That’s waiting until the last moment! At least three newspapers carried news of its closing, and a commentary ran last Friday in the Columbus Dispatch.
I’ve submitted a follow-up story to the News section with your information.
No, no. The Passion of the Christ was the last sell out. Last Temptation was in 1988. That would have been a long time since the theater had a sell out show! It would have closed years earlier if that was the case.
Every day there’s news of indie theaters closing. These two examples seem typical. Their owners really dreamed of running movie theaters, and put their life savings into them, and then closed them within a year.
I’ve been trying to figure out the economics of running a theater and every scenario just seems to come up short. You might have a run where there’s some good indie movies out and people come in, but eventually, you hit a dry spell that drains all your capital and you close.
I try to go to an indie theater near me as often as possible, but a lot of times it’s running something that’s not interesting to me. There’s been upwards of a year that I haven’t gone there because of the movie selection. The only reason the theater is still open is that the operator owns the building and collects rent from retail and office space there. Otherwise, it would have been closed years ago.
Other indies nearby have gone the non-profit route where their operators are basically paid employees of the organization, and the theaters beg for grants or donations to stay in business. It seems that indies that lease their spaces are doomed eventually. The cost of heating and rent keeps increasing while the number of moviegoers declines. Eventually, the operator gets squeezed out and has to give up.
Unless the indies can get access to programming the multiplexes can’t get or don’t want (maybe digital HD broadcasts?), the future doesn’t look too bright.
I would say to learn as much as you can about the restaurant/bar business, because as many owners will tell you, you’re not in the movie business, you’re in the food and candy business. If you’re in a small town, your choice of films will be limited to what your film booker can provide. And your total cost will be the cost of setting up a restaurant/lounge added to the cost of setting up a movie theater.
Despite all this, the dinner/theater concept seems to be catching on, especially if you’re the only entertainment option in town. Otherwise, operating a single-screen theater is very challenging, because your whole business will depend on that single movie your booker can come up with. You’ll want to try to sell as much food and drink as possible to stay in business.
They may have. Their first theater opens next month at an old AMC theater in Redmond, IL.
The article says they’re going after the above-40 crowd, which is interesting because most movies aren’t made for the above-40 crowd.
These are also people who don’t want to be bothered by teenagers. Now, I might be willing to pay extra for that, but they’re also going after people who want to eat and drink during the film. That would be more of a distraction for me than an occasional kick to the back of my seat. And with servers going in and out taking orders and bringing more food and beer — way too distracting.
It’s also interesting there are only going to be 40 seats to a hall. That’s about the size of Steven Spielberg’s screening room.
I personally would rather sit at home and watch a DVD than spend $35 a ticket for a movie, but I have seen people going into the Luxe Level cinemas at the local Showcase Cinema, so there seems to be a market for this. The question is how much of a market. I don’t own a luxury condo or shop at the downtown upscale mall with Tiffany’s and Barney’s in it, but plenty of people do have that much disposable income and do. So we’ll see. It’s a $200 million bet!
You can use Google Maps to see what use to be the entrance of the theater (now an MBTA entrance), and you can “walk” around the building to see the blank walls on the Hayward Plaza side and Harrison Ave. Extension in back at:
I walk by the Boston Common Cinema almost every weekday and it has a sign hanging in its window about IMAX coming there soon. I started wondering how AMC was going to squeeze a five-story-tall screen into one of the theaters there, so I did some research on the Web.
I found some interviews with IMAX executives. It seems IMAX has been downsizing their theaters to make them more affordable to build (IMAX MPX). It’s knocked the build price down to about $1.5 million by shrinking screens and making theaters smaller with seats closer to the screen to provide supposedly the “same” IMAX experience. The head guy said the company does extensive consumer testing and consumers couldn’t tell the difference.
The next evolution for the company is Digital IMAX, which it’s now rolling out. The company signed a deal last year with AMC and Regal for 100 screens and 35 screens respectively.
Basically, Digital IMAX is two Christie DLP digital projectors with 4k resolutions where the images overlapped for greater brightness which can be installed in any theater with a slightly larger screen. The company says the cost of an IMAX print is $22,000 ($44,000 for 3D) and by using digital projection, it can reduce the cost to an $800 hard drive (and make more money). The projectors are suppose to have special processing in them that would make them look just as good as an IMAX film presentation, the company claims, and that consumer testing once again showed people would feel they had the same IMAX experience.
Now almost all the other digital projectors currently installed in theaters are 2k, but Sony, Christie, Barco and NEC already have 4k projectors which should be out next year. If you figure that the number of digital cinemas have been roughly doubling every year, and some chains are already building all digital megaplexes, IMAX’s advantage will be short-lived.
