The January 30, 1931 issue of Film Daily says that Royal is the new name of an Oakland theater formerly called the Fern. I’ve checked the 1926 and 1927 FDY’s and no houses called either the Elmhurst or the Fern are listed, and the only theaters listed on 14th Street (former name of International Boulevard) are nowhere near 94th Avenue, which is where 9411 would be. The Fern Theatre is first listed in the 1928 yearbook, without details, but in the 1929 edition it is listed at 9719 E. 14th Street, with 240 seats.
So there’s a puzzle. Was there an address change? (unlikely, given that the address numbers match up with the cross street numbers.) Did either Garrett Murphy or the FDY (an FDY mistake would not surprise me) get the address wrong? Did the Royal move from the 9700 bock to the 9400 block at some point? Was the Royal really in the same building as the old Elmhurst? Why wasn’t the Elmhurst listed in 1926 and 1927?
And for additional puzzlement, although Oakland annexed the formerly independent town of Elmhurst in 1909, the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory still lists it separately (the FDY’s don’t– I checked) and it lists two theaters at Elmhurst: the Elm, with no details, and the Grand Theatre at… 94th and E. 14th Street! Was Grand a previous name for the Elmhurst Theatre that opened in 1916? Or was it a different theater nearby?
I’m at a loss, but something doesn’t add up. This is where some old city directories or telephone books would come in handy.
The March 6, 1941 issue of The Sauk Center Herald reported that the Oxford Theatre had been bought by F. W. Parsons & Sons, owners of the Main Street Theatre. Parsons was quoted as saying that the Oxford and the Main Street had both been losing money because Sauk Center was too small to support two full-time movie houses. He planned to keep the Oxford open, but only two days a week.
The premier of “Wings” at the Biltmore was to be a low-key event, according to this belated item from the January 24, 1928 issue of Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World:
“No Kliegs for $2.20 Top at Hollywood ‘Wings’
“(Special to Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World)
“HOLLYWOOD, Jan. 10.— There will be no Klieg lights or traffic jams at the Hollywood road show of ‘Wings’ at the Biltmore theatre January 15.
‘There will be none of the customary ballyhoo,’ says A. Griffith Grey, of the Paramount road show department, ‘and no invitations will be given to celebrities. The top price will be $2.20.’"
The recent opening of the Rialto was mentioned at the end of this item from the January 3, 1920 issue of Moving Picture World:
“Vivian Forms Corporation
“The Vivian Theatres Corporation, of Seattle, was incorporated last October for $100,000 and took over its first theatre on November 23. This was the Madison Theatre, one of the most beautiful suburban houses near Seattle. President Brian B. Vivian has operated theatres for several years on the West Coast. His brokerage department handles a big percentage of the deals turned in the Northwest. The Rialto Theatre, just constructed at a cost of $15,000, has very recently been opened at Anacortes, Wash.”
The June 26, 1956 issue of Boxoffice said that J. G. Williams had decided to close the Ilwaco Theatre after having run it for the previous thirty years. Despite his having made improvements to the house, patronage had continued to decline, and he would close it that month to concentrate on his theater in Long Beach, Washington.
That house was called the Sunset Theatre.
An interview with theater owner Jack Williams, part of which is on this Facebook page, reveals that the Ilwaco Theatre building was built in 1923. An earlier storefront theater called the Bell had opened as early as 1914 at 691 Main Street.
An article published in 2006 said that the Ilwaco Theatre had been in the building which by then was occupied by the Sea Hag Bar. The Sea Hag is still in business, at 209 First Avenue South.
The caption of a photo showing the Grand Theatre on this Facebook page says that it was located at Burleson Avenue and E. 6th Street. The entire block has been demolished.
This Facebook page has a circa 1926 photo showing a smaller McCamey movie house called the Star Theatre. It was probably also on Burleson Avenue.
There appears to have been two houses called the Ford Theatre in Rankin, opened four years apart. The December 20, 1952 issue of Boxoffice listed the 580-seat Ford Theatre as one of the many new movie houses opened in the United States that year. But then there is this item from the February 27, 1948 issue of The Rankin News:
“New Theatre Opens On Friday Night To Packed Audience
“The new ‘Ford’ Theatre held its grand opening here last Friday night, playing to a packed house. The theatre has had good attendance every show since. H. Ford Taylor, of Ballinger, who owns the theatre, announced that he will build a second show house across the street when it is needed. He says he has purchased two lots across the street from the new one for that purpose. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were here several days prior and after the opening of the show.”
