Colony Theater

My grandfather was the one who opened the original “left side” theater when the shopping center was built. Being the guy that he is, he couldn’t bring himself to charge what was needed for sodas and snacks in order to keep the theater afloat. So he sold it. I might still have the newspaper clipping from the Raleigh Times when the theater opened. I’ll see if I can find it.

This theater was known briefly in the early 1970s as the Six Forks Cinema (not to be confused with the Six Forks Station 6, which opened in 1986). This first Six Forks Cinema was a single-screen theater, basically the Jerry Lewis Cinema without the Jerry Lewis name. This incarnation also failed, and it subsequently became the Terrace Twin.

This theater opened on December 29,1972 as the Six Forks Cinema and it was Raleigh’s first-ever mini cinema with a seating capacity of 360 that was owned and operated under Jerry Lewis Theatres. The opening attraction for the December 29,1972 premiere was “Joe Kidd” starring Clint Eastwood. By mid-1973,Jerry Lewis Theatres filed for bankruptcy and the ownership of the cinema changed hands under Schneider-Merl Corporation(which also operated the Valley Theatres 1 & 2 at Crabtree Valley and also the Colony at Five Points). A local manager by the name of Bill Rawls did a huge restoration of this theatre in the mid-1970’s, by converting a former restaurant into a second auditorium. By August 5,1977,a Dobly Stereo System was installed in the second auditorium which seated 500 for it’s grand opening of “MacArthur” starring Gregory Peck for the opening of the Terrace Twin that was operated under Bill Rawls Theatres and later under Martin Theatres.

By November of 1988,the Terrace went from showing first-run films to becoming a second-run discount movie house that lasted for six years until it’s closing in 1994. By 1994,Bill Peebles under his company Ambassador Entertainment restored this theatre and turned it into a art-house cinema and renamed it the Colony Theatres 1 & 2 which remains to be one of Raleigh’s top arthouse cinemas.

I have the original ads for the December 29,1972 opening of the Six Forks Cinema and also the August 5, 1977 original ad for the Terrace Twin Theatres. Any and all information can be sent to me at this address: Thank you.

Updated website

It was My father Harry Kellam who opened the single-screen Six Forks Cinema in 1972. It was never a Jerry Lewis Cinema. There was a competing franchise chain (even less successful than the Lewis chain) that included as celebrity backers Glenn Ford and Andy Devine. My Dad invested in that now forgotten company, obtained the franchise, designed the original theater (the concept was that these theaters would fit into existing shopping mall/strip mall store spaces), all before the national franchise went bankrupt. With that backing and support gone, Harry Kellam went ahead and opened the theater to show G and PG movies. Ooops.

Two things moved him out of the business: 1) audiences weren’t very interested in “family” entertainment, and 2) Dad realized that he’d wind up being at the cinema every day, 7 days a week, 365/year, cleaning bathrooms, and walking what receipts there were to the bank in the dark. He leased the placed out until he could sell it. (Well, there was also a projectionist who wasn’t always sober enough to run the equipment, but that’s another story.)