What do you remember of the Center Theatre? You should post it on that page, as well as stuff on any other Fall River theatres, since there is so little posted.
Ron Salters, you mentioned the “other” Warner Theatre on the campus of Worcester Academy. It was called that because it was originally presented to Worcester Academy as a gift from Harry Warner, then president of the Warner Brothers Studio in memory of his son Lewis (Worcester Academy, Class of 1928). It is the Lewis J. Warner Theatre, Ross Auditorium. I did visit this theatre a week or so ago for a Christmas show just to see the place, and it is a wonder to behold, a fantastic renaissance-style period piece inside with great ceiling frescoes, and a classic columned exterior front. It was built in the tradition of other early 20th century grand movie palaces. It has the original 35mm projection booth still in place. It must be one of the greatest “unknown” cinema treasures of New England if not the country and should be visited by theatre fans who come to Worcester. EXTERIOR INTERIOR
Since there is no other cinema in the immediate area, the theatre will certainly be welcome news for many. It may be the northernmost functioning cinema in Rhode Island if that means anything. I suppose you could say it replaces the Lincoln Mall Cinemas which used to be at another end of the mall until a few years ago. That one had four screens. I checked out this place about a month after it had opened on November 18, 2005 and saw The Family Stone in one of the not-so-big auditoriums. Don’t know if there are any larger ones. The place has the now de-rigeur stadium-style seating (very comfortable), is a bit bland in decor, and has a wide but boring lobby-entrance area. In short, it’s McCinema for McMoviegoers before the McDVD comes out in three McMonths.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, author John Kennedy Toole has an episode set in the Prytania. Ignatius, the central character, makes loud comments and is a frequent annoyance at the theatre. The film is a circus thriller with a bit of romance. Kids scream. Ignatius gets worse and worse. In these excerpts Toole writes:
He sat at attention in the darkness of the Prytania only a few rows from the screen, his body filling the seat and protruding into the two adjoining ones. On the seat to his right he had stationed his overcoat, three Milky Ways, and two auxiliary bags of popcorn, the bags neatly rolled at the top to keep the popcorn warm and crisp. Ignatius ate his current popcorn and stared raptly at the previews of coming attractions. One of the films looked bad enough, he thought, to bring him back to the Prytania in a few days. Then the screen glowed in bright, wide technicolor, the lion roared, and the title of the excess flashed on the screen before his miraculous blue and yellow eyes. His face froze and his popcorn bag began to shake. Upon entering the theater, he had carefully buttoned the two earflaps to the top of his cap, and now the strident score of the musical assaulted his naked ears from a variety of speakers. He listened to the music, detecting two popular songs which he particularly disliked, and scrutinized the credits closely to find any names of performers who normally nauseated him.
…
He put the empty popcorn bag to his full lips, inflated it and waited, his eyes gleaming with reflected technicolor…In the darkness two trembling hands met violently. The popcorn bag exploded with a bang. The children shrieked.
“What’s all that noise?” the woman at the candy counter asked the manager.
“He’s here tonight,” the manager told her, pointing across the theater to the hulking silhouette at the bottom of the screen. The manager walked down the aisle to the front rows, where the shrieking was growing wilder. Their fear having dissipated itself, the children were holding a competition of shrieking. Ignatius listened to the bloodcurdling little trebles and giggles and gloated in his dark lair. With a few mild threats, the manager quieted the front rows and then glanced down in the row in which the isolated figure of Ignatius rose like some great monster among the little heads.
…
“Oh my goodness!” Ignatius shouted, unable to contain himself any longer…“What degenerate produced this abortion?”
“Shut up,” someone shouted behind him.
…
When a love scene appeared to be developing, he bounded up out of his seat and stomped up the aisle to the candy counter for more popcorn, but as he returned to his seat, the two pink figures were just preparing to kiss.
“They probably have halitosis,” Ignatius announced over the heads of the children. “I hate to think of the obscene places that those mouths have doubtlessly been before!”
“You’ll have to do something,” the candy woman told the manager laconically. “He’s worse than ever tonight.”
