This Michael Moore interview in the Herald is really interesting. Michael Moore as film exhibitor. Who would have thought?
Of course, he can afford to run the theater at a loss, but then again, he can afford to try things like 25-cent matinees. At that price, you’re almost compelled to buy something at the concession stand!
It’s also interesting that he has a deed restriction that he can’t show a film showing on more than 200 screens. Interesting handicap.
I would be interested to see if he’s really as successful as he says. After all, this is Michael Moore making these statements.
A previous story on this theater had this information:
“A building permit for the project puts the estimated cost of the renovations at $273,000.
“Plans call for four auditoriums —– two with 86 seats each and two with 39 seats each. Seating would be a mix of fixed seats and bistro tables and chairs.”
Davidson has a population of 9100.
Seems like a restaurant that shows movies rather than a movie theater.
This is great news! I think this is probably the only location in downtown Boston that can be reconverted back into a movie theater. The other old movie houses were either converted into performance spaces or entombed in cement (like the old RKO Boston/Cinerama).
I still have a ticket stub for Close Encounters of the Third Kind that played at the Sack 57 the winter of 1977. They had printed up fancy, special reserve tickets for that presentation.
Another piece of trivia is that in 1979 Francis Ford Coppola wanted “Apocalypse Now” to play at the Charles (he had a rivalry with George Lucas and wanted the film to play many of the original locations that “Star Wars” did.) Fox films were locked in there, so Sack Theaters installed a brand new sound system in the “smaller” 57 theater with speakers every 10 feet or so along the walls to appease the director. The sound was very good in that theater from then on.
Sack Theaters channeled most of the action pictures there throughout the 1980s. It was not unusual to see lines going from the outside ticket office in the garage, down along the garage wall, and curving around the corner and stretching down the side street. In the 1990s, Loews threw all the R-rated violent action and urban films there which brought some very tough crowds, and I guess neither the hotel nor Loews wanted the lease renewed.
From the two articles I’ve read, and the speed in which the brothers were promising to have the theater opened, it sounds like they’re not planning any extensive renovations and they’re only going to use the one auditorium that the Stuart Street Playhouse people used.
But Boston hasn’t had independent movies since the Nick closed, and this is welcomed news!
The article in the Naples News says only two or three screens will have films catering to an older clientèle. The rest are apparently the same old, same old, although I have to agree with KingBiscuits that I didn’t see any “mature” films in its opening week schedule, unless you count Inglorious Basterds, Extract and 500 Days of Summer, which are mainstream releases.
I guess the high prices will keep the riff-raff out. Basically, each auditorium is a “Director’s Hall,” to borrow the old General Cinemas term.
I think you’re going to be seeing more experiments like this to see if theaters can get more money out of theater-goers. Showcase is doing its Lux Level where it uses the excuse of serving alcohol to keep people under 21 out of its balcony seats. We’ll see where it leads.
I might be able to afford matinees, since Showcase matinees are now up to $8.25-$8.50. I don’t know about the $15 for evening shows.
Blaming piracy deflects from the fact that the motion picture studios (and the recording industry) has done a lot to ruin its own business.
By deciding to concentrate on the kid/teen/young adult market with their offerings, they literally push away a large segment of the moviegoing public – just about anyone over 30 without kids.
For example, my wife and I use to see 50-70 movies in theaters a year. Last year, I think we saw six. Why? We got tired of the teen sex comedies, the teen horror movies, the teen action pictures, etc. It’s very discouraging. There are very few pictures we want to see.
The recording companies did the same. With all the merging and budget cutting, they cut hundreds of musical acts from their rosters, and concentrated on hip-hop and country, which are the genres that sell the most CDs. Then they complain that sales are down. Well, of course, sales are down, because you cut hundreds of acts that sold in total tens of millions of CDs.
I’m reminded of the story that the studios were surprised that “Driving Miss Daisy” was able to gross over $100 million. They didn’t know there were so many adult movie-goers! Duh! Give them something to see, and they’ll go to the movies.
