Cinema Kings Highway
711 Kings Highway,
Brooklyn,
NY
11223
711 Kings Highway,
Brooklyn,
NY
11223
7 people
favorited this theater
The Jewel Theatre, which stands a few blocks west of the Kingway Theatre, was opened in 1936. It later became a foreign film house until it was damaged by fire in the 1960’s.
It was completed renovated and reopened as the Cinema Kings Highway with an exclusive Brooklyn showing of "Thoroughly Modern Millie." But in the late 1960’s, the owner found he could make a lot more money running XXX and played "He and She" there for over a year.
The story goes that he ran off with all of the profits and the theatre fell into a dispute over the ownership. Before video shut it down, it was split into two theatres, with regular porn running downstairs and gay porn running in the small balcony. It reopened as a triplex, featuring XXX straight porn in one theatre, gay porn in the second, and obscure foreign classics in the third. This is basically the programming policy today.
Contributed by
philipgoldberg
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Recent comments (view all 182 comments)
From the wnet.org website, concerning the new Woody Allen documentary. (I guess they forgot to mention that the Jewel Theater is still in business, too!)
Mia Farrow plays a Depression-era waitress who’s mad about the movies in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). While the film takes place in New Jersey, the theater where Cecilia (Farrow) sees the madcap comedy The Purple Rose of Comedy over and over again is named after The Jewel movie house in Brooklyn — one of the first movie houses in Allen’s Brooklyn neighborhood to show foreign films. The theater scenes were actually filmed in the Kent Theatre on Coney Island Avenue in Flatbush, still operating today.
Thanks for the info, saps. I enjoyed in the documentary how they revisited the theatres of Woody’s youth.
I saw some pictures of the interior
I saw some beautiful pictures of the theatre on www.cinematour.com The place was a beautiful Art Deco jewel. What a shame.
Here’s the direct link:
http://www.cinematour.com/tour/us/7176.html
saps, thanks for that link. OMG, what an Art Deco jewel (no pun intended)!
Here’s an activated link. I don’t know why this still doesn’t happen automatically like it used to in the original version of Cinema Treasures, but it doesn’t: cinematour
I don’t know (or remember) how to hyperlink.
Providing a hyperlink is not important. All one has to do is copy the link and then paste it; it’s no big deal. It doesn’t involve any strenuous exertion or sweat, lol.
Here’s a 1980s tax photo of the exterior: lunaimaging