Kodak says the resolution of 35mm film is 4k, so Digital IMAX will basically have the same resolution as regular 35mm movie film, not the 16x resolution of IMAX 15-perf film.
MIT Media Labs some years ago did studies that indicated that most people couldn’t tell the difference between standard definition and high-definition, and that’s what the IMAX folks seem to be banking on.
I think the company is ruining everything it originally stood for for short-term profits. The company will still insist theaters charge $3 extra for tickets, that the studios pay it 12.5% of the IMAX grosses, and that theater owners kick back 3% of their ticket price to IMAX. In return, all the consumer will get is two modified digital projectors instead of one as in the other digital theaters. They may think that they will be getting the “IMAX experience,” but they really won’t be.
Of course, the IMAX theater at Boston Common will be opening soon, so I hope people will give their opinions here.
You can read an interview with IMAX’s CEO at more at: View link and a good overview of the company and of the new digital system at View link .
I just did some research and apparently IMAX digital is going to be using what’s called 4K projectors, probably from Sony. Most digital theaters are currently using 2K projectors, but in a few years, most new theaters will probably be using 4Ks. So there won’t be any difference between an IMAX theater and a regular theater except for the 12-channel sound equipment, that is, if they’re still going to have 12-channel sound. Also Kodak says 4K is about the quality of 35mm film, and you already have some special effects companies generating effects at 8K. So although IMAX will save a bunch of money in not using film, it’s not really going to be anything special like using 70mm sideways (giving you an effective 140mm film frame). The AMC Boston Common is promising IMAX this month, and this is probably what it’s going to install. Maybe the IMAX folks think people will see the name and think they’re getting something special when they’re really not.
There was some chatter on the wickedlocal.com/stoughton message boards from last April that the cinema was for sale for $580,000 and the owner was trying to get out from under it. There was also a rumor that a big entertainment company wanted to buy it to host concerts, but the lack of public transportation posed a problem. I believe the building has some stores on the first floor. If you go there, you may be able to get more information. Keep in mind that it was costing the previous operator almost $3,000 a month to heat it, and this winter the cost will be higher. Likewise for air conditioning in the summer.
Assembly Square Cinemas never had a good reputation. They were always too crowded, too rowdy, and too dirty. Obviously, when USA Cinemas went bankrupt, they stopped doing everything but emergency maintenance. And AMC was just running the lease out. There’s some talk about building a new cinema nearby in a couple of years.
I don’t think this is a problem with multiplexes off highways. Most theaters are now off highways. The idea with putting them on highways is they’re easier for more people to get to. It has more to do with how much money theater chains are willing to spend for upkeep. Some take more pride than others. And those that lease often do less than the chains that own their own theaters. If you read the reviews of AMC Cinemas, they’re a mixed bag.
I just wanted to give a few remembrances of movies I saw at the Metropolitan-Music Hall-Wang Center/Theater.
I remember first going there with my mother, probably in the mid-‘60s for a Disney film. I think the first show was at 9am and that was the bargain matinee, with the rest of the shows being full price.
My next experience was in 1974 when Columbia Pictures rented out the Met for a full day of free films to celebrate the studio’s 50th anniversary. I remember showing up there after the films had started, and there was no one at the door or in the lobby. I just walked in and took a seat. The theater was about one-third full with people going in and out at times. I saw Funny Girl, The Professionals, Bridge Over the River Kwai and Doctor Strangelove. It was incredible! Great films, and the chance to see them on a giant screen!
I can’t imagine anything like this being done this way today. When I saw Star Wars at the Charles in 1977, there were only about 100 people standing in line before the doors opened. Three years later for Empire, there was a line snaking down the mall about an hour before the movie. By 1982 for E.T., there was at least 1200 people in line and a four-hour wait! These days, people are willing to camp out weeks ahead of time for certain movies or events.
Columbia held a similar film festival at the Music Hall in 1982 for its 60th anniversary, but I was tied up at the time, and I think they might have charged admission. It was basically the same movies being shown.
I believe in 1991 the Wang started a Monday night film series to recapture its movie history. I remember seeing the Wizard of Oz there with a large gay audience that picked up on innuendos in the movie I had never imagined before. And on February 22, 1991 (a Friday night) it squeezed in a special showing of Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston sitting in the audience. He was only two rows behind my girlfriend and me and he stayed for the entire film, although the 70mm print was a blown up, cropped version of the original Cinemascope film.
