An item about the recent reopening of the Niles Theatre after a five-month hiatus was published in the November 8, 1965, issue of Boxoffice. The item refers to the theater as being 28 years old, so that would give an opening date of about 1937.
Judging from the photos, the facade certainly looks like a 1930s Art Deco-influenced design. It’s hard to tell anything from the side wall, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen bricks of quite that size and proportion in California before, and bricks that large usually don’t show up in pre-WWII buildings. That sort of brick must be peculiar to the Modoc Plateau, and might be almost any age. Those bands of concrete are odd, too. They might indicate a rebuilding, or they might not. It’s a puzzling building.
The August 28, 1948, issue of Boxoffice said that E.W. Kugel, owner of the State, was replacing the theater with a new quonset hut building that would seat 450 patrons. It was expected to open in September.
Later, when Kugel opened the Maple Theatre in Mapleton, Iowa, Boxoffice ran an item about him in their issue of January 21, 1951. It said that Kugel had bought the original State in 1934, and had opened the new State in 1948.
The State is not specifically named in an ad which appeared in Boxoffice’s clearing house section on September 29, 1969, but the location of the theater for sale was Hosltein, Iowa. The 375-seat house, offered for $35,000, was described as a long-established business, on the market for the first time.
Most probably the building was merely gutted, but since blocks of old buildings such as this one share common walls with their neighbors, it’s difficult to tell how much of the interior of this one might have been destroyed by the fire. The floors and/or roof might have been gone altogether, or just moderately damaged. A heavy masonry facade and rear wall of a narrow building that’s part of a row will often survive a fire that completely destroys the interior.
The earliest mention of the Niles Theatre I’ve found in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the August 10, 1946, issue, which said that the house had reopened after a complete renovation.
However, the California Index has a card referencing the March 26, 1932, issue of Motion Picture Herald, saying that Edward Niles had taken over the Alhambra Theatre in Alturas. Unless Niles later built a new theater, then Alhambra must be an aka for this house.
The original single-screen Suniland Theatre was designed by architect Robert E. Collins, according to an item in the September 30, 1963, issue of Boxoffice Magazine which announced that construction had begun on the project.
The Tower Theatre was rebuilt in 1937. I don’t know if it was a ground-up rebuilding or merely an extreme remodeling job. An article about Wometco Theatres in the April 16, 1938, issue of Boxoffice Magazine mentioned in passing that Robert E. Collins had been the architect for the rebuilding of the Tower Theatre the previous year.
Boxoffice Magazine agrees with the L.A. Times. Their April 16, 1938, issue said that architect Robert E. Collins was drawing the plans for a new Savoy Theatre in Nassau to replace the one that had recently been destroyed by fire. The seating capacity of the new Savoy was to be 650.
A photo of the new Art Moderne entrance of the Savannah Theatre appeared in the November 21, 1951, issue of Boxoffice magazine. According to the caption, the rebuilt theater had been designed by Florida architect Robert E. Collins, with local architect Carl E. Helfrich associated.
A photo of the front of the Florida Theatre was published in the November 24, 1951, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption identified the architects of the modern house as the Jacksonville firm of Kemp, Bunch, and Jackson.
The firm, founded in 1946, was the successor to the firm of architect Roy A. Benjamin, and the company is still in operation as KBJ Architects.
The Center Theatre was under construction and expected to open in March, according to the January 6, 1940, issue of Boxoffice. The architect was Robert E. Collins.
The July 11, 1953, issue of Boxoffice Magazine says that the State Theatre in Hastings had been destroyed by a fire. The owner planned to reopen the State at a different location in Hastings, but a later issue of the magazine says that he had decided instead to buy the Colonial Theatre in Hamburg, Iowa.
In issues of Film Daily Yearbook prior to 1941, the State should appear under its former name, the Cornhusker Theatre. It had been remodeled and renamed by a new owner that year, according to Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of December 13, 1941.
