One of many Capitol theaters in and around Pittsburgh, this one was in the Beltzhoover section of Pittsburgh.
It may have been called the New Capitol when it opened in 1919 with a reported 750 seats. Later listings indicate it had 650-690 seats and more specifically the 663 mentioned by Rick Aubrey.
The address may have been 120, 124 or 126 Beltzhoover or may have enveloped all of that street frontage.
By 1973 it was a boarded up service station. By 1983 it was Village Pest Control. The property is listed now as being owned by CMN Management LLC.
The theater existed from 1915 (initial capacity possibly 850) through maybe as late as 1964 (776 capacity corroborated). Of the six East Liberty moviehouses that survived into the 1950s, it ranked fifth in the pecking order of when it played movies as they moved through the then-high-earning neighborhood.
Movies began their East Liberty showings at either the Sheridan Square or the Liberty (depending on the distributor) and sometimes the Regent, then moved on into mix ‘n’ match double bills at the Enright, the nearby Shadyside (often concurrently with the Enright) and finally the Cameraphone. (The Triangle got them last.)
The Cameraphone sometimes used the same double bills as the Enright, normally about two weeks later. Usually the bill of fare changed twice a week.
In January 1953 the Cameraphone had the exclusive rerelease of the landmark 1945 exploitation film “Mom and Dad” (1945), an occasion so heavily hyped for its daring content that the booking of the film condemned by the Legion of Decency led to the theater being placed off limits for Catholics for several weeks.
The picture played for 26 days, complete with gender-segregated showings daily and book-selling appearances by the ubiquitous Elliot Forbes, who was portrayed by different actors/lecturers in dozens of theaters around the country concurrently.
The success of the booking and decreasing attendance for late-run movies in the mushrooming TV era led the Cameraphone’s management to try racier fare (“We Want a Child,” “The French Line,” “Bitter Rice,” “Striporama”) with increasing frequency but with none of “Mom and Dad’s” exceptional success.
By 1955 the Cameraphone was trying triple bills of action films.
Advertising vanished from the daily newspapers during most of the theater’s final decade except when it joined the Art Cinema (Downtown) and/or several drive-ins in playing especially adult and softcore sex films.
The theater was razed in the mid-1960s and the property enveloped by the disastrous Penn Circle redevelopment. The specific plot of land once occupied by the Cameraphone became a lawn with benches, a small traffic circle and possibly part of the busway.
The relatively narrow theater was characterized by the fact trains passed by behind its screen wall and by the slightly musty smell of its popcorn and aged carpeting. Theater maintenance was functional at best.
There was a vestibule and a concession area, but minimal separation of the lobby from the auditorium, so that if one entered the theater before an earlier performance had concluded, it was almost impossible not to be aware of what was happening on screen.
The theater may have has as few as 349 seats when it was the Cameraphone. If indeed it grew to 700 seats, one of the renovations may have included taking over an adjacent building.
The theater was a 700-seater with distinctive light fixtures (clusters of little orange lights, if I recall) along the side walls.
Twinned roughly down the middle, it had 417 seats on one side and 390 on the other. Some of the original character was sacrificed, which is always the case nice old houses are halved or quartered.
The Bellevue closed Sept, 2, 2002.
The building is occupied now by something called (I believe) Dollar General.
The (Harris) Beechview Theatre also was known as the Olympic and New Olympic. The structure was used for many years by American Legion Post 740, but by 1983 it was boarded up and advertised as being for sale. The property was sold in 1997 for $200,000 and has a real estate tax value of $238,200. Unsure of its present use.
Millard (nor Miller) and his older brother Ralph Green ran the Guild. Both are deceased.
The theater opened as the Princess, though it’s not clear whether the Green brothers' father owned and operated it from the beginning or whether he took over in 1944, which is apparently when the Princess became the Beacon, named for a nearby street.
Though a late-run neighborhood theater in its pre-Guild days, the Beacon showed an opera version of “Of Mice and Men,” of which the Internet Movie DataBase has no record, in August 1951.
After an extensive renovation that reduced the capacity to 500, the newly rechristened Guild reopened as an art house at Christmas 1954 with the Laurence Harvey version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which lasted seven weeks.