And the film series even made U.S. history on April 29, 1991 when Citizen Kane, on its 50th anniversary tour, sold out all 3,600 seats for a record-breaking $18,000 single-showing take.
Unfortunately, by the time of Citizen Kane, the film series was getting so popular that it was difficult getting good seats. Subscribers to the entire series got seats in the orchestra, while the balcony was general seating.
For the Wizard of Oz, we were in the first row of the balcony, which was OK, but for Citizen Kane, we were about 1/3 back and the sightlines were positively awful. The screen was so low you had to peer down to see it, and you were basically staring at the head of the person in front of you. I had to crane my neck over to see between the heads in front of me, with the heads in front of them blocking my bottom view of the screen, while the person in back of me complained I was blocking his view. I know this was built as a movie palace, but I would say because the Wang is so huge that from 2/3 of the balcony the screen looks smaller than a 19" TV set at home.
I think the film series lasted about 10 years in the winter months, and then Monster.com did a series with free admission. Fortunately, because of the number of films being shot in Boston, and some Boston actors and directors climbing up the ranks of Hollywood, the Wang will be used from time to time for future film premieres. But it’s a shame the theater doesn’t host more cinematic events.
I looked on a map of Boston and technically the entire cinema and parking lot is inside Boston. All of Cleveland Circle is part of Boston and the Brookline border at that point is the Riverside T trolley tracks which run next to the theater.
I worked at 2001 Beacon Street (office building) for six months and I learned to park on the Brookline side down Beaacon Street where you could put in a couple of quarters for 10 hours, whereas on the Boston side, the Boston meter maids went crazy tagging people who had parked more than an hour or two.
Cleveland Circle is sort of a weird part of Boston because the zip code is Brookline’s zip code, and if you dialed 911, you would get Brookline’s police and fire departments. We had to have the Boston police and fire department numbers at our desks in case there was an emergency. So technically, the theater is inside the Boston city limits, but the zip code is Brookline’s.
On another matter, I use to go to this theater in the late ‘70s to early '90s, and I find it hard to believe that this building was converted from an older theater. It’s typical '50s-'60s cinderblock architecture with a modern-style glass-enclosed, split-level lobby. Could the older theater have been flush with the street, where the front parking lot currently is, and was demolished, or could it have been next to the current site, such as where the restaurant is? That seems to make more sense.
After the rear auditoriums were twinned, I tried to see pictures only in the two front theaters. I remember seeing Schindler’s List there around Christmastime 1993 with a packed theater. Movies were quite often sold out on weekends. I also saw Late For Dinner in 1991 in one of the shoebox cinemas in back after the Globe gave the movie a great review. It was the only theater anywhere playing it. Luckily the movie was better than the theater.
Actually, digital cinemas are suppose to save the studios money. Since each 35mm print cost something like $2,000-$3,000, a 4,000-screen rollout, like The Dark Knight, costs an extra $12 million. On the other hand, a hard drive costs $100, and you can reuse it over and over. On the other hand, a digital projector can cost $50,000-$150,000, which is a pretty big cost for a theater.
Apparently, this theater hasn’t had a sell-out since 2004, and the two auditoriums only seat 300. So the theater has been losing money for years.
I think using the Wang as a first-run movie palace is a great idea, and I would certainly support it, but unfortunately it’s not going to happen. The movie chains actually aren’t in the business of showing movies. They’re in the food business. That’s why they’re all hot about installing bars and restaurants in the cinemas. Most of the staff is trained in food preparation and handling, not film, and movies are used to get patrons in to buy food. On-screen advertising has become an important source of revenue too. But since the studios can negotiate to keep up to 100% of the admission price during the first week of a movie’s release, (although it’s usually somewhere between 70%-90%), it wouldn’t make sense for either AMC or Regal to do it, especially since the food selection would be sparse at the Wang and the rental fee, I image, would be high. Also I get the feeling the Wang people don’t want the great unwashed masses trudging through their theater, since it’s been years since they’ve had a film festival there. So although I too wish it would happen, it’s not going to.
I too saw Tommy in Quintaphonic Sound at the Pi Alley in two consecutive showings. Those days, they didn’t kick you out between shows.
It’s funny almost all of the theaters Sack Theaters developed were built into parking garages. Seems to have been a lot of garages built in Boston as part of the 1960s urban renewal projects. The Cheri was a stand-alone garage. The 57 was in the garage part of the 57 Hotel. The Beacon Hill was butted up against the One Beacon Street underground garage. The Pi Alley was in the Pi Alley garage. I think the only Sack Theater not in a garage was the Copley. The other theaters Sack bought from other companies.