A tiny glimpse of the Webster Theater can be seen in this photo. It looks like the original Orpheum Theatre building is still standing next door. They could put a second screen for the Webster in there and have a hundred-year-old theater, sort of. But then, even having a 93-year-old theater is pretty impressive these days.
Under the headline “Brookfield Theatre Unveiled by Nutmeg,” the August 31, 1970, issue of Boxoffice Magazine published the following item: “The independent Nutmeg Theatre Circuit has opened the newly constructed, 800-seat Fine Arts Theatre, Brookfield (suburban Danbury). Derek Hilton is resident manager. Robert Smerling and Norman Bialek head the circuit.”
The seating capacity might never have been as high as 650. The figure Boxoffice published for the Varsity might have been exaggerated, as was often the case. Still, in the 1940s, theater owners did tend to cram the seats pretty close.
But whether the Varsity’s stated capacity was exaggerated or not, I’m sure the Art had fewer seats, as by the 1960s patrons were demanding more comfort, meaning bigger seats spaced farther apart. Judging from the satellite view of the building, I don’t think they could have put in more than 300 seats in that space and maintained the level of comfort a 1960s audience would have wanted, so your estimate probably wasn’t that far off.
The into definitely needs to be rewritten. It currently isn’t about the theater at all.
And while we’re at it, Modern or Mid-Century Modern (the latter more often referring to interior design, but increasingly used to describe buildings as well) should definitely be added to the choice of architectural styles available when submitting theaters to the site. The more issues of Boxoffice from the 1940s on I look at, full of photos of totally modern theater buildings, the more obvious it becomes to me that hundreds of theaters were built in purely modern styles. It doesn’t make sense to call them At Moderne, because most of them have left every trace of that style behind.
What we should call some of the recent multiplexes and megaplexes that borrow heavily from Art Deco and Art Modern, I don’t know. I guess Neo-Deco or Neo-Moderne might do, but I’ve come to think of them as Mannerist Moderne, since they usually have an exaggerated “referential” quality to their designs, characteristic of Mannerism.
But I don’t think any architecture critic has used that appellation.
In the 1970s, the late critic C. Ray Smith wrote a book called “Supermannerism,” which was mostly about architect Paul Rudolph, but the term appears never to have stuck as a stylistic appellation. I think he was on the right track, though. The works of more recent celebrity architects such as Michael Graves look Mannerist as hell to me.
I’ve searched all the usual sources and can’t find any references to either Roy Chase or R.E. Struve as architects, and few references to them of any sort. The California Index contains one card citing a 1928 L.A. Times article saying that R.E. Struve was financing the construction of a building at Encinitas, and there’s a PDF about the coast highway citing a couple of 1925 Oceanside Blade articles saying that Roy Chase had built a hotel there. As far as I’ve been able to discover, neither Chase nor Struve was an architect, but both were local developers.
Until some convincing evidence turns up, I’m inclined to say that the actual architect of this theater remains unknown.
The Art Deco designation at top is the another result of the confusion between the theater and the auditorium. The auditorium I’d consider Streamline Moderne with some lingering Art Deco elements, so I’d say it would be best classified as Art Moderne. The theater, on the other hand, was a fairly pure Midcentury Modern design, although those split, angled columns certainly have a Googiesque quality. However, this theater was built before there ever was a Googie’s coffee shop.
Some of the moderne and modernist buildings designed for theaters were probably among the inspirations for what became the Googie style. What many theater architects did in their designs was to use the building exterior itself as an advertisement, which is essentially what John Lautner did when he come up with the first Googie’s coffee shop design in 1949. I see Googie not so much a style of its own as I do a modernist-influenced extension of the whole theatrical approach to architecture as something to pull in the customers, which was done even with the earliest big movie houses built in the 1910s.
And if form follows function, and one of the functions of a commercial building is to attract the attention of potential patrons, then I suppose Googieism can be seen as an expression, somewhat bent, of the first modernist credo, even though it’s not entirely within the modernist aesthetic.
