The Corbin was built for Robert Lippert Theatres and was opened in 1959. It was a near twin to the Buena Park Theatre opened the same year and which was the subject of this Boxoffice feature of October 19 that year. You can see the resemblance to the 1984 photo, though it looks like the Corbin had a traditional marquee added later, judging from the way it’s mounted on columns rather than attached to the building itself. The Corbin was probably designed by the architect of the Buena Park, Warren F. Overpeck.
The Roger Sherman Theatre reopened on December 23, 1961, following a major remodeling designed by architect Drew Eberson. The house was then the Stanley Warner circuit’s zone flagship, according to the item in Boxoffice of January 1, 1962, which also said: “The interior was completely stripped for the extensive wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling renovation program.” The opening movie was Disney’s “Babes In Toyland.”
A rendering of the new front of the Roger Sherman was published in Boxoffice of December 18, 1961. This item said that the remodeled house would feature continental seating, and that total capacity would be reduced by 350 seats.
Boxoffice of July 9, 1938, ran an item saying that construction on the new Crystal Theatre was scheduled begin on August 15, and that operator Ben Cohen anticipated opening the house some time around Thanksgiving Day.
The item also said that this Crystal was a replacement for an older theater of the same name, across the street from the site of the new house, which had been demolished for the widening of Michigan Avenue.
The opening of the new Crystal was delayed. Boxoffice of December 17 said the house “…bows the latter part of the month.”
The 1982 photo depicts the last Music Box Theatre in Portland, located on Broadway next door to the Fox Theatre. Gary Lacher and Steve Stone’s book “Theaters of Portland” says that there were six Portland theaters called the Music Box. I don’t think it has a page at Cinema Treasures yet.
The Hill Theatre was not a quonset hut, but a site-built theater using laminated wood arches that formed both walls and roof. They came to a slight peak, giving the auditorium a somewhat Gothic look, though the style of the building was California Modern, a regional variant of the Midcentury style, but which favored the use of natural materials such as redwood and stone along with the glass walls more characteristic of the modern mode. This sometimes gave the California Modern a rather rustic look, as was the case with this theater.
A double-page spread about the Hill Theatre was published in Boxoffice of October 19, 1959, though this was several years after the theater had opened. This article gives the seating capacity of the Hill as 303.
Construction of this theater was to begin in 30 days, according to an item in Boxoffice of July 1, 1950. The backers of the project had arranged for the theater to be operated under lease by R.B. Read and Paul Clark, both of Carmel Point. The as-yet unnamed theater was to show “foreign and domestic films of prestige quality.”
Early in 1956 the Hill Theatre was taken over by a partnership of Maury Schwarz and John Parsons, San Francisco exhibitors. Parsons operated a circuit of several houses in the Bay Area and in the Central Valley. He also operated the Golden Bough Theatre in Monterey from about 1955. Many of his theaters were art houses. After Parsons and Schwarz acquired the house, R.B. Read was to continue as manager of the Hill and take over management of the Golden Bough as well, according to Boxoffice of February 18, 1956.
The start of construction on the Coronet Theatre was announced in Boxoffice of February 11, 1963. It was to be the first unit in a six acre commercial project planned by Comstock Developers. It was to be a first-run house, and would be operated under lease by A.J. Longtin, operator of theaters at Madera, Coalinga, and Willows, and former operator of the Guild and Encore theaters in Sacramento.
One of the partners in Comstock Developers was architect Herbert E. Goodpastor, designer of the Coronet. Goodpastor also designed the Manor and Colonial theaters in Sacramento.
A photo of the auditorium of the Cameo Theatre was featured in an ad for the American Seating Company in Boxoffice of January 3, 1953. The architects of the theater were Ginnocchio and Cromwell.
The Crane Theatre became the Fox Theatre in 1955, replacing Fox Midwest’s Tiger Theatre which had burned the previous year. The building was extensively altered and given a Midcentury Modern style by architect Samuel W. Bihr, Jr. Before and after photos are on display in this article in Boxoffice of October 22, 1955. Many additional photos appear on the three subsequent pages.
Boxoffice of March 5, 1949, said that the Coral Way Drive-In had been opened. Wometco took over operation in 1954. In 1955 the circuit had the drive-in rebuilt to plans by architect A. Herbert Mathes. His design was the subject of this article in Boxoffice of October 22, 1955.
