South Dekalb Cinemas 12
2801 Candler Road,
Decatur,
GA
30034
2801 Candler Road,
Decatur,
GA
30034
3 people
favorited this theater
Showing 1 - 25 of 30 comments
I tried the website to see what was going on at this location and all you get is a blank page. If you click on the tab for all showtimes you get only the two Florida theaters. So, it looks as if this place may be closed yet again. I believe this would make the fifth time which has to be approaching some type of record.
I also looked up some yelp reviews on the mall itself and apparently it has turned into a real dump, and a not very safe one at that. One reviewer said that if it were not for all of the police and private security the place would be half empty. Makes sense since there is a police station in the parking lot next to the theater entrance.
As for the theater itself, a comment from 10/15/17 states that the theater is now closed.
Looking at the website and the facebook page, it seems that they are only running 6 movies. With the expense of converting to digital I guess they wanted to make sure this place would work before converting all 12. Or, maybe they decided that there never would be enough product to justify 12.
When the Starlight Drive In on Moreland converted to digital they only did 4 out of 6 screens.
I waded down to the bottom of their Facebook page and found this article on the reopening of the theater:
http://crossroadsnews.com/news/2016/apr/29/south-dekalb-cinema-reopens/
The company seems to consist of two theaters in Florida plus this one. It would be interesting to find out just how they settled on this location and what brought it to their attention. Who knows, maybe they will give the old Magic Johnson over at Greenbriar a try next.
For 25 years South DeKalb was a destination theater which had the entire area of DeKalb County south of Covington Highway all the way out to Conyers to draw from. Now, the AMC Stonecrest 15 sits only four exits down I-20 which pretty much makes SD a neighborhood theater. I think that this is the fourth operator to give this a try since the Duffy expansion. There have been at least three attempts to make the old Cineplex location at Panola and 12 work.
With the start of the multiplex era the cost of equipping a theater and projection booth was too much for anyone other than a national or at least regional company. The wave of theater bankruptcies and resultant lease breakings in the late 90’s produced a good number of completely equipped theaters available for movie buffs and well meaning amateurs to make their dream of running their own theater possible. Most of these fell victim to the realities of trying to compete against AMC and Regal, but a few located in just the right spot managed to make it although few managed to afford the conversion to digital projection.
This Satellite outfit obviously has some money behind it since they were able to convert the booth, rebrand all of the signage, and give the place a good cleanup. Hopefully they will be the exception to the rule and survive.
That is correct. Satellite Cinemas Facebook page indicates that they reopened this theatre April 22 of last year, and as of this current week at least are still open and operating this theatre.
It appears this theatre is open and operated by Satellite Cinemas (www.satellite-cinemas.com)
If you Google “James Duffy” you will get page after page of legal documents along with a few more newspaper articles. It looks as if he, at least in more recent years, was in the “getting sued” business rather than the movie business.
Before I started running projection booths I was in the management end although only as a theater manager, never any type of home office work. However, almost everyone in this business in Atlanta had heard of James Duffy. He first came to my attention when he bought up the old Georgia Cinerama, removed the wall and opened it as one of the first drafthouses. I think the actual name was Cinema ‘N Drafthouse. According to one of those leagal documents the McDonalds that now sits in the parking lot there bought the property and moved him out. The building is now a church.
Duffy then moved his operation to the North Springs and stayed there for several years although according to an article in the Knoxville paper, not without problems with the landlord, the IRS, and a whole slew of creditors. For a while he also controlled the old Capri Theater in Buckhead. In the late 90’s GCC, which was on its last legs, had some kind of relationship with Duffy and the DM office at Parkside (where I was working the booth at the time) had the Drafthouse people using some of that office suite.
When GCC shut down, Duffy took over the Hairston 8 and ran it as a dollar house under the EFW banner. The closest I came to working for him was in 2001 when one of the former GCC managers who was now working for Duffy called and asked if I was interested in running the booth at Parkside/Sandy Springs which they had just taken on. Their problem as it was explained to me was that one of their people wanted to show how well he could run the booth. This person went into the Parkside booth which had been closed for over a year and cranked up the sound to the point that several of the drivers were blown. I did not really want to get involved with EFW since I had heard of problems with bouncing paychecks and since this type of problem was really beyond my ability anyway I declined. I guess they finally got someone to get everything running although when I went back into that booth to work for George Lefont I found that they had just robbed the drivers out of some of the existing speakers that were not damaged so that some of the 4 channel houses only had about one and a half channels working.