I’d go so far as to say that placing as much or more emphasis on architectural effects to attract attention as on functionality of use is one of the primary distinctions between Moderne Modern, just as it was a major distinction between the somewhat eclectic classical revival theater designs of architects such as Thomas Lamb, and the purer classical revival designs of academic architects such as McKim, Mead, and White. It’s also one of the reasons why purist modern architects usually saw the moderne as an example of architectural backsliding, little better than the various revival styles, pure or not, that they wanted to displace.
But I’m sure architecture critics will be arguing about these distinctions for decades to come, so whatever descriptive terms eventually get adopted for these various styles are unlikely to be decided by me. I have fun blathering about it on the Internets, though.
Life Magazine photo of the Marquis, long after it had closed as a regular movie house and had become become the AMPAS Academy Award Theatre. This 1972 photo was taken only a few years before the buildng was demolished.
The Royal Theatre in Hanford was one of three houses taken over by Robert Lippert in 1942. Their former operator, Arthur Fukuda, closed them when, on March 27 that year, a curfew was imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry.
The other Fukuda houses Lippert took over were in Sanger and in Guadalupe, California.
The Royal was one of three theaters taken over from Arthur Fukuda by Robert Lippert in April, 1942. Fukuda had closed his three houses when a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry on March 27 that year.
According to the March 18, 1949, issue of Boxoffice, Lippert had recently bought the Sanger Theatre, formerly operated by Frank Panero. Lippert continued to operate the Royal as well. The Sanger Theatre is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
The Southwest Builder and Contractor article I cited in my February 20, 2008, comment above was from May, 1938, but it appears that the construction of the Sierra Theatre was delayed for many years. The opening of the Sierra was announced in the August 17, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, which said the house had opened on August 6. The opening feature was “Canyon Passage.”
The article did say that completion of the project had been delayed due to shortages of materials, but it seems unlikely that such a delay would have lasted six years. Most likely, construction was not begun until near or shortly after the end of WWII.
The Boxoffice item also gives a much larger seating capacity- 894- than the Southwest Builder & Contractor article had. The theater obviously must have been redesigned between the original announcement and the actual construction.
The article adds that Frank Panero and his sons Ernest and August would continue to operate the Delano Theatre, as well. It also said that in addition to the Delano houses the Panero Theatre Company was then operating two houses in each of the valley towns of West Delano, Shafter, Reedley, and Wasco, and one house each in McFarland and Sanger.
I finally found some more information about the Tiffany. Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of November 7, 1966, said that Robert Lippert and Harold Goldman had opened their new Tiffany Theatre on November 2, with an invitational event that included the American premier of the Greek film “Young Aphrodites.” The architect was Jack Edwards. The stated seating capacity was 400.
The November 2 opening was somewhat later than the projected opening of late May, which had been announced in the April 11, 1966, issue of Boxoffice.
The Lynn and New Lynn Theaters were mentioned in the April 10, 1937, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Apparently both theaters were in operation simultaneously for a time.
The Boxoffice item reads: “Ronald Vincent has changed the names of his two theatres at Laguna Beach, the Lynn being redubbed the Laguna and the New Lynn being called the Southcoast.”
The only mention of the Royal Theatre under that name that I can find in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the June 25, 1949, issue, which says that Robert L. Lippert had sold the house to Moses Hernandez.
But the April 22, 1942, issue of Boxoffice published an item that said that Robert Lippert was taking over three houses, owned by Arthur Fukuda, which had been closed because of the Japanese curfew. It named the three theaters as the Royal in Hanford, the Royal in Sanger, and the Guadalupe in Guadalupe. I think it’s possible (and even likely) that Boxoffice’s copy writer got the name of the Guadalupe house wrong (they did misspell Hanford as Handford) and that all three of Fukuda’s theaters were called the Royal.
It’s not surprising that a Japanese American would have owned these theaters. Many of the agricultural areas of California had substantial Japanese populations during that era, and American-born Japanese, unlike those who had immigrated, were not prohibited from owning real property. Perhaps Arthur Fukuda has descendants who can tell us something about the Royal Theatre.