Unfortunately, after about a decade of catering to the kid/teen/young adult market, adults get out of the habit of going to the movies, which creates a feedback loop where the the studios can say, “see we made an adultish movie and audiences didn’t show up. So it’s back to the kiddie films.”
The whole piracy issue is a red herring. Most people do not want to see a shaky, dark, hard-to-hear cam copy of a movie. And most people do not buy bootleg DVDs from some guy selling them on the street. Likewise, they don’t want to spend hours downloading 300 zip files that then have to be reassembled into a movie file.
The real thing hurting the movie industry is that adults simply know that whatever movie playing in theaters now can be rented from Netflix in 3 months or is going to be on cable TV in a year or less.
Why bother going to the movies? Why bother buying DVDs? They can get their entertainment basically for “free” without piracy.
Some of the details in this story sound fishy. Why do you need 50'x200' screens? That’s a 4:1 ratio. Movies at the most are 2.4:1. So the screens are the wrong ratio.
How is the school going to use these facilities during school hours? The earliest sunset is 4:45pm in December. School is over by then.
Sounds like a way to operate a drive-in without the cars in the summer and to get the land to build it on for free!
I debated about using the line that it could be Showcase Cinema’s last multiplex, but I really think it may be. Majority owner Sumner Redstone has announced that he wants to sell off 80% of the theaters to pay down a huge $1.5 billion personal debt, (not caused by NA, which is profitable), leaving his daughter and NA President Shari Redstone with only 15 theaters in the Northeast (out of 118 worldwide) and its partnership in several Russian theaters. Because of the economic climate, no one has offered Sumner anything for the theaters, and he has a $800 million payment due in October. He’s defaulted once on the loan, so it could be really bad for NA.
NA does have plans to build another Cinema de Lux in Yonkers in the Ridge Hill lifestyle center set to open in 2011, but a lot can happen between now and then. As I said above, NA can’t get a loan to rebuild its own national headquarters, so things are desperate for the company. So that’s why I said it could be NA’s last new theater.
In the ‘60s and early '70s this theater was known as the Nu Pixie Cinema and then the Pixie. During the late '70s and early '80s, it was rented out as practice space for bands. There use to be a lot more entries talking about it including links to some pictures of its deteriorating interior. All those entries seem to be gone now.
From what I can remember, the plaster roof collapsed from water damage in the ‘90s and the current owners would like to fix it up, but the cost is going to be more than $1 million. The owners were trying to find some grants to help pay for it, but chances are slim that the theater could attract audiences to make any kind of use work.
I guess with the economy, AMC did not go ahead with its plans to convert one of the theaters to digital IMAX. The “coming soon” sign came down in October.
Wow. I haven’t thought of this theater in a long time. I went there once for something that wasn’t playing anywhere else, and I never went back. Hard to believe that a single-screen “theater” like this could have been profitable. The fact that it kept changing hands suggests each new owner thought they knew the secret.
Well, if you squint, you can sort of see the cinema. Signs about street level use to be the marquee with the listing of films and times. The small glass “house” to the left of the large building was the ticket booth in its final iteration. (You use to buy tickets inside down the stairs, and then wait in the lobby, but later USA Cinemas changed the flow by trying to keep large and rowdy crowds on the street, which Boston Police did not like and forced them to hire paid details.) The main entrance was next to the ticket booth, and the other entrances were exits from the theaters.
A piece of trivia: “Annual attendance (at the Dedham Showcase) has declined from more than 1 million in the late 1970s to about 400,000” in the 2000s. (Boston.com) That would put the old Dedham Showcase in its prime in the same league as Randolph Showcase is now. It was quite a powerhouse in its day.
Supposedly, in the early days, Sumner Redstone would walk over from National Amusements' headquarters to see how the box office was doing.