From the stories in the papers, it seems that Duffy then went into the theatre building business in partnership with local governments, mall and property owners, and investors. Some very nice and impressive theatres were indeed built, but if those stories are true then everyone from the taxpayers to the ticket takers got left holding useless checks, or maybe no check at all when the theatre closed down.
I think that anyone who has been in this business very long has probably heard stories like this especially involving small independent operations, but this case with so many theatres spread over so many states is certainly imressive.
Wow! It is amazing how guys like this can line up financing and con property owners. I had heard that the closed Cineplex 6 screen in Kennesaw that EFW re-opened stayed open after EFW bailed to try to get the employees some money to cover their bounced checks with the landlord’s blessing.
RStewart: Thank you for that comment. I looked on the North Springs page that I had commented on years ago and found a link to an article in the Naples Florida paper. It was an investigative report on a Naples Theatre owned by James Duffy and what happened to it. Even if you have no connection to any theater in it the article is well researched and makes for interesting reading. It is not a pretty story. Here is the introduction:
Court cases found: 69
Number of money judgments: 47
Judgment total: $24.6 million
Amount paid: $141,208.84
Total theaters found: 88
Number of theaters announced that never opened: 21
Number of theaters open less than 3 years: 37
Number of theaters open 3 years or more: 30
Number of states: 26
Number of theaters in Florida (most of any state): 17
The link for the entire story is here:
http://www.naplesnews.com/community/bonita-banner/james-duffy-atlanta-cinema-movie-theater-fraud-lee
There was “Duffy” involved in some of the various cinema and brewhouses back in the day around Atlanta. He was rumored to be tied up in some sort of monetary games back with the North Springs and a couple of other locations.
I have just noticed that in the comments above, there is no mention of the fact that this place is closed again, probably forever. That American Screenworks era lasted less than a year I think. There was a big legal tangle with the developer who I think was named Duffy, and a lot of creditors from the construction. At least one and maybe two more operators gave it a try, but just as with the old Magic Johnson location across town at Greenbriar they were not able to make it work.
GTC made tons of money with South DeKalb and Greenbriar during their prime days in the 70’s (and in the case of Greenbriar, the mid 60’s) but this is just another case of nothing lasting forever.
This is from a comment by “dmorgan” made on the page for the Candler Road Mini Cinema which was located across Candler Road from the mall. We were talking about the incredible jump in business during the summer of ‘78 at South DeKalb after the twin was quaded in the fall of 1977:
“I remember SD would get Jaws 2, Grease, Heaven Can Wait, Foul Play, and Jungle Book that summer. Saw those movies there or the Glenwood Drive In. Boy, talk about timing. I would say summer 1978 was the first official blockbuster summer as we would come to know it. (Star Wars, of course, kicking things off the summer before with Jaws as a primer in ‘75.)
Like you, and as more of a youngster moviegoer, I was saddened with the butchering of SD into a quad. That being said, they sure got to play a lot of successful product, and nobody seemed to care as I can remember packed houses, lines outside past the Barrel of Fun. (Although I do remember long line down the mall for Freaky Friday on a Saturday when it was a twin!) I think they were the only quad around except Akers Mill at the time."
South DeKalb was in a great location for an intermediate break house when it opened. All of the first run theatres were either downtown or on the north side, and getting a hit from one of those locations was like getting it first run. In 1974 I remember The Sting, Herbie Rides Again, and Longest Yard having repeated sellouts when they arrived after the end of their exclusive northside runs.
After the days of exclusive runs ended starting in 1977, South DeKalb still did tremendous business since the closest first run competition was Stonemont on Memorial Drive. The Belvedere never was much of a factor and Candler Road Twin did not even register. 1978 was one of the busiest summers ever but I remember Escape From Alcatraz, Prophecy, and Amityville Horror in 1979, Airplane, Empire and Urban Cowboy in 1980, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tarzan, and Eye of the Needle in 1981.
I left South DeKalb after that summer and followed Tommy Pike up to Greens Corner which was a brand new and even busier location. South DeKalb started a slow decline about 1984 or so, but was still doing well when GTC sold out to UA Theatres in 1987. UA had little use for a quad in those days when eight was starting to seem small, and no use at all for the employees they inherited from GTC. I do not recall when this location closed, but those years I was there from 1974 until 1981 were very happy and enjoyable times.