An item about the recent reopening of the Niles Theatre after a five-month hiatus was published in the November 8, 1965, issue of Boxoffice. The item refers to the theater as being 28 years old, so that would give an opening date of about 1937.
Judging from the photos, the facade certainly looks like a 1930s Art Deco-influenced design. It’s hard to tell anything from the side wall, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen bricks of quite that size and proportion in California before, and bricks that large usually don’t show up in pre-WWII buildings. That sort of brick must be peculiar to the Modoc Plateau, and might be almost any age. Those bands of concrete are odd, too. They might indicate a rebuilding, or they might not. It’s a puzzling building.
The August 28, 1948, issue of Boxoffice said that E.W. Kugel, owner of the State, was replacing the theater with a new quonset hut building that would seat 450 patrons. It was expected to open in September.
Later, when Kugel opened the Maple Theatre in Mapleton, Iowa, Boxoffice ran an item about him in their issue of January 21, 1951. It said that Kugel had bought the original State in 1934, and had opened the new State in 1948.
The State is not specifically named in an ad which appeared in Boxoffice’s clearing house section on September 29, 1969, but the location of the theater for sale was Hosltein, Iowa. The 375-seat house, offered for $35,000, was described as a long-established business, on the market for the first time.
Most probably the building was merely gutted, but since blocks of old buildings such as this one share common walls with their neighbors, it’s difficult to tell how much of the interior of this one might have been destroyed by the fire. The floors and/or roof might have been gone altogether, or just moderately damaged. A heavy masonry facade and rear wall of a narrow building that’s part of a row will often survive a fire that completely destroys the interior.
The earliest mention of the Niles Theatre I’ve found in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the August 10, 1946, issue, which said that the house had reopened after a complete renovation.
However, the California Index has a card referencing the March 26, 1932, issue of Motion Picture Herald, saying that Edward Niles had taken over the Alhambra Theatre in Alturas. Unless Niles later built a new theater, then Alhambra must be an aka for this house.
The original single-screen Suniland Theatre was designed by architect Robert E. Collins, according to an item in the September 30, 1963, issue of Boxoffice Magazine which announced that construction had begun on the project.
The Tower Theatre was rebuilt in 1937. I don’t know if it was a ground-up rebuilding or merely an extreme remodeling job. An article about Wometco Theatres in the April 16, 1938, issue of Boxoffice Magazine mentioned in passing that Robert E. Collins had been the architect for the rebuilding of the Tower Theatre the previous year.
Boxoffice Magazine agrees with the L.A. Times. Their April 16, 1938, issue said that architect Robert E. Collins was drawing the plans for a new Savoy Theatre in Nassau to replace the one that had recently been destroyed by fire. The seating capacity of the new Savoy was to be 650.
A photo of the new Art Moderne entrance of the Savannah Theatre appeared in the November 21, 1951, issue of Boxoffice magazine. According to the caption, the rebuilt theater had been designed by Florida architect Robert E. Collins, with local architect Carl E. Helfrich associated.
A photo of the front of the Florida Theatre was published in the November 24, 1951, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. The caption identified the architects of the modern house as the Jacksonville firm of Kemp, Bunch, and Jackson.
The firm, founded in 1946, was the successor to the firm of architect Roy A. Benjamin, and the company is still in operation as KBJ Architects.
The Center Theatre was under construction and expected to open in March, according to the January 6, 1940, issue of Boxoffice. The architect was Robert E. Collins.
The July 11, 1953, issue of Boxoffice Magazine says that the State Theatre in Hastings had been destroyed by a fire. The owner planned to reopen the State at a different location in Hastings, but a later issue of the magazine says that he had decided instead to buy the Colonial Theatre in Hamburg, Iowa.
In issues of Film Daily Yearbook prior to 1941, the State should appear under its former name, the Cornhusker Theatre. It had been remodeled and renamed by a new owner that year, according to Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of December 13, 1941.
A tiny glimpse of the Webster Theater can be seen in this photo. It looks like the original Orpheum Theatre building is still standing next door. They could put a second screen for the Webster in there and have a hundred-year-old theater, sort of. But then, even having a 93-year-old theater is pretty impressive these days.
