Juliet I & II

SethLewis on August 5, 2004 at 1:45 pm

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