Montclair Cinemas

The following is from the LA Times on June 22, 1969: New Cinema Opens Doors in Montclair.

 Southern California’s first Cinema I & II, a $1 million dual theater complex designed to meet adult and general family needs, just opened at the Montclair Plaza shopping center, is the forerunner of 40 proposed Southland I & II theaters, according to Arthur Silber, West Coast manager for General Cinema, Inc., of Brockton, Mass.
                 Burke, Kober, Nicolais & Archuleta, Los Angeles and San Francisco architectural firm designed the 1,500-seat structure for Montclair Associates, the owners, according to specifications of the lessee, General Cinema.
                 BKN&A has been retained to design the second Southland Cinema I &II at Riverside’s Tyler Mall. 
                

I worked with a manager named Tom Carey at the Redondo Beach South Bay Cinemas in the mid seventies. He got promoted and went to manage the Montclair Cinemas. If anyone has kept in touch with him, by chance, could you please let him know that I’m trying to contact him. He wrote me a letter of reference that helped get my first job in film distribution. Thanks.

Hey, Ron! How goes it? “Installations” may be a too generous term, as I don’t mean wiring the place for sound or anything, but did stuff like the “new” interior marquee signs, doing the changeout from the old red and white to the gray and blue seats, etc. In any case, I was pretty intimate with both buildings for a long time…they are still missed by me every time I am around the Montclair Plaza area. Good to “see” you, Ron, and Bill’s name up above as well! I went on a bit of a nostalgia trip today and “Googled” GCC and wound up here. Small world!

With a little digging I can come up with a lot of photos of the place, as I did a lot of banners, signs, and window painting for promotions back then. I have the photos packed away someplace…

One would think that as the projectionist at the Montclair Cinemas for thirty years I would take lots of photos. Didn’t happen. I did take few, very few, photos of the place but after ten years I can’t find them. I should look for them. A note to Lavar: The back five cinemas were operated by General Cinema until the last and final day of operation and were never ‘independent’; always GCC.

The back five theatres were built from scratch, designed to be a five screen facility from the beginning.

Thank you and i stand corrected,kind sir.

Looking at the original building from the Montclair Plaza parking lot, the “big” theatre on the left side was twined making the theatre a triplex in 1977. The back five opened in 1980 with “THE ELEPHANT MAN” at the first attraction.

As one of the two projectionists for thirty years at the Montclair “Twin” then “Triplex” then “Eightplex” then “Fiveplex” then nothing, I saw many changes in the facility from ‘twinning’ the large auditorium to adding the fiveplex in the back making it an eightplex to the distruction of the front theatre to the closure and distruction of the back five. The Montclair Cinema’s last day was September 2, 2000. I know. I was there to break down the film and start dismantling the projection equipment. A sad day. And a loss of a thirty-year-old job.

So was this technically two separate theatres? (ie. separate entrances/lobbies?)

Bill was there when i was playing Dr. Scott at Rocky Horror in the late ‘80s-early '90s.

Actually,Zubi,the SRO Montclair 3(later Pacific Montclair 3,they expanded it to a 5-plex shortly after the acquisition)was located on Holt Blvd.

The Indian Hill was near the Pomona/Montclair border on Indian Hill Blvd.