Big hits of the 1950s included “The Green Scarf” (11 weeks), which was a British thriller that has vanished from the planet, “The Sheep Has Five Legs” (eight weeks), “The Ladykillers” (10 weeks), “Lust for Life” (seven weeks before MGM pulled the print), “Wee Geordie” (14), “A Touch of Larceny” (six), “Sons and Lovers” (eight).
The many great films that opened here for shorter runs include “Ugetsu,” “The Killing” and “The Seventh Seal.”
In 1960 the theater brought in the Melina Mercouri blockbuster “Never on Sunday,” which broke house records in its 21-week run. “Tunes of Glory” lasted nine weeks, a subrun of “La Dolce Vita” held on for seven and “Only Two Can Play” for eight.
Mercouri returned in “Phaedra” stayed for 26 or 28 weeks in 1962-63, though reportedly taking in less than “Never on Sunday.”
Cut to 1968. When the French lesbian drama “Therese and Isabelle” opened on a Wednesday in 1968, it was targeted for a raid by the Pittsburgh district attorney. (Note: I cannot account for the date July 19, 1969, that was typed into a legal document shown above and other dates in that document. My time frame is easily verified by microfilm.)
I happened to be working an evening shift that week at The Pittsburgh Press when the call came in from the DA’s office that a raid was to take place during a mid-evening (the 8 p.m.) Friday performance after a token viewing of the evening’s first (the 6 p.m.) performance by someone sent by the DA
Beyond being annoyed that a somewhat legitimate art film was about to be shut down and that the raid was being rigged in the manner it was, I was quadruply dismayed because the warning to the newspapers was designed to draw calalry-to-the-rescue media coverage and because my working hours that week would not permit me to catch the picture before it was closed down.
The raid took place precisely on cue, and the theater lost its picture. But when “Therese and Isabelle” later was cleared to re-open, lines stretched around the block, and the Guild shattered all house records. The notorious movie burned out after 12 weeks as word crept out that it was leisurely, artsy and much less explicit than expected.
Among the bigger hits that followed were “The Libertine” (eight weeks), “Putney Swope” (13), “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” (10), “The Lickerish Quartet” (12) and “I Never Sang for My Father” (eight).
By mid-1972, suffering from competition for bookings from several other newer Pittsburgh art houses and some reported differences with distributors, the Guild launched a new policy of playing double bills of recent commercial hits and, more often, double bills of classics.
Partly because of the Guild’s proximity to the colleges located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, the theater began booking combinations of classics and cult favorites, especially the films of Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, all of whom were enjoying a renewed vogue. Woody Allen’s recent comedies, but not his dramas, fit comfortably into the new agenda. Mel Brooks joined the repertoire, too.
Films dealing with drugs humorously or hysterically (“Yellow Submarine” and “Reefer Madness” being the ultimate examples) or into which an hallucinogenic nature could be read (“Fantasia,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Freaks”) were recycled regularly, too. “Fantasia” returned every few months for years.
The theater closed at the end of 1978 ignominiously with a second-run engagement of “(National Lampoon’s) Animal House,” which was showing in several other theaters the same week.
The theater had exhausted the audience for its cult classics, which had returned so many times they seemed to have worn out their welcome.
Though it would be easy to blame the demise of the Guild, like that of dozens of classic/rep houses across the country in the 1980s, on the advent of home video, which mushroomed in 1982, the theater in fact closed three to four years earlier.
The Guild was missed immediately and since then by those of us who frequented it.
A bonus on any visit was interacting with the Green brothers, who were the sort of mischievous, good-natured “characters” who too soon vanished from the exhibition landscape they once made so colorful.
I don’t recall seeing anything in Deridder, but I thank you, Don and Billy for the information. From another source I learnhed that the third indoor was the Lee and that the drive-in was the Pines.
I seem to recall two of the indoors being on the same side of the street and one of the nicer ones being nearby on the opposite side of a side street.
I remember the Pines repeatedly playing a re-release of the eight-year-old “Thunder Road” as a co-feature or third feature and that the drive-in seemed to infested with mosquitos. The heat and humidity were so high you couldn’t keep the windows closed, and yet when the windows were open, you’d turn into a pin cushion.
Do you mind indicating what city you’re in, LM?
