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April 2000, Week 2

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From:
Dennis P Bingham <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Dennis P Bingham <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 11 Apr 2000 07:29:07 -0500
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I'm just now responding to your initial query.  It's my sense from what
others on this list have said and from my own memory that Cinerama didn't
go completely nationwide--with theaters in major U.S. cities (defined as,
say, 500,000 pop. and over) until about 1960.

In my hometown of Columbus, OH, the Grand, an RKO theater went Cinerama in
1960.  This palace, which shared a block across the street from the Ohio
state house with the opulent Loew's Ohio, a photo of whose interior graced
the cover of David Naylor's 1982 book AMERICAN PICTURE PALACES.  From its
reopening, the Grand Cinerama played the last actual three-camera,
three-screen cinerama films, THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM and
HOW THE WEST WAS WON, as well as the later films road-show marketed as
Cinerama: ...MAD, MAD WORLD, GRAND PRIX, 2001, and ICE STATION ZEBRA.
Non-Cinerama roadshows that played the Grand included THE GREATEST STORY
EVER TOLD and KHARTOUM.  The Grand and the Ohio were both marked for
destruction in 1969, to make way for a new state office tower.  However,
public action saved the Ohio.  It was restored and became the home of the
Columbus Symphony, which has played there since.  The Ohio has stayed true
to its roots, however, and plays movies, at "popular prices" in the
summers.  The Grand, however, was summarily razed in 1969.

As for the other part of your question, again using Columbus as example,
during the studio era, just two of the Big Five vertically integrated
companies were represented there: RKO and Loew's, each of which had two
theatres, the Grand and the Palace, and the Ohio and the Broad,
respectively.  Loew's closed the Broad early in 1961; it was immediately
razed.  RKO, as I've said, converted the Grand to Cinerama.  This left the
RKO Palace and the Loew's Ohio, both glorious Thomas Lamb-designed palaces
built in 1926 and 1928, respectively, going as the two general release
theaters throughout the 1960s.  The Palace, which was open as a movie
house until 1976, converted to all-blaxploitation films around 1972 and
closed when that cycle died out.  The Loew's and RKO theaters in town, and
this is typically nationally as best I've been able to learn, maintained
pre-Paramount Decrees releasing patterns.  To wit, RKO played Warner
Bros., Universal, and Disney exclusively.  Loew's showed MGM (of course),
Paramount, United Artists, and Columbia films.  20th Century-Fox pictures
could play either venue.

As for roadshows--and I don't know how unusual this was--Columbus had a
reconverted turn-of-the-century stage house, rechristened the Hunt's
Cinestage.  From its grand opening with AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS in
1957, Hunt's played only roadshows, often for months on end.  SOUTH
PACIFIC, THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, BEN-HUR, EXODUS, SPARTACUS, EL CID, WEST
SIDE STORY, THE LONGEST DAY, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, MY
FAIR LADY, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, HAWAII, CAMELOT, FINIAN'S RAINBOW, SWEET
CHARITY, and PATTON are films I remember playing for extended runs there.
(BEN-HUR, MY FAIR LADY, and DR. ZHIVAGO each played for nearly a year).
The Cinestage closed and was torn down immediately after the roadshow era
ended, in 1971.

Also, in 1964, Columbus opened its first suburban first-run mall cinema, a
locally-owned theater called Northland.  It was followed by locally-run
Cinema East in 1965 and Eastland in 1968.  General Cinema, which had come
to town with three newly built theaters in 1966, bought Northland and
Eastland in the mid-70s.  Before then, however, all of the suburban chains
(except Loew's, which entered the suburban market on Christmas Day 1966)
showed roadshows.  Northland's first was MARY POPPINS at Christmas 1964,
followed in April 1965 by THE SOUND OF MUSIC, which played there for 17
months.  Northland later remained The Julie Andrews Theater, playing
THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE and STAR! as roadshows.  Cinema East played HELLO
DOLLY at Christmas 1969; Eastland played FUNNY GIRL through much of '69.
One of the General Cinema houses played OLIVER! that same year.  The
suburban theaters were never exclusively roadshows, however.  The very
last roadshow release that I recall was FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, which played
a suburban house, the Drexel, a 1930s neighborhood theater that went to
mainstream "prestige" films like MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and ROMEO AND JULIET
in the late sixties, played it through much of 1972.

I believe Columbus was somewhat typical of mid-size cities at that time,
with roadshows spreading to the suburbs in the mid-sixties and suburban
theatres going back and forth between roadshow and regular-release first
runs.  What surprises me is how irregular the release patterns were from
city to city.  For instance, a look through newspaper microfilm in
Indianapolis, where I now live, reveals that, for example, FUNNY GIRL,
which didn't open in Columbus until Feb. 1969, had come to Indy in Oct.
'68 weeks after its NY premiere.  This didn't mean that roadshows always
came to Indy first.  ROMEO AND JULIET, which opened in Columbus on
Christmas Day 1968, stayed out of Indy until the following March.
OLIVER!, which premiered in Columbus in March 1969, three months after its
New York debut, didn't arrive in Indy until June!  Obviously, the studios
were not terribly impatient to see returns on their huge investments in
these films and were apparently willing to wait until the few roadshow
theaters in each town became available.  The question is why!

Little wonder, then, that this era lasted barely fifteen years.  The film
that definitively killed the roadshow was THE GODFATHER in early 1972.

Dennis Bingham
Indiana University, Indianapolis

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