Santa Maria Theatre
207 South Broadway,
Santa Maria,
CA
93454
207 South Broadway,
Santa Maria,
CA
93454
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The Santa Maria Theatre was opened prior to 1941. This 1,236-seat single screen movie theatre was twinned in its later days of operation.
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Cinema Treasures
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Recent comments (view all 13 comments)
This theater was once the jewel of Santa Maria. It was demolished for an extension of the Santa Maria Town Center Mall.
I saw my first movie there. It was huge, and right in the middle of town. Santa Maria has very little sense of history unless there is money in it. I’m surprised the Santa Maria Inn hasn’t been turned into condos.
Here are two 1983 photos:
Photo1
Photo2
Here are two 1983 photos:
Photo1
Photo2
Here is a postcard:
http://tinyurl.com/m9s47w
I hope you bought that one.
The April 23, 1927, issue of Building and Engineering News said that L. A. Smith had prepared plans for a 2-story and part 3-story theater to be built at S. Broadway and Church Street in Santa Maria for Principal Theatres Inc..
Wow! Memories and more memories, this was a great theatre, tucked in right along broadway, I remember seeing “Born in East LA” there back in 87'. The entire block was historic and it’s an absolute travesty what happened to it. This whole block was torn down so we could have a shopping center with a foot bridge that crosses over broadway and connects the mall to the shopping center. The shopping center is mostly vacant and Mervyns, the biggest store that was there, has been closed and empty for ten years. It’s the Santa Maria version of “the bridge to nowhere”. Bonnach nailed it, almost all of the things that made Santa Maria a nice quaint little town, like the SM theatre, have been bulldozed and replaced with strip mall garbage.
I’m pretty sure this was the theater I saw Rocky IV on Thanksgiving night in 1985. My first and only visit as I was in from out of town for the holiday visiting family. I remember it being kind of small and intimate, not a venue with 1200 seats.
The Santa Maria Theatre must have been twinned in its last years, which is probably why Flix70 remembers it as being smaller than 1,200 seats. Check the 1983 photos linked earlier. The signage on the building didn’t specifically claim two screens, but there are two different movies on the marquee, each with the same starting times. There had to have been two screens.