The manager sighed and started dow the aisle to where Ignatius was mumbling, “Oh, my God, their tongues are all over each other’s capped and rotting teeth.”
In her reminiscence Moments with Chaplin, Lillian Ross recounted her walk with Chaplin around Manhattan, after his long absence from the city, at the time his Limelight was opening in 1952, and before circumstances would induce him to take up permanent residence abroad.
(Quotation follows):
An old woman in a torn dress was standing in front of the New Amsterdam Theatre selling pretzels from a battered baby stroller. “I don’t think the old girl would know whether this is where Ziegfeld had his ‘Follies,’ or whether it had a roof garden,” Chaplin said. He stopped walking. He looked puzzled, a bit hurt.
An elderly man with a pale, freckled face, who was bald except for reddish hair at the base of his skull, came along and stopped beside us. He wore a dirty white shirt open at the collar, and he had a bundle of old newspapers under one arm. “Visiting your old haunts, Charlie?” he said to Chaplin.
“Why, yes,” Chaplin said. “Yes. Yes, I am."
”“I used to come in as a kid, fifteen years old,” the man said. “I used to see you. They were good old days."
"Wasn’t this where Ziegfeld had his ‘Follies’?” Chaplin asked. “And didn’t it have a roof garden upstairs?"
"You’re right,” the man said. “And it still does have a roof garden."
"You see, I was right, wasn’t I?” Chaplin said to me.
This theatre is mentioned in the biography of writer Truman Capote (Capote) by Gerald Clarke. Clarke discusses the period of Truman’s childhood when the boy lived on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. He tells of one of Truman’s teachers at Trinity School:
“The teacher would sometimes walk him home, Truman said, stopping on the way at a movie theater, the Olympia, on upper Broadway. They would sit in the privacy of the back row, and while the teacher fondled him, Truman would masturbate the teacher. What effect that tawdry little scene had on a boy like Truman is impossible to say, but it was, at the very least, a sorry initiation into the mysteries of sex.”
Locals who have been attempting to restore and re-open as a cultural facility the historic Pastime Theatre are not giving up and are fighting the town of Bristol. With a deadline for mortgage payment approaching, members of the Bristol Pastime Theatre Foundation are organizing and attempting to garner support to reverse the Bristol Town Council’s recent decision to lease the old theater to the Bristol Warren Regional School District for use as a school. In the most recent development the Pastime Theatre received a $200,000 federal grant. The Bristol Pastime Theatre Foundation is going to use the money to purchase the theatre from the town, but still needs to raise $141,000 to do it. And they have a very short timeframe, by December 3rd, in which to accomplish this. Yet none of this guarantees that the town will not take over the theatre by eminent domain.
Some of the newer films shown here from time to time represent the only public RI showings. For example, the upcoming A State of Mind, a fabulous documentary about the mind-boggling North Korean “Mass Games,” has not been shown in the area and is worth going out of your way for. The coffee served here is excellent and can be had in real ceramic cups! Remember those?
I went back to the Greenwich last night, my first visit in over twenty years since it became a live-act theatre. The occasion was the R.I. Jewish Film Festival’s showing here of King of the Corner by and with Peter Riegert. I used this opportunity to see what the interior of the theatre was like. I had all but forgotten.
I suspected that probably the showing would be a DVD projection since I guessed also that the 35mm equipment and large screen that used to be here were long ago removed. I wasn’t wrong. A rather tiny screen was set up in the middle of the stage and the DVD was shown by rear-projection. I must say I enjoyed the film, which also stars Eli Wallach and Isabella Rossellini, though disappointed at the limitations of its presentation. But then this place does not normally show movies any more in any format and was simply rented for that purpose by the Jewish festival group.
The original projection booth still stands, but I was unable to detect any equipment behind the portholes. I was amazed at the width of the stage, which runs the whole front of the theatre, minus the two exit-door areas. It must be forty feet wide or more. A fire notice says the theatre’s capacity is 541 persons. The walls of the theatre were painted a light yellow and were peeling in spots. I seem to recall a darker wall motif in the theatre’s movie days. The seats, survivors of many decades, were generally tattered and weatherbeaten. There was a large comfortable amount of leg room between rows. I think the rows may have been re-spaced when the theatre stopped showing movies. There are added platforms with stage-lighting equipment.
