Royal Theater
437 Guadalupe Avenue,
Guadalupe,
CA
93434
437 Guadalupe Avenue,
Guadalupe,
CA
93434
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The Royal Theater opened in 1939 and closed in the late 1990’s. If you know anything else about this theater, please post it here.
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Lost Memory
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Recent comments (view all 16 comments)
This is a website for Gold Coast Sound Studios. They are or were located in the former Royal Theater. There is a brief history of the Royal Theater on their website.
Here are some photos from October 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/38tjsa
http://tinyurl.com/39b69r
Another recent photo can be seen here.
Guadalupe’s a nice little town. Here’s another photo of The Royal.
Another close up of the Royal Theatre.
View link
The only mention of the Royal Theatre under that name that I can find in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the June 25, 1949, issue, which says that Robert L. Lippert had sold the house to Moses Hernandez.
But the April 22, 1942, issue of Boxoffice published an item that said that Robert Lippert was taking over three houses, owned by Arthur Fukuda, which had been closed because of the Japanese curfew. It named the three theaters as the Royal in Hanford, the Royal in Sanger, and the Guadalupe in Guadalupe. I think it’s possible (and even likely) that Boxoffice’s copy writer got the name of the Guadalupe house wrong (they did misspell Hanford as Handford) and that all three of Fukuda’s theaters were called the Royal.
It’s not surprising that a Japanese American would have owned these theaters. Many of the agricultural areas of California had substantial Japanese populations during that era, and American-born Japanese, unlike those who had immigrated, were not prohibited from owning real property. Perhaps Arthur Fukuda has descendants who can tell us something about the Royal Theatre.
Here is a 1980 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/q73zzx
This is a recent photo.
Here is a 1983 photo.
My grandfather, Kiyozo Noji managed the Royal Theater in Guadalupe and my grandmother, father, and uncle ran the concessions area from the time that the theater first opened for business in 1939 until they were relocated to a Japanese internment camp in 1942. Two other employees ran the projectors during that period.