For a long time I’ve had a vague memory of having attended a movie at a twin theater on Beverly Boulevard in the early 1960s, and of having read an article about the opening of said theater in the Los Angeles Times some time before that.
I was pretty sure it was the theater that became the New Beverly, but nobody posting on this page ever mentioned anything about such a twin here, and the theater’s web site said nothing, so I didn’t comment (for several years I also had a very vivid memory, which turned out to be false, of there having been an Admiral Theatre on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, so that embarrassing experience made me a bit gun shy.)
Now, I have found confirmation of the existence of this twin! Boxoffice of October 19, 1959, has an article with pictures of the very theater I remember, and it was indeed this one. Capri and Riviera were not sequential names for this theater, but the names of the two auditoriums of the twin opened at this address by Robert Lippert in the late 1950s.
The Capri and Riviera Theatres had to have been the first twin opened in the city of Los Angeles, and the first in Southern California after Jimmy Edwards opened the Annex at his Alhambra Theatre in suburban Alhambra in 1941.
I don’t recall the year in which I attended the Riviera, but it was probably no earlier than 1961. Boxoffice of September 16, 1963, tells me it couldn’t have been later than 1963, as that’s when the house was restored to a single-screen configuration, reopening as the New Yorker on Friday, September 13.
Both articles give the name of the “legitimate playhouse” (Boxoffice’s term) that had previously occupied the building as the Dahl Theatre. I’ve been unable to find out any details about it. The Los Angeles County Assessor’s office gives the date of construction of the building at 7165 Beverly as 1929, with an effective construction date of 1942. At least two sources say that Slapsie Maxie’s opened here in 1943, which would match well with the 1942 rebuilding.
An article in a 2004 issue of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (PDF here) says that after Slapsie Maxie’s closed, the building became the New Globe Theatre, a venue for Yiddish plays. It was operating under that name in 1951.
The impression I got from the Boxoffice items about the Capri and Rivera was that the building had housed the Dahl Theatre immediately before Lippert converted it into a cinema. I haven’t had much luck with confirming this, but a Google search turned up a theater memorabilia site advertising a “VINTAGE PLAYGOER FROM DAHL THEATRE~LA~ 1958” for seven bucks. I couldn’t find the item on the site, and the Google results also said “No Image Available” in any case.
As for the many sources saying this was once a vaudeville theater, I’m skeptical. For one thing, the footprint was quite small. After allowing space for a stage house, even a theater with a balcony on this lot could scarcely have held five hundred patrons. For another, when Lippert converted the building the ceiling was so low that a special arrangement of mirrors had to be installed to allow the projector beam to reach the screen.
Finally, for anyone to have built a vaudeville theater in this location in 1929 would have been folly. It was not yet very densely populated, there were no streetcar lines on either Beverly or La Brea, and it would have been much easier for locals to leave the neighborhood to reach the large theaters of Hollywood, Carthay Center, and Beverly Hills than it would have been for any significant number of potential audience members to reach this location.
I suspect that, before becoming Slapsie Maxie’s, the building was most likely ordinary retail space, with a vanishingly small chance that it was a neighborhood movie house.
The Palm Springs Theatre was featured in an article in Boxoffice of October 21, 1963. There are a few photos.
The full professional name of the architect of the Palm Springs Theatre was A. Herbert Mathes. He designed many theaters for Wometco during this period, and was also a well-known Miami hotel architect.
Though the Byron Carlyle Theatre was opened in 1968, it got an article in Boxoffice on October 19, 1970. The Byron had 590 seats and the Carlyle seated 993. Oddly, the larger house had only 35mm projection while the smaller was equipped with Century 70/35s.
The Boxoffice article said that the architect of the project, A. Herbert Mathes, was “…the architect responsible for many Wometco theatres….”
This theater opened as the Park East and Park West in 1965. Total seating at opening was 1,500, divided 600 and 900. It was operated by Wometco. A rendering of the proposed house, by architect A. Herbert Mathes, appeared in Boxoffice, December 31, 1964.
Though they placed it in nearby Dover, Delaware, Boxoffice did report the opening of the Smyrna Theatre in its issue of April 10, 1948. It said the house had opened “last week.”