The look of the theatre’s interior is essentially bland and banal, with no distinguishing decorative features of any kind. The exterior of the theatre, on the other hand, is appealing in a classically simple way, with a handsome brick fronting and an attractive canopy over the entrance, beneath a small marquee. The entrance area, where the ticket window is, is an inviting place and is lined with autographed photos and posters of previous performers here, including Claire Bloom. In one nook, a poster/flyer survives and promotes the movies of a week long ago in 1935 when one of the films was Mutiny on the Bounty.
Yesterday I went to see Zathura here. The house lights dimmed, the previews of coming attractions came on, but the pre-film music that accompanies the “slide show” was still continuing to play and didn’t seem about to stop. I complained at the ticket booth, a phone call was made to the projectionist. The problem was corrected by the time I got back. Then, the feature came on, and the house lights came back on! Furious, I complained again, asking if I could catch the film at another of their auditoriums instead. Another showing was scheduled for twenty minues later. I asked, “Doesn’t anybody pay attention to what is going on in the auditoriums?” The girl answered snootily, “Well we have ONE person who is responsible for TWELVE theatres!” “That’s no excuse,” I said.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss available on a nice DVD, there are extended night scenes of the Times Square area and its theatres. One gets clear views of the Victoria with a large display for The Man Between, the Astor with Queen of Sheba, and the Embassy Newsreel Theatre. There are snippets of more. That part must have been shot around November of 1953.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss available on a nice DVD, there are extended night scenes of the Times Square area and its theatres. One gets clear views of the Victoria with a large display for The Man Between, the Astor with Queen of Sheba, and the Embassy Newsreel Theatre. There are snippets of more. That part must have been shot around November of 1953.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss available on a nice DVD, there are extended night scenes of the Times Square area and its theatres. One gets clear views of the Victoria with a large display for The Man Between, the Astor with Queen of Sheba, and the Embassy Newsreel Theatre. There are snippets of more. That part must have been shot around November of 1953.
Jim, almost all these theatres you mention have pages here on Cinema Treasures. You should post your valuable memories for each of those places. I am very interested.
The Majestic ended its days as a movie theatre on May 17, 1971. At least that was the last day a newspaper ad appeared. The last films shown were a double bill of Patton and Mash. After that the theatre, having been sold to Trinity Repertory Company, was gutted and restructured, leaving almost nothing of its original interior architectural magnificence.
The Cinerama Theatre was twinned in 1974 and after twinning re-opened on Wednesday, June 26, 1974. The features first shown as a twin theatre were Chinatown and Claudine.
This theatre opened as the Showcase Cinemas 1-2-3 on Friday, June 28, 1974. The features on the three screens were The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Lucille Ball in Mame. Over the years it kept growing, subdividing, stadiumizing.
I didn’t know where to make this query, but I just found a reference to a Third Avenue theatre called the Modern Playhouse. A 1937 review of the Hungarian film Aranyember talks of “a smoothly running and engaging picture in ‘Man of Gold,’ now at the Modern Playhouse in Third Avenue.” Where on Third Avenue was this theatre and did it have other names? I couldn’t find it listed.
What do you remember of the Center Theatre? You should post it on that page, as well as stuff on any other Fall River theatres, since there is so little posted.
I just visited this theatre for the first time, since it was showing the acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, which wasn’t playing yet in the Providence area and which I wanted to see badly. The movie is a miracle and unforgettable. Madison is about 80 minutes from Providence, near where I live, and about 20 minutes or so north of New Haven and about five minutes from the nearest I-95 exit. The theatre is plain but comfortable and pleasant. The village of Madison has real character, the scent of upscale, and there are some fine retail shops and coffee shops. There is a café in the theatre lobby as well. Here is a photo of the exterior.
