AMC Orleans 8

From a member on http://www.phillyblog.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12676573@N07/

Thanks…sniff sniff…Eddie.

Hughie, from what I can tell, MSN has changed the sign-up process since I visited your website several years back. Because I don’t remember having to consent to accept spam to get to your Orleans website that time around. But the other night when I tried re-visiting it, there was no getting around that MSN requirement so as to go further. And believe me, I get enough spam as it is, soooo…

Anyway, getting back onto the topic of the Orleans Theatre again, architecturally speaking it had been Northeast Philadelphia’s first generic theater. The GCC Northeast not long after the second. All Northeast Philadelphia’s theaters prior to then had been designed by real architects and had much to admire architecturally. But neither the Orleans or GCC Northeast could lay any sort of claims to having been “architectural marvels,” not even by the greatest stretch. On that front, if anything, they served as milestones of great architecture being put aside in Northeast Philadelphia’s case. Sort of like what happened in Florence, Italy under the Medici in reverse. While I’ll be the first to say that the Orleans Theatre had an air of class to it in its first few years of its operation, great architecture certainly was not a factor in that. Not even in the least. For look at it, folks. Architecturally, it was just a large cinderblock box, nothing more, and with superficial embellishments added onto it afterward to try to give it some personality. But truth be said, REAL theaters are a bit more than simply that, just to do the big reality check here. What the Orleans lacked architecturally was well made up for by how well it was run in the first years. But when that aspect was politically phased out, what was the point of anyone with any substance going there anymore? Just to go slumming, a.k.a. SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS?

I think it’s sad that the Orleans is coming down because of the fact that Philadelphia’s forgotten and cast-aside people will have one less thing to help keep their spirits afloat — although I found it sad that this was in the form of those only out to rip them off. In its last 20 years of operation, Chicago’s Hull House it clearly was not. And of course the Target Store that’s going to replace it soon is going to be the same thing. Worse, actually, in that the Target Store will be a major sales outlet for selling Chinese slave-labor produced goods to a people who in yesteryear would’ve produced these same things. A situation bad both for China and the U.S., of course. In China’s case, people of high intelligence are being forced to put all their intelligence aside for the sake of satisfying the mindless U.S. consumer market, while here in America people of low intelligence but with great manufacturing productivity skills if given the opportunity are being forced to somehow fit into an ever-ongoing American services-based economy only. As if. So in that sense there’s perhaps a bit of symbolism in AMC’s choosing Labor Day to shut the Orleans 8 down. And probably not purely coincidental.

The first 70mm 6-track Stereophonic Sound presentation at the Orleans (in 1963) was “55 Days At Peking”. The next was “Mutiny On The Bounty”. The ads commonly made a reference to “On Philadelphia’s largest screen”. Others (when it was still a full-sized theater) were “It’s A Mad Mad, Mad, Mad, World”, “Doctor Zhivago” “The Dirty Dozen”, “West Side Story”, “Spartacus”, “Oklahoma”, “Can-Can”, “Cheyenne Autumn”, “My Fair Lady”, “Finian’s Rainbow”, “Grand Prix”, “Gone With The Wind”, and “2001: A Space Odyessy”.
Of all the theaters to feature 70mm capabilities, including center city theaters, the Orleans (“hands-down”) used it the most! …even after twinning(“Indiana Jones and The Last Crusades”, “Cocoon”, and “Dick Tracy”).

Hughie, you put together a great website regarding the Orleans, which I remember quite well from having visited it several years ago. But the trouble is, which I was just reminded of when I tried to revisit it just now, is that you have to go through an icky sign-up process with MSN before they let you ever get to it, which entails your having to consent to whatever spam they see fit to clog up your e-mail in-box with. So given that, why not create a whole new website dedicated to the memory of the Orleans that functions like a normal one does? That is, one without all those hassles that I don’t think it’s fair people should have to put up with. Thanks, Hughie! And we’ll all be looking forward to your new website soon!

Could we add the web site I created for The Orleans Theatre?

The link is: View link

Although I put the site together a couple of years ago I don’t purport to claim ownership. I look at the site as a community effort to be enjoyed by the select group of folks who have a special spot in their hearts for The Orleans Theatre of old.

A few people have already signed up as members and I encourage others, particularly on this site, to visit, sign up and share their thoughts and memories with the rest of us.

See you at the Orleans !

I was tired, I meant labor, si the final 8 movies that will show at the AMC Orleans 8 is: Balls Of Fury, The Bourne Ultimatum, Illegal Tender, The Invasion, Rush Hour 3, The Simpsons Movie, Superbad and War.

And Movietickets.com has no showtimes after monday, wow so this is really the end, RIP Orleans 8, for thats where I saw movies when I was a kid, and The Simpsons Movie will have been the final movie I saw there.

Ah, so much for a theater that a lot of people love then. So much for all the steadfast loyalties they’ve shown towards it all these many years, making it the last Northeast Philadelphia movie theater of yore still in operation and which they no doubt had hoped to continue to show steadfast loyalty to for the next 50 years or so. So to that we’re now to the point that we say yeah yeah yeah, the hell with all that. Knock that sucker down and slap up a Target Store in its place — which nobody wants, nobody asked for, but they’re going to get shoved at them anyhow. Because that’s what some mindless twit out on the Main Line or wherever wants them to have. I am soooooo glad I am not among Philadelphia’s current movers and shakers because I couldn’t stand to be that wormy and pathetic. But then these are pure lowlifes in nice suits, nice cars, nice houses making these decisions, and with the brains of maggots. And so quite seriously what else can we expect from them but this kind of thing?

And the name “Target,” how appropriate in this case. As in, look for something people love, and then target it. Knock that sucker down, put up something nobody’s going to like in its place, and that’s “justice.”

^Yep like I said last week, but unlike the other times I have speculated about the orleans rumours of closing, this time more people are saying it, including managers (Even ones that currently are at orleans).

I’m really surprised they gave it even that high a rating. For you know a theater’s got to be pretty bad when someone who goes by the user name of “Theaterbuff1” and lives in an area of the city where that’s one of only three theaters around, the AMC Orleans 8 being the closest one, but he wouldn’t even dare consider going to see a movie there, given how it’s been run the past 20 years or so!

Still, although it’s light years away now from how it was when I saw such films as OLIVER! and THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES there in the late 1960s when it was a single screen theater and very classy inside at that, a lot of people love that theater as it is today. And one thing I definitely don’t do is argue with love. Or at least not when it’s love of the only surviving theater from the days of my youth in a part of the city where once there had been so many but now this is the last surviving one.

And sometimes….well, you just have to put aside your own outlook and see things as Joel McCrea came to see them in that classic 1941 movie, SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. For that’s the whole point of movies, after all, isn’t it?

Yep, just like we did the last time, Eddie.

Oh, here we go again. You really have it in for this theater, don’t you, Eddie? But despite your noise, that theater’s staying put, just like Burholme Park up Cottman Avenue from there is. Live with it.