Plaza Theatre
128 South Palm Canyon Drive,
Palm Springs,
CA
92262
128 South Palm Canyon Drive,
Palm Springs,
CA
92262
No one has favorited this theater yet
Showing all 13 comments
Here is a nice 2009 photo.
This plaque gives the opening of the Plaza as December of 1936.
I wasn’t in charge of California Theaters. That was someone else’s task.
How did you overlook this one at your second most favorite website, or haven’t you gotten to “P” yet? View link
This is a 2009 photo.
Sorry! I made a typing error in the first mention of the Paramount subsidiary. It was Telemeter (not Telemter).
In November, 1953, the Plaza Theatre participated in one of the first trials of pay-as-you-see TV in the United States. Seventy-five homes in the Palm Springs area were connected to a coaxial cable system operated by the Telemter subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. A TV set in each home had a cashbox attached in which viewers deposited coins to “unscramble” a new movie playing simultaneously at the Plaza Theatre. The experiment started with Paramount’s “Forever Female.” I don’t know how long the trial lasted, or its outcome, but I doubt that it proved successful. In those days, of course, home TV was only in B&W, so color movies would turn up in monochrome on the Telemeter system.
The Plaza was part of the Earle C. Strebe chain in the early seventies, along with the Palm Springs Theater and the Ramon Drive-In in Palm Springs. Strebe also ran theaters in Big Bear Lake, Crestline and Lake Arrowhead at that time.
Here is a photo.
View link
I have friends who are in Palm Springs now and hopefully they’ll go see a show there. Also would like to see a photo of this theatre that featured Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Frank Sinatra.
I found out Jack Benny used to do radio broadcasts from the stage of the Plaza.
This is an incredible 3 hour vaudeville style show. I understand it is one of the very few vaudeville shows still being performed in the United States and successfully so. The show includes the showgirls, but also song and dance numbers, a puppeteer, a juggler and infamous announcer and stage comedian “Riff Markowitz”, who created the show. The performers are all over 50, but the show is highly energetic, glamourus, lavish and completely professional. They screen movie clips and trailers from the 1930s for the half hour before the show begins to put the audience in the proper retro mood for the show.
The World Premiere of Greta Garbo’s “Camille” was held here in 1936. Garbo herself attended as well as most of the Palm Springs Hollywood crowd.
Supposedly, buried somewhere within the walls of the theatre is a time capsule containing the actual print of “Camille” that was shown there at the premiere.