A decade earlier, Boxoffice of February 26, 1938, said that the Roxy Theatre at Smyrna had escaped damage when a car parked in front of it caught fire.
Also, Commerce Street runs east and west. The building was still standing at 106 W. Commerce when the Google street view truck last went through town. It has lost its marquee to one of those absurd shingled mansardettes that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It must have closed by then.
The building appears to be vacant in street view, but Internet directory sites list it as the location of Slaughter’s Plumbing & Heating. It’s a wholesale outfit so maybe it looks empty because they just don’t have window displays.
Boxoffice indicates a late 1941 or early 1942 opening for the Main Theatre. The issue of January 31, 1942, has this item datelined Coldwater, Michigan: “The new Main, owned by Robert H. Moore and William J. Schulte, has opened here. The old Crystal, owned and managed by Moore, has been closed. Moore will manage the new house.”
There’s an error in the first line of my comment above. Emma Cox did not become the operator of the Gem in 1921, but in either 1931 or 1933 (the Boxoffice article I cited gives both years, and context gives no clue as to which is most apt to be correct.) The dates regarding the Joy and Murr theaters are accurate.
The April 2, 1949, issue of Boxoffice reported that Moses Sliman had opened his 500-seat Murr Theatre at Osceola on March 25. The Murr Theatre became part of the Kerasotes circuit on New Year’s Day 1976, as reported in the January 5 issue of Boxoffice.
The September 23, 1939, issue of Boxoffice gives the opening date of the Joy Theatre as September 10 that year, and at the time the Murr opened the Joy Theatre was still operating. The Joy was in operation at least as late as 1953.
A brief item in Boxoffice of August 3, 1957, said the Gary was scheduled to open August 7. This was a week earlier than the tentative opening date given in a Boxoffice item of July 20, which had also said that “The Pride and the Passion” had been slated as the opening feature.
The August 3 item said: “Remodeling included air conditioning, installation of 1,350 foam rubber seats, new draperies, mosaics and murals, new carpeting and plumbing.” It was Benjamin Sack’s second Todd-AO-equipped theater, the Saxon having been the first.
The earlier Boxoffice item credited designer Louis Chiaramonte with both the design for the remodeling and the decoration of the theater, the same roles he had played for the conversion of the Majestic into the Saxon in Boston and the Lyric into the Saxon in Fitchburg.
The Lake had a fairly brief life as a theater. A 1949 anti-trust decree required the Schine circuit to divest a number of its theaters, and the Lake went to an independent operator in February, 1952. Schine retained control of its “A” house in Canandaigua, the Playhouse. The independent operator did not make a success of the Lake. The July 24, 1954, issue of Boxoffice reported that the theater was being converted for business use.
The Wisconsin Historical Society says the Greendale Theatre opened on April 29, 1939. Here’s their page about Greendale. There is a gallery of Greendale photos, and thumbnails of the front of the theater appear on the second and tenth pages of the thumbs. There’s also a thumb at the upper left corner of page 8 captioned “Commercial Buildings in Winter” which I’m pretty sure shows the theater auditorium from the other side— the big building with the chimney.
A few Boxoffice items mention the Greendale. One of December 21, 1940, gives the seating capacity as 650. The Library of Congress has a floor plan of the theater, also giving the seating capacity as 650.
The original Star Theatre was demolished and replaced by a new building designed for Dipson Theatres by Rochester architect Michael J. DeAngelis. There is an article with a couple of photos in Boxoffice of June 21, 1941.
The article also features the smaller Lake Theatre at Canandaigua, New York, designed by DeAngelis for Schine Theatres at about the same time.
The original interior of the Pine Theatre can be seen in three photos in a June 21, 1941, Boxoffice article about the rebuilding of the ventilation system in the house.
The correct address for the Sunn Cinema is 113 E. Pine Street, which is currently the address of Heaven’s Beauty Salon. There’s been some confusion of theaters in Deming. The listing for the Cinema 3 gives it the aka El Rancho for that house, but that aka properly belongs to the Sunn.
I can’t find any Boxoffice items about a Deming Theatre, but there are plenty of references to the El Rancho, from the early 1940s until the late 1970s. The historic El Rancho photos and rendering I’ll link to below depict the same building in the Sunn Theatre photo of 1982. It did not open as the Deming Theatre.
