I don’t know what the present status of the Paradise is. If the theatre is vacant, I only hope that the new owners have the good sense to “winterize” the building. Remember what happened to the Kings when the pipes burst?
It was know as the Rocking Chair Theatre. Located behind Colonial Plaza on Bumby, Florida State Theatres opened their premiere attraction on November 23rd 1963, the day after President Kennedy was killed. The picture they opened with was “McLintock”. It had a large auditorium on the right side and a smaller one on the left. The large side had an enormous curved screen. Each of the side walls had a large, rear-illuminated porthole. The smaller side was less ornate with a standard Cinemascope screen. Both sides had a traveling curtain with amber wash lights. The large side ran a grind operation, usually 1:30 to 11:30. The small side ran evening and weekend shows only. Both sides would run the same picture with the same film print! Here’s how it worked: The show times were staggered by one hour. After the projectionist finished running reel one, he would rewind it and walk it 50ft to the other side and hand it to the other projectionist. They did it this way for 11 years until they automated.
I was a relief projectionist from 1974 to 1980. Upstairs they had a nice setup. On the large side, they had Norelco DP70 projectors with Ashcraft Core-Lite lamphouses. The small side had Century’s, Photophone 9030’s and Peerless Magnarc’s. The Norelco’s were the early Todd AO type with the double motor capable of running at 30fps. They had originally been installed in a Miami theatre in 1957 and then reinstalled in the Plaza. I walked in late one night in September 1974 just as John Lovejoy and Art Pope were removing one of the Ashcrafts. Scattered on the floor were the large 70mm magazines. They were in the process of converting over to 60min reels, xenon lamphouses, automation control boxes and sensing tape. Sometime during the night Lovejoy glanced up to me and said, “I’ll tell ya, Rick, this is one cheap damn way to run a motion picture”. In a way he was right. That was the last night of the 20min changeovers. From then on, they ran a different program on each side.
The story of the Plaza isn’t just about the building but the people who operated it. Former managers like Walter Colby and Red Tetter, projectionists like Pope, Lovejoy, Earl Rowland, Phil Sullivan, Gene Ragsdale, Wayne Masters, Dudley Washington and several names I can’t remember anymore. It was a great old movie house and I had good memories there.
I have great memories of the Colony during the sixties. Every Tuesday morning during the summer they had kid shows sponcered by RC Cola. All you had to do was to collect six RC bottle caps and you got in free! The show usually started with a cartoon, a race reel and then the feature. The race reel, which ran about 8 minutes, would show a different race every week. I think there were about 10 total; cars, boats, rollerskates, etc. This series must have been produced in the 30’s. At the end of each race the winner in the film had a number on his back and every kid would look inside of his popcorn box for the winning ticket! Sounds kind of hokey now, but if you’re a 10 year old kid it’s exciting.
In the early 70’s, I was a relief projectionist at the Colony. Whenever one of the two projectionists, Art Pope or Ralph Mays were called to work at the Municipal Auditorium, I would be called in to cover. Located up stairs behind the balcony was the projection booth. It looked like a time capsule from 1939. At the time, there were strick fire laws. Since most of the films were nitate, the booth had to be fireproof. The entry door was steel and very heavy. On every porthole there was a fire shutter attached by a cable to a counterweight. If a fire did occur, the lead fuse would melt and the counterweight would fall closing all the fire shutters. But they had so many coats of paint on them, I doubt any of them would have closed! The projection equipment consisted of Super Simplex’s, Photophone 9050’s, and Peerless Magnarc’s. The lamphouses had control knobs made of swirled yellow Catalin and an etched glass sign on top that would illuminate when the carbon was struck! In the next room was an enormous generator to supply DC current for the carbon arcs. Sometime in the mid-fities they installed Motiograph magnetic penthouses for the magnetic-track films. The auditorium was not ornate. It had a Cinemascope screen and no curtain. The first big picture I ran there was Fiddler on the Roof, three shows a day, a roadshow engagement in magnetic stereo sound!
By 1975, the multiplexes and twins were stiff competition for the old downtown houses and the Colony finally closed. The new owners gutted the theatre and put in a restaurant upstairs and boutique mall downstairs. Outside, the blade is still intact with different colors of neon, a reminder of it’s past life.
