Thanks for that vivid picture of life in a theatre! My memories of this theatre go back to the 60’s even if I only remember seeing two films there After the Fox with Peter Sellers and Altered States with William Hurt in the early 80s…Before multiplexes, this theatre regularly day dated with an Upper East Side or Broadway house on major releases
The Lincoln Art was as far as I go back…seeing THE LION IN WINTER there in 1969…my only other visits to this theater were in its short lived hard core porn years
My first memories of this theater in the 60s were of it showing Spanish language films and eventually some soft porn before switching to an art house format…Its glory years as an art house came under Dan Talbot of New Yorker films who later developed the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas…Remember seeing AMARCORD there in the 70s, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, LA PETITE VOLEUSE there in the 80s
This theatre replaced a space that was a well-known revue theatre in the Plaza the Plaza 9 maybe…This was as close to a private screening room feel as we had in Manhattan…wide deep seats…no popcorn and generally not much company…The opening attraction was Alain Resnais' Providence…The listing in adverts was always Cinema III or Cinema 3 with just beneath it in the Plaza Hotel so not to confuse with Cinema I and II or even the Plaza a block away
Eventually Rugoff/Cinema 5 started day dating this with the Sutton or Cinema I mainly on Fox pictures Julia, Robert Altman’s A Wedding, High Anxiety offering reserved seating
Remember seeing A Wedding, Moonlighting, Broadcast News, Field of Dreams here
Remember seeing Antonioni’s The Passenger there in 1975…In its waning days of the 70s Walter Reade would day date this theatre a lot with the Coronet or Baronet on the East Side
What a great theatre…thanks for adding it! Fond memories of The Producers in its very short first run at an 11:30 in the morning show, The Charge of the Light Brigade on a roadshow engagement with a school trip, Truffaut’s Two English Girls, and Fritz the Cat even though I was only 16…
The Symphony itself…a noble second run house was on Broadway…my best memories of it were in the mid 60s seeing unmemorable kid’s pictures from Universal Studios ie Tony Randall in Fluffy, Andy Griffith in Angel in My Pocket
After the Roundabout days, Walter Reade triplexed it as the 23rd St West…Cineplex kept the name until they redid it and twinned it…It was a grotty but fun neigborhood house…saw The Fourth War with Roy Scheider in 1989 there
This wasn’t a bad place to see a movie in the 80’s…saw Absence of Malice,The Verdict, Trading Places, Coming to America and Tucker here…It was I think one screen upstairs and two downstairs and presented a good alternative for the growing area population to going to the Upper East Side and Times Square
Fond memories of this as well…built on the sight of the old RKO 86th St within what was Gimbel’s and now HMV…when it opened in the early 70’s suburban style single ticket booth twins weren’t very common yet in Manhattan…this had a two tone marquee one half white one half orange in keeping with the way RKO was doing it in the suburbs…In the RKO years the product was first run but not brilliant – mostly MGM, Cinerama Releasing, American International some blaxpo and exploitation pictures…Remember seeing The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, Ben, Shaft’s Big Score, a couple of fun horror pictures there, eventually a reissue of American Graffiti around 1977
Cineplex Odeon tarted it up and it had the block to itself for a while in the late 80’s while the Orpheum got torn down and rebuilt as a sevenplex…Saw Tremors, The Hunt for Red October, The War of the Roses
This opened in 1971-72? as the UA COLUMBIA I & II as a first run venue primarily for Columbia Pictures…One opening attraction was The Last Picture Show which I managed to get into even though I was a couple of years underage…Columbia managed to run a couple of road show attractions through here as well such as Young Winston and Godspell…Eventually some Fox first run and Universal product came through here and they redid the front and renamed them the Gemini Twins around 1978…Among the pictures I saw here in the 70s – The Last Detail, Images, The New Centurions, The Three Musketeers, A Woman Under the Influence, American Graffiti, A Bridge Too Far, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 2nd run and Rocky in 2nd run…In the 80s Total Recall, Air America
The original marquee was flat against the facade and they tended to squeeze some abrreviated coming attractions onto them…There was also a move in the early 80s to using homemade rather than studio posters for coming attractions
In 1974 they held an all nite Columbia retrospective for the 50th anniversary of Columbia Pictures…my dad tried in vain to track me down there
The Festival was the Festival…Joe Levine’s theatre was the Lincoln Art near 7th Avenue…This was a Walter Reade theatre as far as I can remember back into the mid 60s until Loews took it in the 80s…Always tought to program I remember a mix of art, 1st and 2nd run stuff here including James Bond double bills, La Grande Vadrouille my favourite French comedy ever and Ten From Your Show of Shows…In the 80s I saw Au Revoir Les Enfants and The Navigator here
