General Cinema Essex Green I-III

and BTW the Essex Green I-II-III address was not Rooney Circle, at least when I worked there all our mail came to a Prospect Avenue address.

thanks Bill Great 2001 ad.My friend Nick in Tampa sent me a copy like that from the Tampa paper.don’t see ads like that anymore,Heck don’t see ads much at all and quite frankly most movies stink today anyways.

I was employed by the GCC Essex Green Cinemas from September 1987 to September 1988 and enjoyed working with a lot of the people there. BTW does anyone happen to know what became of our two projectionists Jimmy Heckle and George (I can’t remember his last name).

The original Essex Green Cinema opened as a single screen house seating about 1000 in 1966. The October 10 issue of Boxoffice that year ran a brief article about the new General Cinemas house. It said that Maurice D. Sornick was the architect.

The April 10, 1972, issue of Boxoffice reported that the theater had been renamed the Essex Green Twin Cinemas on the opening (March 29) of a second auditorium accommodating and additional 800 seats.

The June 4, 1979, issue of Boxoffice said that General Cinema’s Essex Green was slated to reopen as a triplex on June 15. The conversion was accomplished by splitting the second auditorium in two. The original main auditorium remained open during the conversion.

My favorite theater when I was a kid. I’ll always remember seeing my first movies here.

Looking at that ad, if I have counted correctly there are only six of the 22 theatres listed that are still open today, and only one—the Lafayette in Suffern—in the same configuration it was back in 1969. The Wayne, the Hudson Plaza, the Warner (Ridgewood), the Warner-Route 4, and the Washington Cinema all still exist but have been subdivided since then.

The two smaller auditoriums in the Essex Green Cinema weren’t add-ons; the original Theater #2 was subdivided, in 1979 I think, and Dolby Stereo was installed in all three halls at that time. The two original (identical) auditoriums both had huge “light board” screens, and the remaining full-sized auditorium eventually was equipped with 70mm projection and may have been the first theatre in NJ to receive THX certification. I have many good moviegoing memories of the place as a teen and into my early 30s; its successor, a nine-screen stadium complex originally opened by GCC in its final few years before being sold to AMC, is pretty unmemorable.

That’s called a Coop Display ad. The distributor gives a certain amount for a large ad, the cost to be split between those theatres listed underneath who were opening with the film. The local paper probably had a smaller directory, sometimes with paste-up artwork and showtimes for their individual theatre.