One aspect of the description was wrong; it might have opened as a single screen, but sometime in the 70’s it became a double screen. I distinctly recall either having to go right to one screen or left to another; somewhat like the General Cinema Theater at Northpark. I did not know this was an Interstate Theater at first. Our family knew the man who ran Interstate for Dallas/Fort Worth, Raymond Willie. My dad was in advertising and used my sister and I in an ad campaign for Interstate’s showing of the Disney movie, “In Search of the Castaways” with Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier. I have pictures of the publicity.
I am quite doubtful of the 1995 closing date. I got into home video in 1985 and was soon (at least by 86 or 87) renting videos there at the Blockbuster, so the Theater had to be gone by then.
Larry; the time frame would have been Gigantis, then, in 1959; we didn’t move in that house until 1958, and in 1956, I would have only been one year old for most of the year. It either was Gigantis, or a re-run of Godzilla. Did you search just IMDB or do you have access to the Dallas Morning News archives online and looked up the movie listings?
If we change the status to demolished, would it get rid of the google street view of that address? I think showing where it was in relation to what’s there now has some value.
I have to tell a funny story on myself. When I was about 5, I was in our back yard looking south; I could have sworn I saw what looked like Godzilla storming the country side on the southern horizon. I told my parents about it, but they just dismissed it as a kid’s imagination. Over the years and decades I thought back on to that and wondered if I, as a kid, was just hallucinating. Many decades later, in the late 1990’s, I ran into some of the “greatest generation” folks who still lived on Prestonshire Ln, and we talked about the old days of that neighborhood. They told me they remembered how far they could see because there were practically no tall trees in the 50s, and that they could easily see the movies on the screen of that drive-in on Northwest Highway.
Then it hit me. It’s likely that what I had seen was an actual Godzilla movie being shown on that movie screen. Being just around 5 years old or so, I just interpreted it as the real deal. I guess I’ll have to go to the library in downtown Dallas (a bit of a drive as I now live in McKinney) to peruse the microfiche copies of old Dallas movie ads to see if/when Godzilla played there around that time.
I wish there was a picture of the screen online. I remember this well. I grew up in that area and I was born in 1954. I remember it being torn down and the Kip’s and the shopping strip mall being built there. I too, remember the clown on the front and remember Kip’s with fondness.
One aspect of the description was wrong; it might have opened as a single screen, but sometime in the 70’s it became a double screen. I distinctly recall either having to go right to one screen or left to another; somewhat like the General Cinema Theater at Northpark. I did not know this was an Interstate Theater at first. Our family knew the man who ran Interstate for Dallas/Fort Worth, Raymond Willie. My dad was in advertising and used my sister and I in an ad campaign for Interstate’s showing of the Disney movie, “In Search of the Castaways” with Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier. I have pictures of the publicity.
I am quite doubtful of the 1995 closing date. I got into home video in 1985 and was soon (at least by 86 or 87) renting videos there at the Blockbuster, so the Theater had to be gone by then.
Larry; the time frame would have been Gigantis, then, in 1959; we didn’t move in that house until 1958, and in 1956, I would have only been one year old for most of the year. It either was Gigantis, or a re-run of Godzilla. Did you search just IMDB or do you have access to the Dallas Morning News archives online and looked up the movie listings?
If we change the status to demolished, would it get rid of the google street view of that address? I think showing where it was in relation to what’s there now has some value.
I have to tell a funny story on myself. When I was about 5, I was in our back yard looking south; I could have sworn I saw what looked like Godzilla storming the country side on the southern horizon. I told my parents about it, but they just dismissed it as a kid’s imagination. Over the years and decades I thought back on to that and wondered if I, as a kid, was just hallucinating. Many decades later, in the late 1990’s, I ran into some of the “greatest generation” folks who still lived on Prestonshire Ln, and we talked about the old days of that neighborhood. They told me they remembered how far they could see because there were practically no tall trees in the 50s, and that they could easily see the movies on the screen of that drive-in on Northwest Highway.
Then it hit me. It’s likely that what I had seen was an actual Godzilla movie being shown on that movie screen. Being just around 5 years old or so, I just interpreted it as the real deal. I guess I’ll have to go to the library in downtown Dallas (a bit of a drive as I now live in McKinney) to peruse the microfiche copies of old Dallas movie ads to see if/when Godzilla played there around that time.
I wish there was a picture of the screen online. I remember this well. I grew up in that area and I was born in 1954. I remember it being torn down and the Kip’s and the shopping strip mall being built there. I too, remember the clown on the front and remember Kip’s with fondness.