This theatre shifted policy many times. I remember seeing IF Stone’s Weekly there during its early days as an art house. It then went porn both gay and straight, $1, porn and then a brief comeback as a discount house before closing down.
I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark here in the main screen in 1981 and Fort Apache the Bronx in the small screen. Zurich at the time had a few large cinemas remaining – the ABC, the Bellevue which was very Disney, the Capitol which was porn these three I believe now are plexed – but the Apollo was the grandest. The other great thing about Zurich moviegoing was a showcase in the Bahnhof (the train station) with posters and showtimes of anything playing in town – which was great for students and trainees working there who didn’t really know enough German to buy a paper. Most major releases are shown in English with 3 subtitles German Italian and French
This Orpheum reopened in 1994…The original Orpheum I remember as a single screen seeing How the West Was Won, Major Dundee, Cat Ballou and a few others before it was twinned around 1967…the second theater Loews Cine had its entrance around the corner on 3rd Avenue out of the old balcony while the Orpheum retained its 4 aisle entrance on the ground floor…Loews eventually made it easy and renamed them as Loews Orpheum 1 and 2…Fond memories of the twin as well mutliple viewings of The French Connection, as well as Cactus Flower, See No Evil, Ryan’s Daughter on one side and The Valachi Papers and others on the other…Many years later I was able to see the end of the original Orpheum living around the block on 89th st and still enjoy pictures like Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones 3, The Abyss, U2 Rattle and Hum
If I’m not mistaken this twin opened in the mid 70s by as the Agee 1 and 2…It was named after the writer and critic James Agee and operated by Cinecom who also had the Carnegie Hall Cinema at the time…The programming was mostly art but didn’t last very long and went Spanish until the 80s…When City Cinemas had it in the mid 80s there was some Warner Bros first run but mostly studio stuff that other theatres wouldn’t touch ie Bill Cosby in Leonard Part VI and often Manhattan exclusives
The auditoria were nothing special…long tunnelly 300 seaters
This has had an interesting history both as a first run theatre and now as a second run discount house…As a first run remember seeing Jacques Tati’s Traffic here in around 1972…believe it also had Emanuelle here for over a year…When I settled in London it was a second tier first run theatre showing mostly pictures from local distributor Guild – saw The Hot Spot, Narrow Margin and a preview of Grand Canyon here…Since around 1991 the Robins family has operated it as a discount with a robust schedule of recent hits…over the years have seen The Hudsecker Proxy, The Firm, Bad Lieutenant, Lost Highway, City of God here…it’s busy studenty and fun and there is a membership scheme which will save you even more for around £9 up front…the theatre must seat around 250 downstairs and 100 upstairs and both are double aisled…
This is a must for budget travellers to London to catch the odd film they missed back home
Saw Touching the Void here with my nephew recently…as in many of the Paris multiplexes the configuration is a bit strange with two single aisle sections split by a walkway leading to the rest room and a row of single seats along the wall
How is the renovation? I only saw one film there nearly 20 years ago but it’s good to see that this survived along with the Balzac as art houses along the Champs
The Key was a true institution…I imagine sorely missed in DC…At the time of its closing it was a triplex showing a great range of art films in all languages…Among the pictures I saw there in 95-96 – Kieslowski’s Blue, A Great Day in Harlem, Crumb, Little Odessa, and a great French picture with Michel Blanc whose title escapes me…The Key also used to host a number of cinema clubs
When I lived in DC in the mid 90s these were booked primarily as second run discount theatres…A reasonable if not overly comfortable place to catch up on The Madness of King George, Get Shorty, Braveheart, Goldeneye and Mrs. Parker and the Roundtable…The sad part is that with the Key and the Biograph gone DC’s college community around Georgetown is left with just a new megaplex
It would be great to have a first run chronology of this theater – say from 1963-1985…it would probably include a number of Oscar nominees on long first runs at least from say 1970 onwards…thanks in advance to the research minded among us…
So that leaves City Cinemas with what? the Cinema ½/3 the Village East and the Angelika…Hardly critical mass…The Sutton may have been badly twinned but it did give longer legs to some smaller films in its last two years