I went to the new Showcase Cinema de Lux at Legacy Place this weekend and I was very disappointed. After avoiding the Dedham Showcase ever since the Randolph Showcase opened up 11 years ago, I thought I would finally have a state-of-the-art theater a little more than a mile away from where I live.
I went to see Inglorious Basterds in Auditorium 6, and since this was the first film of the day, theaters 1-7 on the left side of the lobby were all empty and wide open. So I took a look.
Auditoriums 1-6 are small viewing rooms, having between 98 and 180 seats. Only auditorium 7 is on the large size with 420 seats.
The layouts are basically the same. The theaters have between 3 and 7 rows of seats on the flat (not sloping) floor in front of the screens. Auditorium seating starts about halfway back of the room. The rooms are narrow, so the screens are small, and like the old Dedham Showcase, there is a short black curtain that lowers from the top of the screen for Panavision films. So widescreen movies actually take up less space on the screen than non-widescreen movies. From the second row of auditorium seating in a 180-seat theater, I saw more of the theater than the movie image.
The cheap seats (non-Lux Level) are narrow and have the shortest armrests I’ve ever seen in a new theater. My forearms rested on the cup holder, and I actually had red circles pressed into my arms when I left.
I thought it was interesting that the video ads shown before the movie had the top and bottom of their images cut off by the screen masking as the picture was blown up to fill the screen from side-to-side, rather than shrinking the image to fit the widescreen ratio from top-to-bottom. I suspect the ads would have looked really small if they were projected properly.
The sound was OK, but nothing special.
The Cinema de Lux concept is set up to sell food and drink rather than show movies, and that’s evident. There’s a lounge right off the lobby, and the Lux Level is upstairs and away from the riff-raff.
Another interesting detail is the names of the movies are nowhere to be seen anywhere near the auditoriums, and the number of the theater is not displayed at the ticket booth, so you don’t know which movie is playing in which theater until you buy a ticket. I guess they’re trying to keep you from seeing another movie for free.
So all in all, I was extremely disappointed. The theater reminded me more of a fancier Copley Place with its viewing rooms squeezed into retail space, rather than the flagship cinema of National Amusements. I want big screens and big sound with auditorium seating, not small rooms with small screens. Unless the other side of the theater is different, I’m afraid I’m going to have to continue trekking out to Randolph.
Hughes was one of the few people to walk away from Hollywood at the peak of his popularity to be with his family and raise his sons. Seems like he was taken too early.
Start by forming a committee of like-minded people. Then work out some sort of business plan on what you think the theater could be used for. For example, if there are theater groups in the area, approach them to see if they would use the theater for their performances. Look into forming a non-profit corporation so this way you can do fund-raising and accept government grants.
Most theaters have gone out of business because they no longer served a purpose. People moved away, audiences dwindled, a new theater opened up down the street, etc. If you can figure out what it can be used for that will help you create a plan for the theater.
The best way to advocate for the preservation and/or restoration of the theater is to form a community group of like-minded individuals and try to influence the present or future owners as to what use would best suit the neighborhood. If no one buys the theater, you could look into forming a non-profit and trying to solicit donations to buy the theater and run it as a non-profit. That model has been very successful for a lot of theaters that were close to being destroyed. (Tax savings, etc.). Governments also tend to respond to organized groups, and having politicians behind your idea helps. Also having business plans, design plans, etc., allows local people visualize how the property can benefit them.
That happened about 10 years ago in Boston too. The Paris theater in the Back Bay was stripped to its steel I-beams and turned into a CVS! I guess there’s something about the high ceilings and big open space of theaters that they’re drawn to.
Boy, a $50,000 renovation has now cost them $250,000 and Nedrow lost his job last February as well. This is very scary!
This Michael Moore interview in the Herald is really interesting. Michael Moore as film exhibitor. Who would have thought?
Of course, he can afford to run the theater at a loss, but then again, he can afford to try things like 25-cent matinees. At that price, you’re almost compelled to buy something at the concession stand!
It’s also interesting that he has a deed restriction that he can’t show a film showing on more than 200 screens. Interesting handicap.
