posted 12-13-2003 04:19 AM                    

quote:

---

Who's that guy who is impersonating Dan Lyons & cashing his checks & all? He's doesn't even look like Dan; who is he trying to fool? Is Dan like tied up in a closet

---

posted 12-15-2003 02:32 AM                       

quote:

---

I never saw a balcony at this theatre until the current redo. If there was a balcony originally, it was closed up and plastered over decades ago.

---

quote:

---

The procenium was also completely removed (not even one pillar visible)since at least the 50's. I saw a number of films on the theatre's D-150 screen. The deep curving curtains and screen occupied the whole front of the semi pie-shaped auditorium.

---

My recollection was that the proscenium was altered for Cinemascope, & then the D-150 screen was installed in front of what remained & drapes hung over everything at the sides. "Removal" would not be clean or easy or economical or the way it's ever been done!


If you look at the plan view of the theater on the page linked above, you can see that these combination houses were essentially two buildings: The auditorium, & the stage house. They are two buildings between which is the most monster firewall imaginable - poured concrete 1 to 2 feet thick.

The bizarre thing is that these theaters were already built inside another building. Look at the plan view; you can see the funnel shape of the auditorium shell, & then outside of it the square shape of the building shell itself. If there were a section view, you would see the top of the theater suspended from the top of the shell above. Uninformed people just see them as empty spaces, but they just see the auditorium. Folks don't see what things are, how they work, or if something they don't know "is anything". A theatre is a machine installed inside a shell, & it really is most obvious in these older ones that did more.

You have a shell, then you build a cellular theater in it. If you want, you can take the theater out, you have the shell again to do something with: like complete it with offices like the rest of the building (as in the NY Paramount).

If they wanted to build a new theatre & just needed a shell to start with, a better choice would be almost anything else already standing that's just a shell. (First thing to mind would be an old department store: examples from the 1800s to 1940s were large, open, square, easily built in, lots of decorative & historic-y detail.)

But the Egyptian is weird. You can see how it got that way by following the blindered thought processes like looking at a decades-old rat's nest in an equipment rack of added equipment over the years. Okay, we'll save the theatre! But we want a different design theatre! Okay, we'll build it inside the theatre! What's been saved? The front yard & the organ grille on the ceiling. A new theatre has been built; the old theatre has been buried. It's not like a massive rehab of an existing theatre, like Powell Hall. You have to understand the progression of disjointed thinking from "save historic theatre" to "build theatre in building".

I'm all for building excellent new theatres & also saving old ones, but the result is not so much ill-conceived as it is crazy. Instead of just a theater built in a shell, you've got this Chinese nesting boxes thing. It additionally results in the strangest hoops to jump through like having to extend it into the stage house. And what's in the fly tower above the new auditorium cell? Can it be used?

quote:

---

I plan to see THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES in January there

---

Woo hoo! On the same day with IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD, both in 70mm! I'd like to be sitting there all day with 20 boxes of Chocolate Stars and a 50 gallon drum of Sprite!

posted 12-15-2003 03:23 AM                    

quote:

---

Removal" would not be clean or easy or economical or the way it's ever been done!

---

posted 12-15-2003 10:03 PM                    

quote:

---

Brand new restored Todd-AO 70mm Print!!
THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES

---

posted 02-13-2004 07:38 PM                    

quote:

---

So didn't ANYBODY make it to the festival to give a report?

---