Cocomo Cinemas
625 E. Morgan Street,
Boonville,
MO
65233
625 E. Morgan Street,
Boonville,
MO
65233
No one has favorited this theater yet
Showing 3 comments
Correction: Although Boonville has once left without any indoor movie business in the late-1970s and early-1980s until the launch of the Cocomo in 1982, I just recently found out that Boonville still has movie theater business during the period. Shortly after the Lyric Theatre (later the Thespian Hall Theatre) ended its movie business on July 27, 1976, the Starlite Drive-In became the only movie theater in Boonville until its closure in 1982 (which occurred around the same time the Cocomo Cinemas opened).
The entire history is wrong. Here’s the real story (edited from the previous comment from February 5, 2024):
Boonville was once left without a movie theater for seven years after the Thespian Hall stopped running movies in 1975. People were demanded to see movies in Columbia despite its short 25-mile distance across the Missouri River on Interstate 70.
Movies returned to Boonville when 59-year-old Johnnie Griggs of Appleton City renovated the low-slung brick structure that was once a cavernous National Guard Armory store and opened the twin-screen CoCoMo Cinemas in 1982 with an estimate $125,000. The theater name itself was named after the county where Boonville sits, which is Cooper County, Missouri. It had a total capacity of 386 seats (with 211 seats in one screen and 175 seats in the other).
Griggs was a longtime movie operator across much of mid-Missouri, mainly in Columbia. Griggs' theater career started right at the age of 12 when he began working at the Plaza Theatre in Appleton City in 1939. He literally knew everything about being a projectionist because he did saw the headline involving the Lowry City incident where a 14-year-old projectionist died in an explosion caused by the theater’s projector during World War II. While he was in high school, Griggs began operating several other theaters across Henry and St. Clair Counties throughout the remainder of World War II. Not just one job, but he took almost every single job a theater had.
In the 1950s, Griggs began working right at the heart of Columbia. He once operated the Missouri Theatre throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s and would later help demolish the Parkade Drive-In in 1961 and insert the car speakers at the Sky-Hi Drive-In in 1965. Unfortunately he left the movie business for a short period of time afterward due to concerns over the rise of explicit content in movies. He did make a comeback though and would later purchase the Grand Theatre in Fayette in 1978. A short time after, he began operating two more theaters in Muscatine, Iowa, but came back to Missouri a short time later. That’s when he spent the $125,000 to bring back Boonville’s movie business.
Despite being a small twin-screener, it did receive Hollywood fame on August 30, 1991 when “Child’s Play 3” (which was partially filmed in Boonville) held one of its premieres at the Cocomo. Its first showing wasn’t successful, but its second showing grew massively big time overloading one of the two screens. Griggs reported that it was a hell of hard work and negotiation.
The Cocomo Cinemas closed in mid-1998.
The Cocomo was open as late as 1995, when I saw JURY DUTY with Paulie Shore there. I believe it was closed by 1997 or 1998, and still stands empty, though from the outside the building looks to be in good shape. It was an interesting little theatre.