The El Rancho was featured in this Boxoffice article of November 2, 1942, which also featured two of Jack Corgan’s other recent theater projects. The previous year, a rendering of the proposed El Rancho was included in the Just Off the Boards feature of Boxoffice’s June 21 issue.
Numerous comments about the El Rancho are currently found on the Cinema Treasures page for the Cinema 3, which was identified there as having been located in the former El Rancho building. This was apparently an error, as CT user Mr50s said that Cinema 3 had been located in a former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. That plant was at the corner of Pine and Copper streets, about a block and half west of the Sunn/El Rancho.
It looks like we’ve got two different theaters conflated on this page. Mr50s said the Cinema 3 was in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. If that’s the case then El Rancho was not an aka for Cinema 3. The address of 113 E. Pine Street given for this theater was indeed the address of R.E. Griffith’s El Rancho Theatre, which was the original name of the house currently listed at Cinema Treasures as the Sunn Cinema. It was the El Rancho from opening in 1942 until the late 1970s.
A .pdf of the minutes of a 2009 Luna County Board of Commissioners meeting includes a reference to a proposal for a Luna County Youth Arts Center, to be located in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant at 101 N. Copper Street, Deming. It doesn’t mention the building having been used as a theater, but if Mr50s is correct, that must have been the address of the Cinema 3.
If the Albuquerque Journal article cited in the intro was correct and the Cinema 3 was in the former El Rancho (Albuquerque is 233 miles from Deming, and I’m more inclined to trust Mr50s, who actually lived in Deming) then the pages for the two theaters need to be combined. Otherwise, the address on this page and the aka’s on both pages need to be changed.
Hughes-Franklin was the name of a theater chain formed around 1930 by Howard Hughes and Harold B. Franklin. It was an extensive chain and they had a number of theaters in the Los Angeles area, and based on what little I’ve been able to find out about it some of their houses appear to have been operated in association with local partners. Considering the two names connected with it, I wonder if this could have been one of them? I don’t think the chain lasted very long, though, so it might not have been around by the time the Franklin opened in 1936.
The Corbin was built for Robert Lippert Theatres and was opened in 1959. It was a near twin to the Buena Park Theatre opened the same year and which was the subject of this Boxoffice feature of October 19 that year. You can see the resemblance to the 1984 photo, though it looks like the Corbin had a traditional marquee added later, judging from the way it’s mounted on columns rather than attached to the building itself. The Corbin was probably designed by the architect of the Buena Park, Warren F. Overpeck.
The Roger Sherman Theatre reopened on December 23, 1961, following a major remodeling designed by architect Drew Eberson. The house was then the Stanley Warner circuit’s zone flagship, according to the item in Boxoffice of January 1, 1962, which also said: “The interior was completely stripped for the extensive wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling renovation program.” The opening movie was Disney’s “Babes In Toyland.”
A rendering of the new front of the Roger Sherman was published in Boxoffice of December 18, 1961. This item said that the remodeled house would feature continental seating, and that total capacity would be reduced by 350 seats.
Boxoffice of July 9, 1938, ran an item saying that construction on the new Crystal Theatre was scheduled begin on August 15, and that operator Ben Cohen anticipated opening the house some time around Thanksgiving Day.
The item also said that this Crystal was a replacement for an older theater of the same name, across the street from the site of the new house, which had been demolished for the widening of Michigan Avenue.
The opening of the new Crystal was delayed. Boxoffice of December 17 said the house “…bows the latter part of the month.”
The 1982 photo depicts the last Music Box Theatre in Portland, located on Broadway next door to the Fox Theatre. Gary Lacher and Steve Stone’s book “Theaters of Portland” says that there were six Portland theaters called the Music Box. I don’t think it has a page at Cinema Treasures yet.
The Hill Theatre was not a quonset hut, but a site-built theater using laminated wood arches that formed both walls and roof. They came to a slight peak, giving the auditorium a somewhat Gothic look, though the style of the building was California Modern, a regional variant of the Midcentury style, but which favored the use of natural materials such as redwood and stone along with the glass walls more characteristic of the modern mode. This sometimes gave the California Modern a rather rustic look, as was the case with this theater.
