Their mailbox has 111.2 MEGABYTES 
of email in it. Do you think they read it very often? Also, note the "pods" for each auditorium. It seems that this architecture would not be often used because it dramatically increases the amount of brick needed, and probably costs more to heat and cool.
The subpage with the photographs is http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/generated_subpages/facilities/university.html
Evans A Criswell
Main URL: http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/
(Clicking "Historical Theatre Information", then "Huntsville, Decatur, and Athens, AL",
then "University Cinemas" takes you to the subpage also. I don't have a link back to the rest of the structure from each subpage yet.)
quote:
Wow! Thats a real expensive way to construct a theater.
What would you expect in Huntsville, a town that contains nothing but rocket scientists?
In Mobile, AL, Carmike bought it all & has closed everything built before about 1997. A Hollywood multi has arrived, but otherwise I think it's about three Carmike 16-ishes.
The only one really worth missing was a classic 1970's middle of the mall parking lot cube, but it had been twinned. Still, the two were fairly large (though too long) & were the last hint of the type of theater where cities used to go when all of the city went to see a particular movie playing at only one theater.
Unrelated to Carmike's acquisition, the last independent was a porno theater (the Midtown) downtown which moved its operation to the back half of the building when downtown was facelifted. The facade of the building was renovated to its original look - The Crown Theater, ca. 1910 - & a dance club moved in. Knowledge of the existence of the porno theater in the Crown always made me happy, as it made that theater the longest continually operating theater in the city...almost 100 years! Unfortunately, the guys got bought out & closed it down last year. Now the oldest continually operating theater in Mobile is the ca. 1997 Carmike 14 on government.
I suppose that one seems antique now, since it's the only one in the town without stadium seating.
It's actually a mix of software developers and engineers. There are probably very few rocket scientists here.
I've been in Huntsville since 1988, and I know how people from out of town would think: "Since there are so many high-tech people here, they'd demand the best in movie theatres and home theatre equipment." They're sadly mistaken. Most of those high-tech high-paid folks go out and buy the cheapest home theatre stuff they can find and don't know or care about the details of theatre projection quality when they go out to see movies.
All but one of Huntsville's theatres (not Decatur) were built by Cobb, a cheap Birmingham company that only installed adjustable masking in 4 out of 12 auditoriums at Madison Square 12 (1985) and 4 out of 16 (originally) at Hollywood 16 (1994). All other screens are 1.85:1 only. You should have seen that old Cobb Cinema 8 theatre (1982) that closed back in May. It was an A&P grocery store (look at http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/generated_subpages/facilities/st72-r8.html for a picture), with non-adjustable 2.00:1 screens (20 foot by 10 foot) in 7 out of its 8 auditoriums. Huntsville is the closest thing to theatre hell that I could imagine, and the people do not demand anything better. I feel that I'm the only one who cares. I'll tell some of my high-tech friends that they're missing nearly 25% of the image on scope films and they just don't care. They don't even know there are "flat" and "scope" movies of different sizes, and they just assume that the theatre staff know what they're doing. (Most of them also hate letterboxed movies on DVD.) This is the reason that our theatres are in such sad shape. Before Carmike put their Carmike 10 facility here, there was not an acceptable theatre in Huntsville, which is why I started going to Decatur and including them in my ratings.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but my work is NASA-funded. Nearly all of the work I've done has dealt with atmospheric science data. I've been programming since 1984. If it weren't for these skills, I probably would not have been able to create my theatre ratings web site. In my area, I've found that theatre staff members tend to not have computers and don't use the internet. One manager has emailed me about my site, and he keeps losing the URL. A staff member of another theatre asked me for the URL and I gave it to him. I saw him two days ago and he said, "I never saw your site, but I'm cleaning up my room and I think I'll find that paper." Ugh. I know that neither Decatur theatre manager has a computer or email. One manager from Decatur got one of his workers to download and print the comments about his theatre. The Carmike 10 manager here in Huntsville is the only one I know of that uses email. They got an account with a local ISP (hiwaay.net), the same one I use, so I can tell that the size of their email box (account name "carmike") is 116630533 bytes. (Dont' worry; I can't read it.) Their mailbox has 111.2 MEGABYTES of email in it. Do you think they read it very often?
To sum up Huntsville's theatre situation:
What is the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care!
Until someone else comes along to give Regal more competition, it is likely that nothing will change. (Regal took over all of those terrible Cobb theatres).
If I were to choose a city that would have a high probability of having good theatres, I'd try to pick a place with a lot of intelligent artistic people and few high-tech ones. Huntsville is the opposite, and maybe that's why we have bad theatres (except for one).