Under the headline “Brookfield Theatre Unveiled by Nutmeg,” the August 31, 1970, issue of Boxoffice Magazine published the following item: “The independent Nutmeg Theatre Circuit has opened the newly constructed, 800-seat Fine Arts Theatre, Brookfield (suburban Danbury). Derek Hilton is resident manager. Robert Smerling and Norman Bialek head the circuit.”
The seating capacity might never have been as high as 650. The figure Boxoffice published for the Varsity might have been exaggerated, as was often the case. Still, in the 1940s, theater owners did tend to cram the seats pretty close.
But whether the Varsity’s stated capacity was exaggerated or not, I’m sure the Art had fewer seats, as by the 1960s patrons were demanding more comfort, meaning bigger seats spaced farther apart. Judging from the satellite view of the building, I don’t think they could have put in more than 300 seats in that space and maintained the level of comfort a 1960s audience would have wanted, so your estimate probably wasn’t that far off.
The into definitely needs to be rewritten. It currently isn’t about the theater at all.
And while we’re at it, Modern or Mid-Century Modern (the latter more often referring to interior design, but increasingly used to describe buildings as well) should definitely be added to the choice of architectural styles available when submitting theaters to the site. The more issues of Boxoffice from the 1940s on I look at, full of photos of totally modern theater buildings, the more obvious it becomes to me that hundreds of theaters were built in purely modern styles. It doesn’t make sense to call them At Moderne, because most of them have left every trace of that style behind.
What we should call some of the recent multiplexes and megaplexes that borrow heavily from Art Deco and Art Modern, I don’t know. I guess Neo-Deco or Neo-Moderne might do, but I’ve come to think of them as Mannerist Moderne, since they usually have an exaggerated “referential” quality to their designs, characteristic of Mannerism.
But I don’t think any architecture critic has used that appellation.
In the 1970s, the late critic C. Ray Smith wrote a book called “Supermannerism,” which was mostly about architect Paul Rudolph, but the term appears never to have stuck as a stylistic appellation. I think he was on the right track, though. The works of more recent celebrity architects such as Michael Graves look Mannerist as hell to me.
I’ve searched all the usual sources and can’t find any references to either Roy Chase or R.E. Struve as architects, and few references to them of any sort. The California Index contains one card citing a 1928 L.A. Times article saying that R.E. Struve was financing the construction of a building at Encinitas, and there’s a PDF about the coast highway citing a couple of 1925 Oceanside Blade articles saying that Roy Chase had built a hotel there. As far as I’ve been able to discover, neither Chase nor Struve was an architect, but both were local developers.
Until some convincing evidence turns up, I’m inclined to say that the actual architect of this theater remains unknown.
The Art Deco designation at top is the another result of the confusion between the theater and the auditorium. The auditorium I’d consider Streamline Moderne with some lingering Art Deco elements, so I’d say it would be best classified as Art Moderne. The theater, on the other hand, was a fairly pure Midcentury Modern design, although those split, angled columns certainly have a Googiesque quality. However, this theater was built before there ever was a Googie’s coffee shop.
Some of the moderne and modernist buildings designed for theaters were probably among the inspirations for what became the Googie style. What many theater architects did in their designs was to use the building exterior itself as an advertisement, which is essentially what John Lautner did when he come up with the first Googie’s coffee shop design in 1949. I see Googie not so much a style of its own as I do a modernist-influenced extension of the whole theatrical approach to architecture as something to pull in the customers, which was done even with the earliest big movie houses built in the 1910s.
And if form follows function, and one of the functions of a commercial building is to attract the attention of potential patrons, then I suppose Googieism can be seen as an expression, somewhat bent, of the first modernist credo, even though it’s not entirely within the modernist aesthetic.
I’d go so far as to say that placing as much or more emphasis on architectural effects to attract attention as on functionality of use is one of the primary distinctions between Moderne Modern, just as it was a major distinction between the somewhat eclectic classical revival theater designs of architects such as Thomas Lamb, and the purer classical revival designs of academic architects such as McKim, Mead, and White. It’s also one of the reasons why purist modern architects usually saw the moderne as an example of architectural backsliding, little better than the various revival styles, pure or not, that they wanted to displace.