I would be interested to see if he’s really as successful as he says. After all, this is Michael Moore making these statements.
A previous story on this theater had this information:
“A building permit for the project puts the estimated cost of the renovations at $273,000.
“Plans call for four auditoriums —– two with 86 seats each and two with 39 seats each. Seating would be a mix of fixed seats and bistro tables and chairs.”
Davidson has a population of 9100.
Seems like a restaurant that shows movies rather than a movie theater.
This is great news! I think this is probably the only location in downtown Boston that can be reconverted back into a movie theater. The other old movie houses were either converted into performance spaces or entombed in cement (like the old RKO Boston/Cinerama).
I still have a ticket stub for Close Encounters of the Third Kind that played at the Sack 57 the winter of 1977. They had printed up fancy, special reserve tickets for that presentation.
Another piece of trivia is that in 1979 Francis Ford Coppola wanted “Apocalypse Now” to play at the Charles (he had a rivalry with George Lucas and wanted the film to play many of the original locations that “Star Wars” did.) Fox films were locked in there, so Sack Theaters installed a brand new sound system in the “smaller” 57 theater with speakers every 10 feet or so along the walls to appease the director. The sound was very good in that theater from then on.
Sack Theaters channeled most of the action pictures there throughout the 1980s. It was not unusual to see lines going from the outside ticket office in the garage, down along the garage wall, and curving around the corner and stretching down the side street. In the 1990s, Loews threw all the R-rated violent action and urban films there which brought some very tough crowds, and I guess neither the hotel nor Loews wanted the lease renewed.
From the two articles I’ve read, and the speed in which the brothers were promising to have the theater opened, it sounds like they’re not planning any extensive renovations and they’re only going to use the one auditorium that the Stuart Street Playhouse people used.
But Boston hasn’t had independent movies since the Nick closed, and this is welcomed news!
The article in the Naples News says only two or three screens will have films catering to an older clientèle. The rest are apparently the same old, same old, although I have to agree with KingBiscuits that I didn’t see any “mature” films in its opening week schedule, unless you count Inglorious Basterds, Extract and 500 Days of Summer, which are mainstream releases.
The picture on the Naples News site shows a 113-seat auditorium, although with standard seating, it probably would have been closer to 200 seats. The screen looks to be about 24 feet wide. Tickets are $15, although matinées are $10.
I guess the high prices will keep the riff-raff out. Basically, each auditorium is a “Director’s Hall,” to borrow the old General Cinemas term.
I think you’re going to be seeing more experiments like this to see if theaters can get more money out of theater-goers. Showcase is doing its Lux Level where it uses the excuse of serving alcohol to keep people under 21 out of its balcony seats. We’ll see where it leads.
I might be able to afford matinees, since Showcase matinees are now up to $8.25-$8.50. I don’t know about the $15 for evening shows.
Blaming piracy deflects from the fact that the motion picture studios (and the recording industry) has done a lot to ruin its own business.
By deciding to concentrate on the kid/teen/young adult market with their offerings, they literally push away a large segment of the moviegoing public – just about anyone over 30 without kids.
For example, my wife and I use to see 50-70 movies in theaters a year. Last year, I think we saw six. Why? We got tired of the teen sex comedies, the teen horror movies, the teen action pictures, etc. It’s very discouraging. There are very few pictures we want to see.
The recording companies did the same. With all the merging and budget cutting, they cut hundreds of musical acts from their rosters, and concentrated on hip-hop and country, which are the genres that sell the most CDs. Then they complain that sales are down. Well, of course, sales are down, because you cut hundreds of acts that sold in total tens of millions of CDs.
I’m reminded of the story that the studios were surprised that “Driving Miss Daisy” was able to gross over $100 million. They didn’t know there were so many adult movie-goers! Duh! Give them something to see, and they’ll go to the movies.
