Sony Columbus Circle
15 Columbus Circle,
New York,
NY
10019
15 Columbus Circle,
New York,
NY
10019
6 people
favorited this theater
Nestled under the base of the former Gulf & Western Building which was the home of Paramount Pictures at the corner of Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, it featured mostly high profile films and Academy Award nominated features. The Paramount Theatre was opened on June 24, 1970 with “Catch 22”. It was taken over by Loew’s in 1981.
Before it closed in 1994, it screened the film “Forrest Gump” and stayed there for months.
The building above was sold to real estate mogul Donald Trump who converted it to a hotel and tower today. The theater was the first to go — it was completely removed and is now an underground parking garage in the basement of the hotel. Today, there’s no sign that the theater ever existed.
Contributed by
Jamal P. Savage
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Recent comments (view all 50 comments)
Wait just a minute, people stood in lines to see “THE GREAT GATSBY” Heck, we couldn’t give tickets way. Bruce Dern and Robert Redford should have found a western to do. oh, it was NYC.
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The only time I was in this theater was to see “Young Frankenstein”. I was totally unimpressed with the theater itself, which was appallingly nondescript. No one need mourn its demise.
Weird movie for a weird theater. Saw the Hellstrom Chronicles here. You could usuallly count on Cinema 5 releasing quality product. This was a miss. Donald Rugoff must have been out of the office when his company agreed to distribute this one.
went to a studio preview of Shirley Valentine here. Studio passed out comment cards to us as we entered to be returned as we left the theatre. Although the theatre was modern and non-descript, the above ground entrance/marquee was interesting. Nice to enter before descending into the bowels of NYC
I saw “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” here. I don’t remember much about the interior except for it being underground. Since the line for “Cuckoo’s Nest” stretched for blocks it must have had a large seating capacity. I always remembered the unique exterior. Now that it is a parking garage with no traces of it left perhaps the introduction should list it as demolished.
I somehow doubt that the line “stretched for blocks,” but it might have extended around the one square block which contained this theatre and what was then the Gulf + Western office building (now transformed into a Trump hotel and apartment tower).
Tinsel I remember it being one of the longest movie lines I ever waited on. I’d like to know what the seating capacity was. Of course the movie was worth the wait.
While I passed by this theater literally hundreds of times on my way to Lincoln Center, I only visited it once. The film I saw was a cinematic version of Richard Strauss' opera “Der Rosenkavalier” Elizabeth Schwartzkopf played the Marshallen and Otto Edelman was Baron Ochs. Since, as noted above, this theater mostly played first run movies, this probably represented a bit of a departure.
I would guess between 500 and 600 seats. When the theatre originally opened, the screen was set back from the audience in a most peculiar way. I wish that I had a photo, because I can’t accurately describe it. But if you were sitting in the front row, you still seemed a goodly distance from the screen. After many complaints, this was eliminated by moving the screen forward, eliminating the tunnel effect.