Going back to the pictures from Roger Rabbit, that is not the real El Rey. In the second linked photo, one can clearly see the One Wilshire building in the background, which puts this location somewhere downtown.
The one and only time I’ve ever been to the Lumiere was to see Sling Blade in late 1996 or early 1997. Don’t remember much about the theatre, other than it felt quaint and antiquated at the time.
The biggest problem with the article is that it was written by someone who has no experience in exhibition, and has only tangental and anecdotal “facts” to form their worldview.
The Movies was where you ended up if you wanted to see a movie that was so bad, every other theatre in the area decided not to play it. If it played at The Movies, it didn’t play at any of the UAs, or the Skyview Drive-In, or Scotts Valley. And if you went to The Movies, you were subjected to the worst cinema experience possible: extremely long and narrow “houses” with screens probably less than ten feet wide, with poorly maintained mono sound and a “I think we can fit this here” mentality when it came to the box office and snack bar. This theatre was so bad, even Troma wouldn’t play their worst dreck here. It was about the only place one could see the late 1980s output of Cannon and Empire Films. It is surely not missed.
Typical case of internet misappropriation and misrepresenting of other people’s hard work, and then having the lemmings respond not to the original points but the screwed up “facts.”
When I was an assistant manager at the Aptos Twin in the late 1980s, I got a call from the Area Manager (for whom I also was an assistant for at the 41st Avenue Playhouse), telling me that one of the storerooms upstairs needs to be emptied out. Didn’t matter what I did with what was in there, but that it all needed to go. Well, as it turns out, it was the poster room, and it had several thousand one-sheets from the 1960s and 1970s in otherwise immaculate condition (posters from National Screen Service were folded in those days), having been untouched since first use… if they even were used. An incredible treasure trove of artifacts from the era. It took two friends and I three trips in my 1964 Ford Falcon station wagon to get everything home. I have only one piece left from that entire collection, a one-sheet from the original Gone in 60 Seconds, for personal reasons, and there are times I still wish I had it, but that nights that followed, discovering and rediscovering all these older movies as I cataloged by hand everything I took home, was magical.
That is a mighty fine looking parcel of weeds. Thank you, owners of that plot of land, for bringing a little bit of dreariness to an otherwise boring area.
Following up on Joe Vogel’s post from May 2009… by the time I moved to Santa Cruz in 1982, the Playhouse was already a part of the UATC circuit. A late 1980s lawsuit against UATC by a local independent exhibitor (which can be read at View link) states UATC had already purchased Kindair by the time their Movie 1 & 2 Theatre opened in February of 1984.
I don’t know about the turning people away part, but I’ll never go back to the AVCO as long as the big auditorium remains twinned. AMC should take a lesson from the Del Mar in Santa Cruz, and restore the big house to its pre-split glory.
IMHO, the only negative this theatre has is the lousy parking all around Westwood. Heavily restricted street parking plus too expensive lot parking equals a tough time for anyone running the Crest.
If there was an inherent need to reopen the St. Francis, I would do everything I could to help make it happen. But with the San Francisco Centre cinemas one block down the street and the Metreon one more block over, this dead junkhole can go.
Now, what can we do to get the Northpoint back in operation as a commercial movie theatre?
That’s funny. I do work for a top five exhibitor, and my theatre saw a good uptick in attendance this summer. Our market share over our local competition also jumped up dramatically this summer. Maybe it’s because our theatre isn’t crappy, our projection isn’t crappy, and our staff isn’t crappy. And while the summer might not have filled with several soon-to-be-classic movies, what summer ever has been? Every September, we hear the same calls of how the just ended summer season was one of the worst ever, how there were only one or two truly worthy movies and how the endless stream of junk from Hollywood is going to kill the industry. What other great movies were released in the summer of 1975, along with Jaws? What other perennials were released the same timeframe in 1977, the summer of Star Wars? Or 1981, the summer of Raiders? Or 1984, the summer of Ghostbusters? We have enough time and distance to accurately judge.