And have you visited any Pittsburgh theaters?
Your photos are often sensational, but in many cases where a posting is older than a year or two, I cannot access them. The same with Warren’s older PhotoBucket offerings. I have no idea why the links sometimes expire in time.
For reasons I’ve forgotten, I was always intrigued by the name Exeter Street Theatre when I was keeping track of Variety’s reported grosses for Boston moviehouses.
When I visited a Boston friend in 1972, we saw one or two of the latest releases in the heart of Boston (“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” was one), and somehow the subject of visiting the Exeter came up.
It happened to be playing a revival of Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (1953), which I loved. But mainly I was struck by the uniqueness of the theater, which informed the experience of watching “Tokyo Story."
I’m sorry to learn the theater had difficulty getting major bookings and that it long ago stopped serving the filmgoing community.
The sheer capacity (a whopping 1,300 seats) must have made the theater difficult to maintain in terms of utilities, et al, and it may have had a weekly nut (operating expenses) greater than most distributors were willing to allow for.
Also, art house distributors tend to favor long runs in more intimate houses. Protracted engagements of "The Mouse That Roared” and “Cousin, Cousine” notwithstanding, I’m guessing most movies burned out too quickly at the large Exeter Street.
Lost Memory, You are an amazing source of information on old theaters. And you’re all over the map, literally, in terms of Cinema Treasures theaters you monitor.
I’m guessing you exhusted your resources on Leesville to come up with all four of those names and that there’s nowhere else on the Internet or in publication that I might find more information.
And I suppose that until someone from Leesville (a small town and therefore a long shot) or someone formerly stationed at Fort Polk can come up with Cinema Treasures entries for these four movie sites, I’m unlikely to make any headway here.
As someone who also was at Fort Gordon, I was lucky to find most of the Augusta GA moviehouses (all except the drive-in) on C.T., but I’ve had no luck tracking down the sites (a drive-in and one then-newish indoor theater in 1965) that were in a small South Carolina town just across the border from Augusta, GA. (Maybe it was Aiken SC.)
I thank you, LM, for your resources and your follow-through.
Like the Super 71 Drive-In in Belle Vernon, the Route 19 advertised in the Pittsburgh newspapers but was sufficiently far enough from the city that was able to play first-run movies concurrent with Downtown Pittsburgh and even, occasionally, just ahead of Pittsburgh.
The Route 19’s screen was plainly visible to motorists on Route 19. As Denny Pine says, the screen was not razed until many, many years after the drive-in closed.
Some of the major first-run movies I drove some distance to see out here on double bills were “The Facts of Life,” “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” and the original “101 Dalmatians.”
Is this the theater that played a roadshow engagement of “Doctor Zhivago”? If not, can anyone tell me where that first played in Houston? Saw it on Memorial Day weekend in 1966.
As someone who was stationed at Fort Polk in 1966, I’m trying to track down the names of the three indoor Downtown Leesville moviehouses and the name of the drive-in that was fairly close to town and Fort Polk.
Can anyone help here? There are no theater listings on Cinema Treasures for Leesville theaters.
As someone who was stationed at Fort Polk in 1966, I’m trying to track down the names of the three indoor Downtown Leesville moviehouses and the name of the drive-in that was fairly close to town and Fort Polk.
Can anyone help here? There are no theater listings on Cinema Treasures for Leesville theaters.
As someone who was stationed at Fort Polk in 1966, I’m trying to track down the names of the three indoor Downtown Leesville moviehouses and the name of the drive-in that was fairly close to town and Fort Polk.
Can anyone help here? There are no theater listings on Cinema Treasures for Leesville theaters.
Various sources list the capacity for the Gaiety/Gayety and the later Fulton as 1,727, 1,532 and, later still, 1,475. Capacities tended to shrink as newer, wider, more-legroom seats were installed.
The Fulton for decades played nearly all first-run Universal/Universal-International pictures. It shared 20th Century Fox films about 50-50 with the nearly adjacent John P. Harris (later Gateway) Theatre.
