Egyptian Theatre
1707 Broadway,
Scottsbluff,
NE
69361
1707 Broadway,
Scottsbluff,
NE
69361
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another article:
Egyptian theatre to be demolished 08 Mar 1945, Thu Scottsbluff Daily Star-Herald (Scottsbluff, Nebraska) Newspapers.com
Closed March 5th, 1945 after a fire.
This opened on October 20th, 1927. Grand opening ad posted.
It took an entire railroad car to bring the $23,500 three-manual Marr-Colton pipe organ from Warsaw, New York to the Egyptian Theatre. The Egyptian opened with Billie Dove in “American Beauty” with Helen Whitehead at the hoseshoe-shaped organ console. On March 23, 1929, the Egyptian became the first theatre in the Oklahoma panhandle to show talkies with Richard Barthelmess in “Weary River.”
The final show took place on October 4, 1945 with Rita Hayworth in “Tonight and Every Night” supported by the March of Time short, “The Unknown Battle.” A short circuit the next morning in the curtain rigging led to a fire that destroyed the building and led to its razing. In one of the more amazing stories, the projectionist saved both of the prints before the first got out of hand - worried that they would explode and stoke the flames. They would be carried to the Bluffs theatre with normal presentations that night through Wednesday. That’s effort!
CSWalczak’s link was acting odd for me, so here’s the Internet Archive backup version.
For a couple more details, here’s the story in the March 17, 1945 issue of Boxoffice:
Fire did $175,000 damage to the Egyptian Theatre, Scottsbluff, Neb., practically destroying the building, the only things saved being the booth and the front of the house. The theatre, owned by W. H. Ostenberg and operated as a unit of Gibralter Enterprises, will be rebuilt as soon as possible. No film was burned. The house had 1,016 seats.
This article about the Scottsbluff area’s theater history, from the Scottsbluff Star-Herald of January 3, 2016, notes that the Egyptian Theatre opened in October, 1927.
An accompanying photo shows a remnant of the Egyptian’s decoration that still exists on an interior wall of the Midwest Theatre, so at least part of the original building must have survived the March 5, 1945, fire to be incorporated into the new theater.
Here is a blog page, with pictures, about the fire.
From the 1930s a photo postcard of the Egyptian in Scottsbluff