Capri Theatre

Plitt operated this theater at one point. Theater is located in a shopping center. Operated as a first run house in the 1970's, later going to second-run before closing.

I was looking for the name of a theater that closed on Chicago Ave. in Minneapolis, where I now live (the mailman has a bet going with another mailman about who can remember the name first) when I stumbled upon this website. Ah, the Capri Theater in the Park and Shop Shopping Center on Willow Pass Road… Memories of my teenage years. It's a church now? How sad. I remember riding the escalator up and thinking how neat it was to have a movie theater on the second floor. My very first boyfriend and I used to go there quite a lot. Wonder what became of him…

The Capri theatre opened on Wednesday May 28, 1969 (coincidentally, the same day the Festival 1 & 11 theatres in Walnut Creek, CA opened). The first feature was “Winning” starring Paul Newman.

I had an opportunity to stop by the Park and Shop Shopping Center in Concord, California recently and paid a visit to the long abandoned Capri theatre. I was surprised to find as I approached the theatre, the front doors were unlocked. As I entered I found both escalators (located to the right) had been roped off and no longer operational. I only way up was by staircase (located on the left). Except for one flyer taped to the front door and a large cross propped up in a corner at the top of the staircase, I saw no other signs that a church had become the recent occupier of the Capri theatre. As I made my way down the left corridor towards the front lobby, it seemed as if nothing had changed. The wonderfully dated “movie reel” designed carpet was still in place as well as the refreshment counter. The only glairing difference I witnessed was the amount of clutter placed in front of the glass doors in front of the lobby. Large lighting units, sofas, chairs and such had been left strewed about. I was unable to get any closer to the theatre. The glass doors before the lobby area were locked.

Although I had only attending the Capri theatre a few times in the 1970s, “The Missouri Breaks” in May of 1976 and “Annie Hall” in April of 1977 to name a couple. A feeling of nostalgia and sadness, once described by film director Sam Fuller upon the closure of any movie theatre, came over me as I left the shopping center parking lot.

The Capri closed on Labor Day, 1998. An interesting read on the City of Concord's opposition to a church operating in this space can be seen at http://www.ci.concord.ca.us/citygov/agendas/bc/plc/2004/05-19-04/rpt05-19-04-1ph.pdf#search='sun%20valley%20mall%20movie%20theater'

I worked at the Capri Theatre from 1973 until 1977. This was just after the theatre's heyday as a premiere single-screen house. The Festival multi-screen theatre in Walnut Creek had opened and the Fox Theatre down the street on Willow Pass Rd had twinned. When I started working there, ABC Theaters ran the Capri. Bookings were still high-end, with a lot of MGM titles going in first run. A year later, ABC became Plitt Theaters and the San Francisco district changed management, with dramatic results. A lot of four-walling took place in 1976. Plitt had no other houses in Contra Costa County. Most of Plitt's movie houses were in San Francisco proper or Sacramento. The Capri was operating in a kind of no man's land where Syufy and the Festival theaters dominated. For example, SOYLENT GREEN would have been a typical booking in 1973. By 1976, the Capri was running FOOD OF THE GODS and HORROR HIGH, and competing with the driveins rather than with the Century or Festival theaters. The theatre was beautifully made, with almost a thousand seats. The booth could run 70mm. The theater occupied the 2nd and 3rd floors of 1653 Willow Pass Rd. A customer would enter the glass doors at the street level, climb two tiers of stairs or ride the escalator to the 2nd floor, and then go up two more (brief) tiers of stairs to the lobby. The lobby was separated by a set of glass doors. As you approached the lobby from the stairs, the box office (with two cashier positions) was on the left and the theatre proper was on the right, through the glass doors. Inside the glass doors, the generous concession stand area was to your right; the auditorium entrance was just beyond that. Manager's office was straight ahead and bathrooms/storage were to the end of the lobby and hang a right. Three sets of double doors led into the auditorium. Inside the auditorium, there were three sections -- the side sections were not as wide as the middle section, and all rows stopped about 10 feet from a raised stage (about four or five feet high); about fifteen feet set back from the edge of the stage was the screen. The third story contained the projection booth and two or three storage rooms. A rear storage room on the 2nd floor housed, in the early 1970s, an enormous popcorn popper. There was also a storage area in the basement. There was a box office on the street level but it was rarely used after a few successful robberies. A large, illuminated marquee was mounted on the 2nd floor exterior, facing Willow Pass Road. Changing the marquee took some doing -- the only access to the catwalk underneath the marquee was to climb up a cyclone-fenced trash shed on the west side of the building, next to what was then a branch of Crocker Bank, and pull oneself up onto a ledge that led around the front of the building. Getting down to ground level was treacherous. Marquee letters were lowered from the 3rd floor in a box.