Let’s go back 25 years, to 1985. Back to the Future was a smash, but what else came out that summer? The other major studio and indie distributed films of that summer were The Black Cauldron, Brewster’s Millions, The Bride, Cocoon, D.A.R.Y.L., Day of the Dead, The Emerald Forest, Explorers, Fletch, Fright Night, The Goonies, The Heavenly Kid, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Legend of Billie Jean, Lifeforce, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Man with One Red Shoe, My Science Project, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Ordeal by Innocence, Pale Rider, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Perfect, Prizzi’s Honor, The Protector, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Real Genius, Red Sonja, Return of the Living Dead, Return to Oz, Rustler’s Rhapsody, Secret Admirer, Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird, Silverado, St. Elmo’s Fire, The Stuff, Summer Rental, Teen Wolf, A View to a Kill, Volunteers, Warning Sign, Weird Science and Year of the Dragon.
Take a good look at that list. It’s about par for any summer. A lot of crap you’ve probably forgotten about, three or four titles you might watch once every ten years and two or three more you might actually own on DVD. The most shocking part of the list is that two of the five Best Picture nominees from that year, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Prizzi’s Honor, were released that summer. That didn’t happen very often, although it’s more likely to happen now there are ten BP nomination slots. But still, really think about it. How many of those movies did you see in theatres back then (assuming, of course, you were old enough at the time to go to see most of them). That summer, I saw Back to the Future, Cocoon, Explorers, Fletch, The Goonies, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Pale Rider, Prizzi’s Honor, Real Genius, Silverado, St. Elmo’s Fire and Weird Science in theatres. Of those, I only own one on DVD after all this time, which is of course Back to the Future. I’ll watch most of the others once every few years. But of the ones I didn’t see in theatres that I would ever watch again is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and I haven’t watched it in years.
Go back to any summer movie season in the past thirty five years and you’ll see the same thing over and over again. Mostly crap, a handful of films we’d watch if we stumbled across them on TV and a few we would actually own.
Except that movie attendance has been at a steady level for the past several years, despite the addition of all the new HDTV equipment. Unless one are a Ted Kaczynski-level recluse, most humans need to get out of the house from time to time, and movies are regularly one of the best and most cost-effective ways of doing so.
When I started working in movie theatres, as a teenager in 1986, there were about 1.05 billion movie tickets sold. VCRs still weren’t as prevalent as they’d become a few years later (hell, Sony was still making and selling Beta machines), laserdiscs were a niche market and televisions were still 4:3. We were just about to be introduced to a new gaming system called Sega, and we were a decade away from DVDs being introduced or from the internet finding mass acceptance. Mobile phones, if you could even afford one, were large and only made phone calls for another 15 years. Widescreen HDTVs were twentysomething years from becoming a must-have for even the most ardent early adopter. Yet, here we are, a generation later, with all this technology available to us, with all these different ways to watch movies in the comfort of our homes, or even on the road on our smart phones or DVD-equipped SUVs, and 1.4 billion movie tickets were sold in 2009.
The end of movie theatres has been predicted for… well, almost as long as there has been movie theatres. From the days of the nickelodeon to today, some nutjob has been screaming doom and gloom about exhibition. And yes, movie attendance has fallen by 2/3 since the days when 75m people went to the movies in the 1920s and 1930s, but we humans still continue go to the movies, in boxes of all shapes and sizes, no matter what the size of our HDTV screen is, what our internet connection speed is, or what entertainment boxes we might have connected to the internet and our HDTV screens.
Please do, Titus. I wish I still had all my Sash Mill calendars.
Don’t worry Danny, you’ll see it again twice more… when you document the closing of the Westlake 8 and the Janss 9. :|
Going back to the pictures from Roger Rabbit, that is not the real El Rey. In the second linked photo, one can clearly see the One Wilshire building in the background, which puts this location somewhere downtown.
Bagdad Cafe opened in 1987, for the record.
The one and only time I’ve ever been to the Lumiere was to see Sling Blade in late 1996 or early 1997. Don’t remember much about the theatre, other than it felt quaint and antiquated at the time.
The biggest problem with the article is that it was written by someone who has no experience in exhibition, and has only tangental and anecdotal “facts” to form their worldview.