American Screenworks will be opening its new $10 million cinemas at the Gallery of South DeKalb on April 20, and the Atlanta-based company and mall management are expecting the throngs to come.
Sayed Raza, American Screenwork’s operations manager, said construction crews are working round-the-clock to have the 42,000-square-foot facility at the rear of the mall ready for Opening Night.
“It will be ready,” he said Friday as crews unfurled acres of green, orange and black print carpet and painters added final coats of paint and a slew of women swept and vacuumed construction dust from the cinema’s 12 auditoriums.
The new cinema replaces a smaller old asbestos-laced 24,000-square-foot cinema that closed in the 1990s.
American Screenworks stepped in to build the cinema when a deal with Magic Johnson Cinemas fell through under the mall’s previous owners.
Tene Harris, the mall’s general manager, said that work crew had guttied the old cinema which will be replaced with a12-screen theater with stadium seating.
The new complex will also have a jazz bar and a small arcade inside. She said the bar would be only admit patrons who are 21 years and older.
It will be the second Atlanta cinema for American Screen Works, which also operates a cinema at Memorial Drive and South Hairston Road the former general cinema 8.
The 30-plus year-old mall used to have a cinema but it closed in the mid 1990s because of disrepair.
The new complex comes five years after a deal between the mall’s previous owner, O'Leary Partners, and Magic Johnson Theatres to build a 12-screen cinema at the 800,000 square-foot mall fizzled.
The 40,000 square-foot theatre complex , which will include digital sound in all auditoriums, advanced ticket pick-up and an enhanced food and beverage menu, is part of the mall’s redevelopment program
Atlanta-based American Screen Works, whose parent company is the Restaurant Entertainment Group, has been in the movie business since 1979. It operates 32 cinemas in cities like Orlando, Denver, Washington DC, Seattle, Cincinnati and Minneapolis
The 72,808-square-foot building will house a 12-screen multiplex attached to the mall. It will be triple the size of the mall’s old cinema
The $13 million cinema was made possible when DeKalb County approved a $2.8 million tax package in May 1998 to help seed the project.
South DeKalb Mall has been without a cinema since 1997, when the old cinema was closed. The Theaters will seat 3,600 in stadium-style seats.
Yes Stan, Daniel Village theatre a GTC had no doors leading into the theatre if you didn’t set middleways or up front you heard popcorn popping or the girls at the concession talking.Never realised they had other theatres like that,Very stupid design.It wasn’t until it was Twinnned that doors were put up.Great Story.
Here some photos.
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Oct 15 1988 these movies are playing; “MESSENGER OF DEATH” one of Bronson’s last movies,“TOUGHER THAN LEATHER” “DANGEROUS LOVE” and “ALIEN NATION”.
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This is a picture of the old South DeKalb Twin building sticking out the back of the mall with the new addition to the right that turned it into a 12.
Stan and all of you guys I could read your stories and relate so much.“THE FEEL ON YOUR FINGERS FROM CARRYING FILM CANS.” Pure theatre employee stories.Somehow the union didn’t want no part of carrying them to the booth!
Stan, thanks so much for responding. You may have seen me there with my Mom and sister for sure! When did “Herbie Rides Again” play? ‘74 or so? Anyway, I remember the crazy lines when it was quadded.
I have to say again, I loved the narrow and long carpeted hallway to the box office. Very unique, it was almost like an art gallery.
I also remember going to the Candler Mini Cinema every once in a while, (the few times they showed a Disney movie, with soft-core porn playing in the next house! ah, the ‘70’s!) a midget compared to SD. Wonderful memories, thank God for this website.
Dmorg: Thanks for that nice write up of your memories of the South Dekalb. Maybe I saw you on your first visit since on my first day as manager we were running Herbie and Crazy Mary Dirty Larry. This was a very enjoyable theatre to work in and even when busy was easy to run since you could stand in front of the box office and see almost the entire operation. The only time things got hectic was when you had to line people up in the mall for #1 or outside for #2.
Your memories of what type of movies played on which side may be correct, but content had nothing to do with it. During cold weather, we usually tried to put the busy movie in #1 so we could line people up inside the mall. This was always a problem as the line would get confused with the people in the mall and it was too easy for people to hang around the mall entrance and break in line once we started to let the people in. Whenever the weather permitted, the busy movie would be in #2 so we could run the line up the hall and outside.