The May 14, 1952 issue of The Exhibitor confirms the opening of the Ford Theatre early that month. I’ve been unable to discover what then became of the 1948 Ford Theatre, but it probably closed. In the 1940s and 1950s, Rankin was an oil patch boomtown, but its population now is probably less than half its peak. Not much remains of the business district along Main Street, which is most likely where the theaters were located.
The first Ford was not Rankin’s first movie theater. The July 13, 1929 issue of Motion Picture News mentioned a house called the Palace Theatre.
The January 13, 1940 issue of Boxoffice listed the Empire Theatre as one of three downtown Mobile houses then being operated by the Saenger Theatres Corporation. The other two were the Crown and the Saenger.
The January 13, 1940 issue of Boxoffice listed the Crown Theatre as one of three downtown Mobile houses then being operated by the Saenger Theatres Corporation. The other two were the Empire and the Saenger.
An item in the December 31, 1955 issue of Boxoffice revealed that the Texas Theatre and Sky-Vue Drive-In at Haskell were both owned by Frontier Theatres.
I don’t know why Boxoffice said in 1955 that the Ritz had been Arcola’s first theater when it opened in 1933. Not only does the 1926 Film Daily Year Book list a 300-seat house called the Olympia there, but the July 29, 1922 issue of The Billboard says that a house called the New Lyric Theatre had recently opened in Arcola. Not only that, but the Olympia was mentioned in the January 3, 1914 issue of Moving Picture World, and listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory as the Olympian Theatre. Then the April 9, 1921 MPW mentions an Arcola Theatre, while the August 13 issue that year mentions the sale of the “Olympic” (undoubtedly a typo for Olympia.)
This item is from the July 29, 1922 issue of The Billboard: “The Temple Theater, Viroqua, Wis., was formally opened early this month and has been enjoying excellent patronage.”
The May 24, 1913 issue of San Francisco Dramatic Review had this item: “Construction work has been started on the new Rex Theatre in Buhl, Idaho, by W. J. Siegel and Charles Kalina. The Theatre will be 50x120 feet, with boxes and gallery.”
The Towne Theatre opened on March 6, 1952. The next day’s issue of the Quincy Valley Post-Register said that the $30,000 theater would operate four days a week. The opening feature was the 1951 south seas adventure/romance film “Bird of Paradise” starring Debra Paget, Louis Jourdan and Jeff Chandler. The Towne might have been Quincy’s first movie theater, as the official population didn’t top 300 until the 1940 census, and didn’t reach four digits until after 1950.
The January 27, 1906 issue of Pacific Building and Engineering Record has this item: “Pe Ell, Opera House: Walter Gould will build a new opera house, 50x80 ft., 2 stories high.” Walter Gould was noted as the owner of the Gould Theatre in an item in The Chehalis Bee-Nugget of May 14, 1926. Gould had just installed a new cooling system in the theater and had the house partly reseated.
I’ve been unable to find a single period reference to a “Casino Opera House” at Spokane on the Internet, even though that name shows up on a number of web sites (though not here) in reference to this theater. The name even appears on the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, usually a reliable site. A theater of that name in Portland, Oregon shows up quite a few times, as does a house of that name in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, but all references to the one in Spokane are modern.
Aside from one 1891 reference, in a weekly newspaper from The Dalles, Oregon, I can’t even find a “Casino Theatre” in Spokane before the 1910s. There are many lists of theaters in Spokane from the period, but the Casino is conspicuous by its absence. For example, the 1906-1907 Cahn guide lists two legitimate house at Spokane: the Spokane Theatre and The Auditorium. It lists six vaudeville houses: La Boheme, Oberon, Comique, Edison, Washington, and Cineograph.