I remember it was THE premiere downtown theatre in Orlando. My first visit to the Beacham was in 1961. It was my friend, Jeff Brown’s 7th birthday and we went to see “101 Dalmations”. After the movie was over, my mother and Jeff’s grandmother took us around the corner to Morrison’s Cafeteria. Back then cafeteria food was really good and Morrison’s was the best!
Years later, after they put in the new Cinerama screen my mother took my brother and I to see “The Sound of Music”. It was so successful the picture ran for 18 months!
Even as a kid when my parents owned a drive-in theatre in the 50’s,
I was interested in film projection. In 1971, I was the youngest projectionist in town. The BA of local 631 just happened to work at the Beacham. His name was Dick Gabel. He was a grey-haired man in
his early 60’s. He gave me a tour of the booth. Since I was used to old drive-in theatre equipment, I had never seen such a beautiful projection booth. “So this is the good stuff”, I thought to myself, Norelco AAII projectors, Ashcraft Core-lite lamphouses, equipped to run 6 channel sound on 70mm film, nothing but the best of everything. Later on I met the other projectionist, a heck of a nice guy by the name of John Prine. Turns out Gabel, Prine and Ambrose all initiated into the local on the same day in 1929! Unfortunately, Florida State Theatres fell into hard times and closed the Beacham and Colony in 1975. The Plaza stayed open for another 7 or 8 years. One day I got a call from the BA and he asked me to go down and help with the clean-up. I didn’t know what he meant until I got there. What a mess! Apparantly during the month’s time the theatre was closed, the hot-water heater had burst and clouded the booth with steam. By the time it was discovered, every bit of exposed metal had a thin layer of rust on it. Even the aluminum reels were pitted. It took weeks of cleaning and polishing and changing the oil in the projectors to get everything operational. To my amazement, projectionist John Lawson was able to dry out the amplifiers and get them running again! One day I remember discovering an old picture in the managers office. It was taken in 1936, in front of the theatre, on the marquee was “Mr Deeds Goes to Town”. In the picture, all of the ushers were lined up and they all wore white spats! I walked around the auditorium and looked at the ribboned Cinerama screen for the last time. The following year the theatre changed hands and became The Great Southern Music Hall.
Thank you Mr. Lundy, for providing the link to the slideshow. Now I want to visit the Bronx. The Grand Concourse is indeed a grand concourse!
I don’t know what the present status of the Paradise is. If the theatre is vacant, I only hope that the new owners have the good sense to “winterize” the building. Remember what happened to the Kings when the pipes burst?
It was know as the Rocking Chair Theatre. Located behind Colonial Plaza on Bumby, Florida State Theatres opened their premiere attraction on November 23rd 1963, the day after President Kennedy was killed. The picture they opened with was “McLintock”. It had a large auditorium on the right side and a smaller one on the left. The large side had an enormous curved screen. Each of the side walls had a large, rear-illuminated porthole. The smaller side was less ornate with a standard Cinemascope screen. Both sides had a traveling curtain with amber wash lights. The large side ran a grind operation, usually 1:30 to 11:30. The small side ran evening and weekend shows only. Both sides would run the same picture with the same film print! Here’s how it worked: The show times were staggered by one hour. After the projectionist finished running reel one, he would rewind it and walk it 50ft to the other side and hand it to the other projectionist. They did it this way for 11 years until they automated.
I was a relief projectionist from 1974 to 1980. Upstairs they had a nice setup. On the large side, they had Norelco DP70 projectors with Ashcraft Core-Lite lamphouses. The small side had Century’s, Photophone 9030’s and Peerless Magnarc’s. The Norelco’s were the early Todd AO type with the double motor capable of running at 30fps. They had originally been installed in a Miami theatre in 1957 and then reinstalled in the Plaza. I walked in late one night in September 1974 just as John Lovejoy and Art Pope were removing one of the Ashcrafts. Scattered on the floor were the large 70mm magazines. They were in the process of converting over to 60min reels, xenon lamphouses, automation control boxes and sensing tape. Sometime during the night Lovejoy glanced up to me and said, “I’ll tell ya, Rick, this is one cheap damn way to run a motion picture”. In a way he was right. That was the last night of the 20min changeovers. From then on, they ran a different program on each side.
The story of the Plaza isn’t just about the building but the people who operated it. Former managers like Walter Colby and Red Tetter, projectionists like Pope, Lovejoy, Earl Rowland, Phil Sullivan, Gene Ragsdale, Wayne Masters, Dudley Washington and several names I can’t remember anymore. It was a great old movie house and I had good memories there.
