Almonte Cinema 6

The Almonte Shopping Center launched theatre-less in 1963. But Commonwealth Amusement Corp. Circuit changed that with the addition of the Almonte Cinema 6 on June 19, 1981. At the same time, Commonwealth added the Oklahoma Cinema Circuit’s locations of North Park Theater 4, French Market Twin, and Heritage Park Mall Cinema Three. United Artists bought out Commonwealth. It started to weed out smaller theaters. The Almonte 6 made the cut operating all the way until October of 1996 when UA dropped it at the end of the month likely at the end of a 15-year opt out on a lease.

Hollywood Theaters picked up the Almonte in December of 1996 and then all of the discarded GCC locations as of August 15, 1997. It ran its expanded portfolio with the Almonte 6 staying first-run to 1999. But the launch of megaplexes including Cinemark Tinseltown and the AMC Quail Springs 24-plex was a disaster to Hollywood Theater’s aging multiplexes. It closed the Almonte theater briefly in May of 1999 to reposition the aging six-plex to a dollar house along with the Quail Springs 6 location. But with a marketplace overstated with aging discount houses, both the Almonte 6 and Quail Springs 6 were quick casualties. The Almonte closed on December 17, 1999. The Quail Springs closed two weeks later. Hollywood would continue to shed locations including the Brixton 8 until it had just one theater in the market in January of 2008.

More Almonte 6 miscellanea:

Originally a Farris Shanbour/Oklahoma Cinema Theatres project—his largest to that time—but he died a month or two before its opening, and the ownership for this one was sold to Commonwealth. Some of the veteran IATSE projectionists from Shanbour’s North Park Theatre transferred here. Oddly, although neither company had had anything to do with one another until then, both chains dressed their lower staff in the exact same black and red polyester-fiber uniforms.

The Almonte Mall itself has always been an small, standard, unpretentious one-block strip mall in a comfortably working-/middle-class-part of town a half-mile from the interstate and 2 miles from the airport, which may partly have decided its construction. Dow 100-level industries and billion-dollar-level real-estate developers at that time however did not run to establish factories and mansions in far southwest OKC so why the Almonte 6 was built there—knowing full well that both the cable TV and home-video/VCR revolutions were about to occur with no huge population spike predicted for the nearby area and not even placed at a particularly high-traffic intersection (the 2-miles-away SW 74th & Penn crossing has always been more of a local headache)—was never revealed.

There was a community rumor the ushers here were particularly on the lookout for auditorium jumpers.

The largest auditorium, directly behind the front lobby, had 70mm capability although it was hardly ever used for the life of the theatre. 2010 with Roy Scheider was exhibited here in that format on its December 1984 U.S. opening day.

June 19th, 1981 grand opening ad in photo section

the theater is completely desrtoyed as i am rewiring it at this time. stupid tweakers broke in and destroyed what they didnt steal. the screens are ripped down, speakers either broken or destroyed, and in the projector room every thing is gone.

Yes it is but i enjoyed it.It was a time to chat with the girls,If they were real good they did everything for me,except count the money.About the time you would finish Box office, the concessionstand girl would come in with her money.Since we never had Cash registers or COMPUTERS it is amazing we hardly came up short. But like you said LOEWS had a separate Concession that you never had to worry about.

Nice pictures guys. I came up in the business where after the last show you picked up the boxoffice girl went in the office and check out with real BOR’S.An adding machine and a type writer.Sorta glad i didn’t have computers.And guess what we did okay.

And here’s another stray photo I located – a view of the box office at the Almonte Cinemas 6 as it appeared in summer 1988. Note the standee advertising Tom Cruise in “Cocktail”, a big hit for us that summer.

Ticketing was a purely manual, paper and pencil operation – no computers. Six ticket machines loaded with three different color tickets, a cheat sheet to price multiple sales taped to the counter, and a hand-held calculator for backup. A far cry from today’s operations!

View link

I trained as a Commonwealth Theaters manager at the Almonte in the summer of 1984 – at the time, the six-plex was the chain’s flagship theater in Oklahoma City. After serving time at several other locations, I became the Almonte’s manager for about nine months in 1988.

The theater safe was located in the office located upstairs with the projection booth; a very narrow window on the second floor served as the entryway for burglars one night in the summer of ‘88 as they smashed it open and entered from the roof. They managed to maneuver the wheeled, heavy safe to the top of the stairs and pushed it down, where it smashed through a wall into the adjacent restroom. Undeterred, the crooks wheeled it out the back door into the rear alley, where they were spotted by a neighboring resident and escaped, leaving the safe behind. It was returned to the office and filled with cement – leaving us to wonder how this giant hunk of metal and rock could ever be moved from the building!

Air photo:
http://tinyurl.com/3baecx