With a tip of the hat to Ron3853 for listing the Fulton’s films from mid-1958 onward, big hits from the 1949-58 period included “Wake of the Red Witch,” “I Was a Male War Bride,” “Sands of Iwo Jima,” “Broken Arrow,” “Harvey,” “The Quiet Man,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Hans Christian Andersen,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “The Moon Is Blue,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “The Glenn Miller Story,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “The Egyptian,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” “To Hell and Back,” “Carousel,” “The King and I,”
“Written on the Wind” and “The Young Lions.”
The present Byham includes not only the original Fulton Theatre but its 235-seat sibling, a shoebox auditorium whose identity mainly was the Fulton Mini but which sometimes was called Fulton II and finally the Fulton Annex.
It was located at 101 Sixth Street (the main Fulton was at 103 Sixth Street) and opened in March 1970 with a six-week moveover engagement of “Anne of the Thousand Days.” The bill of fare was a mix of moveover runs, frequently from the Fulton, of hits such as “MAS*H,” “The Stewardesses” and “Joe” to a mix of lower-profile films, softcore porno, reissues, exploitation films and the occasional distinguished first run such as “Sounder” (18 weeks) and “Claudine.”
Eventually the Fulton Mini became the Downtown venue of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which used what it called the Fulton Annex for foreign and independent American art fare, including Three Rivers Arts Festival screenings.
Since losing the Fulton Annex, the front part of which became the Byham’s interior box office, Pittsburgh Filmmakers has been running movies at three venues: Regent Square Theatre, Melwood Screening Room in North Oakland and a Downtown theater long known as the Art Cinema and later rechristened the Harris.
Despite many misleading Internet and phone directory indications to the contrary, Benedum Center, and the Stanley Theatre before it, is not and was not ever at 719 Liberty Avenue. That’s the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, not the theater, which is on the east side of Seventh Street between Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue.
And though it’s true that the Stanley began in 1928 with a capacity of 3,886 seats, the costly transformation of the theater into Benedum Center, with all new, more comfortable seats, reduced the capacity by about 1,000 to roughly 2,880 seats. I say roughly because the capacity is altered for some performances.
The Stanley was for decades the largest moviehouse in Western Pennsylvania.
It played virtually every major first-run Warner Bros. film from 1928 through the mid-1960s, by which time booking patterns changed.
The Stanley also was the Pittsburgh premiere site for many Disney films, the bigger RKO-Radio pictures and approximately half of all Paramount pictures, the other half going to Loew’s Penn.
For many years up until the December 1953 installation of Cinerama in the nearby Warner Theatre, the remaining Warner, RKO and Disney films made their local debuts at the Warner, including the Warner Bros. blockbuster “A Streetcar Named Desire” for an extended run.
But generally, up until the end of 1953, the Warner was used as a moveover house for its bigger sibling, the Stanley. Pictures would play at the Stanley for a week or two before moving to the Warner, which had about half of the Stanley’s capacity.
The occasional booking jam resulted in the Stanley picking up an occasional 1940s or 1950s MGM film such as “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Athena.”
Despite the fact virtually all Columbia pictures opened at the smaller John P. Harris Theatre, Columbia put its 1954 blockbuster “From Here to Eternity” into the Stanley, with its much higher earning potential.
Many thanks to Ron3853 for posting lists of Stanley film openings from mid-1958 onward.
Some of the many pictures to open at the Stanley earlier were “Rear Window,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “A Star Is Born,” “The High and the Mighty,” “White Heat,” “Cinderella,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “House of Wax,” “Shane,” “Battle Cry,” “Sayonara,” “The Pajama Game,” “The Bad Seed,” “The Searchers,” “Mister Roberts,” “The Country Girl,” “The Rose Tattoo,” “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant.”
This was the second theater called the Brushton in the Pittsburgh community of Brushton. (There’s a new separate listing for the original.) This one may have had 631 seats as mentioned above, but I also found an indication it had just 400 seats. The theater existed from 1923-50. The earlier Brushton closed in 1921.
One of many Capitol theaters in and around Pittsburgh, this one was in the Beltzhoover section of Pittsburgh.
It may have been called the New Capitol when it opened in 1919 with a reported 750 seats. Later listings indicate it had 650-690 seats and more specifically the 663 mentioned by Rick Aubrey.
The address may have been 120, 124 or 126 Beltzhoover or may have enveloped all of that street frontage.