Note: Even the expensively-built University 6 theatre that I started this thread by describing had a reputation of being terribly maintained and unclean as early as 1982. There may have been no sound bleed-through, but the sticky floors and poor sound quality hurt it. I heard it was closed because of crime in the parking lot (drug deals, etc.) See the graffiti in the pictures. It is close to what is now a bad group of apartment complexes.
Evans A Criswell http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/
quote:
If I were to choose a city that would have a high probability of having good theatres, I'd try to pick a place with a lot of intelligent artistic people and few high-tech ones.
Give up on that. I know of one University that has a regular "film festival" which is rented videos shown on a screen with an old, low-res video projector that probably came from a bar. They see no difference between film & video.
A huge 1920's movie theater that couldn't get a print of a particular title for an Arts Council showing, & so instead set up on the balcony rail a Sony video projector w/videocassette from SunCoast. They threw it about 17x17 in the middle of the regular movie screen (count the pixels!), and I got to listen to the Arts Council folk say "It looks just as good as the other movies, they should do them all this way."
I recently watched in a University classroom a video of a Broadway show projected with a consumer video projector. After listening to a brief preamble about how dark & difficult to make out a lot of the movie seemed to be, I watched the perfessor fire it up & show it not on the retractable screen, but on the slightly blue sheetrock wall "so it would be bigger".
Maybe the builder of that theatre wanted to make a bunch of cinedomes?!?!
Ick --- why on Earth?
The theatre opened as a 4-screen multiplex, and two auditoriums were added on later. I need to get a copy of some of the early ads since they had an overhead style drawing of the facility back when it had 4 screens. That way, I could determine which two pods were added later.
I spoke to a theatre manager lately that was familiar with that theatre and he said his main complaint with it was its lobby was too small to handle a lot of people waiting to get into the movies. The "pod" design requires a centralized lobby, and there is a limit to how many "pods" can be built and connected to the central lobby without having to spend a lot of money modifying the facility to include halls.
If this theatre had been maintained well and updated with digital sound, it could have had a lot of potential. I saw two movies there. "Kindergarten Cop" was acceptable, and "Wayne's World" had terrible sound (with Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" sounding like the singers were talking under water). The management would have had to put more effort into keep crime down (drug deals, etc.) in the parking lot. The entire back of the facility is covered in graffiti. Most new developments along US 72 keep moving westward. The area where that theatre was built used to be great. One of the city's nicest hotels was nearby (and recently torn down after years of neglect) as well as a Wal-Mart (now moved several miles west) and numerous fast-food places (still there). I hope this area will somehow be revitalized in the future since it is so close to the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Evans
Both locations were "Carmike" houses, and were "THE" place to see a show in the 80's.
Cinema North is still operating as a theater, but now run as a cheap discount house.
Cinema South has been sold and is now a thriving night club. Four clubs in one building. Disco in one auditorium, Country in another, Karaoke in another, and Top 40 dance music in the last.
Regal's 27 screen "Hollywood 27" put the final nail in the coffins of many of the smaller theaters in this town.
There's a company (I forget the name) that makes special cement block for sound insulation. It has "scientifically designed" slots cut into it with metal and fiberglass baffles inside the chambers. The idea is that the lower freq. waves go into the slots and are absorbed by the inner panels, rather than letting the block vibrate witht the sound and transmitting it through the wall.
It was designed for schools and other buildings that are close to highways and airports, etc. It looks rather cool. Instead of shipping you the blocks they ship the molds and portable brick making machines. You actually make your own blocks on-site.
I'm sure it's expensive but I wonder if it could be applied to theatre construction?
It was the hope of the developer of the mall to transform the "Ford glass plant dump" and former Davidson county landfill into the "premier shopping experience" for the north-west portion of town. It didn't work.
The "mistake by the lake" as it is affectionately known to Nashvllians was located on the wrong side of town in an area surrounded by housing projects and low income families.
The mall never took off as a shopping destination, and was mostly vacant when it was open. The only thing that did succeed there was "Hooters", and when it moved downtown to the redeveloped 2nd Avenue district, the whole place just died.
I used to work at that "Hooters" while in college, and I only saw one movie there and that was "Ford Fairlane" with Andrew Dice Clay.
Hmmm. It sounds like Carmike may be about to make a similar mistake here in Huntsville, thinking of putting a new theatre in a new shopping center called "The Fountain" (reminds me of the failed "Fountain Square") that is located in an area surrounded by housing projects and low-class neighborhoods, and right across from the city's new municipal complex, which includes a jail! One of the managers told me about this plan and I have tried to discourage him on the idea, hoping it will lead to the higher ups at Carmike investigating the location more carefully. This new location is only a couple of miles from the University 6 theatre that I opened this thread talking about, and it had crime problems. However, "The Fountain" is at the intersection of I-565, US 231/431, and US 72. On a map, it looks fantastic, until you actually look around at the neighborhoods around there. I'll keep telling that Carmike manager, "Remember Fountain Square?"
