursed vibe, including two ushers who died after stepping into an empty elevator shaft on the 10th floor.
Stairway to the boxes, at the Fox Theatre on Market Street, San Francisco. July 2, 1961
Photo: Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle
From a distance, the scene might have looked better than ever in the 1940s and 1950s. Photos looking down Market Street, neon stacked on neon, are some of the most stunning San Francisco images of the era. But up close, Market Street was becoming seedier. Upscale shopping and dining had moved up the hill, and more San Franciscans were staying home to watch television.
The State Theater, with 2,100 seats, went out of business in 1954. (There’s a Ross Dress for Less on that corner now.) The Alcazar closed a few years later, making way for what is now the Handlery Union Square Hotel.
The largest indignity was suffered by the gorgeous Fox. . A push for the city to take it over was beaten back by a vocal group including Mayor George Christopher and The Chronicle’s Herb Caen, who called the pro-Fox preservationists “a sad cult.” The best theater the city would ever see was demolished by a wrecking ball painted gold in 1963, and replaced by the rabbit-poop brown, 32-floor, boxy Fox Plaza office building.
“I can’t seem to squeeze out even a crocodile tear over the imminent destruction of the Fox Theater,” Caen wrote in 1963. “Unlike the Hall of Justice, which has true dignity, it is a dusty satire of a way of life that never really existed.”
The Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco shows the "Planet of the Apes" movies. March 3, 1973.
Photo: Barney Peterson / The Chronicle
In the 1970s the Warfield, Orpheum and Golden Gate theaters were given new purpose by music promoter Bill Graham and live theater promoters including Carole Shorenstein Hayes. The remaining Market Street theaters became X-rated dens, homes for drugs or vermin, or both.
The only significant downtown theater to survive the 1906 earthquake was taken down by its 1989 sequel. The American Theater, which had been renamed the Embassy in the 1920s, had gathered a following with second-run movie marathons and Ten-o-Win wheel-of-fortune cash drawings. But once the Loma Prieta earthquake struck, the unreinforced bricks inside the building crumbled, and the Embassy was red-tagged for future demolition.
Left with no competition on the block, the St. Francis continued showing second-run movies until Oct. 26, 2000. Its last films were “X-Men,” “Space Cowboys” and “The Watcher.” Before being demolished in 2013, the building remained abandoned, letters falling off the marquee like a game of Hangman that got tougher each year.
The St. Francis Theatre moved into this Market Street building (circa 1910) in 1925, during the area’s cinema heydays, and closed in 2000.
Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2010
The Strand Theater ended the 92-year history of movies on Market Street in a blaze of glory. The porn movie palace, well-known for crack cocaine sales and prostitution, was raided by police for both in 2003 and closed for good.
“How should I know what the (expletive) they do up there,” the Strand manager told police that day, as reported in the San Francisco Business Times.
Thankfully, the story doesn’t end there.
In 1999 and 2006, respectively, a pair of multiplexes, the AMC Metreon 16 and Westfield San Francisco Centre, were built a block away, with entrances on Mission Street. (The Westfield’s Market Street address is a technicality: The cinema is a three-minute walk, with several escalator rides, from Market Street.)
The Embassy was razed in 2004 and remained an empty lot for more than a decade. The Strand, almost unrecognizeable after a redesign, was reborn as an American Conservatory Theater venue.
The Strand theater on Market street is seen on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 in San Francisco, Calif.
Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle
And the Dolby Cinema on Market Street, occasionally used for critics screenings and other private events since 2016, is now hosting ticketed customers for the San Francisco International Film Festival, which runs through April 23 at several theaters. (The Peter Sarsgaard drama “The Sound of Silence” and the Mexico City ambulance documentary “Midnight Family” both play Sunday, April 14, at the Dolby.)
Market Street movie palaces: What’s playing in 1950 and 2015
The sleek state-of-the-art theater doesn’t resemble any of the old movie palaces. It doesn’t even serve popcorn. The Dolby is almost certainly not the beginning of any real comeback for Market Street cinema.
But walking outside after a screening, blinking eyes adjusting to the light on Market Street, it’s easy to convince yourself it’s part of something bigger. A short epilogue to one of the most epic runs in San Francisco entertainment history.
Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
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Frank Cox
Film God
Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011
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posted 04-17-2019 07:01 PM
Gatineau drive-in theatre closes after 45 years
quote:
One of the few remaining drive-in theatres in the Ottawa-Gatineau area has dimmed its screens for the last time.
Ciné-Parc Templeton in east Gatineau, Que., confirmed to Radio-Canada Wednesday it had gone out of business.
The theatre, which wrapped up its 45th season last fall, sold its equipment to the Belle Neige ski resort in Val-Morin, Que., northwest of Montreal, according to owner Paul Touchet.
The Val-Morin resort intends to open its own drive-in theatre next month.
In 2011, the City of Gatineau considered expropriating the drive-in's property to install a waste treatment centre, but a petition with some 3,000 signatures halted those plans.
Ciné-ParcTempleton had invested $100,000 per screen in 2013 to go digital.
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