By 1973 it was a boarded up service station. By 1983 it was Village Pest Control. The property is listed now as being owned by CMN Management LLC.
The theater existed from 1915 (initial capacity possibly 850) through maybe as late as 1964 (776 capacity corroborated). Of the six East Liberty moviehouses that survived into the 1950s, it ranked fifth in the pecking order of when it played movies as they moved through the then-high-earning neighborhood.
Movies began their East Liberty showings at either the Sheridan Square or the Liberty (depending on the distributor) and sometimes the Regent, then moved on into mix ‘n’ match double bills at the Enright, the nearby Shadyside (often concurrently with the Enright) and finally the Cameraphone. (The Triangle got them last.)
The Cameraphone sometimes used the same double bills as the Enright, normally about two weeks later. Usually the bill of fare changed twice a week.
In January 1953 the Cameraphone had the exclusive rerelease of the landmark 1945 exploitation film “Mom and Dad” (1945), an occasion so heavily hyped for its daring content that the booking of the film condemned by the Legion of Decency led to the theater being placed off limits for Catholics for several weeks.
The picture played for 26 days, complete with gender-segregated showings daily and book-selling appearances by the ubiquitous Elliot Forbes, who was portrayed by different actors/lecturers in dozens of theaters around the country concurrently.
The success of the booking and decreasing attendance for late-run movies in the mushrooming TV era led the Cameraphone’s management to try racier fare (“We Want a Child,” “The French Line,” “Bitter Rice,” “Striporama”) with increasing frequency but with none of “Mom and Dad’s” exceptional success.
By 1955 the Cameraphone was trying triple bills of action films.
Advertising vanished from the daily newspapers during most of the theater’s final decade except when it joined the Art Cinema (Downtown) and/or several drive-ins in playing especially adult and softcore sex films.
The theater was razed in the mid-1960s and the property enveloped by the disastrous Penn Circle redevelopment. The specific plot of land once occupied by the Cameraphone became a lawn with benches, a small traffic circle and possibly part of the busway.
The relatively narrow theater was characterized by the fact trains passed by behind its screen wall and by the slightly musty smell of its popcorn and aged carpeting. Theater maintenance was functional at best.
There was a vestibule and a concession area, but minimal separation of the lobby from the auditorium, so that if one entered the theater before an earlier performance had concluded, it was almost impossible not to be aware of what was happening on screen.
The theater may have has as few as 349 seats when it was the Cameraphone. If indeed it grew to 700 seats, one of the renovations may have included taking over an adjacent building.
The theater was a 700-seater with distinctive light fixtures (clusters of little orange lights, if I recall) along the side walls.
Twinned roughly down the middle, it had 417 seats on one side and 390 on the other. Some of the original character was sacrificed, which is always the case nice old houses are halved or quartered.
The Bellevue closed Sept, 2, 2002.
The building is occupied now by something called (I believe) Dollar General.
Thanks, Ken. I always appreciated that the restaurant’s owners retained a suggestion of the old marquee.
The (Harris) Beechview Theatre also was known as the Olympic and New Olympic. The structure was used for many years by American Legion Post 740, but by 1983 it was boarded up and advertised as being for sale. The property was sold in 1997 for $200,000 and has a real estate tax value of $238,200. Unsure of its present use.
By 1983 the property was occupied by a shoe store and a jewelry store.
Millard (nor Miller) and his older brother Ralph Green ran the Guild. Both are deceased.
The theater opened as the Princess, though it’s not clear whether the Green brothers' father owned and operated it from the beginning or whether he took over in 1944, which is apparently when the Princess became the Beacon, named for a nearby street.
Though a late-run neighborhood theater in its pre-Guild days, the Beacon showed an opera version of “Of Mice and Men,” of which the Internet Movie DataBase has no record, in August 1951.
After an extensive renovation that reduced the capacity to 500, the newly rechristened Guild reopened as an art house at Christmas 1954 with the Laurence Harvey version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which lasted seven weeks.
Big hits of the 1950s included “The Green Scarf” (11 weeks), which was a British thriller that has vanished from the planet, “The Sheep Has Five Legs” (eight weeks), “The Ladykillers” (10 weeks), “Lust for Life” (seven weeks before MGM pulled the print), “Wee Geordie” (14), “A Touch of Larceny” (six), “Sons and Lovers” (eight).