I suspect that The Casino building that Clemmer converted into a theater in 1907 was The Casino described on this page at the Spokane History Timeline web site. It doesn’t give the address of The Casino, and says (perhaps erroneously) that it was built in 1894, but I doubt there would have been two places called the Casino in Spokane at that time. It is described as “… a 4 story building which had a Hotel, Casino, dance hall, bar, Variety Hall, Turkish bath and even a section for down-and-outers to stay when they came to town.”
It is likely that the name Casino Opera House that shows up on some web sites is spurious, and just one of those bits of misinformation that somebody put on the Internet, after which it propagated. If contemporaries ever called it an Opera House they probably had their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks. The Variety Hall that was part of the operation might have been a theater of sorts, but most likely was just a big saloon with a stage, a type of venue quite common in late 19th century America, especially in the west. It’s likely that Clemmer just gutted the building and built an essentially new theater inside the original walls.
The Strand was at one time a Fox Intermountain house. The January 13, 1940 issue of Motion Picture Herald said “N. S. SAWAYA has taken over the Fox Intermountain Strand at Trinidad, Colo.”
The bit about the Isis having been the West Opera House should be removed from the description. There was no West Opera House in Trinidad. The West Theatre, opened in 1908, was the house that later became the Fox West Theatre. It didn’t become a movie theater until the 1920s.
A letter dated September 18, 1911, from A. R. Wilson, owner of the Isis Theatre in Trinidad, was published in the October, 1911 issue of Motography. Six theaters were listed at Trinidad in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. In addition to the Isis, there were the Best Theatre, the Central Park Theatre, the Crystal Theatre, the Maze Theatre, and the Rex Theatre. Only the Central Park was listed with a location, that being San Juan Street and Santa Fe Highway. However, a 1907 city directory listed the Crystal at 205 W. Main Street. None of the theaters in the 1914 AMPD were among the four listed in the 1926 FDY, though there was a house called the Palace-Rex listed.
The Pacific Coast Architecture Database has a page for this theater. PCAD gives a slightly different history, saying that the house opened as the Madison Street Theatre in 1902, was the Alcazar in 1904 and 1905, and then John Considine operated the house as the Star Theatre #2 from 1905 to 1911.
At this point, PCAD’s page goes a bit off the rails, saying that the house later operated as the Owl, the State, and the Rivoli, but their own page for the Tivoli Theatre (later the State and the Rivoli) says that the latter house was a new build on the site of the Star Theatre. As the Tivoli didn’t open until November, 1913, it’s possible that the Star (or Owl, as it might have been called by then) operated into the early part of that year. In any case, 1913 is probably the year the Star was demolished.
The January 30, 1931 issue of Film Daily says that Royal is the new name of an Oakland theater formerly called the Fern. I’ve checked the 1926 and 1927 FDY’s and no houses called either the Elmhurst or the Fern are listed, and the only theaters listed on 14th Street (former name of International Boulevard) are nowhere near 94th Avenue, which is where 9411 would be. The Fern Theatre is first listed in the 1928 yearbook, without details, but in the 1929 edition it is listed at 9719 E. 14th Street, with 240 seats.
So there’s a puzzle. Was there an address change? (unlikely, given that the address numbers match up with the cross street numbers.) Did either Garrett Murphy or the FDY (an FDY mistake would not surprise me) get the address wrong? Did the Royal move from the 9700 bock to the 9400 block at some point? Was the Royal really in the same building as the old Elmhurst? Why wasn’t the Elmhurst listed in 1926 and 1927?
And for additional puzzlement, although Oakland annexed the formerly independent town of Elmhurst in 1909, the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory still lists it separately (the FDY’s don’t– I checked) and it lists two theaters at Elmhurst: the Elm, with no details, and the Grand Theatre at… 94th and E. 14th Street! Was Grand a previous name for the Elmhurst Theatre that opened in 1916? Or was it a different theater nearby?
I’m at a loss, but something doesn’t add up. This is where some old city directories or telephone books would come in handy.
This theater’s name change from Shamrock to Cameo was reported in the July 20, 1931 issue of Film Daily.
The March 6, 1941 issue of The Sauk Center Herald reported that the Oxford Theatre had been bought by F. W. Parsons & Sons, owners of the Main Street Theatre. Parsons was quoted as saying that the Oxford and the Main Street had both been losing money because Sauk Center was too small to support two full-time movie houses. He planned to keep the Oxford open, but only two days a week.