A double-page spread about the Hill Theatre was published in Boxoffice of October 19, 1959, though this was several years after the theater had opened. This article gives the seating capacity of the Hill as 303.
Construction of this theater was to begin in 30 days, according to an item in Boxoffice of July 1, 1950. The backers of the project had arranged for the theater to be operated under lease by R.B. Read and Paul Clark, both of Carmel Point. The as-yet unnamed theater was to show “foreign and domestic films of prestige quality.”
Early in 1956 the Hill Theatre was taken over by a partnership of Maury Schwarz and John Parsons, San Francisco exhibitors. Parsons operated a circuit of several houses in the Bay Area and in the Central Valley. He also operated the Golden Bough Theatre in Monterey from about 1955. Many of his theaters were art houses. After Parsons and Schwarz acquired the house, R.B. Read was to continue as manager of the Hill and take over management of the Golden Bough as well, according to Boxoffice of February 18, 1956.
The start of construction on the Coronet Theatre was announced in Boxoffice of February 11, 1963. It was to be the first unit in a six acre commercial project planned by Comstock Developers. It was to be a first-run house, and would be operated under lease by A.J. Longtin, operator of theaters at Madera, Coalinga, and Willows, and former operator of the Guild and Encore theaters in Sacramento.
One of the partners in Comstock Developers was architect Herbert E. Goodpastor, designer of the Coronet. Goodpastor also designed the Manor and Colonial theaters in Sacramento.
A photo of the auditorium of the Cameo Theatre was featured in an ad for the American Seating Company in Boxoffice of January 3, 1953. The architects of the theater were Ginnocchio and Cromwell.
The Crane Theatre became the Fox Theatre in 1955, replacing Fox Midwest’s Tiger Theatre which had burned the previous year. The building was extensively altered and given a Midcentury Modern style by architect Samuel W. Bihr, Jr. Before and after photos are on display in this article in Boxoffice of October 22, 1955. Many additional photos appear on the three subsequent pages.
Boxoffice of March 5, 1949, said that the Coral Way Drive-In had been opened. Wometco took over operation in 1954. In 1955 the circuit had the drive-in rebuilt to plans by architect A. Herbert Mathes. His design was the subject of this article in Boxoffice of October 22, 1955.
For a long time I’ve had a vague memory of having attended a movie at a twin theater on Beverly Boulevard in the early 1960s, and of having read an article about the opening of said theater in the Los Angeles Times some time before that.
I was pretty sure it was the theater that became the New Beverly, but nobody posting on this page ever mentioned anything about such a twin here, and the theater’s web site said nothing, so I didn’t comment (for several years I also had a very vivid memory, which turned out to be false, of there having been an Admiral Theatre on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, so that embarrassing experience made me a bit gun shy.)
Now, I have found confirmation of the existence of this twin! Boxoffice of October 19, 1959, has an article with pictures of the very theater I remember, and it was indeed this one. Capri and Riviera were not sequential names for this theater, but the names of the two auditoriums of the twin opened at this address by Robert Lippert in the late 1950s.
The Capri and Riviera Theatres had to have been the first twin opened in the city of Los Angeles, and the first in Southern California after Jimmy Edwards opened the Annex at his Alhambra Theatre in suburban Alhambra in 1941.
I don’t recall the year in which I attended the Riviera, but it was probably no earlier than 1961. Boxoffice of September 16, 1963, tells me it couldn’t have been later than 1963, as that’s when the house was restored to a single-screen configuration, reopening as the New Yorker on Friday, September 13.
Both articles give the name of the “legitimate playhouse” (Boxoffice’s term) that had previously occupied the building as the Dahl Theatre. I’ve been unable to find out any details about it. The Los Angeles County Assessor’s office gives the date of construction of the building at 7165 Beverly as 1929, with an effective construction date of 1942. At least two sources say that Slapsie Maxie’s opened here in 1943, which would match well with the 1942 rebuilding.
An article in a 2004 issue of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (PDF here) says that after Slapsie Maxie’s closed, the building became the New Globe Theatre, a venue for Yiddish plays. It was operating under that name in 1951.