Thanks, Ron, I stand corrected. I thought it was quicker than that. I might have had a job for 8 years there if they had hired me.
I came across a quote from Ty Barr in the October 16, 2005 Boston Globe where he said the Nickelodeon “…became the first art house to outgross a mainstream chain.”
I didn’t see this mentioned on either this page or the Nickelodeon page, so I’m proud to be the one to bring up this little bit of history.
Right after I graduated from college in 1978, I was looking around for work, and came across an ad to be the manager of the Nickelodeon Theatre in Kenmore Square, which was the old Loew’s Abbey. I had an interview with the owner who introduced himself as Joel, I think, which research reveals would have been Joel Tranum. He told me he owned the Nickelodeon on the Cape, which showed independent and revival films, and he was going to play the same in Boston. He had applied a fresh coat of paint to the theater, and things were pretty tidy, although I remember that the main theater had columns that blocked some views of the screen, and that some seats were too far on the left and the right to be able to see anything but a distorted view. We talked for a while, but I got the impression I was too young for him, and he tried to scare me off by saying that he could only pay me $3 or $4 an hour and I would have to open the theater at 11 am, close it at midnight, or 2 am on the weekends and work 6 days a week, which sounded great to me at the time. But he eventually hired a slightly older woman as manager.
At first, the theater only played “classic” movies. I remember seeing a washed out print of Forbidden Planet at a matinee with only one other customer in the place. What had happened was movie distributors considered Boston/Brookline/Cambridge one market, and any theater that won a film had an exclusive engagement in the area. But I think in six months, Joel had convinced the distributors to consider the cities as separate markets and business really took off at the Nick with first-run indie movies. The place would be packed most nights and weekends.
USA Cinemas took instant notice of this new competitor in its midst, and where it had ignored indie films before, it suddenly took a great interest in the theater, and I think, in about a year’s time, it bought the Nick and embraced indie programming, eventually moving to more mainstream specialty films from the studios and larger independent distributors.
According to an article I found from the Burlington (VT) Free Press in 2003, Tranum opened Nickelodeons in Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont, in addition to the one on Cape Cod, and he eventually sold them out to bigger theater chains. The article identified him as a Boston-based developer.
As far as I know, the Nick was the only challenger to USA Cinemas' monopoly in Boston in 25 years, and it was quickly bought out to keep a lock on the market.
I toured the Modern Theater probably about ‘77 or '78 after the Mayflower had closed and before its short-lived period as a performance center. It was Boston’s first theater exclusively built to show movies, and one of the first in the country.
Since it was built before the golden days of the Hollywood-style movie palace, it was quite plain inside. It had a very small “lobby,” really no bigger than an area to house a ticket booth, and the auditorium was nothing more than a long rectangular box with a gently sloping floor. There was no decoration on the walls (e.g. murals, moldings, etc.) and there had already been some water damage. Even at that time, the idea was not to restore, since there was nothing of interest to restore, but to revive it as a performance space.
At the time, I thought it might have been interesting to restore it as a silent movie theater and see silent movies in an actual era theater, but it probably wouldn’t have paid the bills.
Suffolk University has applied to take over the theater and renovate the space, much like Emerson is doing with the Paramount just a few doors down. Suffolk and Emerson are basically swallowing the entire block with a combination of new construction behind the old facades and the renovation of existing buildings. The promise is that the Modern Theatre and the Paramount will again be in operation, although as live theater venues and not movie houses.
I remember my mom taking me there in the ‘60s to see Disney movies. It had a small but beautiful marble lobby, which has been preserved along with the facade, but, obviously, the rest has been gutted. I think I saw Jerry Lewis’ Which Way to the Front there in 1970, and my brother and I were definitely at the Planet of the Apes marathon mentioned previously, probably in 1973.
As said before, the Paramount was on the edge of the Combat Zone. In fact, the arcade next to it sold adult books in the ‘60s-'70s, although it did have an excellent science fiction section and it had all the Doc Savage and Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks when I was growing up. I’m sure many parents had to avert the eyes of their youngsters when going down to that area.
My guess is that since Emerson College restored the Majestic (Saxon), it didn’t need another theater and didn’t want to take on another restoration project. But Emerson does need space, and both Emerson and Suffolk University are gobbling up that block with Suffolk slated to develop the Modern Theater and Emerson making several black box theaters out of the Paramount.
That’s waiting until the last moment! At least three newspapers carried news of its closing, and a commentary ran last Friday in the Columbus Dispatch.
