Colony Theatre

The January 25th, 1935 grand opening ad has been uploaded here.

A recent photo of the Colony Theater
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I’ve seen old photos of the Colony with an entrance directly on Lincoln Road itself. It was probably in 1955 that Florida State Theaters remodeled it with it’s diagonal entrance from Lincoln Road to Lenox Avenue.

The above-the-marquee signage lost its Plexiglass panels after 1965’s Hurricane Donna… and I remember seeing pieces of it up and down Lenox Avenue. In 1967 I (and a high school buddy) got dressed up in sport jackets and ties to look older – and we actually got in (at the age of 15) to see the movie “Candy” at the Colony…

When I worked at Miami-Dade Community College in the late 1970’s, one of the members of the graphics department was Frank Spaulding, who had been an animator with Fleischer – both in New York and in Miami…

My guess would be that Miami Beach was more tourism oriented, and world premieres there would encourage word-of-mouth promotion when visitors returned to their respective hometowns. It’s also possible that “double world premieres” were arranged to meet extra demand.

The brief presence of the Fleischer Studios received substantial press in Miami; a generous sampling can be found in Leslie Cabarga’s book “The Fleischer Story” (out of print, but worth the money for animation history fans). Another animated feature, “Mr. Bug Goes to Town” and the first Superman cartoons were among Fleischer’s output there before Paramount withdrew their business.

Another (co- with the Sheridan) world premiere of note was the Fleischer Studios' first feature film, “Gulliver’s Travels” (1939), produced at the company’s short-lived Miami headquarters. For a look at what the Studios became:

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On February 18, 1936, a little over a year after it opened, the Colony Theatre hosted the world premier of Walter Wanger’s “The Trail Of the Lonesome Pines,” the first dramatic feature film in full color. Two days later, the New York premier was presented at the Paramount Theatre there. Paramount Pictures congratulated itself with this two-page spread in Boxoffice Magazine of March 7, 1936.

The October 23, 1948, issue of Boxoffice reported another world premier at the Colony, that of the Ingrid Bergman-Charles Boyer movie “Arch of Triumph.”

A brief item in Boxoffice of September 23, 1950, mentioned “…Paramount’s Colony, Miami Beach, now called the Colony Art Theatre….” This name and policy change does not appear to have lasted long, and Boxoffice was again calling it simply the Colony Theatre by 1952.

The theater was apparently closed in late 1953. The November 12, 1955, issue of Boxoffice reported that the Colony would be reopened by Florida State Theatres on December 23 with the southeastern regional premier of “Guys and Dolls.” The house had been closed for two years, the item said, and was being refurbished and would be equipped for wide-screen movies.

After that, the Colony appears to have thrived as a first-run house, with occasional road shows, for a couple of decades, and was mentioned in Boxoffice frequently.

This is a 2008 photo.

Some photos are at this link.

Colony opening program, January 1935.

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Much nicer since its upgrade. The only problem is how steep the stadium seating is. I went to see the only South Florida screening, on 35mm, of David Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire,’ and despite my $20 to $30 ticket price (don’t remember the cost, but the ticket price was almost as steep as the seating incline), I was given an assigned seat, way up top, which made sitting through this otherwise wonderful 3-hour film somewhat of a chore. Assigned seating for any film screening, unless you’re at high-profile film festival (many of which don’t even impose such a thing), is just snooty, and in this case — given the particularly uncultured region in which the Colony sits (Lynch didn’t trust this market for a regular run of his self-distributed film) — pretentious.

Here is the Colony Theater at night.

It should be mentioned in the introduction that the Colony had about 1,200 seats in its heyday as a cinema. The current seating capacity of 465 creates a false impression of what the original theatre building was like. Some multiplex “screens” have more than 465 seats.

One more photo of the Colony Theater can be seen here.