The many great films that opened here for shorter runs include “Ugetsu,” “The Killing” and “The Seventh Seal.”
In 1960 the theater brought in the Melina Mercouri blockbuster “Never on Sunday,” which broke house records in its 21-week run. “Tunes of Glory” lasted nine weeks, a subrun of “La Dolce Vita” held on for seven and “Only Two Can Play” for eight.
Mercouri returned in “Phaedra” stayed for 26 or 28 weeks in 1962-63, though reportedly taking in less than “Never on Sunday.”
Cut to 1968. When the French lesbian drama “Therese and Isabelle” opened on a Wednesday in 1968, it was targeted for a raid by the Pittsburgh district attorney. (Note: I cannot account for the date July 19, 1969, that was typed into a legal document shown above and other dates in that document. My time frame is easily verified by microfilm.)
I happened to be working an evening shift that week at The Pittsburgh Press when the call came in from the DA’s office that a raid was to take place during a mid-evening (the 8 p.m.) Friday performance after a token viewing of the evening’s first (the 6 p.m.) performance by someone sent by the DA
Beyond being annoyed that a somewhat legitimate art film was about to be shut down and that the raid was being rigged in the manner it was, I was quadruply dismayed because the warning to the newspapers was designed to draw calalry-to-the-rescue media coverage and because my working hours that week would not permit me to catch the picture before it was closed down.
The raid took place precisely on cue, and the theater lost its picture. But when “Therese and Isabelle” later was cleared to re-open, lines stretched around the block, and the Guild shattered all house records. The notorious movie burned out after 12 weeks as word crept out that it was leisurely, artsy and much less explicit than expected.
Among the bigger hits that followed were “The Libertine” (eight weeks), “Putney Swope” (13), “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?” (10), “The Lickerish Quartet” (12) and “I Never Sang for My Father” (eight).
By mid-1972, suffering from competition for bookings from several other newer Pittsburgh art houses and some reported differences with distributors, the Guild launched a new policy of playing double bills of recent commercial hits and, more often, double bills of classics.
Partly because of the Guild’s proximity to the colleges located in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, the theater began booking combinations of classics and cult favorites, especially the films of Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, all of whom were enjoying a renewed vogue. Woody Allen’s recent comedies, but not his dramas, fit comfortably into the new agenda. Mel Brooks joined the repertoire, too.
Films dealing with drugs humorously or hysterically (“Yellow Submarine” and “Reefer Madness” being the ultimate examples) or into which an hallucinogenic nature could be read (“Fantasia,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Freaks”) were recycled regularly, too. “Fantasia” returned every few months for years.
The theater closed at the end of 1978 ignominiously with a second-run engagement of “(National Lampoon’s) Animal House,” which was showing in several other theaters the same week.
The theater had exhausted the audience for its cult classics, which had returned so many times they seemed to have worn out their welcome.
Though it would be easy to blame the demise of the Guild, like that of dozens of classic/rep houses across the country in the 1980s, on the advent of home video, which mushroomed in 1982, the theater in fact closed three to four years earlier.
The Guild was missed immediately and since then by those of us who frequented it.
A bonus on any visit was interacting with the Green brothers, who were the sort of mischievous, good-natured “characters” who too soon vanished from the exhibition landscape they once made so colorful.
I don’t recall seeing anything in Deridder, but I thank you, Don and Billy for the information. From another source I learnhed that the third indoor was the Lee and that the drive-in was the Pines.
I seem to recall two of the indoors being on the same side of the street and one of the nicer ones being nearby on the opposite side of a side street.
I remember the Pines repeatedly playing a re-release of the eight-year-old “Thunder Road” as a co-feature or third feature and that the drive-in seemed to infested with mosquitos. The heat and humidity were so high you couldn’t keep the windows closed, and yet when the windows were open, you’d turn into a pin cushion.
Had no problems at any of the indoors.
Do you mind indicating what city you’re in, LM?
And have you visited any Pittsburgh theaters?