But I’m sure architecture critics will be arguing about these distinctions for decades to come, so whatever descriptive terms eventually get adopted for these various styles are unlikely to be decided by me. I have fun blathering about it on the Internets, though.
Life Magazine photo of the Marquis, long after it had closed as a regular movie house and had become become the AMPAS Academy Award Theatre. This 1972 photo was taken only a few years before the buildng was demolished.
The Royal Theatre in Hanford was one of three houses taken over by Robert Lippert in 1942. Their former operator, Arthur Fukuda, closed them when, on March 27 that year, a curfew was imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry.
The other Fukuda houses Lippert took over were in Sanger and in Guadalupe, California.
The Royal was one of three theaters taken over from Arthur Fukuda by Robert Lippert in April, 1942. Fukuda had closed his three houses when a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been imposed on Americans of Japanese ancestry on March 27 that year.
According to the March 18, 1949, issue of Boxoffice, Lippert had recently bought the Sanger Theatre, formerly operated by Frank Panero. Lippert continued to operate the Royal as well. The Sanger Theatre is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures.
The Southwest Builder and Contractor article I cited in my February 20, 2008, comment above was from May, 1938, but it appears that the construction of the Sierra Theatre was delayed for many years. The opening of the Sierra was announced in the August 17, 1946, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, which said the house had opened on August 6. The opening feature was “Canyon Passage.”
The article did say that completion of the project had been delayed due to shortages of materials, but it seems unlikely that such a delay would have lasted six years. Most likely, construction was not begun until near or shortly after the end of WWII.
The Boxoffice item also gives a much larger seating capacity- 894- than the Southwest Builder & Contractor article had. The theater obviously must have been redesigned between the original announcement and the actual construction.
The article adds that Frank Panero and his sons Ernest and August would continue to operate the Delano Theatre, as well. It also said that in addition to the Delano houses the Panero Theatre Company was then operating two houses in each of the valley towns of West Delano, Shafter, Reedley, and Wasco, and one house each in McFarland and Sanger.
I finally found some more information about the Tiffany. Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of November 7, 1966, said that Robert Lippert and Harold Goldman had opened their new Tiffany Theatre on November 2, with an invitational event that included the American premier of the Greek film “Young Aphrodites.” The architect was Jack Edwards. The stated seating capacity was 400.
The November 2 opening was somewhat later than the projected opening of late May, which had been announced in the April 11, 1966, issue of Boxoffice.
The Lynn and New Lynn Theaters were mentioned in the April 10, 1937, issue of Boxoffice Magazine. Apparently both theaters were in operation simultaneously for a time.
The Boxoffice item reads: “Ronald Vincent has changed the names of his two theatres at Laguna Beach, the Lynn being redubbed the Laguna and the New Lynn being called the Southcoast.”
The only mention of the Royal Theatre under that name that I can find in Boxoffice Magazine comes from the June 25, 1949, issue, which says that Robert L. Lippert had sold the house to Moses Hernandez.
But the April 22, 1942, issue of Boxoffice published an item that said that Robert Lippert was taking over three houses, owned by Arthur Fukuda, which had been closed because of the Japanese curfew. It named the three theaters as the Royal in Hanford, the Royal in Sanger, and the Guadalupe in Guadalupe. I think it’s possible (and even likely) that Boxoffice’s copy writer got the name of the Guadalupe house wrong (they did misspell Hanford as Handford) and that all three of Fukuda’s theaters were called the Royal.
It’s not surprising that a Japanese American would have owned these theaters. Many of the agricultural areas of California had substantial Japanese populations during that era, and American-born Japanese, unlike those who had immigrated, were not prohibited from owning real property. Perhaps Arthur Fukuda has descendants who can tell us something about the Royal Theatre.
Thanks for the photo links, CapnRob. They do help clear things up.