This was one of my neighborhood theatres when I lived in the Dupont area in the mid 90s…I didnt realize it went all the way back to the 60s…It had all the pros and limitations of a raked single screen theatre…an interestingly shaped entrance and good sized waiting area but some pretty cramped seating and a feeling of disinvestment which all those theatres suffered from at the time under Cineplex Odeon (the Janus, West End 1-4 and Dupont)
Saw Nixon, Crimson Tide, Les Miserables (the Jean-Paul Belmondo version) there
Saw Jaws here before the twinning…a packed house great atmosphere at the Midnight show opening weekend…the saddest part of the Rivoli’s last years was that for the final couple of years United Artists took the Rivoli name off of it and called it simply the United Artists Twin 1 and 2…great for the Chuck Norris pictures it seemed to book
Remember the Regency from my UPenn days…pretty anonymous feeling twin…best memory was going to an advance preview of Marathon Man the Saturday before opening back when movies used to open on Wednesdays…again the odd Philly habit of doubling up the old feature and the new feature on Wednesdays was the rule here making for some strange double features
The 62nd St & Broadway opened in late 1988 as a Cineplex Odeon 300 seater? at the base of an apartment building – the Chequers condo? Needless to say it’s been hard to programme as first run but lately running mostly pictures from Fox/Fox Searchlight
Surprised that this wasn’t listed yet…A great place to see a film on one’s own or with a date…always something to talk about and worth seeing…Had the pleasure of seeing things as different as La Nuit de Varennes, Milou en Mai, My Left Foot, Salaam Bombay here
I remember the Arcadia from my college years at Penn in the late 70s…What blew my mind was the bizarre mix of bookings these theatres including the Arcadia in particular would get…Major studio releases one week and when they would bomb some porn to fill in…also what seemed unique to Philadelphia is a double feature on opening day usually with some old blaxpo as the bottom of the bill…saw Who’ll Stop the Rain for my Vietnam war film class along with Let’s Do It Again on this kind of bill
This said the Arcadia was a decent place to see a movie
Did the following notes for a Cinema Treasures correspondent who contacted me a month ago about this theatre…Please note that it was the Juliet I & II
The Juliet opened as an ABC theatre…There were different ABC chainlets broken up regionally ie ABC Mountain for Utah and Colorado, ABC Southeast for Florida and so on…They never really had critical mass in the NY area with only the Juliet and a couple upstate to show for themselves…Part of the attraction of this theatre was there was also a great old-fashioned fish house between 79th St and 80th St on 3rd Avenue (The Clam Box?) which made for a good family night out on Sunday night
The Juliet may well have opened with The Last Valley but I thought it might have been Disney’s Aristocats as well or just behind it. There was a downstairs screen and an upstairs with an escalator…the upstairs screen had quite decent raked seating – I remember being rather high up for Taxi Driver, The Longest Yard and a double bill of Klute and Summer of 42…The box office was streetside and the inside was your basic issue cinema red carpet and brass coloured laminate
The first run years were the first couple – with mostly Cinerama or ABC Pictures or MGM releases ie The Grissom Gang, The Wild Rovers daydating with Broadway houses like the Rivoli, or Embassy or Cinerama (keep in mind that the Juliets predated the revamped RKO 86th St by a couple of years when those screens picked up the first run mantle of Cinerama/AIP/MGM)…Later on it was subruns or showcase runs mostly with moveovers from the Loews Orpheum/Cine or from the 3rd Ave and 60th St theatres like the pictures I mentioned…The theatres were just good functional neighborhood theatres not particularly glamorous just something you wanted to see most of the time…My sister and I did a double feature here one night as well one in each theatre Cabaret and possibly The Last Detail ( we did the same not long after in the then UA Columbia I and II)…because the brand wasn’t particularly strong they didn’t really fit into the Red Carpet, Blue Ribbon or Flagship groupings of the time…A 1973 or 74 revival of Gone with the Wind did well here also…Am not sure when it switched from ABC to Hallmark but remember the distinctive ABC logo becoming just a red dot on the marquee
The last years 1975-78 were a bit of a mess…mostly $1.00 runs I believe…remember seeing Emanuelle, Night Moves in these years…One of the last attractions if not the last was that Don Johnson/Jason Robards classic A Boy and His Dog…The space sat vacant for nearly a year before being torn down for a high rise building…The theatre must have had one of the shortest lives of any cinema
One of the westside’s most distinctive theatres. If I’m not mistaken you entered through a turnstile. The marquee was a brass coloured two line wraparound…and I believe you could buy books of tickets for this theatre.