The impression I got from the Boxoffice items about the Capri and Rivera was that the building had housed the Dahl Theatre immediately before Lippert converted it into a cinema. I haven’t had much luck with confirming this, but a Google search turned up a theater memorabilia site advertising a “VINTAGE PLAYGOER FROM DAHL THEATRE~LA~ 1958” for seven bucks. I couldn’t find the item on the site, and the Google results also said “No Image Available” in any case.
As for the many sources saying this was once a vaudeville theater, I’m skeptical. For one thing, the footprint was quite small. After allowing space for a stage house, even a theater with a balcony on this lot could scarcely have held five hundred patrons. For another, when Lippert converted the building the ceiling was so low that a special arrangement of mirrors had to be installed to allow the projector beam to reach the screen.
Finally, for anyone to have built a vaudeville theater in this location in 1929 would have been folly. It was not yet very densely populated, there were no streetcar lines on either Beverly or La Brea, and it would have been much easier for locals to leave the neighborhood to reach the large theaters of Hollywood, Carthay Center, and Beverly Hills than it would have been for any significant number of potential audience members to reach this location.
I suspect that, before becoming Slapsie Maxie’s, the building was most likely ordinary retail space, with a vanishingly small chance that it was a neighborhood movie house.
The Palm Springs Theatre was featured in an article in Boxoffice of October 21, 1963. There are a few photos.
The full professional name of the architect of the Palm Springs Theatre was A. Herbert Mathes. He designed many theaters for Wometco during this period, and was also a well-known Miami hotel architect.
Though the Byron Carlyle Theatre was opened in 1968, it got an article in Boxoffice on October 19, 1970. The Byron had 590 seats and the Carlyle seated 993. Oddly, the larger house had only 35mm projection while the smaller was equipped with Century 70/35s.
The Boxoffice article said that the architect of the project, A. Herbert Mathes, was “…the architect responsible for many Wometco theatres….”
This theater opened as the Park East and Park West in 1965. Total seating at opening was 1,500, divided 600 and 900. It was operated by Wometco. A rendering of the proposed house, by architect A. Herbert Mathes, appeared in Boxoffice, December 31, 1964.
Though they placed it in nearby Dover, Delaware, Boxoffice did report the opening of the Smyrna Theatre in its issue of April 10, 1948. It said the house had opened “last week.”
A decade earlier, Boxoffice of February 26, 1938, said that the Roxy Theatre at Smyrna had escaped damage when a car parked in front of it caught fire.
Also, Commerce Street runs east and west. The building was still standing at 106 W. Commerce when the Google street view truck last went through town. It has lost its marquee to one of those absurd shingled mansardettes that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It must have closed by then.
The building appears to be vacant in street view, but Internet directory sites list it as the location of Slaughter’s Plumbing & Heating. It’s a wholesale outfit so maybe it looks empty because they just don’t have window displays.
Boxoffice indicates a late 1941 or early 1942 opening for the Main Theatre. The issue of January 31, 1942, has this item datelined Coldwater, Michigan: “The new Main, owned by Robert H. Moore and William J. Schulte, has opened here. The old Crystal, owned and managed by Moore, has been closed. Moore will manage the new house.”
There’s an error in the first line of my comment above. Emma Cox did not become the operator of the Gem in 1921, but in either 1931 or 1933 (the Boxoffice article I cited gives both years, and context gives no clue as to which is most apt to be correct.) The dates regarding the Joy and Murr theaters are accurate.
The April 2, 1949, issue of Boxoffice reported that Moses Sliman had opened his 500-seat Murr Theatre at Osceola on March 25. The Murr Theatre became part of the Kerasotes circuit on New Year’s Day 1976, as reported in the January 5 issue of Boxoffice.
The September 23, 1939, issue of Boxoffice gives the opening date of the Joy Theatre as September 10 that year, and at the time the Murr opened the Joy Theatre was still operating. The Joy was in operation at least as late as 1953.
A brief item in Boxoffice of August 3, 1957, said the Gary was scheduled to open August 7. This was a week earlier than the tentative opening date given in a Boxoffice item of July 20, which had also said that “The Pride and the Passion” had been slated as the opening feature.
The August 3 item said: “Remodeling included air conditioning, installation of 1,350 foam rubber seats, new draperies, mosaics and murals, new carpeting and plumbing.” It was Benjamin Sack’s second Todd-AO-equipped theater, the Saxon having been the first.
