Royal Theatre

I lived in the neighborhood in the 90’s. For some reason this wasn’t a regular movie stop for me. I did see “Blues Brothers 2000” there in Feb. 1998 right before it closed. There were only a couple other people in the theater and they were smoking cigarettes!

Actually the screen was in front of the stage. There was a wall backstage that people had been signing for years. On the left hand side you could go under the stage.

Perhaps my mind has gone bonkers but after I arrived here in 1976 it seems to me that in addition to its very sticky floors, that the screen had been placed at the back wall of the stage as everything else had been removed and this was the only way they could get a screen of the proper Cinemascope dimensions to fit.

For years this theater ran every James Bond film on the first day it opened. The manager had a little white poodle and the floors of the theater were covered in sticky soda residue while the ceiling was covered with hundreds, if not thousands of Mason Dots that people woul chew and through up to the ceiling. I saw every Bond film there hen it opened from 1964-1980.

The Royal Theatre became a Blumenfeld property in the mid-1980s. The new operator refurbished the theatre at a cost of about $250K, and the place looked and smelled great, especially its huge lobby. Ed Lowelling (who reportedly died some time ago), who ran the Royal, was one of the best movie theatre managers in the Bay Area; the sad thing was the Royal’s location in the seediest stretch of Polk Street. Blumenfeld was unwilling to book the best movies into the Royal because so many moviegoers avoided that neighborhood due to its abundance of litter, homeless people and prostitutes (the Regency 1 got the Blumenfeld blockbusters). Due its unpopular status, the Royal mostly sat nearly empty and therefore always looked brand new.

The January 8, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World ran an item in its San Francisco column saying that plans for the Royal Theatre Company’s new house on California Street near Polk had been completed, but the architect the item named was Bernard J. Joseph.

Does anyone know why Joseph’s plans were abandoned for those of the Reid Brothers, or why the theater’s entrance was placed around the corner on Polk Street instead of on California Street?

Here is a 1999 photograph I took of the Royal Theatre:
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I finally saw the completed replicated Royal facade last night. It was a little early in the evening, and the lighting behind the stained glass was not on. A copy of what may have been the original marquee is now attached. There is at least one difference, and that is that it is held up by steel pillars. The marquee has geometric patterns where reader boards would be, backed by what appears to be translucent white glass or plastic. The design copies a marquee which was rendered in a color pastel presentation drawing produced by the offices of Miller and Pflueger. I saw this pastel during an auction preview of the John Pflueger collection at Butterfild and Butterfield in 1990. The marquee had two large metal and cathedral glass laterns at the corners. Not long after, I mentioned having seen the rendering to theatre historian Steve Levin, and he had seen the same illustration years before, and commented that he had never actually seen a photo of that first marquee design, and was unsure whether it had even actually been executed like that. A photo does exist of a rectangular marquee with geometric neon and traditional reader boards, which for a time coexisted with the tall Royal vertical sign added later. The wedge-shaped marquee familiar to all of us over the last several decades was added still later. Regardless of whether the present marquee duplicates something once there, or whether it was inspired by the pastel rendering from the Pflueger office, the result is quite impressive. The steel pillars may seem a jarring note to purists, perhaps, but maybe they were required by modern building codes. The lanterns employ the same vivid orange and gold-veined cathedral glass that was installed in the false window on the facade.

I have some very old photos of the Royal Theater. If you would like them e-mail me at

Don…Thank you so much for your photograph. This must have been a late evening shot as to the angle of the shaddows. Lovely!

If only the owner, Ted Nasser, had the brains to have leased the Royal to me some 7 or so years ago, the old lady would be still open today and looking a lot prettier.
My plans, along with over 3,000 signatures of support, not including every surrounding merchant, were to have turned this lovely place into an all British cinema.

Further in mind was the installation of a second procenium arch with curtains for moderate size stage ready for “live” performances by visiting Brits… Plus, added to the programme would have been openings of new films from Britain including Film Festivals and a British themed gift & food shop.

And the name ROYAL was perfect for my dreams but Ted was “blind” to the fact of allowing such a venture to come true!
Simon Overton, Long Beach, Ca.

Gary… I was in my favourite “city by the bay” in April ‘07 and was shocked to see a pile of boxy looking apartments being constructed on the site of the Royal.
I cannot recall seeing anything left of the Royal’s classic facade.
Perhaps a photographic update is possible from a local fan?
Pretty please?

My photograph of the ROYAL.
www.flickr.com/photos/lastpictureshow/296523891

The Royal had one interesting note.

Somehow it managed to have the opening of every James Bond picture. My cousin and I saw every Bond picture there on opening day for years.

The theatre had a small snack bar and the theatre manager had a small scruffy poodle which he used to walk each night. On the other side of the theatre the dollar store was a Nationwide Bank at one time.

The inside of the theatre had permanently sticky floors from all the soda spilled there over the years and kids and adults used to buy Dots and Jujubes and chew them and threw them at the ceiling. There must have been thousands of the damned things up there !

George Senda
Concord Ca