The new Cinemaworld, a 16-screen multiplex, opened in November, 2005 at Lincoln Mall, near where the Lincoln Mall Cinemas used to be.
Ron Salters, you mentioned the “other” Warner Theatre on the campus of Worcester Academy. It was called that because it was originally presented to Worcester Academy as a gift from Harry Warner, then president of the Warner Brothers Studio in memory of his son Lewis (Worcester Academy, Class of 1928). It is the Lewis J. Warner Theatre, Ross Auditorium. I did visit this theatre a week or so ago for a Christmas show just to see the place, and it is a wonder to behold, a fantastic renaissance-style period piece inside with great ceiling frescoes, and a classic columned exterior front. It was built in the tradition of other early 20th century grand movie palaces. It has the original 35mm projection booth still in place. It must be one of the greatest “unknown” cinema treasures of New England if not the country and should be visited by theatre fans who come to Worcester.
EXTERIOR
INTERIOR
Since there is no other cinema in the immediate area, the theatre will certainly be welcome news for many. It may be the northernmost functioning cinema in Rhode Island if that means anything. I suppose you could say it replaces the Lincoln Mall Cinemas which used to be at another end of the mall until a few years ago. That one had four screens. I checked out this place about a month after it had opened on November 18, 2005 and saw The Family Stone in one of the not-so-big auditoriums. Don’t know if there are any larger ones. The place has the now de-rigeur stadium-style seating (very comfortable), is a bit bland in decor, and has a wide but boring lobby-entrance area. In short, it’s McCinema for McMoviegoers before the McDVD comes out in three McMonths.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, author John Kennedy Toole has an episode set in the Prytania. Ignatius, the central character, makes loud comments and is a frequent annoyance at the theatre. The film is a circus thriller with a bit of romance. Kids scream. Ignatius gets worse and worse. In these excerpts Toole writes:
He sat at attention in the darkness of the Prytania only a few rows from the screen, his body filling the seat and protruding into the two adjoining ones. On the seat to his right he had stationed his overcoat, three Milky Ways, and two auxiliary bags of popcorn, the bags neatly rolled at the top to keep the popcorn warm and crisp. Ignatius ate his current popcorn and stared raptly at the previews of coming attractions. One of the films looked bad enough, he thought, to bring him back to the Prytania in a few days. Then the screen glowed in bright, wide technicolor, the lion roared, and the title of the excess flashed on the screen before his miraculous blue and yellow eyes. His face froze and his popcorn bag began to shake. Upon entering the theater, he had carefully buttoned the two earflaps to the top of his cap, and now the strident score of the musical assaulted his naked ears from a variety of speakers. He listened to the music, detecting two popular songs which he particularly disliked, and scrutinized the credits closely to find any names of performers who normally nauseated him.
…
He put the empty popcorn bag to his full lips, inflated it and waited, his eyes gleaming with reflected technicolor…In the darkness two trembling hands met violently. The popcorn bag exploded with a bang. The children shrieked.
“What’s all that noise?” the woman at the candy counter asked the manager.
“He’s here tonight,” the manager told her, pointing across the theater to the hulking silhouette at the bottom of the screen. The manager walked down the aisle to the front rows, where the shrieking was growing wilder. Their fear having dissipated itself, the children were holding a competition of shrieking. Ignatius listened to the bloodcurdling little trebles and giggles and gloated in his dark lair. With a few mild threats, the manager quieted the front rows and then glanced down in the row in which the isolated figure of Ignatius rose like some great monster among the little heads.
…
“Oh my goodness!” Ignatius shouted, unable to contain himself any longer…“What degenerate produced this abortion?”
“Shut up,” someone shouted behind him.
…
When a love scene appeared to be developing, he bounded up out of his seat and stomped up the aisle to the candy counter for more popcorn, but as he returned to his seat, the two pink figures were just preparing to kiss.
“They probably have halitosis,” Ignatius announced over the heads of the children. “I hate to think of the obscene places that those mouths have doubtlessly been before!”