I’ve submitted a follow-up story to the News section with your information.
I made a mistake in the story. Igor is a French-made computer animation kids film being distributed by MGM.
No, no. The Passion of the Christ was the last sell out. Last Temptation was in 1988. That would have been a long time since the theater had a sell out show! It would have closed years earlier if that was the case.
Every day there’s news of indie theaters closing. These two examples seem typical. Their owners really dreamed of running movie theaters, and put their life savings into them, and then closed them within a year.
I’ve been trying to figure out the economics of running a theater and every scenario just seems to come up short. You might have a run where there’s some good indie movies out and people come in, but eventually, you hit a dry spell that drains all your capital and you close.
I try to go to an indie theater near me as often as possible, but a lot of times it’s running something that’s not interesting to me. There’s been upwards of a year that I haven’t gone there because of the movie selection. The only reason the theater is still open is that the operator owns the building and collects rent from retail and office space there. Otherwise, it would have been closed years ago.
Other indies nearby have gone the non-profit route where their operators are basically paid employees of the organization, and the theaters beg for grants or donations to stay in business. It seems that indies that lease their spaces are doomed eventually. The cost of heating and rent keeps increasing while the number of moviegoers declines. Eventually, the operator gets squeezed out and has to give up.
Unless the indies can get access to programming the multiplexes can’t get or don’t want (maybe digital HD broadcasts?), the future doesn’t look too bright.
The Grandview is closing Sept 27th.
I would say to learn as much as you can about the restaurant/bar business, because as many owners will tell you, you’re not in the movie business, you’re in the food and candy business. If you’re in a small town, your choice of films will be limited to what your film booker can provide. And your total cost will be the cost of setting up a restaurant/lounge added to the cost of setting up a movie theater.
Despite all this, the dinner/theater concept seems to be catching on, especially if you’re the only entertainment option in town. Otherwise, operating a single-screen theater is very challenging, because your whole business will depend on that single movie your booker can come up with. You’ll want to try to sell as much food and drink as possible to stay in business.
They may have. Their first theater opens next month at an old AMC theater in Redmond, IL.
The article says they’re going after the above-40 crowd, which is interesting because most movies aren’t made for the above-40 crowd.
These are also people who don’t want to be bothered by teenagers. Now, I might be willing to pay extra for that, but they’re also going after people who want to eat and drink during the film. That would be more of a distraction for me than an occasional kick to the back of my seat. And with servers going in and out taking orders and bringing more food and beer — way too distracting.
It’s also interesting there are only going to be 40 seats to a hall. That’s about the size of Steven Spielberg’s screening room.
I personally would rather sit at home and watch a DVD than spend $35 a ticket for a movie, but I have seen people going into the Luxe Level cinemas at the local Showcase Cinema, so there seems to be a market for this. The question is how much of a market. I don’t own a luxury condo or shop at the downtown upscale mall with Tiffany’s and Barney’s in it, but plenty of people do have that much disposable income and do. So we’ll see. It’s a $200 million bet!
You can use Google Maps to see what use to be the entrance of the theater (now an MBTA entrance), and you can “walk” around the building to see the blank walls on the Hayward Plaza side and Harrison Ave. Extension in back at:
View link
I walk by the Boston Common Cinema almost every weekday and it has a sign hanging in its window about IMAX coming there soon. I started wondering how AMC was going to squeeze a five-story-tall screen into one of the theaters there, so I did some research on the Web.
I found some interviews with IMAX executives. It seems IMAX has been downsizing their theaters to make them more affordable to build (IMAX MPX). It’s knocked the build price down to about $1.5 million by shrinking screens and making theaters smaller with seats closer to the screen to provide supposedly the “same” IMAX experience. The head guy said the company does extensive consumer testing and consumers couldn’t tell the difference.
The next evolution for the company is Digital IMAX, which it’s now rolling out. The company signed a deal last year with AMC and Regal for 100 screens and 35 screens respectively.
Basically, Digital IMAX is two Christie DLP digital projectors with 4k resolutions where the images overlapped for greater brightness which can be installed in any theater with a slightly larger screen. The company says the cost of an IMAX print is $22,000 ($44,000 for 3D) and by using digital projection, it can reduce the cost to an $800 hard drive (and make more money). The projectors are suppose to have special processing in them that would make them look just as good as an IMAX film presentation, the company claims, and that consumer testing once again showed people would feel they had the same IMAX experience.
Now almost all the other digital projectors currently installed in theaters are 2k, but Sony, Christie, Barco and NEC already have 4k projectors which should be out next year. If you figure that the number of digital cinemas have been roughly doubling every year, and some chains are already building all digital megaplexes, IMAX’s advantage will be short-lived.