Unfortunately, after about a decade of catering to the kid/teen/young adult market, adults get out of the habit of going to the movies, which creates a feedback loop where the the studios can say, “see we made an adultish movie and audiences didn’t show up. So it’s back to the kiddie films.”
The whole piracy issue is a red herring. Most people do not want to see a shaky, dark, hard-to-hear cam copy of a movie. And most people do not buy bootleg DVDs from some guy selling them on the street. Likewise, they don’t want to spend hours downloading 300 zip files that then have to be reassembled into a movie file.
The real thing hurting the movie industry is that adults simply know that whatever movie playing in theaters now can be rented from Netflix in 3 months or is going to be on cable TV in a year or less.
Why bother going to the movies? Why bother buying DVDs? They can get their entertainment basically for “free” without piracy.
Some of the details in this story sound fishy. Why do you need 50'x200' screens? That’s a 4:1 ratio. Movies at the most are 2.4:1. So the screens are the wrong ratio.
How is the school going to use these facilities during school hours? The earliest sunset is 4:45pm in December. School is over by then.
Sounds like a way to operate a drive-in without the cars in the summer and to get the land to build it on for free!
There’s a great review thread on this theater on Yelp.
There’s a good review thread of the Showcase Randolph on Yelp.
The theater had a rough opening weekend. It had a couple of power failures on different days.
You can read some comments about the theater at Yelp.com.
I debated about using the line that it could be Showcase Cinema’s last multiplex, but I really think it may be. Majority owner Sumner Redstone has announced that he wants to sell off 80% of the theaters to pay down a huge $1.5 billion personal debt, (not caused by NA, which is profitable), leaving his daughter and NA President Shari Redstone with only 15 theaters in the Northeast (out of 118 worldwide) and its partnership in several Russian theaters. Because of the economic climate, no one has offered Sumner anything for the theaters, and he has a $800 million payment due in October. He’s defaulted once on the loan, so it could be really bad for NA.
NA does have plans to build another Cinema de Lux in Yonkers in the Ridge Hill lifestyle center set to open in 2011, but a lot can happen between now and then. As I said above, NA can’t get a loan to rebuild its own national headquarters, so things are desperate for the company. So that’s why I said it could be NA’s last new theater.
In the ‘60s and early '70s this theater was known as the Nu Pixie Cinema and then the Pixie. During the late '70s and early '80s, it was rented out as practice space for bands. There use to be a lot more entries talking about it including links to some pictures of its deteriorating interior. All those entries seem to be gone now.
From what I can remember, the plaster roof collapsed from water damage in the ‘90s and the current owners would like to fix it up, but the cost is going to be more than $1 million. The owners were trying to find some grants to help pay for it, but chances are slim that the theater could attract audiences to make any kind of use work.
I guess with the economy, AMC did not go ahead with its plans to convert one of the theaters to digital IMAX. The “coming soon” sign came down in October.
CinemaTour has three pictures here.
Wow. I haven’t thought of this theater in a long time. I went there once for something that wasn’t playing anywhere else, and I never went back. Hard to believe that a single-screen “theater” like this could have been profitable. The fact that it kept changing hands suggests each new owner thought they knew the secret.
Well, if you squint, you can sort of see the cinema. Signs about street level use to be the marquee with the listing of films and times. The small glass “house” to the left of the large building was the ticket booth in its final iteration. (You use to buy tickets inside down the stairs, and then wait in the lobby, but later USA Cinemas changed the flow by trying to keep large and rowdy crowds on the street, which Boston Police did not like and forced them to hire paid details.) The main entrance was next to the ticket booth, and the other entrances were exits from the theaters.
A piece of trivia: “Annual attendance (at the Dedham Showcase) has declined from more than 1 million in the late 1970s to about 400,000” in the 2000s. (Boston.com) That would put the old Dedham Showcase in its prime in the same league as Randolph Showcase is now. It was quite a powerhouse in its day.
Supposedly, in the early days, Sumner Redstone would walk over from National Amusements' headquarters to see how the box office was doing.