Booking for most of the 60s and 70s was primarily 2nd and 3rd run with some arthouse style bookings weaved in. Towards the late 70s with the eventual quadding of the Loews 83rd Street, the shift of the Beacon to concerts, the entry of the Cinema Studios to the market and the gradual cleanup and gentrification of the neighborhood, this theatre was twinned and a fair amount of first run art house product or quality 2nd run product came in. The only film I can actually remember seeing here was a Hungarian coming of age film in around 1981.
Finally made it to the big screen after several years of trying…Saw I ROBOT on opening day at the first show…Great experience comfortable armchair seating with great legroom…Great sound and curved screen…Outdoes the Ziegfeld in New York for comfort even if it is a bit smaller. Also the UGC’s have finally started selling decent popcorn
The atmosphere…the wood panelling…the blue upholstery are just a tad dated to make this a really delightful slightly old-fashioned place to see a movie…There will almost always be a Hollywood blockbuster here on first-run so a great experience for visitors to Paris also…The first show daily is only 5 euros
Now that the Astor Plaza is sadly no more, can someone at Cinema Treasures please edit this page – separating out the true comments about the theatre…and the memories…shifting the gossip and the asides about 70mm to another page…This theatre deserves a concise updated history – key pictures opening here, long runs, and links to relevant news articles (maybe even some NY Times bits from the trouble pre-history as the Reade and then the opening as the Astor Plaza.
This theatre shifted policy many times. I remember seeing IF Stone’s Weekly there during its early days as an art house. It then went porn both gay and straight, $1, porn and then a brief comeback as a discount house before closing down.
I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark here in the main screen in 1981 and Fort Apache the Bronx in the small screen. Zurich at the time had a few large cinemas remaining – the ABC, the Bellevue which was very Disney, the Capitol which was porn these three I believe now are plexed – but the Apollo was the grandest. The other great thing about Zurich moviegoing was a showcase in the Bahnhof (the train station) with posters and showtimes of anything playing in town – which was great for students and trainees working there who didn’t really know enough German to buy a paper. Most major releases are shown in English with 3 subtitles German Italian and French
This Orpheum reopened in 1994…The original Orpheum I remember as a single screen seeing How the West Was Won, Major Dundee, Cat Ballou and a few others before it was twinned around 1967…the second theater Loews Cine had its entrance around the corner on 3rd Avenue out of the old balcony while the Orpheum retained its 4 aisle entrance on the ground floor…Loews eventually made it easy and renamed them as Loews Orpheum 1 and 2…Fond memories of the twin as well mutliple viewings of The French Connection, as well as Cactus Flower, See No Evil, Ryan’s Daughter on one side and The Valachi Papers and others on the other…Many years later I was able to see the end of the original Orpheum living around the block on 89th st and still enjoy pictures like Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones 3, The Abyss, U2 Rattle and Hum
If I’m not mistaken this twin opened in the mid 70s by as the Agee 1 and 2…It was named after the writer and critic James Agee and operated by Cinecom who also had the Carnegie Hall Cinema at the time…The programming was mostly art but didn’t last very long and went Spanish until the 80s…When City Cinemas had it in the mid 80s there was some Warner Bros first run but mostly studio stuff that other theatres wouldn’t touch ie Bill Cosby in Leonard Part VI and often Manhattan exclusives
The auditoria were nothing special…long tunnelly 300 seaters
UGC is promising us a new 16-20 screener for 2005
This has had an interesting history both as a first run theatre and now as a second run discount house…As a first run remember seeing Jacques Tati’s Traffic here in around 1972…believe it also had Emanuelle here for over a year…When I settled in London it was a second tier first run theatre showing mostly pictures from local distributor Guild – saw The Hot Spot, Narrow Margin and a preview of Grand Canyon here…Since around 1991 the Robins family has operated it as a discount with a robust schedule of recent hits…over the years have seen The Hudsecker Proxy, The Firm, Bad Lieutenant, Lost Highway, City of God here…it’s busy studenty and fun and there is a membership scheme which will save you even more for around £9 up front…the theatre must seat around 250 downstairs and 100 upstairs and both are double aisled…