Kodak says the resolution of 35mm film is 4k, so Digital IMAX will basically have the same resolution as regular 35mm movie film, not the 16x resolution of IMAX 15-perf film.
MIT Media Labs some years ago did studies that indicated that most people couldn’t tell the difference between standard definition and high-definition, and that’s what the IMAX folks seem to be banking on.
I think the company is ruining everything it originally stood for for short-term profits. The company will still insist theaters charge $3 extra for tickets, that the studios pay it 12.5% of the IMAX grosses, and that theater owners kick back 3% of their ticket price to IMAX. In return, all the consumer will get is two modified digital projectors instead of one as in the other digital theaters. They may think that they will be getting the “IMAX experience,” but they really won’t be.
Of course, the IMAX theater at Boston Common will be opening soon, so I hope people will give their opinions here.
You can read an interview with IMAX’s CEO at more at: View link and a good overview of the company and of the new digital system at View link .
I just did some research and apparently IMAX digital is going to be using what’s called 4K projectors, probably from Sony. Most digital theaters are currently using 2K projectors, but in a few years, most new theaters will probably be using 4Ks. So there won’t be any difference between an IMAX theater and a regular theater except for the 12-channel sound equipment, that is, if they’re still going to have 12-channel sound. Also Kodak says 4K is about the quality of 35mm film, and you already have some special effects companies generating effects at 8K. So although IMAX will save a bunch of money in not using film, it’s not really going to be anything special like using 70mm sideways (giving you an effective 140mm film frame). The AMC Boston Common is promising IMAX this month, and this is probably what it’s going to install. Maybe the IMAX folks think people will see the name and think they’re getting something special when they’re really not.
There was some chatter on the wickedlocal.com/stoughton message boards from last April that the cinema was for sale for $580,000 and the owner was trying to get out from under it. There was also a rumor that a big entertainment company wanted to buy it to host concerts, but the lack of public transportation posed a problem. I believe the building has some stores on the first floor. If you go there, you may be able to get more information. Keep in mind that it was costing the previous operator almost $3,000 a month to heat it, and this winter the cost will be higher. Likewise for air conditioning in the summer.
Great story. Hope to hear more like this.
Assembly Square Cinemas never had a good reputation. They were always too crowded, too rowdy, and too dirty. Obviously, when USA Cinemas went bankrupt, they stopped doing everything but emergency maintenance. And AMC was just running the lease out. There’s some talk about building a new cinema nearby in a couple of years.
I don’t think this is a problem with multiplexes off highways. Most theaters are now off highways. The idea with putting them on highways is they’re easier for more people to get to. It has more to do with how much money theater chains are willing to spend for upkeep. Some take more pride than others. And those that lease often do less than the chains that own their own theaters. If you read the reviews of AMC Cinemas, they’re a mixed bag.
I just wanted to give a few remembrances of movies I saw at the Metropolitan-Music Hall-Wang Center/Theater.
I remember first going there with my mother, probably in the mid-‘60s for a Disney film. I think the first show was at 9am and that was the bargain matinee, with the rest of the shows being full price.
My next experience was in 1974 when Columbia Pictures rented out the Met for a full day of free films to celebrate the studio’s 50th anniversary. I remember showing up there after the films had started, and there was no one at the door or in the lobby. I just walked in and took a seat. The theater was about one-third full with people going in and out at times. I saw Funny Girl, The Professionals, Bridge Over the River Kwai and Doctor Strangelove. It was incredible! Great films, and the chance to see them on a giant screen!
I can’t imagine anything like this being done this way today. When I saw Star Wars at the Charles in 1977, there were only about 100 people standing in line before the doors opened. Three years later for Empire, there was a line snaking down the mall about an hour before the movie. By 1982 for E.T., there was at least 1200 people in line and a four-hour wait! These days, people are willing to camp out weeks ahead of time for certain movies or events.
Columbia held a similar film festival at the Music Hall in 1982 for its 60th anniversary, but I was tied up at the time, and I think they might have charged admission. It was basically the same movies being shown.
I believe in 1991 the Wang started a Monday night film series to recapture its movie history. I remember seeing the Wizard of Oz there with a large gay audience that picked up on innuendos in the movie I had never imagined before. And on February 22, 1991 (a Friday night) it squeezed in a special showing of Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston sitting in the audience. He was only two rows behind my girlfriend and me and he stayed for the entire film, although the 70mm print was a blown up, cropped version of the original Cinemascope film.