I have great memories of the Colony during the sixties. Every Tuesday morning during the summer they had kid shows sponcered by RC Cola. All you had to do was to collect six RC bottle caps and you got in free! The show usually started with a cartoon, a race reel and then the feature. The race reel, which ran about 8 minutes, would show a different race every week. I think there were about 10 total; cars, boats, rollerskates, etc. This series must have been produced in the 30’s. At the end of each race the winner in the film had a number on his back and every kid would look inside of his popcorn box for the winning ticket! Sounds kind of hokey now, but if you’re a 10 year old kid it’s exciting.
In the early 70’s, I was a relief projectionist at the Colony. Whenever one of the two projectionists, Art Pope or Ralph Mays were called to work at the Municipal Auditorium, I would be called in to cover. Located up stairs behind the balcony was the projection booth. It looked like a time capsule from 1939. At the time, there were strick fire laws. Since most of the films were nitate, the booth had to be fireproof. The entry door was steel and very heavy. On every porthole there was a fire shutter attached by a cable to a counterweight. If a fire did occur, the lead fuse would melt and the counterweight would fall closing all the fire shutters. But they had so many coats of paint on them, I doubt any of them would have closed! The projection equipment consisted of Super Simplex’s, Photophone 9050’s, and Peerless Magnarc’s. The lamphouses had control knobs made of swirled yellow Catalin and an etched glass sign on top that would illuminate when the carbon was struck! In the next room was an enormous generator to supply DC current for the carbon arcs. Sometime in the mid-fities they installed Motiograph magnetic penthouses for the magnetic-track films. The auditorium was not ornate. It had a Cinemascope screen and no curtain. The first big picture I ran there was Fiddler on the Roof, three shows a day, a roadshow engagement in magnetic stereo sound!
By 1975, the multiplexes and twins were stiff competition for the old downtown houses and the Colony finally closed. The new owners gutted the theatre and put in a restaurant upstairs and boutique mall downstairs. Outside, the blade is still intact with different colors of neon, a reminder of it’s past life.
I remember it was THE premiere downtown theatre in Orlando. My first visit to the Beacham was in 1961. It was my friend, Jeff Brown’s 7th birthday and we went to see “101 Dalmations”. After the movie was over, my mother and Jeff’s grandmother took us around the corner to Morrison’s Cafeteria. Back then cafeteria food was really good and Morrison’s was the best!
Years later, after they put in the new Cinerama screen my mother took my brother and I to see “The Sound of Music”. It was so successful the picture ran for 18 months!
Even as a kid when my parents owned a drive-in theatre in the 50’s,
I was interested in film projection. In 1971, I was the youngest projectionist in town. The BA of local 631 just happened to work at the Beacham. His name was Dick Gabel. He was a grey-haired man in
his early 60’s. He gave me a tour of the booth. Since I was used to old drive-in theatre equipment, I had never seen such a beautiful projection booth. “So this is the good stuff”, I thought to myself, Norelco AAII projectors, Ashcraft Core-lite lamphouses, equipped to run 6 channel sound on 70mm film, nothing but the best of everything. Later on I met the other projectionist, a heck of a nice guy by the name of John Prine. Turns out Gabel, Prine and Ambrose all initiated into the local on the same day in 1929! Unfortunately, Florida State Theatres fell into hard times and closed the Beacham and Colony in 1975. The Plaza stayed open for another 7 or 8 years. One day I got a call from the BA and he asked me to go down and help with the clean-up. I didn’t know what he meant until I got there. What a mess! Apparantly during the month’s time the theatre was closed, the hot-water heater had burst and clouded the booth with steam. By the time it was discovered, every bit of exposed metal had a thin layer of rust on it. Even the aluminum reels were pitted. It took weeks of cleaning and polishing and changing the oil in the projectors to get everything operational. To my amazement, projectionist John Lawson was able to dry out the amplifiers and get them running again! One day I remember discovering an old picture in the managers office. It was taken in 1936, in front of the theatre, on the marquee was “Mr Deeds Goes to Town”. In the picture, all of the ushers were lined up and they all wore white spats! I walked around the auditorium and looked at the ribboned Cinerama screen for the last time. The following year the theatre changed hands and became The Great Southern Music Hall.