This is a must for budget travellers to London to catch the odd film they missed back home
Saw Touching the Void here with my nephew recently…as in many of the Paris multiplexes the configuration is a bit strange with two single aisle sections split by a walkway leading to the rest room and a row of single seats along the wall
How is the renovation? I only saw one film there nearly 20 years ago but it’s good to see that this survived along with the Balzac as art houses along the Champs
The Key was a true institution…I imagine sorely missed in DC…At the time of its closing it was a triplex showing a great range of art films in all languages…Among the pictures I saw there in 95-96 – Kieslowski’s Blue, A Great Day in Harlem, Crumb, Little Odessa, and a great French picture with Michel Blanc whose title escapes me…The Key also used to host a number of cinema clubs
Was this the Winston originally?
When I lived in DC in the mid 90s these were booked primarily as second run discount theatres…A reasonable if not overly comfortable place to catch up on The Madness of King George, Get Shorty, Braveheart, Goldeneye and Mrs. Parker and the Roundtable…The sad part is that with the Key and the Biograph gone DC’s college community around Georgetown is left with just a new megaplex
It would be great to have a first run chronology of this theater – say from 1963-1985…it would probably include a number of Oscar nominees on long first runs at least from say 1970 onwards…thanks in advance to the research minded among us…
So that leaves City Cinemas with what? the Cinema ½/3 the Village East and the Angelika…Hardly critical mass…The Sutton may have been badly twinned but it did give longer legs to some smaller films in its last two years
This was one of my neighborhood theatres when I lived in the Dupont area in the mid 90s…I didnt realize it went all the way back to the 60s…It had all the pros and limitations of a raked single screen theatre…an interestingly shaped entrance and good sized waiting area but some pretty cramped seating and a feeling of disinvestment which all those theatres suffered from at the time under Cineplex Odeon (the Janus, West End 1-4 and Dupont)
Saw Nixon, Crimson Tide, Les Miserables (the Jean-Paul Belmondo version) there
This was BS Moss' Movieland from the very late 70s onward…ET first ran here in 1982 for nearly a year
Saw Jaws here before the twinning…a packed house great atmosphere at the Midnight show opening weekend…the saddest part of the Rivoli’s last years was that for the final couple of years United Artists took the Rivoli name off of it and called it simply the United Artists Twin 1 and 2…great for the Chuck Norris pictures it seemed to book
Remember the Regency from my UPenn days…pretty anonymous feeling twin…best memory was going to an advance preview of Marathon Man the Saturday before opening back when movies used to open on Wednesdays…again the odd Philly habit of doubling up the old feature and the new feature on Wednesdays was the rule here making for some strange double features
When exactly did it stop showing movies as the DeMille…My guess is 1974…I remember seeing The Concert for Bangla Desh there in the summer of ‘72
The 62nd St & Broadway opened in late 1988 as a Cineplex Odeon 300 seater? at the base of an apartment building – the Chequers condo? Needless to say it’s been hard to programme as first run but lately running mostly pictures from Fox/Fox Searchlight
Surprised that this wasn’t listed yet…A great place to see a film on one’s own or with a date…always something to talk about and worth seeing…Had the pleasure of seeing things as different as La Nuit de Varennes, Milou en Mai, My Left Foot, Salaam Bombay here
I remember the Arcadia from my college years at Penn in the late 70s…What blew my mind was the bizarre mix of bookings these theatres including the Arcadia in particular would get…Major studio releases one week and when they would bomb some porn to fill in…also what seemed unique to Philadelphia is a double feature on opening day usually with some old blaxpo as the bottom of the bill…saw Who’ll Stop the Rain for my Vietnam war film class along with Let’s Do It Again on this kind of bill
This said the Arcadia was a decent place to see a movie