And the film series even made U.S. history on April 29, 1991 when Citizen Kane, on its 50th anniversary tour, sold out all 3,600 seats for a record-breaking $18,000 single-showing take.
Unfortunately, by the time of Citizen Kane, the film series was getting so popular that it was difficult getting good seats. Subscribers to the entire series got seats in the orchestra, while the balcony was general seating.
For the Wizard of Oz, we were in the first row of the balcony, which was OK, but for Citizen Kane, we were about 1/3 back and the sightlines were positively awful. The screen was so low you had to peer down to see it, and you were basically staring at the head of the person in front of you. I had to crane my neck over to see between the heads in front of me, with the heads in front of them blocking my bottom view of the screen, while the person in back of me complained I was blocking his view. I know this was built as a movie palace, but I would say because the Wang is so huge that from 2/3 of the balcony the screen looks smaller than a 19" TV set at home.
I think the film series lasted about 10 years in the winter months, and then Monster.com did a series with free admission. Fortunately, because of the number of films being shot in Boston, and some Boston actors and directors climbing up the ranks of Hollywood, the Wang will be used from time to time for future film premieres. But it’s a shame the theater doesn’t host more cinematic events.
I thought I’d drop in my 2 cents.
I looked on a map of Boston and technically the entire cinema and parking lot is inside Boston. All of Cleveland Circle is part of Boston and the Brookline border at that point is the Riverside T trolley tracks which run next to the theater.
I worked at 2001 Beacon Street (office building) for six months and I learned to park on the Brookline side down Beaacon Street where you could put in a couple of quarters for 10 hours, whereas on the Boston side, the Boston meter maids went crazy tagging people who had parked more than an hour or two.
Cleveland Circle is sort of a weird part of Boston because the zip code is Brookline’s zip code, and if you dialed 911, you would get Brookline’s police and fire departments. We had to have the Boston police and fire department numbers at our desks in case there was an emergency. So technically, the theater is inside the Boston city limits, but the zip code is Brookline’s.
On another matter, I use to go to this theater in the late ‘70s to early '90s, and I find it hard to believe that this building was converted from an older theater. It’s typical '50s-'60s cinderblock architecture with a modern-style glass-enclosed, split-level lobby. Could the older theater have been flush with the street, where the front parking lot currently is, and was demolished, or could it have been next to the current site, such as where the restaurant is? That seems to make more sense.
After the rear auditoriums were twinned, I tried to see pictures only in the two front theaters. I remember seeing Schindler’s List there around Christmastime 1993 with a packed theater. Movies were quite often sold out on weekends. I also saw Late For Dinner in 1991 in one of the shoebox cinemas in back after the Globe gave the movie a great review. It was the only theater anywhere playing it. Luckily the movie was better than the theater.
Actually, digital cinemas are suppose to save the studios money. Since each 35mm print cost something like $2,000-$3,000, a 4,000-screen rollout, like The Dark Knight, costs an extra $12 million. On the other hand, a hard drive costs $100, and you can reuse it over and over. On the other hand, a digital projector can cost $50,000-$150,000, which is a pretty big cost for a theater.
Apparently, this theater hasn’t had a sell-out since 2004, and the two auditoriums only seat 300. So the theater has been losing money for years.
I think using the Wang as a first-run movie palace is a great idea, and I would certainly support it, but unfortunately it’s not going to happen. The movie chains actually aren’t in the business of showing movies. They’re in the food business. That’s why they’re all hot about installing bars and restaurants in the cinemas. Most of the staff is trained in food preparation and handling, not film, and movies are used to get patrons in to buy food. On-screen advertising has become an important source of revenue too. But since the studios can negotiate to keep up to 100% of the admission price during the first week of a movie’s release, (although it’s usually somewhere between 70%-90%), it wouldn’t make sense for either AMC or Regal to do it, especially since the food selection would be sparse at the Wang and the rental fee, I image, would be high. Also I get the feeling the Wang people don’t want the great unwashed masses trudging through their theater, since it’s been years since they’ve had a film festival there. So although I too wish it would happen, it’s not going to.
I too saw Tommy in Quintaphonic Sound at the Pi Alley in two consecutive showings. Those days, they didn’t kick you out between shows.
It’s funny almost all of the theaters Sack Theaters developed were built into parking garages. Seems to have been a lot of garages built in Boston as part of the 1960s urban renewal projects. The Cheri was a stand-alone garage. The 57 was in the garage part of the 57 Hotel. The Beacon Hill was butted up against the One Beacon Street underground garage. The Pi Alley was in the Pi Alley garage. I think the only Sack Theater not in a garage was the Copley. The other theaters Sack bought from other companies.
