Teatro Cinerama

Vanishing Point? Wow, that would have been awesome on the curved screen!. I bet that Grand Prix looked spectacular, specially the scenes shot at the Monza track. According to the late great Andres Roura, Fantastic Voyage, which was filmed in Cinemascope, was the first film to be screened at the Teatro Cinerama using anamorphic optics.

JSA

It is with great sadness that I inform you the passing the Andres Roura, a great contributor to these pages about movie theaters in Puerto Rico. I had the privilege of meeting Andres thanks to this site and our long lunch conversations about movies and movie theaters are things I will always treasure. And I will miss his weekly e-mails telling me about movies on TCM. Que en paz descanses.

This webpage includes an interior picture of the theater showing its impressive Cinerama screen.

great special-feel theater where i saw several musicals during the seventies such as “mame” and “you can’t stop the music.”

I grew-up and lived in Puerto Rico’s San Juan metropolitan area between 1970 and 1989. my special event cinemas were Plaza1 y 2, Laguna Gardens, and Cinerama. Second best were: Radio City (Saturday Night Fever), Puerto Rico (several james Bond movies), Metropolitan (Sound of Music, Sleeper) and of course Music Hall (Barefoot in the Park and several Disney movies.) those theaters now have mythic qualities in my memories specially when i think of the many joyless, drab, and badly maintained movie theaters of the present.

I walked over and took a new photo today. The actual address is 1648 Fernandez Juncos. The larger building with the ramps that was mentioned was the Dept of National Parks building that is being demolished as part of Santurce’s redevelopment. Building is now Paonessa Carpets – on the southeast corner of Fernandez Juncos and Calle Bolivar. BTW – I live next to the old Hotel Metropol near the former Metropolitan, so if anyone needs photos, just point me in the right direction with address or description and I’ll try to fill in some of the theaters without photos.

The Cinerama opened on a week day with How The West… Films opened in San Juan on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Saturday openings were for Easter openings because in the 60’s, during Holy Week, most theaters showed reissues of religious films like The 10 Commandments.

Bob, as some contributor here know, I was in the film business in PR in the 60’s. ALL films in the English language were shown in English with Spanish subtitles, including Cinerama films of course. Maybe animated films for children alternated English and Spanish or used the Spanish version in “la isla”, but I am not sure because Commonwealth did not book many animated films. Disney’s Sword and the Stone was shown with subtitles at the Plaza 2. The cost of booking a film did not have anything to do with the language or if it had subtitles. It had to do with quality, star power, etc. Foreign films were in English most of the time if not all the time, because they were booked through their US distributors' offices in PR (MGM, Columbia, Fox, etc.). In the case of The Longest Day, the soundtrack was in English. French and German and had both Spanish and English subtitles. Originally the film had Spanish subtitles only but we requested Fox to add English subtitles for non Spanish speaking customers, at no extra cost for us. The only ones who had to pay for subtitling a film were independent distributors like World Films. Subtitling cost about $1,500 and did not affect the booking/rental cost. Subtitling was easy, print the titles on the negative and then print the copies of the film.

Please help me out, here in Illinois. I am trying to find my way around Santurce using the CINERAMA as a starting point. It would help to have the exact address of this theater so I can find the building on the satellite photo and see what it looks like from the air.

I think the cross street is Cll Bolivar and it would have an address something like 1647 Avenida Fernadez Juncos. If you type 1647 before the street on the map—-is that the theater on the northwest corner? If that’s the building it looks like it has ramps on the roof, did it have parking on the roof?

It would nice to find the exact address so it could be added to this site.

Bob,

Interesting topic!

“2001: A Space Odyssey” was shown in English at the Metro in Ponce De Leon Avenue.

I never saw a film in Puerto Rico with a Spanish soundtrack, unless it was from Latin America or Spain. All the English-speaking films I saw there (from the mid-60’s to mid 80’s) were sub-titled. That’s not saying it didn’t happen, I just did not see or remember any. However, some of the coming attraction trailers had a Spanish speaking narrator.

Someone told me that these days some theaters show movies dubbed in Spanish, particularly family friendly fare.

JSA

While on vacation at PR, this last weekend, I took a late night drive on the Fernandez Juncos Ave., and was shocked to see how much it has changed. The Cinerama is still somewhat recognizable from the outside, but it looks like it’s all boarded up and no longer functioning as a carpet store. Very depressing. And don’t get me going on the Metropolitan…

JSA

ALSO KNOW AS, CINERAMA

“How the West Was Won” in 3-sitrip CINERAMA, played from May 4, 1965 for 18 weeks.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, This is CINERAMA!” Lowell Thomas, September 30, 1952

Here is a photo. I think it’s the same one that LM posted and was later deleted:
http://tinyurl.com/2oxkn3

Hi JSA ,

Thanks for the info ! By the way I went tothe 2001 Space Odissey at the Metro during those years and it was a wonderful experience, it changed my life !Even though i am a professional musician my outlook of modern music was affected dramatically !!

Best !!