Neon Movies

prick on March 30, 2012 at 10:12 am

This theater was originally opened as The Dayton Movies, by the same company that owned and operated The Cincinnati Movies, now the location of the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. They booked the same films for both locations with 5 or 6 different films showing each day, rotating the showtimes so that each film played at a different time every day. The schedules were a bit complicated but extremely interesting and full of great art-house films every month.

StanMalone on December 2, 2008 at 8:33 pm

In 1998, and again in 1999 I made the trek to Dayton to experience Cinerama at the Neon. In 1998, the Saturday feature was This Is Cinerama, and in 1999 it was Cinerama Holiday, in glorious Eastman pink. Both times the Sunday feature was How The West Was Won. Given the friendly and informal atmosphere of the New Neon Movies, we were invited to look the place over on Friday night.

Since the Cinerama projectors must be mounted at screen level to avoid the vertical keystone effect, we were able to get an up close look at the whole operation. The side projectors were located in the back corners of the auditorium while the center projector was located in the lobby itself with the beam shooting through a hole cut in the back wall of the auditorium. The 7 track sound projector/processor was located next to the center projector. The entire presentation was run by John Harvey who alone did the work of the four to seven man crew used in the Cinerama days.

Despite the somewhat slap dash nature of the set up, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the presentation. Although the New Neon was small, with about 220 seats, from the fifth row of seats we were treated to an experience equal to that at the Seattle Cinerama and superior to the one at the Dome. Great sound, incredible picture, and a great time was had by all.

An article recently appeared in Slate magazine on the subject of Cinerama. This is the paragraph that mentioned the Neon:

Cinerama faded before I was born, but my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, became the unlikely site of a Cinerama revival in the ‘90s, thanks to the efforts of Dayton projectionist John Harvey. Harvey had previously set up a Cinerama screening room in his ranch homeâ€"eliminating two bedrooms in the processâ€"and helped the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, set up Cinerama projection in 1993. In 1996, Harvey moved his home equipment to the Neon Movies, a downtown theater that had served as a pilgrimage site for Daytonians seeking art house fare since the mid-'80s. Harvey’s Cinerama setup was supposed to have a one-month stay. Instead, it stuck around for more than three years, attracting widescreen enthusiasts like Quentin Tarantino and Joe Dante.

Keith Phipps writes about movies for The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of the Onion.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2204189/

lostmemory on November 7, 2008 at 12:46 am

Here is a photo of The Neon.