At one theatre here (which has just recently closed) the walls between the auditoriums were common and paper thin. I remember the story of a woman who complained that while she was watching "Little Women" her viewing was constantly interrupted by the Starship Enterprise flying by and having space battles in dts on the screen next door!
Yes, quality design in that one...
The URL for the pictures is http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/images/nashville/ (You can't get to them from my main site at this time.)
These Nashville theatres (you said they were Carmike, but were they BUILT by Carmike?) are very, very similar to the University 6 (judge for yourself), but some of the pods seem more like an octagon than a hexagon. The Cinema North design seems to have more shared walls between auditoriums than the University 6 or Cinema South did. Comments?
The Cinema North has a freeway overpass going right through the middle of the parking lot between it and the rest of that shopping center. I assume that wasn't there when the place was first built?
Evans A Criswell http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/
I used to live in Nashville (1975-1982) and now live 5 hours east on I-40. Is the MetroCenter really as barren as you say? I worked at WZTV at their old location at 38th Av. and Charlotte Pike. When I left, they were preparing for the move to MetroCenter. I guess they are still there, too? The old Skyway Drive In was my haunt in 1977 when I ran Star Wars every night.
Is the Belcourt theatre still near Vanderbilt U? I think I heard that the Tennessee Theater downtown bit the dust a few years back, like the old Sam Davis Hotel did. (Ka-BOOM)
Bruce
Bruce...
Fountain Square is "really" as dead as I claimed.
The Belcourt "almost" got torn down last year, but a group of "art-film lovers" saved it and now runs it strictly as an art-house. They've got a web-site, but I can't remember the domain.
The old Tennessee theater on Church street was torn down in 1986 to make way for a 20 story "luxury condo/apartment" building. I've got some photos of the Tennessee before it was torn down.
You mentioned the old "Sam Davis Hotel". I currently work for an engineering firm in Nashville, and we have one of the original solid-oak fully enclosed phone booths from the lobby of the Sam Davis in our lobby.
Where was the Skyway drive-in? I know of the "Cresent", the "Montague", the "Capital"
and "Colonial"... but never heard of the "Skyway". I've got the two original Brenkert BX-60's from the "Sumner" drive-in in my basement.
The URL is http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/images/nashville/ (Not linked into my main site.)
If you want to know the general condition of MetroCenter, take a look at this theatre. The wide shot I provided links to a much larger version of the picture. For my movie, I'd like the Sicily Caesar Pizza and Pasta auditorium, please! There appear to be several office type buildings in use, and most of the food places in the area probably survive by providing convenient lunch places for the office workers. Fountain Square Mall looks mostly empty, and it appears that many of the spaces in use are not stores, but are offices for businesses.
By the way, the Cinema South picture I put up was taken at night with the shutter open for 2 seconds. The ones taken at 1 second showed "The Outer Limit" on the sign, but the auditoriums did not show up well.
Evans http://home.hiwaay.net/~criswell/theatre/
Octagons (or extended octagons) come together in quite neat ways. I couldn't find my 30-60-90 drafting triangle, so I haven't toyed with hexagons yet. Hexagons tile the plane, so some neat things might happen with them. With octagons, it is possible to build a structure with minimal sound bleed-through, while not having such a ridiculous amount of rectangular wall, while having a centralized booth and lobby. However, it is hard to have more than 6 or 7 auditoriums without losing the centralized booth or lobby. Maybe that's why the "pod" design went out when the number of auditoriums per theatre went up.
Comments? Ideas for cool or non-conventional multiplex designs?
Evans
The common wall(s) do share the same poured footing, but then each wall starts with it's own poured (or concrete block) base. The studs (usually steel, nowadays) is built up from there, and there's no mechanical connection between the two until the wall reaches the roof.
The pod idea is a really good one, but probably just too expensive. It's not just the walls, there would be higher costs for several other things, like ducting, roof grid, etc. If the pod idea gives you a (say) 100% sound isolation, constructing the footing as I described might give you (say) 92%, but the cost would be much, much lower.
And, of course, it seems the avaiable property is never in an ideal shape for what you want.
I worked at a theater located right next to railroad tracks. I was talking to the architect, who told me they poured several tons of lead into the foundation to prevent the wall (facing the tracks) from shaking when trains went by. While it may have helped, it really didn't work too well. It's a local sort of joke to be watching a film there when a train goes by, and have the action on the screen match the shaking of the theater.
It has been 4009 days since the last post.