Of course this all changed when they split the two houses. Then, things got too hectic with different showtimes and exit times so you just had to do the best you could and when possible stretch out the intermissions. On some movies like Jaws 2 and The Muppet Movie, and the Bo Derek Tarzan of all things, the crowds were so large you would have an entire sellout lined up while the previous movie was still on. No amount of intermission could solve that.
I have always thought that the original twin theatre was the nicest theatre combined with the best presentation of any theatre I ever worked in. Glad to see someone else noticed.
The June 1, 1971, issue of Boxoffice reported that Georgia Theatres had opened its new South DeKalb Twin Cinemas on May 20. Each of the auditoriums had 550 seats, according to Boxoffice. The opening features were “In Search of the Castaways” and “Cactus Flower.”
The project was designed by Atlanta architectural firm Stevens & Wilkinson. I’ve been unable to discover if any other theaters were designed by this noted firm (which is still in business, now as Stevens & Wilkinson Stang & Newdow) but they did design an office building for the Wilby-Kincey circuit in 1955.
For page update: note that former manager Stan Malone, in his comment of Jan 14, 2006, above, gives the seating capacity of this house as 1,312 after it was reconfigured as a quad in 1977.
Hey all. Erik G. here. You know, the wierd one. After Claude left Gene Drake took over I believe. Thank you for the memories.
My first job was here also! What an awesome first job —– fun people to work with, managers that hosted after hours showings for employees. I MUST have worked with bc70 there…My ‘boyfriend’ Bif was the ass’t manager for a time and this posting really brought back lots of fond memories! Thanks for sharing! Tracy “Dobbs”
My first job was at this theatre!
1985, I was 15 years old! It was a quad at that point. Claude Mulchi and Keith Mixon were the managers. Jack Gallant was an usher and Charles was the projectionist. At that time, most of the employees went to the nearby Mount Carmel Christian School. There was Joe Whittaker, Tracy Dobbs, her boyfriend Bif Washburn, Gretchen Krauss, Sam Tingle, Mike Carraher…
I worked there about 2 years. I had a blast for the most part, but that place was a complete zoo. I mostly did concessions, but also did the ticket booth. It was usually an utter mob scene.
If it was from Canon pictures, had Chuck Norris or Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Jason in it, it would definitely open at South Dekalb.
Mr. Malone made mention of the forehead butts to the curved glass at the ticket counter. That was true hilarity.
I remember carrying those film cans from the parking lot entrance down the slope and up to the booth. I thought my fingers would snap off.
The marquee on Candler Road was freaking 50 feet up easy, if not more. It jutted out of a steep hill. I was never afraid of heights until I had to stand on that 1 and a half foot wide grate way way up in the freezing wind changing letters!!
What harness? I can’t believe I didn’t fall off.
I remember one Saturday morning, a patron came up to complain about the sound. Upon inspection, it was discovered that one of the huge main speakers in Theatre 1 had been taken out of the back door.
That back door was the source of much villainy. Many people would sneak into the open door during a show. During a showing of “Aliens”, that back door slammed with such force that is sounded like a gunshot. The crowd poured out of the two tiny doors into that circular lobby room, screaming and trampling.
One new girl had a crush on Bif. She called him Mr. Spock, which was dead on. Upon being rebuffed, she locked herself in the ticket booth and squatted under the counter, while the crowd waited. -fun-
I was once working alone in the concession area, 15 people waiting on either side.
I pushed the oil feed on the popcorn machine, and a bare wire lit the oil and flames licked from the pan. Being the teenaged rocket scientist that I was, I filled a cup with water from the soda machine. Carbonated water. When I threw it onto the flame, the air bubbles fed the fire and an explosion blew out the top of the machine. It looked and sounded like a rock concert. The line emptied fairly quickly after that. I don’t remember the fire department showing up. I’m surprised the sprinklers didn’t go off.
Mulchi and Charles would show whatever was new after closing on Thursday or Friday nights. Claude had a stereo system in his office next to Theatre 4 that was truly deafening.
Most of the employees went to Lenox with Mulchi, and I hear some serious drama erupted between him and employees there. I stayed to work under a manager that transfered from Starlite. Not long after I was almost beat up in the mall exit for closing the locked door, preventing two gang thugs from entering.
During a showing of “Jason Lives” the crowd laughed as I tried to send out the 5 guys hiding behind the curtain. Not fun. The mall and area was changing. I left pretty soon after that.
I wanted to thank Mr. Coursey for his photos of the local theatres. (I wish there were more of Northlake2 and Southlake 2.) Great site!