Simply because it wasn’t really in my neighborhood only remember seeing one picture here in the 60’s the rather forgettable Marlon Brando comedy Bedtime Story (remade in the 80s as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels)…great aqua seats and interiors
The Plaza was always a Rugoff/Cinema 5 theatre from my consciousness in the mid 60s until it ended up with Cineplex Odeon in the 80s…a great great house with its older small town trimmings in the lobby…saw a wide range of pictures there in first and second run including a Charlie Chaplin retrospective in the 60s, Alfredo Alfredo, The Garden of the Finzi Contini, Viva Maria, Round Midnight, Bird, The Music Box, The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover the first half at least until the film broke…In the 80s Diva ran here for nearly a year and Branagh’s Henry V was here for a 5 – 6 month run
In the 60’s this was an art house but drifted into some very odd neighborhood programming under a company called Cinecom…some Disney double features at Disney’s nadir…some Carry On’s and some early Wes Craven Last House on the Left…it redeemed itself in the early to mid-70s with $1.00 revivals changing nearly daily…I can remember seeing a Jack Nicholson double feature Five Easy Pieces and Drive He Sais…a D.H. Lawrence double feature Sons and Lovers and Women In Love and the 4 hour French picture The Mother and the Whore here…
Cineplex Odeon did what it could with it but it was never a great location for a theatre…saw the John Lennon documentary Imagine in the big room and a Gerard Depardieu picture Trop Belle Pour Lui in the smaller room in the 88-89
I wasn’t impressed with the renderings on the Apollo website…What Picadilly doesn’t need is another set of smallish rooms with the same programming as everyone else. Saw some good films in these theatres in the 70’s-90’s…Quadrophenia in its original run…The Crying Game, Housesitter, Citizen Kane in a 2 week reissue, White Men Can’t Jump, American Beauty, Monty Python the Meaning of Life, Green Card…
This is a real shame…like the old Plaza on 58th St this is a theatre that should have been left to age gracefully and carry on as a landmark…The twinning of it was bad enough…Among the pictures I saw here in the 70s were Butch Cassidy, The Sicilian Clan, Network, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein, The Three Stooges Revue…The other great thing from a location point of view is that people queuing had a long block to do it in…part of the fun of going to the movies in Manhattan in the cold when theatres got 6 shows a day in
Before Walter Reade took it over around 1977 (first attraction The Boys from Company C), this was a neighbourhood house with an odd history…First as an AIT theatre sometimes day-dating with the 72nd St Playhouse, sometimes showing foreign arty films, sometimes some first run…then as a discount house…and as a porn house with a nearly year long run of Devil and Miss Jones…My only real visit was for a Pink Panther movie in 77 or 78 but I can attest to ET having a nearly 6 month first run there in 82
Among the films in the big room Empire 1 are a couple of the Star Trek films, Jurassic Park, Primary Colours, Ride with the Devil…The last of the Star Treks with the original cast was a treat on the giant screen…It is a generally more comfortable experience than the Odeon Leicester Sq
In Number 2 I’ve seen things like Schindler’s List, Carlito’s Way, Gangs of New York, Henry & June, Jungle Fever…an old fashion large house not unreminiscent of being in the Beekman or Sutton in New York for a quality film…some new seats wouldn’t be unappreciated
I squeezed into Number 3 for Cape Fear but wouldn’t rush back considering the choices we now have in London in local multiplexes
This theater was around the corner from where our Miami friends lived and I was lucky to catch a couple of interesting pictures there in the 60’s including Fitzwilly with Dick van Dyke, Never on Sunday on a reissue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…It was a pretty bog standard 400 seat single screen but certainly appealing enough for the times
Beyond the fact that this is a really old-fashioned twin with tight seating, I’ve enjoyed some fun and interesting times here…squeezed in the front rows of the downstairs screen for Harry Potter and Evita or way up top for Strictly Ballroom
The OWE is home to the commerical portion of the London Film Festival – a great chance every year to see pictures before general distribution…In previous years I’ve been to the surprise film a couple of times, and saw the first London screening of Shawshank Redemption which has a massive cult following here
Far from a perfect place to see a movie, but it is a great place to see good audience pictures
Beyond the fact that this is a really old-fashioned twin with tight seating, I’ve enjoyed some fun and interesting times here…squeezed in the front rows of the downstairs screen for Harry Potter and Evita or way up top for Strictly Ballroom
The OWE is home to the commerical portion of the London Film Festival – a great chance every year to see pictures before general distribution…In previous years I’ve been to the surprise film a couple of times, and saw the first London screening of Shawshank Redemption which has a massive cult following here
Far from a perfect place to see a movie, but it is a great place to see good audience pictures