The Movies was where you ended up if you wanted to see a movie that was so bad, every other theatre in the area decided not to play it. If it played at The Movies, it didn’t play at any of the UAs, or the Skyview Drive-In, or Scotts Valley. And if you went to The Movies, you were subjected to the worst cinema experience possible: extremely long and narrow “houses” with screens probably less than ten feet wide, with poorly maintained mono sound and a “I think we can fit this here” mentality when it came to the box office and snack bar. This theatre was so bad, even Troma wouldn’t play their worst dreck here. It was about the only place one could see the late 1980s output of Cannon and Empire Films. It is surely not missed.
Those who wish to witness the destruction of the Beverly Center Cinemas can now do so, thanks to these photos from the crew who did the demolition.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=202713169745672&set=a.202712746412381.61420.198451240171865&type=1&theater
Typical case of internet misappropriation and misrepresenting of other people’s hard work, and then having the lemmings respond not to the original points but the screwed up “facts.”
The only movie I remember seeing here is The Hindenberg, but I seem to remember seeing it appear in a couple of movies from the 1970s.
When I was an assistant manager at the Aptos Twin in the late 1980s, I got a call from the Area Manager (for whom I also was an assistant for at the 41st Avenue Playhouse), telling me that one of the storerooms upstairs needs to be emptied out. Didn’t matter what I did with what was in there, but that it all needed to go. Well, as it turns out, it was the poster room, and it had several thousand one-sheets from the 1960s and 1970s in otherwise immaculate condition (posters from National Screen Service were folded in those days), having been untouched since first use… if they even were used. An incredible treasure trove of artifacts from the era. It took two friends and I three trips in my 1964 Ford Falcon station wagon to get everything home. I have only one piece left from that entire collection, a one-sheet from the original Gone in 60 Seconds, for personal reasons, and there are times I still wish I had it, but that nights that followed, discovering and rediscovering all these older movies as I cataloged by hand everything I took home, was magical.
Ironic how EW thinks the way to fix movie theatres is to make them less movie theatres and more gathering places that happen to also show movies.
clueless
That is a mighty fine looking parcel of weeds. Thank you, owners of that plot of land, for bringing a little bit of dreariness to an otherwise boring area.
Following up on Joe Vogel’s post from May 2009… by the time I moved to Santa Cruz in 1982, the Playhouse was already a part of the UATC circuit. A late 1980s lawsuit against UATC by a local independent exhibitor (which can be read at View link) states UATC had already purchased Kindair by the time their Movie 1 & 2 Theatre opened in February of 1984.
I don’t know about the turning people away part, but I’ll never go back to the AVCO as long as the big auditorium remains twinned. AMC should take a lesson from the Del Mar in Santa Cruz, and restore the big house to its pre-split glory.
Not surprisingly, it’s the best damn movie theatre in Los Angeles, bar none.
You gave the Beverly Center another chance, Chris. Give this new theatre a chance.
Nope. It was always going to be a Rave.
Not to be mean, but when does the hilarity start in all those clips?
IMHO, the only negative this theatre has is the lousy parking all around Westwood. Heavily restricted street parking plus too expensive lot parking equals a tough time for anyone running the Crest.
If there was an inherent need to reopen the St. Francis, I would do everything I could to help make it happen. But with the San Francisco Centre cinemas one block down the street and the Metreon one more block over, this dead junkhole can go.
Now, what can we do to get the Northpoint back in operation as a commercial movie theatre?
That’s funny. I do work for a top five exhibitor, and my theatre saw a good uptick in attendance this summer. Our market share over our local competition also jumped up dramatically this summer. Maybe it’s because our theatre isn’t crappy, our projection isn’t crappy, and our staff isn’t crappy. And while the summer might not have filled with several soon-to-be-classic movies, what summer ever has been? Every September, we hear the same calls of how the just ended summer season was one of the worst ever, how there were only one or two truly worthy movies and how the endless stream of junk from Hollywood is going to kill the industry. What other great movies were released in the summer of 1975, along with Jaws? What other perennials were released the same timeframe in 1977, the summer of Star Wars? Or 1981, the summer of Raiders? Or 1984, the summer of Ghostbusters? We have enough time and distance to accurately judge.