Thanks, Ron, I stand corrected. I thought it was quicker than that. I might have had a job for 8 years there if they had hired me.
I came across a quote from Ty Barr in the October 16, 2005 Boston Globe where he said the Nickelodeon “…became the first art house to outgross a mainstream chain.”
I didn’t see this mentioned on either this page or the Nickelodeon page, so I’m proud to be the one to bring up this little bit of history.
Right after I graduated from college in 1978, I was looking around for work, and came across an ad to be the manager of the Nickelodeon Theatre in Kenmore Square, which was the old Loew’s Abbey. I had an interview with the owner who introduced himself as Joel, I think, which research reveals would have been Joel Tranum. He told me he owned the Nickelodeon on the Cape, which showed independent and revival films, and he was going to play the same in Boston. He had applied a fresh coat of paint to the theater, and things were pretty tidy, although I remember that the main theater had columns that blocked some views of the screen, and that some seats were too far on the left and the right to be able to see anything but a distorted view. We talked for a while, but I got the impression I was too young for him, and he tried to scare me off by saying that he could only pay me $3 or $4 an hour and I would have to open the theater at 11 am, close it at midnight, or 2 am on the weekends and work 6 days a week, which sounded great to me at the time. But he eventually hired a slightly older woman as manager.
At first, the theater only played “classic” movies. I remember seeing a washed out print of Forbidden Planet at a matinee with only one other customer in the place. What had happened was movie distributors considered Boston/Brookline/Cambridge one market, and any theater that won a film had an exclusive engagement in the area. But I think in six months, Joel had convinced the distributors to consider the cities as separate markets and business really took off at the Nick with first-run indie movies. The place would be packed most nights and weekends.
USA Cinemas took instant notice of this new competitor in its midst, and where it had ignored indie films before, it suddenly took a great interest in the theater, and I think, in about a year’s time, it bought the Nick and embraced indie programming, eventually moving to more mainstream specialty films from the studios and larger independent distributors.
According to an article I found from the Burlington (VT) Free Press in 2003, Tranum opened Nickelodeons in Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont, in addition to the one on Cape Cod, and he eventually sold them out to bigger theater chains. The article identified him as a Boston-based developer.
As far as I know, the Nick was the only challenger to USA Cinemas' monopoly in Boston in 25 years, and it was quickly bought out to keep a lock on the market.
I toured the Modern Theater probably about ‘77 or '78 after the Mayflower had closed and before its short-lived period as a performance center. It was Boston’s first theater exclusively built to show movies, and one of the first in the country.
Since it was built before the golden days of the Hollywood-style movie palace, it was quite plain inside. It had a very small “lobby,” really no bigger than an area to house a ticket booth, and the auditorium was nothing more than a long rectangular box with a gently sloping floor. There was no decoration on the walls (e.g. murals, moldings, etc.) and there had already been some water damage. Even at that time, the idea was not to restore, since there was nothing of interest to restore, but to revive it as a performance space.
At the time, I thought it might have been interesting to restore it as a silent movie theater and see silent movies in an actual era theater, but it probably wouldn’t have paid the bills.
Suffolk University has applied to take over the theater and renovate the space, much like Emerson is doing with the Paramount just a few doors down. Suffolk and Emerson are basically swallowing the entire block with a combination of new construction behind the old facades and the renovation of existing buildings. The promise is that the Modern Theatre and the Paramount will again be in operation, although as live theater venues and not movie houses.
Thanks for all the memories. There’s some more recent photos posted yesterday at:
View link
I remember my mom taking me there in the ‘60s to see Disney movies. It had a small but beautiful marble lobby, which has been preserved along with the facade, but, obviously, the rest has been gutted. I think I saw Jerry Lewis’ Which Way to the Front there in 1970, and my brother and I were definitely at the Planet of the Apes marathon mentioned previously, probably in 1973.
As said before, the Paramount was on the edge of the Combat Zone. In fact, the arcade next to it sold adult books in the ‘60s-'70s, although it did have an excellent science fiction section and it had all the Doc Savage and Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks when I was growing up. I’m sure many parents had to avert the eyes of their youngsters when going down to that area.
My guess is that since Emerson College restored the Majestic (Saxon), it didn’t need another theater and didn’t want to take on another restoration project. But Emerson does need space, and both Emerson and Suffolk University are gobbling up that block with Suffolk slated to develop the Modern Theater and Emerson making several black box theaters out of the Paramount.