The earlier Boxoffice item credited designer Louis Chiaramonte with both the design for the remodeling and the decoration of the theater, the same roles he had played for the conversion of the Majestic into the Saxon in Boston and the Lyric into the Saxon in Fitchburg.
The Lake had a fairly brief life as a theater. A 1949 anti-trust decree required the Schine circuit to divest a number of its theaters, and the Lake went to an independent operator in February, 1952. Schine retained control of its “A” house in Canandaigua, the Playhouse. The independent operator did not make a success of the Lake. The July 24, 1954, issue of Boxoffice reported that the theater was being converted for business use.
The Wisconsin Historical Society says the Greendale Theatre opened on April 29, 1939. Here’s their page about Greendale. There is a gallery of Greendale photos, and thumbnails of the front of the theater appear on the second and tenth pages of the thumbs. There’s also a thumb at the upper left corner of page 8 captioned “Commercial Buildings in Winter” which I’m pretty sure shows the theater auditorium from the other side— the big building with the chimney.
A few Boxoffice items mention the Greendale. One of December 21, 1940, gives the seating capacity as 650. The Library of Congress has a floor plan of the theater, also giving the seating capacity as 650.
The original Star Theatre was demolished and replaced by a new building designed for Dipson Theatres by Rochester architect Michael J. DeAngelis. There is an article with a couple of photos in Boxoffice of June 21, 1941.
The article also features the smaller Lake Theatre at Canandaigua, New York, designed by DeAngelis for Schine Theatres at about the same time.
The original interior of the Pine Theatre can be seen in three photos in a June 21, 1941, Boxoffice article about the rebuilding of the ventilation system in the house.
The correct address for the Sunn Cinema is 113 E. Pine Street, which is currently the address of Heaven’s Beauty Salon. There’s been some confusion of theaters in Deming. The listing for the Cinema 3 gives it the aka El Rancho for that house, but that aka properly belongs to the Sunn.
I can’t find any Boxoffice items about a Deming Theatre, but there are plenty of references to the El Rancho, from the early 1940s until the late 1970s. The historic El Rancho photos and rendering I’ll link to below depict the same building in the Sunn Theatre photo of 1982. It did not open as the Deming Theatre.
The El Rancho was featured in this Boxoffice article of November 2, 1942, which also featured two of Jack Corgan’s other recent theater projects. The previous year, a rendering of the proposed El Rancho was included in the Just Off the Boards feature of Boxoffice’s June 21 issue.
Numerous comments about the El Rancho are currently found on the Cinema Treasures page for the Cinema 3, which was identified there as having been located in the former El Rancho building. This was apparently an error, as CT user Mr50s said that Cinema 3 had been located in a former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. That plant was at the corner of Pine and Copper streets, about a block and half west of the Sunn/El Rancho.
It looks like we’ve got two different theaters conflated on this page. Mr50s said the Cinema 3 was in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. If that’s the case then El Rancho was not an aka for Cinema 3. The address of 113 E. Pine Street given for this theater was indeed the address of R.E. Griffith’s El Rancho Theatre, which was the original name of the house currently listed at Cinema Treasures as the Sunn Cinema. It was the El Rancho from opening in 1942 until the late 1970s.
A .pdf of the minutes of a 2009 Luna County Board of Commissioners meeting includes a reference to a proposal for a Luna County Youth Arts Center, to be located in the former Pepsi-Cola bottling plant at 101 N. Copper Street, Deming. It doesn’t mention the building having been used as a theater, but if Mr50s is correct, that must have been the address of the Cinema 3.
If the Albuquerque Journal article cited in the intro was correct and the Cinema 3 was in the former El Rancho (Albuquerque is 233 miles from Deming, and I’m more inclined to trust Mr50s, who actually lived in Deming) then the pages for the two theaters need to be combined. Otherwise, the address on this page and the aka’s on both pages need to be changed.
Hughes-Franklin was the name of a theater chain formed around 1930 by Howard Hughes and Harold B. Franklin. It was an extensive chain and they had a number of theaters in the Los Angeles area, and based on what little I’ve been able to find out about it some of their houses appear to have been operated in association with local partners. Considering the two names connected with it, I wonder if this could have been one of them? I don’t think the chain lasted very long, though, so it might not have been around by the time the Franklin opened in 1936.