“You’ll have to do something,” the candy woman told the manager laconically. “He’s worse than ever tonight.”
The manager sighed and started dow the aisle to where Ignatius was mumbling, “Oh, my God, their tongues are all over each other’s capped and rotting teeth.”
In her reminiscence Moments with Chaplin, Lillian Ross recounted her walk with Chaplin around Manhattan, after his long absence from the city, at the time his Limelight was opening in 1952, and before circumstances would induce him to take up permanent residence abroad.
(Quotation follows):
An old woman in a torn dress was standing in front of the New Amsterdam Theatre selling pretzels from a battered baby stroller. “I don’t think the old girl would know whether this is where Ziegfeld had his ‘Follies,’ or whether it had a roof garden,” Chaplin said. He stopped walking. He looked puzzled, a bit hurt.
An elderly man with a pale, freckled face, who was bald except for reddish hair at the base of his skull, came along and stopped beside us. He wore a dirty white shirt open at the collar, and he had a bundle of old newspapers under one arm. “Visiting your old haunts, Charlie?” he said to Chaplin.
“Why, yes,” Chaplin said. “Yes. Yes, I am."
”“I used to come in as a kid, fifteen years old,” the man said. “I used to see you. They were good old days."
"Wasn’t this where Ziegfeld had his ‘Follies’?” Chaplin asked. “And didn’t it have a roof garden upstairs?"
"You’re right,” the man said. “And it still does have a roof garden."
"You see, I was right, wasn’t I?” Chaplin said to me.
This theatre is mentioned in the biography of writer Truman Capote (Capote) by Gerald Clarke. Clarke discusses the period of Truman’s childhood when the boy lived on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. He tells of one of Truman’s teachers at Trinity School:
“The teacher would sometimes walk him home, Truman said, stopping on the way at a movie theater, the Olympia, on upper Broadway. They would sit in the privacy of the back row, and while the teacher fondled him, Truman would masturbate the teacher. What effect that tawdry little scene had on a boy like Truman is impossible to say, but it was, at the very least, a sorry initiation into the mysteries of sex.”
Locals who have been attempting to restore and re-open as a cultural facility the historic Pastime Theatre are not giving up and are fighting the town of Bristol. With a deadline for mortgage payment approaching, members of the Bristol Pastime Theatre Foundation are organizing and attempting to garner support to reverse the Bristol Town Council’s recent decision to lease the old theater to the Bristol Warren Regional School District for use as a school. In the most recent development the Pastime Theatre received a $200,000 federal grant. The Bristol Pastime Theatre Foundation is going to use the money to purchase the theatre from the town, but still needs to raise $141,000 to do it. And they have a very short timeframe, by December 3rd, in which to accomplish this. Yet none of this guarantees that the town will not take over the theatre by eminent domain.
I don’t know the answer to those questions except that it never had a balcony in its previous theatre days.
Rhode Island has another cinema-café, the Revival House in Westerly. While it doesn’t have theatre-type seating (or couches!) and employs DVD projection rather than 35mm like the Cable Car, it does have wider-ranging programs of new, old, and harder-to-see films. Check the Revival House page and their website.
Some of the newer films shown here from time to time represent the only public RI showings. For example, the upcoming A State of Mind, a fabulous documentary about the mind-boggling North Korean “Mass Games,” has not been shown in the area and is worth going out of your way for. The coffee served here is excellent and can be had in real ceramic cups! Remember those?
Here is a photo of the Wellesley Community Playhouse from 1981.
I went back to the Greenwich last night, my first visit in over twenty years since it became a live-act theatre. The occasion was the R.I. Jewish Film Festival’s showing here of King of the Corner by and with Peter Riegert. I used this opportunity to see what the interior of the theatre was like. I had all but forgotten.
I suspected that probably the showing would be a DVD projection since I guessed also that the 35mm equipment and large screen that used to be here were long ago removed. I wasn’t wrong. A rather tiny screen was set up in the middle of the stage and the DVD was shown by rear-projection. I must say I enjoyed the film, which also stars Eli Wallach and Isabella Rossellini, though disappointed at the limitations of its presentation. But then this place does not normally show movies any more in any format and was simply rented for that purpose by the Jewish festival group.
