Guild Theatre
949 El Camino Real,
Menlo Park,
CA
94025
949 El Camino Real,
Menlo Park,
CA
94025
4 people
favorited this theater
Built as the Menlo Theatre in 1926, it is a short drive north of the Stanford Shopping Center and nestled right next to downtown Menlo Park. Originally built as a burlesque house and converted to exhibit movies in the 1940’s, it is the oldest standing theater on the San Francisco Peninsula, featuring two giant golden wings on either side of its gloriously large screen. Operated by Landmark Theatres since 1989, the Guild Theatre features the finest in independent film and foreign language cinema.
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Michael
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Recent comments (view all 13 comments)
Here is a nice color photo:
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Here is another photo of The Guild in Menlo Park.
Oh Guild. How do I love thee. You are quite simply my favorite theatre to see any movie that I know will mean something special to me. All Ambout My Mother, Huit Femmes, Enigma, Kolya, Gosford Park, Talk To Her, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, Wilde, A Prarie Home Companion. I can sit back and stare at your comfortable screens and stay warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer. Your staff treat me with a familiar manner that sometimes we fight, other times they alone are worth the price of admission. Your marquee glows pink against the El Camino back drop to let us all know to stop and say hi sometime.
This is another night view of the Guild Theater.
The interior of the Guild is structurally plain, but there are numerous things to delight the eye. The tiny lobby is decorated in a kind of funky artiness that’s hard to describe, as though someone went to a craft store, bought various decorative moldings and trimmings and had lots of fun. This beats the previous look, which dated from the Sixties or early Seventies, where both the lobby and auditorium were black and orange. For many years since though, the auditorium has featured some nice fixtures and ornamental details slavaged from other classic theatres. I’m quite sure the two moderne ceiling fixtures are from the Uptown, San Francisco. The wall sconces are also moderne, but I don’t know where they’re from. A gilded wave motif wainscot and some large scroll/floral flourishes at the front and rear of the auditorium come from some Fox house and date from the Skouras era, and are identical to portions of the intact Skouras decor in the Redwood City Fox and the California in Berkeley, among others.
A black and white photo taken in the 40s of the Guild’s interior shows modest moderne interpretations of classical themes in murals flanking the screen.
I recall reading or hearing that the Guild was originally built in the Twenties, and had its facade lopped off and rebuilt when El Camino Real was widened. Guild was not the theatre’s original name. It MAY have been the Menlo Park at first, though I shouldn’t be quoted on this. Obviously, this would have been before the Park on El Camino, or the Menlo, on Santa Cruz Avenue, were opened.
Here is a 2008 photo of the Guild.
This is an exterior photo and here is a view of the interior.
1986 Day Photo
1986 Night Photo
Here is a nice write-up and photo set from 4/3/11:
http://inmenlo.com/2011/04/03/guild-theatre-bringing-movies-to-menlo-for-85-years/
This piece confirms GaryParks' points about the interior details not being original, and that it wasn’t originally named the Guild (was just the “Menlo Theatre.”
A 2011 photo can be seen here.