Here’s a picture of the Randolph Cinema, front entrance.
Randolph Cinema
I’ll come up with the page. I’m doing research on it now.
I went to the new Showcase Cinema de Lux at Legacy Place this weekend and I was very disappointed. After avoiding the Dedham Showcase ever since the Randolph Showcase opened up 11 years ago, I thought I would finally have a state-of-the-art theater a little more than a mile away from where I live.
I went to see Inglorious Basterds in Auditorium 6, and since this was the first film of the day, theaters 1-7 on the left side of the lobby were all empty and wide open. So I took a look.
Auditoriums 1-6 are small viewing rooms, having between 98 and 180 seats. Only auditorium 7 is on the large size with 420 seats.
The layouts are basically the same. The theaters have between 3 and 7 rows of seats on the flat (not sloping) floor in front of the screens. Auditorium seating starts about halfway back of the room. The rooms are narrow, so the screens are small, and like the old Dedham Showcase, there is a short black curtain that lowers from the top of the screen for Panavision films. So widescreen movies actually take up less space on the screen than non-widescreen movies. From the second row of auditorium seating in a 180-seat theater, I saw more of the theater than the movie image.
The cheap seats (non-Lux Level) are narrow and have the shortest armrests I’ve ever seen in a new theater. My forearms rested on the cup holder, and I actually had red circles pressed into my arms when I left.
I thought it was interesting that the video ads shown before the movie had the top and bottom of their images cut off by the screen masking as the picture was blown up to fill the screen from side-to-side, rather than shrinking the image to fit the widescreen ratio from top-to-bottom. I suspect the ads would have looked really small if they were projected properly.
The sound was OK, but nothing special.
The Cinema de Lux concept is set up to sell food and drink rather than show movies, and that’s evident. There’s a lounge right off the lobby, and the Lux Level is upstairs and away from the riff-raff.
Another interesting detail is the names of the movies are nowhere to be seen anywhere near the auditoriums, and the number of the theater is not displayed at the ticket booth, so you don’t know which movie is playing in which theater until you buy a ticket. I guess they’re trying to keep you from seeing another movie for free.
So all in all, I was extremely disappointed. The theater reminded me more of a fancier Copley Place with its viewing rooms squeezed into retail space, rather than the flagship cinema of National Amusements. I want big screens and big sound with auditorium seating, not small rooms with small screens. Unless the other side of the theater is different, I’m afraid I’m going to have to continue trekking out to Randolph.
Yes, the theater got a grant to put up a new marquee.
Hughes was one of the few people to walk away from Hollywood at the peak of his popularity to be with his family and raise his sons. Seems like he was taken too early.
Start by forming a committee of like-minded people. Then work out some sort of business plan on what you think the theater could be used for. For example, if there are theater groups in the area, approach them to see if they would use the theater for their performances. Look into forming a non-profit corporation so this way you can do fund-raising and accept government grants.
Most theaters have gone out of business because they no longer served a purpose. People moved away, audiences dwindled, a new theater opened up down the street, etc. If you can figure out what it can be used for that will help you create a plan for the theater.
The best way to advocate for the preservation and/or restoration of the theater is to form a community group of like-minded individuals and try to influence the present or future owners as to what use would best suit the neighborhood. If no one buys the theater, you could look into forming a non-profit and trying to solicit donations to buy the theater and run it as a non-profit. That model has been very successful for a lot of theaters that were close to being destroyed. (Tax savings, etc.). Governments also tend to respond to organized groups, and having politicians behind your idea helps. Also having business plans, design plans, etc., allows local people visualize how the property can benefit them.
It’s a lot of work, but it could pay off for you.
Great article and pictures. Extremely sad these theaters were either knocked down or remade into bingo parlors.
That happened about 10 years ago in Boston too. The Paris theater in the Back Bay was stripped to its steel I-beams and turned into a CVS! I guess there’s something about the high ceilings and big open space of theaters that they’re drawn to.