White City Cinemas
50 Boston Turnpike,
Shrewsbury,
MA
01545
50 Boston Turnpike,
Shrewsbury,
MA
01545
2 people
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Previously operated by: Stanley-Warner Theatres
Previous Names: White City Shopping Center Theatre
Nearby Theaters
News About This Theater
- Mar 2, 2010 — Happy 45th, "The Sound Of Music"
The 1,100-seat White City Shopping Center Theatre in Shrewsbury was opened on January 29, 1965. It was twinned on June 24, 1977, reopening with “Star Wars” & “Jaws”. It was mentioned in a post by a longtime projectionist about a theater in Worcester, so I looked it up. The number is disconnected and was in the White City Plaza East. On a website about the resort and amusement park, there was a mall and movie theater complex located at the plaza on those grounds.
Contributed by
Dave Bonan
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Recent comments (view all 23 comments)
It’s gone? How sad. The last picture I saw there was “Forrest Gump”.
(I’ve been out of MA for awhile) :–)
bulzi…you’re not a nutcase, are you?! You’re starting to remind me of budyboy100. :-)
There are plenty of verifiable sources to support my claim that in its original first-run, reserved-seat Worcester engagement “2001: A Space Odyssey” ran at SHOWCASE CINEMAS and not at WHITE CITY. Here’s one reference. Here’s another.
Also consider that “2001” was initially released exclusively to Cinerama theaters (as this article details), of which SHOWCASE CINEMAS was the only such venue in Worcester.
Another verifiable fact is that the third movie to play WHITE CITY, (despite your insistence it was “2001”) was “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” which began on 06/29/66 and followed “The Sound Of Music’s” 53-week run. (At this point in time, “2001” hadn’t even been made!)
Dude, just deal with it, you’re simply misremembering what occured. What you probably are remembering is a re-release or return engagement that took place years later. It’s human nature and not uncommon to misremember details, especially those from several decades past.
There’s an interesting – and entertaining – article about one family’s experience seeing “The Graduate” (1968) here on this website: http://www.dickwhitney.net/dickwhitneyautobiographyTheGraduate.html
I was the manager at White City from ‘75 to '77 and worked with Charles Gobron and Kathy Blake as my assistants. The theater was really beautiful, but like many of the huge houses was pretty hard to fill. We did screen a week of “1776” for school groups, and that was about as full as it got. I remember the ushers changing the huge marquee in the winter with wind just blasting off Lake Q – it was brutal. We screened “Nickelodeon” for Christmas in 1976 and as a promotion the studio only charged a nickel on opening night. It was predictably frigid, though, and the theater was only half full. A few days later I arrived to open and found a bunch of suits from Redstone inside. They had bought the theater and no one from RKO had even told me. I worked for them a week and transferred to the RKO Merritt in Bridgeport, CT. I miss the wonderful kids that staffed the place – they were a lot of fun.
As family-authorized caretaker of my late father-in-law’s slide collection, I’ve uploaded a 1967 photo of the White Cinema Theatre in the out-of-focus background of a crew race on Lake Quinsigamond. I do this as a thank-you to the CinemaTreasures.org website for helping me identify the photo. The guidelines for this website in 2014 say I should upload only if I’m the photographer, but I am following the spirit of that restriction. The unseen, in-focus foreground is an excellent photo. If you people celebrated privileged teenage white males good at propelling tiny boats, I would have uploaded the whole picture. Upon reading that last sentence, never mind. The fuzzy background theater is a more enduring memory than the in-focus foreground.
If you go to the online recollection link posted by Logan5, you will note the White City spelled Katharine Ross' name correctly on the marquee, but misspelled it on the makeshift one-sheet display lettering next to the entrance as “Katherine Ross.” Perhaps the assistant manager was in a tizzy over the studio finding out.
Stanley Warner Theatres used this basic Theatre design in many houses that it built in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The Washington DC area contained many of the identical designs like the KB Fairfax circle, the KB Cinema 7, and KB Langley. The Cinemart in Hampden Ct. may have also been the same design.
The equipment installed in White City came from the old Warner Theatre in downtown Worcester that White City replaced.
A chronology of the Worcester region’s 70mm presentations history has recently been published. White City gets several mentions in the article.
Invention only opening on January 28th, 1965, and to the public the next day. Grand opening ad posted.
Two screens on June 24th, 1977. Grand opening ad posted.