To add to the above post, there was also the Sun Valley Cinemas at Sun Valley Mall(operated by General Cinema Corporation) and the Showcase on Grant St. Sun Valley also showed first-run product. The Showcase in 1973 was a discount house that went to hard porn in 1975 and then became part of the Pussycat chain in 1976.

Here is a photo of the Capri Theatre marquee and entrance circa 1976, which will do until this site gets its photo service working again. In this shot, you are facing in from the shopping center parking lot.

http://moviesfound.netfirms.com/images/capri-picture.jpg

I, too, managed the Capri theatre from 1992 to 1994. By that time the Enea family had taken it over. After obtaining the Capri, they kept the single screen and reopened it in 1990. It closed in 1991 when audiences dwindled down to literally two people per night. The Eneas split the huge auditorium in half widthwise and created two smaller theatres to the right and left, so looking at the three sets of doors in the lobby, the right and left doors now went into the smaller theatres and the center doors opened to a long sloping hallway into the larger auditorium. As far as I could tell the original screen and automated masking was left intact. This new configuration opened in early 1992 shortly before I began working there. At that time it was a second-run discount house, with a $2 admission ($1.50 weekdays) if you bought a $2 "membership card." By the end of 1992 the membership format was not working and the theatre switched to first-run only. Being a mom-and-pop operation compared to the theatres with money (Syufy, Festival, Brenden), the movies we got were usually smaller films no other chain wanted, or they were cast-offs from the bigger theatres that needed room for a newer feature. Later on a few Indian-language films were shown on occasion. Due to the ethnic diversity of the area, there was always an audience for these films; why this was not continued on a more permanent basis is beyond me.

As far as equipment is concerned, the smaller theatres were far inferior to any I had seen. For some reason, the booths for the smaller theatres had a large area of open dead space in front of the projector, used for storage or whatever. This was probably part of the original single-screen booth that had not been removed. Because of this, the projector could not be pointed downward and, as a result, the screens in those theatres were uncomfortably high. And only the large auditorium had Dolby (analog) sound; I don't believe the smaller rooms even had surround sound. There was no 70mm capability either. And I too had to make the treacherous climb to the outside ledge to change the marquee; however, I had to climb the ladder while holding the letter box too.

The Capri under Enea ownership closed around May of 1995. It reopened a short time later that year under different ownership and closed again just as quickly. Thus came an end to the neighborhood theatre I loved as a kid and despised as an employee.

This was in the Contra Costa Times in August 2005:

After six years of legal wrangling, Harvest Church parishioners will finally be able to worship in the old Capri Theater they own at Concord's Park & Shop center. A recent court ruling has enabled the church to plan renovations needed to begin holding services on the theater's second floor by next year. A Contra Costa County judge ruled that Concord did not violate its general plan last year when it approved the church to hold services in the former theater.

CONCORD
Church wins fight to use old theater

Bob Egelko
Friday, June 8, 2007
A Concord church's long-standing application to convert a vacant movie theater into a house of worship has won approval from a state appeals court.

The Harvest Church bought the former Capri Theater in the Park and Shop Mall in 1998 and sought to build a church and conference center on the second floor. Concord officials rejected the idea, saying it would interfere with plans to revitalize the area with retail development. The appeals court agreed with the city.

The church then revised its proposal by dropping the conference center. The new plan was approved by the City Council 3-2 in 2004, despite opposition from some mall tenants.

On Wednesday, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said the council was entitled to take a different view of the scaled-down proposal. With the site still vacant and the shopping center deteriorating, the city reached the reasonable conclusion that the church would promote retail development, the court said.

The Harvest Church now holds Sunday services in a leased auditorium at a nearby theater. An attorney for the church, Wayne Smith, said it plans to apply for a building permit soon.

A lawyer for opponents was unavailable for comment.

THIS STORY RAN IN THE PENINSULA & EAST BAY EDITIONS

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/08/BABADIGEST5.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

I need to contact them to take photos before they do too much to the theatrey-ness of it all.

The Capri Theatre, like other ABC houses of the 1960s and 1970s, was designed by architect Henry George Greene.

Here's a photo of the former Capri Theatre.