Loew's Jersey Theatre

Response to Hal Wolverton:

The “Willie” you’re talking about that was a janitor/handyman at the Loew’s Jersey worked there longer than only 30 years. I know this will be impossible to imagine, but Willie (and I don’t have his last name near me) actually worked at the Loew’s Jersey for its complete (Pre FOL) life, from when the thearte opened in 1929, until it shut down in 1986. He was a teenager when he first started working there.

FOL has some of the huge daily journals from the Jersey dating back to the early 30’s which list the employees, how much they were paid weekly, how many dependents they support, the daily weather, and what the State and the Stanley were showing. Real neat stuff. Anyway, WIllie is in these journals.

After the theatre shut down, Hartz Mountain (the then purchaser of the Loew’s) kept Willie on to be a watchman. Colin Egan would tell me stories about dealing with Willie in the early days of FOL, and trying to save the theatre from demolition. Let’s just say he was a character, but in a good way.

He has since passed away, but I had a major recollection of hearing about Willie after reading Hal’s posting.

Last night on the American Music Awards, Gwen Stefani premiered her latest single “Wind It Up”, and guess what? The song sampled, note-for-note, large portions of “The Lonely Goatherd” song from “The Sound of Music”! Talk about a musical’s staying power!

Do you think Chris Plummer will show up for Sound of Music?

I’ve just seen the December titles for the “Holidays at the Loew’s Jersey” Film Festival…do my eyes deceive me, or are they actually showing “The Sound of Music” here?!?

That was the FIRST movie that I can ever recall seeing in a movie theater! It was the late 1960s and I must have been four- or five-years-old, and I remember it as a big old single-screen movie theater, perhaps the Elmwood or Eagle (I lived in Elmhurst, Queens until I was six). I remember walking up Broadway from Grandview Towers apartments towards Jackson Heights, so it was probably the Eagle. What powerful memories – it almost brings me to tears. If I recall correctly, I saw it about five times – it fostered my love of music as a child, and was probably my all-time favorite cinematic experience!

I will try to bring my three 8-year-old nieces along, so they can experience it just as I did as a child.

BIll… was this the same print the Ziegfeld ran back in Feb or March?

I too was at the screening last night! It was my first visit to the Jersey. I came from Manhattan and convinced a few friends to join me. We all had a great time and we will be back! None of us had ever seen the film before and I agree with the above posters about the quality of the film and especially the sound! Even the popcorn was great!

I worked at the Loew’s Jersey in 1975 and 1976 after it was converted to a triple. I loved the old place and it was being badly abused. People just tossed their garbage off the balcony into the abandoned front section of the orchestra. The dressing rooms, etc. in the basement were like opening up a time capsule and finding it weathered and covered with dust. I never got to hear the organ but you could just imagine how’d sound in such a place… the three story lobby… the huge balcony.. the projection booth way up the top with all those old antigues wasting away…. the black carbon pieces for the lamps that seemed to be a half inch thick or more. ( I was used to much smaller ones with a copper color coating on them. )

There was in the 1970’s an usher/handyman/janitor working there named
Willie. Nobody seemed to know just how long he’d worked there but the
guess started at 30 years and went up. Anybody know what happened to
him ?

There was a manager there named Mrs. Rausch ( sp? ) and an assistant
named Lenny Franco. Another assistant was a coptic christian Egyptian
fellow named Mr. Ibriham or Abraham.

I’m glad they’ve been able to save the place.

You should not leave davebazooka. There are a number of cranky people here but you should pay them no mind. If all of the nice people leave only the cranks will remain. That would make this website a very boring place indeed.

Maybe you misread my post, Dave… but discussing movies is completely fine.

Again, if it gets out of hand (dozens of comments about a movie on a theater page), we might have a problem. But the occassional movie discussion is completely okay, even welcome.

We’re working hard to improve the community here on Cinema Treasures, so I hope you don’t give up on the site just yet.

While Cinema Treasures main focus is moving theaters, it’s okay to discuss movies… after all, that’s why we go to theaters in the first place.

Use your discretion, of course. This probably isn’t the place to have an in-depth discussion about movies (as Jim points out), but a comment or two is okay.

Yes, the 1950s version of The Thing was a fine achievement, and EdSolero’s advocacy of “2001” is eloquent and deserved, BUT, gentlemen, this CT site is about CINEMAS, not cinema. There is ample room at www.IMDB.com to praise film, but that is little help here since almost all movie houses eventually played everything, so there is no historical note to these buildings and no cachet that any title played here or there. Now, if there were a peculiar live performance in a show house that required it to use special equipment, THAT might be of historical note. If we take up space here to engage in the ‘ad infinitum’ of discussion of films, we dilute the value of this site and cause serious architectural historians to turn off message bulletins from CT, as they then come to regard the Comments on the site as too trivial and Off-Topic to bother with (it does take time to go to each bulletin, often to find them to be only ‘me too’ comments agreeing with a previous post). I don’t think that that is the vision of CT’s founders.

I know how it is; we all have favorite movies that we once saw or wish to see in a favorite venue, and, also, there is precious little to speak of after some years now of comments about the structural aspects having been made, but it is this and the UNIQUE aspects of any one cinema that drew us here and still others every day. Let us respect that unique purpose to record the uniqueness of individual cinemas/theatres lest this generously provided board degenerate into just another random gab fest as have so many other sites on the Net.

I would agree ET was rather dumb and 2001 deserves all the praise written here. But if we could just go back a few years to simplier times, One of my favorite horror movies from the 50s was the 1951 Howard Hawks production of “The Thing” I watched again recently and thought it held up rather well.
I think it has excellent direction, Hawks did not take direction credit but it has his stamp all over it. Of course the kids today would find it tame by todays standards. Has it ever played at Loew’s Jersey?
Does anyone else think it was a good film for it’s time?

The Loews Jersey has a temorary stipped down web site with show info at http://www.loewsjersey.net

We ran Forbidden Planet & Alien already. We are trying not to repeat ourselves, at least not to often.