The premier of “Wings” at the Biltmore was to be a low-key event, according to this belated item from the January 24, 1928 issue of Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World:
The recent opening of the Rialto was mentioned at the end of this item from the January 3, 1920 issue of Moving Picture World:
The June 26, 1956 issue of Boxoffice said that J. G. Williams had decided to close the Ilwaco Theatre after having run it for the previous thirty years. Despite his having made improvements to the house, patronage had continued to decline, and he would close it that month to concentrate on his theater in Long Beach, Washington. That house was called the Sunset Theatre.
An interview with theater owner Jack Williams, part of which is on this Facebook page, reveals that the Ilwaco Theatre building was built in 1923. An earlier storefront theater called the Bell had opened as early as 1914 at 691 Main Street.
An article published in 2006 said that the Ilwaco Theatre had been in the building which by then was occupied by the Sea Hag Bar. The Sea Hag is still in business, at 209 First Avenue South.
The caption of a photo showing the Grand Theatre on this Facebook page says that it was located at Burleson Avenue and E. 6th Street. The entire block has been demolished.
This Facebook page has a circa 1926 photo showing a smaller McCamey movie house called the Star Theatre. It was probably also on Burleson Avenue.
There appears to have been two houses called the Ford Theatre in Rankin, opened four years apart. The December 20, 1952 issue of Boxoffice listed the 580-seat Ford Theatre as one of the many new movie houses opened in the United States that year. But then there is this item from the February 27, 1948 issue of The Rankin News:
The May 14, 1952 issue of The Exhibitor confirms the opening of the Ford Theatre early that month. I’ve been unable to discover what then became of the 1948 Ford Theatre, but it probably closed. In the 1940s and 1950s, Rankin was an oil patch boomtown, but its population now is probably less than half its peak. Not much remains of the business district along Main Street, which is most likely where the theaters were located.The first Ford was not Rankin’s first movie theater. The July 13, 1929 issue of Motion Picture News mentioned a house called the Palace Theatre.
The January 13, 1940 issue of Boxoffice listed the Empire Theatre as one of three downtown Mobile houses then being operated by the Saenger Theatres Corporation. The other two were the Crown and the Saenger.
The January 13, 1940 issue of Boxoffice listed the Crown Theatre as one of three downtown Mobile houses then being operated by the Saenger Theatres Corporation. The other two were the Empire and the Saenger.
By 1964, the Lobo Theatre was being operated by Frontier Theatres, as noted in the August 24 issue of Boxoffice.
The April 7, 1958 issue of Boxoffice said that the Tu-Vu Drive-In was designed by San Diego architect Stanley Burne.
An item in the December 31, 1955 issue of Boxoffice revealed that the Texas Theatre and Sky-Vue Drive-In at Haskell were both owned by Frontier Theatres.
I don’t know why Boxoffice said in 1955 that the Ritz had been Arcola’s first theater when it opened in 1933. Not only does the 1926 Film Daily Year Book list a 300-seat house called the Olympia there, but the July 29, 1922 issue of The Billboard says that a house called the New Lyric Theatre had recently opened in Arcola. Not only that, but the Olympia was mentioned in the January 3, 1914 issue of Moving Picture World, and listed in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory as the Olympian Theatre. Then the April 9, 1921 MPW mentions an Arcola Theatre, while the August 13 issue that year mentions the sale of the “Olympic” (undoubtedly a typo for Olympia.)
This item is from the July 29, 1922 issue of The Billboard: “The Temple Theater, Viroqua, Wis., was formally opened early this month and has been enjoying excellent patronage.”
The May 24, 1913 issue of San Francisco Dramatic Review had this item: “Construction work has been started on the new Rex Theatre in Buhl, Idaho, by W. J. Siegel and Charles Kalina. The Theatre will be 50x120 feet, with boxes and gallery.”
The Towne Theatre opened on March 6, 1952. The next day’s issue of the Quincy Valley Post-Register said that the $30,000 theater would operate four days a week. The opening feature was the 1951 south seas adventure/romance film “Bird of Paradise” starring Debra Paget, Louis Jourdan and Jeff Chandler. The Towne might have been Quincy’s first movie theater, as the official population didn’t top 300 until the 1940 census, and didn’t reach four digits until after 1950.