Let’s go back 25 years, to 1985. Back to the Future was a smash, but what else came out that summer? The other major studio and indie distributed films of that summer were The Black Cauldron, Brewster’s Millions, The Bride, Cocoon, D.A.R.Y.L., Day of the Dead, The Emerald Forest, Explorers, Fletch, Fright Night, The Goonies, The Heavenly Kid, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Legend of Billie Jean, Lifeforce, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Man with One Red Shoe, My Science Project, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Ordeal by Innocence, Pale Rider, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Perfect, Prizzi’s Honor, The Protector, Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Real Genius, Red Sonja, Return of the Living Dead, Return to Oz, Rustler’s Rhapsody, Secret Admirer, Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird, Silverado, St. Elmo’s Fire, The Stuff, Summer Rental, Teen Wolf, A View to a Kill, Volunteers, Warning Sign, Weird Science and Year of the Dragon.
Take a good look at that list. It’s about par for any summer. A lot of crap you’ve probably forgotten about, three or four titles you might watch once every ten years and two or three more you might actually own on DVD. The most shocking part of the list is that two of the five Best Picture nominees from that year, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Prizzi’s Honor, were released that summer. That didn’t happen very often, although it’s more likely to happen now there are ten BP nomination slots. But still, really think about it. How many of those movies did you see in theatres back then (assuming, of course, you were old enough at the time to go to see most of them). That summer, I saw Back to the Future, Cocoon, Explorers, Fletch, The Goonies, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Pale Rider, Prizzi’s Honor, Real Genius, Silverado, St. Elmo’s Fire and Weird Science in theatres. Of those, I only own one on DVD after all this time, which is of course Back to the Future. I’ll watch most of the others once every few years. But of the ones I didn’t see in theatres that I would ever watch again is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and I haven’t watched it in years.
Go back to any summer movie season in the past thirty five years and you’ll see the same thing over and over again. Mostly crap, a handful of films we’d watch if we stumbled across them on TV and a few we would actually own.
Except that movie attendance has been at a steady level for the past several years, despite the addition of all the new HDTV equipment. Unless one are a Ted Kaczynski-level recluse, most humans need to get out of the house from time to time, and movies are regularly one of the best and most cost-effective ways of doing so.
When I started working in movie theatres, as a teenager in 1986, there were about 1.05 billion movie tickets sold. VCRs still weren’t as prevalent as they’d become a few years later (hell, Sony was still making and selling Beta machines), laserdiscs were a niche market and televisions were still 4:3. We were just about to be introduced to a new gaming system called Sega, and we were a decade away from DVDs being introduced or from the internet finding mass acceptance. Mobile phones, if you could even afford one, were large and only made phone calls for another 15 years. Widescreen HDTVs were twentysomething years from becoming a must-have for even the most ardent early adopter. Yet, here we are, a generation later, with all this technology available to us, with all these different ways to watch movies in the comfort of our homes, or even on the road on our smart phones or DVD-equipped SUVs, and 1.4 billion movie tickets were sold in 2009.
The end of movie theatres has been predicted for… well, almost as long as there has been movie theatres. From the days of the nickelodeon to today, some nutjob has been screaming doom and gloom about exhibition. And yes, movie attendance has fallen by 2/3 since the days when 75m people went to the movies in the 1920s and 1930s, but we humans still continue go to the movies, in boxes of all shapes and sizes, no matter what the size of our HDTV screen is, what our internet connection speed is, or what entertainment boxes we might have connected to the internet and our HDTV screens.
Is Chicken Little at it again? Did he lot learn anything from when he posted nearly the exact same rant a year ago?
Don’t know why I never noticed this before, but ZaSu Pitts' name is spelled incorrectly in the theatre description.
Saw my first movie here in many a year a few days ago, and the theatre is still as charming as ever.
Except Sensurround wasn’t rumbling seats. It was a precursor to what we call an LFE today.