Center Theatre

Old ticket:
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Listed as part of Rapf & Ruden in the 1956 Film Daily Yearbook.

My experience with the Center predates its being twinned. It was an okay neighborhood theatre, never very comfortable, that got kinda run down by the time I stopped going there in the late ‘80s. I think it may have switched to all-Indian films before Roberts bought it, twinned it and renamed it the Lost Picture Show (I’ve been to the original Lost Picture Show in Union, which I believe is now closed). It had been in the downtown area of Bloomfield probably since the 1930s, and while it probably did have live shows in its early years—as I recall, it had a stage although the screen was pretty far forward in the stage area—my experience with it was strictly as a moviegoer. I grew up in Bloomfield, and so this was within walking distance for me. I recall seeing “Taxi Driver,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoos’s Nest,” “The Exorcist,” “Black Sunday,” “Sorcerer,” and a couple dozen other movies there in the late '70s and early '80s. Probably about 500 seats including a balcony, decent-sized 'scope screen (no curtain) and sightlines, cramped lobby. Did not get stereo sound until after Roberts bought it; in fact, sound and projection got progressively more murky from about 1983 on.

The Center Theater, about three blocks away, runs Indian films, some with English subtitles, exclusively.
The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), July 26, 1998 p039

Listed in the 1951 FDY as having 955 seats and located at 560 Bloomfield Avenue.

Yes, the Royal Theatre sounds correct. I am curious about the address given above for the Center Theater – wasn’t this one on Bloomfield Avenue also? Is the Belmont Avenue address a mistake?

Wasn’t there another theater in Bloomfield, a few blocks west of this one on Bloomfield Ave? I’m pretty sure I saw “Natural Born Killers” there in 1994, but when I drove by recently there was no sign of it in any form – I think it must have been completely torn down.