Continental Theatre
7650 East Skelly Drive,
Tulsa,
OK
74129
7650 East Skelly Drive,
Tulsa,
OK
74129
1 person
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Tulsa’s Continental Theatre was sister house to the Continental in Oklahoma City. Both houses specialized in reserved seat, road show engagements.
This house opened in 1967, and was decorated in a black/white/chrome International flair. The stadium style, 1000 seat auditorium contained overstuffed rocking chair theatre seats, a curved, mammoth sized screen, and lush drapery.
Barton Theatres sunk a great sum of money into building both Continental Theatres. Unfortunately, it was at this same time that twin cinemas were coming into vogue, and road show attractions were falling out of favor with the movie-going public. Thus, niether cinema ever attained financial success.
After sitting vacant a number of years, the Tulsa Continental Theatre was razed in 1981.
Contributed by
Ben Miller
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Recent comments (view all 5 comments)
One example of the kind of problems the Continental experienced was when they spent a lot of money booking and promoting an exclusive, reserved seat engagement of Julie Andrew’s new big budget, road show attraction “STAR”, at advanced prices. I was a high school student when I went to see this movie on opening night. Surprisingly there were only about a hundred people in attendance. One of the ushers told me advanced tickets sales were sluggish for every performance, and since the film had been promoted as reserved seating, no walk in trade was showing up. By the time the Continental got radio spots and newspaper ads out announcing open ticket sales at popular prices, word had spread that “STAR” was a stinker.
See the Oklahoma City Continental listing for good exterior/interior photos. Both houses were identical.
Since the Denver, OKC, and Tulsa Cotinental structures were exact duplicates of one another this site shows what all three looked like;
http://cinerama.topcities.com/ctcontinental.htm
I remember going to see Dr. Doolittle at this theater when I was a child (the Rex Harrison vehicle). The had lollipops for the children under the seats.
From a projectionist standpoint, the Continental was “the” place to show movies. Beautiful and big Norelco AAII 35/70mm projectors. (The only projectors to ever win an Oscar) Huge multi channel Ampex sound system capable of running any sound format for that time and five Altec A4 stage speakers with Altec A7 surround speakers. Huge 170 amp Super Corelite carbon arc lamphouses; (later replaced by Xenex xenon lamphouses) The big Norelcos and the Super Corelite lamps were water cooled. The last couple of films I ran there in 70mm were “Return Of A Man Called Horse” and of course “Gone With The Wind”.
Mr. George Gaughn did a magnificient job owning and operating his three Continental Theatres.
Respectfully Submitted,
Ben Kehe
Motion Picture Projection Services, Inc.
Tulsa, Oklahoma
918 906 3715
Two things: First, the Continental did not have stadium seating, as the introduction currently states. Like the other two Continental Theatres built by Barton, it had continental seating, an unbroken block of seats with the aisles confined to the sides of the house.
Second, the architect’s surname is spelled Garrett, with a double t. This can be seen in the article about the Oklahoma City Continental Garrett wrote for Boxoffice Magazine, which is linked from the comment by Oklahomo Cowboy’s comment of July 7, 2007, above.