South Dekalb Cinemas 12

jeterga on September 5, 2010 at 6:50 pm

The 72,808-square-foot building will house a 12-screen multiplex attached to the mall. It will be triple the size of the mall’s old cinema

The $13 million cinema was made possible when DeKalb County approved a $2.8 million tax package in May 1998 to help seed the project.

South DeKalb Mall has been without a cinema since 1997, when the old cinema was closed. The Theaters will seat 3,600 in stadium-style seats.

jeterga on September 5, 2010 at 7:33 pm

American Screenworks will be opening its new $10 million cinemas at the Gallery of South DeKalb on April 20, and the Atlanta-based company and mall management are expecting the throngs to come.

Sayed Raza, American Screenwork’s operations manager, said construction crews are working round-the-clock to have the 42,000-square-foot facility at the rear of the mall ready for Opening Night.

“It will be ready,” he said Friday as crews unfurled acres of green, orange and black print carpet and painters added final coats of paint and a slew of women swept and vacuumed construction dust from the cinema’s 12 auditoriums.

The new cinema replaces a smaller old asbestos-laced 24,000-square-foot cinema that closed in the 1990s.

American Screenworks stepped in to build the cinema when a deal with Magic Johnson Cinemas fell through under the mall’s previous owners.

StanMalone on October 7, 2015 at 5:49 am

RStewart: Thank you for that comment. I looked on the North Springs page that I had commented on years ago and found a link to an article in the Naples Florida paper. It was an investigative report on a Naples Theatre owned by James Duffy and what happened to it. Even if you have no connection to any theater in it the article is well researched and makes for interesting reading. It is not a pretty story. Here is the introduction:

Court cases found: 69

Number of money judgments: 47

Judgment total: $24.6 million

Amount paid: $141,208.84

Total theaters found: 88

Number of theaters announced that never opened: 21

Number of theaters open less than 3 years: 37

Number of theaters open 3 years or more: 30

Number of states: 26

Number of theaters in Florida (most of any state): 17

The link for the entire story is here:

http://www.naplesnews.com/community/bonita-banner/james-duffy-atlanta-cinema-movie-theater-fraud-lee

StanMalone on October 8, 2015 at 4:54 am

If you Google “James Duffy” you will get page after page of legal documents along with a few more newspaper articles. It looks as if he, at least in more recent years, was in the “getting sued” business rather than the movie business.

Before I started running projection booths I was in the management end although only as a theater manager, never any type of home office work. However, almost everyone in this business in Atlanta had heard of James Duffy. He first came to my attention when he bought up the old Georgia Cinerama, removed the wall and opened it as one of the first drafthouses. I think the actual name was Cinema ‘N Drafthouse. According to one of those leagal documents the McDonalds that now sits in the parking lot there bought the property and moved him out. The building is now a church.

Duffy then moved his operation to the North Springs and stayed there for several years although according to an article in the Knoxville paper, not without problems with the landlord, the IRS, and a whole slew of creditors. For a while he also controlled the old Capri Theater in Buckhead. In the late 90’s GCC, which was on its last legs, had some kind of relationship with Duffy and the DM office at Parkside (where I was working the booth at the time) had the Drafthouse people using some of that office suite.

When GCC shut down, Duffy took over the Hairston 8 and ran it as a dollar house under the EFW banner. The closest I came to working for him was in 2001 when one of the former GCC managers who was now working for Duffy called and asked if I was interested in running the booth at Parkside/Sandy Springs which they had just taken on. Their problem as it was explained to me was that one of their people wanted to show how well he could run the booth. This person went into the Parkside booth which had been closed for over a year and cranked up the sound to the point that several of the drivers were blown. I did not really want to get involved with EFW since I had heard of problems with bouncing paychecks and since this type of problem was really beyond my ability anyway I declined. I guess they finally got someone to get everything running although when I went back into that booth to work for George Lefont I found that they had just robbed the drivers out of some of the existing speakers that were not damaged so that some of the 4 channel houses only had about one and a half channels working.

From the stories in the papers, it seems that Duffy then went into the theatre building business in partnership with local governments, mall and property owners, and investors. Some very nice and impressive theatres were indeed built, but if those stories are true then everyone from the taxpayers to the ticket takers got left holding useless checks, or maybe no check at all when the theatre closed down.

I think that anyone who has been in this business very long has probably heard stories like this especially involving small independent operations, but this case with so many theatres spread over so many states is certainly imressive.

crunchocky on February 6, 2017 at 6:35 pm

That is correct. Satellite Cinemas Facebook page indicates that they reopened this theatre April 22 of last year, and as of this current week at least are still open and operating this theatre.