My family moved from Manhattan to Fresh Meadows in 1950 so this became our local theater. My first date with a girl was to the Meadows and I saw my first 3-D film there… Bwana Devil! Seeing my first 3-D there was very important in my life as 3-D has been my career for the past 40 years now. (I directed three 3-D music videos for the Rolling Stones and now teach Stereoscopic 3-D to grad students.)
I only remember the Meadows as one large theater, the concept of breaking up a theater did not exist then.
The quality of 3-D projection in the 50’s was awful. The poster before me, theatrefan, spoke up for the beauty of actual film over digital. This may be true for normal 2-D movies but, for 3-D, digital is so very superior that is might be highly irresponsible to show 3-D from film today.
There was a Horn & Hardart cafeteria diagonally facing the theater’s entrance and that was part of the experience. Also a large Bloomingdales was right nearby. I wonder what those are now? Maybe a trip is in order. I learned to ride a bike in a Fresh Meadows parking lot, and, a few years later, to drive a car in that same lot!
By the way, I discovered this site just last week and I posted some other memories under Carnegie Hall Cinema.
I was an usher when the theater first opened. I remember it showing the Apu Trilogy and I saw those films a zillion times… not a bad cinema & music education! I was a music major then at City College and the theater was owned by the family of my fellow music major, Peter Schlosser. Film Forum is now showing that famous Trilogy and that’s what made me think to search and find this site. I think it was around the summer of ‘59 or '60, when it opened and I worked. A few years after that, I studied Indian music seriously and that was partly due to the Apu influence. I think that Philip Glass, who I later worked with, was also influenced by Ravi Shankar’s great score. I never was back to the theater after that summer and sometimes wondered whatever happened to it. I had no idea of its later history & decline.
My family moved from Manhattan to Fresh Meadows in 1950 so this became our local theater. My first date with a girl was to the Meadows and I saw my first 3-D film there… Bwana Devil! Seeing my first 3-D there was very important in my life as 3-D has been my career for the past 40 years now. (I directed three 3-D music videos for the Rolling Stones and now teach Stereoscopic 3-D to grad students.)
I only remember the Meadows as one large theater, the concept of breaking up a theater did not exist then.
The quality of 3-D projection in the 50’s was awful. The poster before me, theatrefan, spoke up for the beauty of actual film over digital. This may be true for normal 2-D movies but, for 3-D, digital is so very superior that is might be highly irresponsible to show 3-D from film today.
There was a Horn & Hardart cafeteria diagonally facing the theater’s entrance and that was part of the experience. Also a large Bloomingdales was right nearby. I wonder what those are now? Maybe a trip is in order. I learned to ride a bike in a Fresh Meadows parking lot, and, a few years later, to drive a car in that same lot!
By the way, I discovered this site just last week and I posted some other memories under Carnegie Hall Cinema.
I was an usher when the theater first opened. I remember it showing the Apu Trilogy and I saw those films a zillion times… not a bad cinema & music education! I was a music major then at City College and the theater was owned by the family of my fellow music major, Peter Schlosser. Film Forum is now showing that famous Trilogy and that’s what made me think to search and find this site. I think it was around the summer of ‘59 or '60, when it opened and I worked. A few years after that, I studied Indian music seriously and that was partly due to the Apu influence. I think that Philip Glass, who I later worked with, was also influenced by Ravi Shankar’s great score. I never was back to the theater after that summer and sometimes wondered whatever happened to it. I had no idea of its later history & decline.