Thanks for that vivid picture of life in a theatre! My memories of this theatre go back to the 60’s even if I only remember seeing two films there After the Fox with Peter Sellers and Altered States with William Hurt in the early 80s…Before multiplexes, this theatre regularly day dated with an Upper East Side or Broadway house on major releases
The Lincoln Art was as far as I go back…seeing THE LION IN WINTER there in 1969…my only other visits to this theater were in its short lived hard core porn years
A porn theater with a really distinctive marquee down the block from the original Herman’s Sporting Goods
My first memories of this theater in the 60s were of it showing Spanish language films and eventually some soft porn before switching to an art house format…Its glory years as an art house came under Dan Talbot of New Yorker films who later developed the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas…Remember seeing AMARCORD there in the 70s, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, LA PETITE VOLEUSE there in the 80s
This theatre replaced a space that was a well-known revue theatre in the Plaza the Plaza 9 maybe…This was as close to a private screening room feel as we had in Manhattan…wide deep seats…no popcorn and generally not much company…The opening attraction was Alain Resnais' Providence…The listing in adverts was always Cinema III or Cinema 3 with just beneath it in the Plaza Hotel so not to confuse with Cinema I and II or even the Plaza a block away
Eventually Rugoff/Cinema 5 started day dating this with the Sutton or Cinema I mainly on Fox pictures Julia, Robert Altman’s A Wedding, High Anxiety offering reserved seating
Remember seeing A Wedding, Moonlighting, Broadcast News, Field of Dreams here
Remember seeing Antonioni’s The Passenger there in 1975…In its waning days of the 70s Walter Reade would day date this theatre a lot with the Coronet or Baronet on the East Side
What a great theatre…thanks for adding it! Fond memories of The Producers in its very short first run at an 11:30 in the morning show, The Charge of the Light Brigade on a roadshow engagement with a school trip, Truffaut’s Two English Girls, and Fritz the Cat even though I was only 16…
The Symphony itself…a noble second run house was on Broadway…my best memories of it were in the mid 60s seeing unmemorable kid’s pictures from Universal Studios ie Tony Randall in Fluffy, Andy Griffith in Angel in My Pocket
After the Roundabout days, Walter Reade triplexed it as the 23rd St West…Cineplex kept the name until they redid it and twinned it…It was a grotty but fun neigborhood house…saw The Fourth War with Roy Scheider in 1989 there
This wasn’t a bad place to see a movie in the 80’s…saw Absence of Malice,The Verdict, Trading Places, Coming to America and Tucker here…It was I think one screen upstairs and two downstairs and presented a good alternative for the growing area population to going to the Upper East Side and Times Square
Fond memories of this as well…built on the sight of the old RKO 86th St within what was Gimbel’s and now HMV…when it opened in the early 70’s suburban style single ticket booth twins weren’t very common yet in Manhattan…this had a two tone marquee one half white one half orange in keeping with the way RKO was doing it in the suburbs…In the RKO years the product was first run but not brilliant – mostly MGM, Cinerama Releasing, American International some blaxpo and exploitation pictures…Remember seeing The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, Ben, Shaft’s Big Score, a couple of fun horror pictures there, eventually a reissue of American Graffiti around 1977
Cineplex Odeon tarted it up and it had the block to itself for a while in the late 80’s while the Orpheum got torn down and rebuilt as a sevenplex…Saw Tremors, The Hunt for Red October, The War of the Roses
woody…according to today’s Standard there’s a demonstration on Wednesday in front of the cinema
We assume that this whole block will be torn down eventually…
This opened in 1971-72? as the UA COLUMBIA I & II as a first run venue primarily for Columbia Pictures…One opening attraction was The Last Picture Show which I managed to get into even though I was a couple of years underage…Columbia managed to run a couple of road show attractions through here as well such as Young Winston and Godspell…Eventually some Fox first run and Universal product came through here and they redid the front and renamed them the Gemini Twins around 1978…Among the pictures I saw here in the 70s – The Last Detail, Images, The New Centurions, The Three Musketeers, A Woman Under the Influence, American Graffiti, A Bridge Too Far, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 2nd run and Rocky in 2nd run…In the 80s Total Recall, Air America
The original marquee was flat against the facade and they tended to squeeze some abrreviated coming attractions onto them…There was also a move in the early 80s to using homemade rather than studio posters for coming attractions
In 1974 they held an all nite Columbia retrospective for the 50th anniversary of Columbia Pictures…my dad tried in vain to track me down there
The Festival was the Festival…Joe Levine’s theatre was the Lincoln Art near 7th Avenue…This was a Walter Reade theatre as far as I can remember back into the mid 60s until Loews took it in the 80s…Always tought to program I remember a mix of art, 1st and 2nd run stuff here including James Bond double bills, La Grande Vadrouille my favourite French comedy ever and Ten From Your Show of Shows…In the 80s I saw Au Revoir Les Enfants and The Navigator here