The original projection booth still stands, but I was unable to detect any equipment behind the portholes. I was amazed at the width of the stage, which runs the whole front of the theatre, minus the two exit-door areas. It must be forty feet wide or more. A fire notice says the theatre’s capacity is 541 persons. The walls of the theatre were painted a light yellow and were peeling in spots. I seem to recall a darker wall motif in the theatre’s movie days. The seats, survivors of many decades, were generally tattered and weatherbeaten. There was a large comfortable amount of leg room between rows. I think the rows may have been re-spaced when the theatre stopped showing movies. There are added platforms with stage-lighting equipment.
The look of the theatre’s interior is essentially bland and banal, with no distinguishing decorative features of any kind. The exterior of the theatre, on the other hand, is appealing in a classically simple way, with a handsome brick fronting and an attractive canopy over the entrance, beneath a small marquee. The entrance area, where the ticket window is, is an inviting place and is lined with autographed photos and posters of previous performers here, including Claire Bloom. In one nook, a poster/flyer survives and promotes the movies of a week long ago in 1935 when one of the films was Mutiny on the Bounty.
Yesterday I went to see Zathura here. The house lights dimmed, the previews of coming attractions came on, but the pre-film music that accompanies the “slide show” was still continuing to play and didn’t seem about to stop. I complained at the ticket booth, a phone call was made to the projectionist. The problem was corrected by the time I got back. Then, the feature came on, and the house lights came back on! Furious, I complained again, asking if I could catch the film at another of their auditoriums instead. Another showing was scheduled for twenty minues later. I asked, “Doesn’t anybody pay attention to what is going on in the auditoriums?” The girl answered snootily, “Well we have ONE person who is responsible for TWELVE theatres!” “That’s no excuse,” I said.
The building opened as a skating rink in 1884 and was converted to a theatre in 1885.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss available on a nice DVD, there are extended night scenes of the Times Square area and its theatres. One gets clear views of the Victoria with a large display for The Man Between, the Astor with Queen of Sheba, and the Embassy Newsreel Theatre. There are snippets of more. That part must have been shot around November of 1953.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss available on a nice DVD, there are extended night scenes of the Times Square area and its theatres. One gets clear views of the Victoria with a large display for The Man Between, the Astor with Queen of Sheba, and the Embassy Newsreel Theatre. There are snippets of more. That part must have been shot around November of 1953.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 film Killer’s Kiss available on a nice DVD, there are extended night scenes of the Times Square area and its theatres. One gets clear views of the Victoria with a large display for The Man Between, the Astor with Queen of Sheba, and the Embassy Newsreel Theatre. There are snippets of more. That part must have been shot around November of 1953.
Jim, almost all these theatres you mention have pages here on Cinema Treasures. You should post your valuable memories for each of those places. I am very interested.
Jim, you should post what you remember about Woonsocket Cinemas on its page here.
The Majestic ended its days as a movie theatre on May 17, 1971. At least that was the last day a newspaper ad appeared. The last films shown were a double bill of Patton and Mash. After that the theatre, having been sold to Trinity Repertory Company, was gutted and restructured, leaving almost nothing of its original interior architectural magnificence.
The Cinerama Theatre was twinned in 1974 and after twinning re-opened on Wednesday, June 26, 1974. The features first shown as a twin theatre were Chinatown and Claudine.
This theatre opened as the Showcase Cinemas 1-2-3 on Friday, June 28, 1974. The features on the three screens were The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Lucille Ball in Mame. Over the years it kept growing, subdividing, stadiumizing.
I didn’t know where to make this query, but I just found a reference to a Third Avenue theatre called the Modern Playhouse. A 1937 review of the Hungarian film Aranyember talks of “a smoothly running and engaging picture in ‘Man of Gold,’ now at the Modern Playhouse in Third Avenue.” Where on Third Avenue was this theatre and did it have other names? I couldn’t find it listed.