Your photos are often sensational, but in many cases where a posting is older than a year or two, I cannot access them. The same with Warren’s older PhotoBucket offerings. I have no idea why the links sometimes expire in time.
For reasons I’ve forgotten, I was always intrigued by the name Exeter Street Theatre when I was keeping track of Variety’s reported grosses for Boston moviehouses.
When I visited a Boston friend in 1972, we saw one or two of the latest releases in the heart of Boston (“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” was one), and somehow the subject of visiting the Exeter came up.
It happened to be playing a revival of Ozu’s “Tokyo Story” (1953), which I loved. But mainly I was struck by the uniqueness of the theater, which informed the experience of watching “Tokyo Story."
I’m sorry to learn the theater had difficulty getting major bookings and that it long ago stopped serving the filmgoing community.
The sheer capacity (a whopping 1,300 seats) must have made the theater difficult to maintain in terms of utilities, et al, and it may have had a weekly nut (operating expenses) greater than most distributors were willing to allow for.
Also, art house distributors tend to favor long runs in more intimate houses. Protracted engagements of "The Mouse That Roared” and “Cousin, Cousine” notwithstanding, I’m guessing most movies burned out too quickly at the large Exeter Street.
That’s an astonishing facade for a theater that did not survive long.
Lost Memory, You are an amazing source of information on old theaters. And you’re all over the map, literally, in terms of Cinema Treasures theaters you monitor.
I’m guessing you exhusted your resources on Leesville to come up with all four of those names and that there’s nowhere else on the Internet or in publication that I might find more information.
And I suppose that until someone from Leesville (a small town and therefore a long shot) or someone formerly stationed at Fort Polk can come up with Cinema Treasures entries for these four movie sites, I’m unlikely to make any headway here.
As someone who also was at Fort Gordon, I was lucky to find most of the Augusta GA moviehouses (all except the drive-in) on C.T., but I’ve had no luck tracking down the sites (a drive-in and one then-newish indoor theater in 1965) that were in a small South Carolina town just across the border from Augusta, GA. (Maybe it was Aiken SC.)
I thank you, LM, for your resources and your follow-through.
Like the Super 71 Drive-In in Belle Vernon, the Route 19 advertised in the Pittsburgh newspapers but was sufficiently far enough from the city that was able to play first-run movies concurrent with Downtown Pittsburgh and even, occasionally, just ahead of Pittsburgh.
The Route 19’s screen was plainly visible to motorists on Route 19. As Denny Pine says, the screen was not razed until many, many years after the drive-in closed.
Some of the major first-run movies I drove some distance to see out here on double bills were “The Facts of Life,” “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs” and the original “101 Dalmatians.”
Is this the theater that played a roadshow engagement of “Doctor Zhivago”? If not, can anyone tell me where that first played in Houston? Saw it on Memorial Day weekend in 1966.
Is Aiken the nearest city of some size in South Carolina?
As someone who was stationed at Fort Polk in 1966, I’m trying to track down the names of the three indoor Downtown Leesville moviehouses and the name of the drive-in that was fairly close to town and Fort Polk.
Can anyone help here? There are no theater listings on Cinema Treasures for Leesville theaters.
Thanks very much for any help.
As someone who was stationed at Fort Polk in 1966, I’m trying to track down the names of the three indoor Downtown Leesville moviehouses and the name of the drive-in that was fairly close to town and Fort Polk.
Can anyone help here? There are no theater listings on Cinema Treasures for Leesville theaters.
Thanks very much for any help.
As someone who was stationed at Fort Polk in 1966, I’m trying to track down the names of the three indoor Downtown Leesville moviehouses and the name of the drive-in that was fairly close to town and Fort Polk.
Can anyone help here? There are no theater listings on Cinema Treasures for Leesville theaters.
Thanks very much for any help.
Saw “Birdman of Alcatraz” here in the summer of 1962.
Ron3853, if you want to backdate your files on Downtown theater bookings from January 1949 through mid-1958, I can help.
Various sources list the capacity for the Gaiety/Gayety and the later Fulton as 1,727, 1,532 and, later still, 1,475. Capacities tended to shrink as newer, wider, more-legroom seats were installed.
The Fulton for decades played nearly all first-run Universal/Universal-International pictures. It shared 20th Century Fox films about 50-50 with the nearly adjacent John P. Harris (later Gateway) Theatre.