The January 27, 1906 issue of Pacific Building and Engineering Record has this item: “Pe Ell, Opera House: Walter Gould will build a new opera house, 50x80 ft., 2 stories high.” Walter Gould was noted as the owner of the Gould Theatre in an item in The Chehalis Bee-Nugget of May 14, 1926. Gould had just installed a new cooling system in the theater and had the house partly reseated.
I’ve been unable to find a single period reference to a “Casino Opera House” at Spokane on the Internet, even though that name shows up on a number of web sites (though not here) in reference to this theater. The name even appears on the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, usually a reliable site. A theater of that name in Portland, Oregon shows up quite a few times, as does a house of that name in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, but all references to the one in Spokane are modern.
Aside from one 1891 reference, in a weekly newspaper from The Dalles, Oregon, I can’t even find a “Casino Theatre” in Spokane before the 1910s. There are many lists of theaters in Spokane from the period, but the Casino is conspicuous by its absence. For example, the 1906-1907 Cahn guide lists two legitimate house at Spokane: the Spokane Theatre and The Auditorium. It lists six vaudeville houses: La Boheme, Oberon, Comique, Edison, Washington, and Cineograph.
I suspect that The Casino building that Clemmer converted into a theater in 1907 was The Casino described on this page at the Spokane History Timeline web site. It doesn’t give the address of The Casino, and says (perhaps erroneously) that it was built in 1894, but I doubt there would have been two places called the Casino in Spokane at that time. It is described as “… a 4 story building which had a Hotel, Casino, dance hall, bar, Variety Hall, Turkish bath and even a section for down-and-outers to stay when they came to town.”
It is likely that the name Casino Opera House that shows up on some web sites is spurious, and just one of those bits of misinformation that somebody put on the Internet, after which it propagated. If contemporaries ever called it an Opera House they probably had their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks. The Variety Hall that was part of the operation might have been a theater of sorts, but most likely was just a big saloon with a stage, a type of venue quite common in late 19th century America, especially in the west. It’s likely that Clemmer just gutted the building and built an essentially new theater inside the original walls.
The Rialto was mentioned in the September 5, 1925 issue of Motion Picture News. It was listed in the 1926 FDY with 350 seats.
The Strand was at one time a Fox Intermountain house. The January 13, 1940 issue of Motion Picture Herald said “N. S. SAWAYA has taken over the Fox Intermountain Strand at Trinidad, Colo.”
The bit about the Isis having been the West Opera House should be removed from the description. There was no West Opera House in Trinidad. The West Theatre, opened in 1908, was the house that later became the Fox West Theatre. It didn’t become a movie theater until the 1920s.
A letter dated September 18, 1911, from A. R. Wilson, owner of the Isis Theatre in Trinidad, was published in the October, 1911 issue of Motography. Six theaters were listed at Trinidad in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. In addition to the Isis, there were the Best Theatre, the Central Park Theatre, the Crystal Theatre, the Maze Theatre, and the Rex Theatre. Only the Central Park was listed with a location, that being San Juan Street and Santa Fe Highway. However, a 1907 city directory listed the Crystal at 205 W. Main Street. None of the theaters in the 1914 AMPD were among the four listed in the 1926 FDY, though there was a house called the Palace-Rex listed.
The Pacific Coast Architecture Database has a page for this theater. PCAD gives a slightly different history, saying that the house opened as the Madison Street Theatre in 1902, was the Alcazar in 1904 and 1905, and then John Considine operated the house as the Star Theatre #2 from 1905 to 1911.
At this point, PCAD’s page goes a bit off the rails, saying that the house later operated as the Owl, the State, and the Rivoli, but their own page for the Tivoli Theatre (later the State and the Rivoli) says that the latter house was a new build on the site of the Star Theatre. As the Tivoli didn’t open until November, 1913, it’s possible that the Star (or Owl, as it might have been called by then) operated into the early part of that year. In any case, 1913 is probably the year the Star was demolished.
Actually the sources say that the theater was “founded” in 1946, which might mean only that construction began that year.