Did the following notes for a Cinema Treasures correspondent who contacted me a month ago about this theatre…Please note that it was the Juliet I & II
The Juliet opened as an ABC theatre…There were different ABC chainlets broken up regionally ie ABC Mountain for Utah and Colorado, ABC Southeast for Florida and so on…They never really had critical mass in the NY area with only the Juliet and a couple upstate to show for themselves…Part of the attraction of this theatre was there was also a great old-fashioned fish house between 79th St and 80th St on 3rd Avenue (The Clam Box?) which made for a good family night out on Sunday night
The Juliet may well have opened with The Last Valley but I thought it might have been Disney’s Aristocats as well or just behind it. There was a downstairs screen and an upstairs with an escalator…the upstairs screen had quite decent raked seating – I remember being rather high up for Taxi Driver, The Longest Yard and a double bill of Klute and Summer of 42…The box office was streetside and the inside was your basic issue cinema red carpet and brass coloured laminate
The first run years were the first couple – with mostly Cinerama or ABC Pictures or MGM releases ie The Grissom Gang, The Wild Rovers daydating with Broadway houses like the Rivoli, or Embassy or Cinerama (keep in mind that the Juliets predated the revamped RKO 86th St by a couple of years when those screens picked up the first run mantle of Cinerama/AIP/MGM)…Later on it was subruns or showcase runs mostly with moveovers from the Loews Orpheum/Cine or from the 3rd Ave and 60th St theatres like the pictures I mentioned…The theatres were just good functional neighborhood theatres not particularly glamorous just something you wanted to see most of the time…My sister and I did a double feature here one night as well one in each theatre Cabaret and possibly The Last Detail ( we did the same not long after in the then UA Columbia I and II)…because the brand wasn’t particularly strong they didn’t really fit into the Red Carpet, Blue Ribbon or Flagship groupings of the time…A 1973 or 74 revival of Gone with the Wind did well here also…Am not sure when it switched from ABC to Hallmark but remember the distinctive ABC logo becoming just a red dot on the marquee
The last years 1975-78 were a bit of a mess…mostly $1.00 runs I believe…remember seeing Emanuelle, Night Moves in these years…One of the last attractions if not the last was that Don Johnson/Jason Robards classic A Boy and His Dog…The space sat vacant for nearly a year before being torn down for a high rise building…The theatre must have had one of the shortest lives of any cinema
One of the westside’s most distinctive theatres. If I’m not mistaken you entered through a turnstile. The marquee was a brass coloured two line wraparound…and I believe you could buy books of tickets for this theatre.
Booking for most of the 60s and 70s was primarily 2nd and 3rd run with some arthouse style bookings weaved in. Towards the late 70s with the eventual quadding of the Loews 83rd Street, the shift of the Beacon to concerts, the entry of the Cinema Studios to the market and the gradual cleanup and gentrification of the neighborhood, this theatre was twinned and a fair amount of first run art house product or quality 2nd run product came in. The only film I can actually remember seeing here was a Hungarian coming of age film in around 1981.
Finally made it to the big screen after several years of trying…Saw I ROBOT on opening day at the first show…Great experience comfortable armchair seating with great legroom…Great sound and curved screen…Outdoes the Ziegfeld in New York for comfort even if it is a bit smaller. Also the UGC’s have finally started selling decent popcorn
The atmosphere…the wood panelling…the blue upholstery are just a tad dated to make this a really delightful slightly old-fashioned place to see a movie…There will almost always be a Hollywood blockbuster here on first-run so a great experience for visitors to Paris also…The first show daily is only 5 euros
Now that the Astor Plaza is sadly no more, can someone at Cinema Treasures please edit this page – separating out the true comments about the theatre…and the memories…shifting the gossip and the asides about 70mm to another page…This theatre deserves a concise updated history – key pictures opening here, long runs, and links to relevant news articles (maybe even some NY Times bits from the trouble pre-history as the Reade and then the opening as the Astor Plaza.
Thanks