With a tip of the hat to Ron3853 for listing the Fulton’s films from mid-1958 onward, big hits from the 1949-58 period included “Wake of the Red Witch,” “I Was a Male War Bride,” “Sands of Iwo Jima,” “Broken Arrow,” “Harvey,” “The Quiet Man,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Hans Christian Andersen,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “The Moon Is Blue,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “The Glenn Miller Story,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “The Egyptian,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” “To Hell and Back,” “Carousel,” “The King and I,”
“Written on the Wind” and “The Young Lions.”
The present Byham includes not only the original Fulton Theatre but its 235-seat sibling, a shoebox auditorium whose identity mainly was the Fulton Mini but which sometimes was called Fulton II and finally the Fulton Annex.
It was located at 101 Sixth Street (the main Fulton was at 103 Sixth Street) and opened in March 1970 with a six-week moveover engagement of “Anne of the Thousand Days.” The bill of fare was a mix of moveover runs, frequently from the Fulton, of hits such as “MAS*H,” “The Stewardesses” and “Joe” to a mix of lower-profile films, softcore porno, reissues, exploitation films and the occasional distinguished first run such as “Sounder” (18 weeks) and “Claudine.”
Eventually the Fulton Mini became the Downtown venue of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which used what it called the Fulton Annex for foreign and independent American art fare, including Three Rivers Arts Festival screenings.
Since losing the Fulton Annex, the front part of which became the Byham’s interior box office, Pittsburgh Filmmakers has been running movies at three venues: Regent Square Theatre, Melwood Screening Room in North Oakland and a Downtown theater long known as the Art Cinema and later rechristened the Harris.
Despite many misleading Internet and phone directory indications to the contrary, Benedum Center, and the Stanley Theatre before it, is not and was not ever at 719 Liberty Avenue. That’s the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, not the theater, which is on the east side of Seventh Street between Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue.
And though it’s true that the Stanley began in 1928 with a capacity of 3,886 seats, the costly transformation of the theater into Benedum Center, with all new, more comfortable seats, reduced the capacity by about 1,000 to roughly 2,880 seats. I say roughly because the capacity is altered for some performances.
The Stanley was for decades the largest moviehouse in Western Pennsylvania.
It played virtually every major first-run Warner Bros. film from 1928 through the mid-1960s, by which time booking patterns changed.
The Stanley also was the Pittsburgh premiere site for many Disney films, the bigger RKO-Radio pictures and approximately half of all Paramount pictures, the other half going to Loew’s Penn.
For many years up until the December 1953 installation of Cinerama in the nearby Warner Theatre, the remaining Warner, RKO and Disney films made their local debuts at the Warner, including the Warner Bros. blockbuster “A Streetcar Named Desire” for an extended run.
But generally, up until the end of 1953, the Warner was used as a moveover house for its bigger sibling, the Stanley. Pictures would play at the Stanley for a week or two before moving to the Warner, which had about half of the Stanley’s capacity.
The occasional booking jam resulted in the Stanley picking up an occasional 1940s or 1950s MGM film such as “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Athena.”
Despite the fact virtually all Columbia pictures opened at the smaller John P. Harris Theatre, Columbia put its 1954 blockbuster “From Here to Eternity” into the Stanley, with its much higher earning potential.
Many thanks to Ron3853 for posting lists of Stanley film openings from mid-1958 onward.
Some of the many pictures to open at the Stanley earlier were “Rear Window,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “A Star Is Born,” “The High and the Mighty,” “White Heat,” “Cinderella,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “House of Wax,” “Shane,” “Battle Cry,” “Sayonara,” “The Pajama Game,” “The Bad Seed,” “The Searchers,” “Mister Roberts,” “The Country Girl,” “The Rose Tattoo,” “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant.”
This was the second theater called the Brushton in the Pittsburgh community of Brushton. (There’s a new separate listing for the original.) This one may have had 631 seats as mentioned above, but I also found an indication it had just 400 seats. The theater existed from 1923-50. The earlier Brushton closed in 1921.
It was also a dance studio at one point. My records indicate it closed in 1959, but I lack a precise date and the final attractions.