Simply because it wasn’t really in my neighborhood only remember seeing one picture here in the 60’s the rather forgettable Marlon Brando comedy Bedtime Story (remade in the 80s as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels)…great aqua seats and interiors
The Plaza was always a Rugoff/Cinema 5 theatre from my consciousness in the mid 60s until it ended up with Cineplex Odeon in the 80s…a great great house with its older small town trimmings in the lobby…saw a wide range of pictures there in first and second run including a Charlie Chaplin retrospective in the 60s, Alfredo Alfredo, The Garden of the Finzi Contini, Viva Maria, Round Midnight, Bird, The Music Box, The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover the first half at least until the film broke…In the 80s Diva ran here for nearly a year and Branagh’s Henry V was here for a 5 – 6 month run
In the 60’s this was an art house but drifted into some very odd neighborhood programming under a company called Cinecom…some Disney double features at Disney’s nadir…some Carry On’s and some early Wes Craven Last House on the Left…it redeemed itself in the early to mid-70s with $1.00 revivals changing nearly daily…I can remember seeing a Jack Nicholson double feature Five Easy Pieces and Drive He Sais…a D.H. Lawrence double feature Sons and Lovers and Women In Love and the 4 hour French picture The Mother and the Whore here…
Cineplex Odeon did what it could with it but it was never a great location for a theatre…saw the John Lennon documentary Imagine in the big room and a Gerard Depardieu picture Trop Belle Pour Lui in the smaller room in the 88-89
I wasn’t impressed with the renderings on the Apollo website…What Picadilly doesn’t need is another set of smallish rooms with the same programming as everyone else. Saw some good films in these theatres in the 70’s-90’s…Quadrophenia in its original run…The Crying Game, Housesitter, Citizen Kane in a 2 week reissue, White Men Can’t Jump, American Beauty, Monty Python the Meaning of Life, Green Card…
This is a real shame…like the old Plaza on 58th St this is a theatre that should have been left to age gracefully and carry on as a landmark…The twinning of it was bad enough…Among the pictures I saw here in the 70s were Butch Cassidy, The Sicilian Clan, Network, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein, The Three Stooges Revue…The other great thing from a location point of view is that people queuing had a long block to do it in…part of the fun of going to the movies in Manhattan in the cold when theatres got 6 shows a day in
Before Walter Reade took it over around 1977 (first attraction The Boys from Company C), this was a neighbourhood house with an odd history…First as an AIT theatre sometimes day-dating with the 72nd St Playhouse, sometimes showing foreign arty films, sometimes some first run…then as a discount house…and as a porn house with a nearly year long run of Devil and Miss Jones…My only real visit was for a Pink Panther movie in 77 or 78 but I can attest to ET having a nearly 6 month first run there in 82
Among the films in the big room Empire 1 are a couple of the Star Trek films, Jurassic Park, Primary Colours, Ride with the Devil…The last of the Star Treks with the original cast was a treat on the giant screen…It is a generally more comfortable experience than the Odeon Leicester Sq
In Number 2 I’ve seen things like Schindler’s List, Carlito’s Way, Gangs of New York, Henry & June, Jungle Fever…an old fashion large house not unreminiscent of being in the Beekman or Sutton in New York for a quality film…some new seats wouldn’t be unappreciated
I squeezed into Number 3 for Cape Fear but wouldn’t rush back considering the choices we now have in London in local multiplexes
This theater was around the corner from where our Miami friends lived and I was lucky to catch a couple of interesting pictures there in the 60’s including Fitzwilly with Dick van Dyke, Never on Sunday on a reissue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner…It was a pretty bog standard 400 seat single screen but certainly appealing enough for the times
Beyond the fact that this is a really old-fashioned twin with tight seating, I’ve enjoyed some fun and interesting times here…squeezed in the front rows of the downstairs screen for Harry Potter and Evita or way up top for Strictly Ballroom
The OWE is home to the commerical portion of the London Film Festival – a great chance every year to see pictures before general distribution…In previous years I’ve been to the surprise film a couple of times, and saw the first London screening of Shawshank Redemption which has a massive cult following here
Far from a perfect place to see a movie, but it is a great place to see good audience pictures
Beyond the fact that this is a really old-fashioned twin with tight seating, I’ve enjoyed some fun and interesting times here…squeezed in the front rows of the downstairs screen for Harry Potter and Evita or way up top for Strictly Ballroom
The OWE is home to the commerical portion of the London Film Festival – a great chance every year to see pictures before general distribution…In previous years I’ve been to the surprise film a couple of times, and saw the first London screening of Shawshank Redemption which has a massive cult following here
Far from a perfect place to see a movie, but it is a great place to see good audience pictures