Kent 6 Cinemas

The building still stands, exterior redecorated, as an extension of Kent-Meridian High School. By the way, they did redecorate in emerald green wall curtains before being closed. They added stereo, which they cranked up past distortion as if it was a THX installation. It wasn’t.

Regal sold the Kent 6 to the Kent School District about five years ago. I presume it has been torn down. Regal then abandoned the Kent market, even though the area was/is growing rapidly. AMC came in and built a 14plex in the heart of a revitalized core business area. Real is really hard to figure out…

Mark, the floodgates have opened!

There are so many debacles with Luxury’s presentations. Three instantly come to mind:

Somehow or another, The Coliseum, a once grand palace but already on its death bed, managed to get an exclusive engagement of “Dune” in 70MM no less. However, leave it to The Coliseum to have the film break five times in one screening, which actually caused rioting. Seattle police had to be called in, and the event made the late news. Some people say ‘all publicity is good publicity.’ I don’t think that was the case here.

A couple of years after Luxury bought out the National General Theaters in the Seattle area, they carved up the large 900 seat house of the Crossroads, a twin theater in Bellevue. They did this in a most odd fashion, carving out two small houses in the back corners of the theater and leaving a hallway between them to access what was the front half of the original house. Anyway, they never bothered to realign the seats, so that the seats angled toward the wall instead of straight to the screen. Should you find yourself sitting towards the front on the side bordering the hallway, you had to crane your neck to see the screen. Brilliant! Also, they opened the theaters before they were finished. There was NO masking at all on the screens, and the walls had not been covered with any kind of soundproofing or drapes! I guess Luxury is just a word.

Finally, in my local Luxury house, the Aurora Village 4, it was opened with just one of the theaters finished and the lobby not even close to being completed. We’re talking a hard concrete floor in the lobby, the snack bar consisting of a folding table with a popcorn warmer, a portable soda dispenser and stacks of various candies to pick from. As far as I was concerned, this theater wasn’t even up to their standards (low as they were). It was built inside a former supermarket and the large theater (600 seats) had a ceiling so low that the main air-conditioner duct protruded down far enough from the ceiling so as to block out a small, but significant enough part of the screen at the top center of the picture. At one film I saw there (I think it was one of the Agatha Christie films), the left half of the screen was out of focus, while the right side was in focus. When I complained to the manager, he said that was the way the film was supposed to be shown. I kid you not! I asked for my money back, and (surprise) he refused. I never set foot in that hellhole afterwards. By the way, this theater was so cheap that they didn’t even install any of those nice high backed seats.

But I would like to end on an up note for Luxury. When Close Encounters initially played in Seattle, it was in 35MM four track dolby at the King in downtown Seattle. Even though the film critic of the Seattle Times railed against GCC for their refusal to show it in 70MM, they would not budge. Therefore, I drove 175 miles down to Portland to see it at Luxury’s Eastgate 3 in glorious 70MM on a huge screen. It was an excellent presentation in a great theater.

So once in a while, they’d actually get it right. But just once in a while.

Mark, I was just about to enter my own comments, but you beat me to it! You did forget to mention a couple of items, one being the awful gold/orange/brown color scheme in all of Luxury’s theaters built during the 70s (and in the case of the Kent, remaining that same way until it closed about three years ago.

Another unique feature of Luxury Theaters was the placement of waste recepticals placed strategically inside each auditorium along the aisles every four or five rows. Now, that’s luxury! When Act III took over, that was the first thing to go!

Although truly not a Cinema Treasure, I sometimes wax nostalgically for these built-on-the-cheap cinemas that were plopped down in some of the worst locations imaginable (think the above mentioned Puyallup 6). They are truly part of a bygone era and have now completely disappeared from the Seattle-Tacoma market.

Lest anyone think that I love dumping on Luxury Theaters (which I do not deny), I will say that they were the first to install high-backed chairs in their new builds with lots of legroom in most of these cheap theaters. Being 6'4", that was a much appreciated feature.