Minor correction to the commentary that mentioned the Three Smoothies as “probably a tap group.” They were a singing trio consisting of brothers Little Ryan and Charlie Ryan, plus Arlene “Babs” Johnson. And they were very milquetoast.
A correction for the commentator who thought the El Rauncho was torn down in the 1960s. It closed mid-August 1979, & I’m unsure how soon thereafter it was torn down. The last films it ever showed were “Love At First Bite” with “Old Dracula.”
When it first opened in July 1954 it was the first theater in the region that provided both Stereo & Cinemescope widescreen, so it was briefly state of the art, even though it got run down more quickly than any other outdoor screen. The first doublebill it showed was “Pony Express” with “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,” which were by no means new movies, so it was down-market from the start. The original owners were O. L. Chinquy, Elton Fay, & Lloyd Honey. www.weirdwildrealm.com
I remember that in the 1960s this theater would project advertisements out the upper window onto the wall of the building across the alley. The only movie I can recall seeing there was Bambi which really messed with my head, animals being burned alive. Later when it became a porno house I was still pretty young & it seemed so weird that I’d seen Bambi in a porno theater.
There was another cinema right straight across the street from the Roxy called the Renton Theater (today designed Renton Civic Theater but it doesn’t show films). In the late 1960s these theaters were already scummy but it was quite an “event” for teenage film fans because there’d be two cinemas worth of patrons (mostly young) filling the sidewalks & sometimes even blocking the street before & between shows, & even kids who weren’t going to see any films showed up with their skateboards (Renton did not have much after-hours traffic to worry about, other than people coming to the two cinemas). The street between the two theaters became a defacto teen hang-out area. But in the 1980s the then-owner of both cinemas, Roger Forbes, turned them into porno houses.
In the 1990s the Roxy was entering its sixth decade of existance & was managed by Arif Azhar who played only Indian films, & it was the only Indian filmhouse in King County, so Seattle’s Indian restaurant community would arrange group auto journeys to Renton. Absolutely no upkeep had been done for the place, but it was glorious to have such access to Bollywood musicals.
In recent years there has been some attempt to preserve the old Roxy as a historical site. It’s crummy architecture & no great loss if it comes down frankly, but Renton does not have much of the original town left, & it would be a nice bit of nostalgia even though it was never one of the movie palaces, it was second-rate from the day it was built. www.weirdwildrealm.com
The Lewis & Clark was considered fairly lower-class venue even in its heyday when it had but one screen; people who remembered movie palaces (or were able to attend one or another of the few remaining movie palaces) lamented this new suburban look for theaters alongside stripmalls. After it was turned multi-screen it lost whatever slight charm it once had. Originally it was painted throughout with murals about the Lewis & Clark Expedition, painted by a local muralist who history seems to have forgotten, but who in the 1950s & 1960s & early 1970s had her murals in A&P Grocery, The Spanish Castle dance club, the Pioneer Village restaurant in Federal Way (on the inner walls of authentic pioneer homes that had been moved to a single spot as a tourist attraction that failed big time), & all manner of businesses most of which have since been demolished.
With renovation to turn the Lewis & Clark multiplex, some portions of the murals remained, interupted by new walls. By the late 1980s the place always smelled bad & was an eyesore inside & out, & when during its last gasp it came to be used as a hillybilly revivalist christian enclave, it was obvioiusly time to tear it down. It was never in the running for any kind of architectural treasure, it was “early stripmall” all the way, a semi-enclosed complex that was a precursor to the wholly enclosed malls to follow.
I think the only nostalgia anyone can feel for it is that it was a hang-out for sub-working-class teenagers who would accumulate in or around the bowling alley (but never bowl) & there’d be minor “rumbles” in the parking lot & the sixteen year old boys would bully & beat the crap out of the thirteen year olds, & junior highschool girls would have their first sex acts with junior-college boys in that parking lot, then sometime after midnight the cops would harrass all the kids who’d go home & come back the next weekend. But in the 1970s when the first big enclosed mall was built (Southcenter), it marked the end of the Lewis & Clark parking lot as even a teen hangout, & seriously, it might as well have been torn down way back then.
The Lynwood is in part a dream-cinema doing everything that a film-lover would do with a filmhouse, but it’s not in all regards a dream-cinema for attendees. It’s strangely located out in the middle of nowhere, but worth the journey as it’s the only Kitsap County venue that shows more than the usual commercial releases or recent second-runs. I finally stopped driving out to it because it was getting unhealthy: if it got lucky with good attendance, lacking air conditioning, it was like watching a film from inside an Easy Bake Oven. Parking can be difficult as well, as it has next to none.
Today the Roxy is an unpleasant hick-Christian coffeehouse with almost no patronage except on Sunday but stays open because of tax exemptons & church volunteerism. It dominates a street that was some years ago designated an “arts” street which was supposed to appeal to tourism & get the abandoned buildings rented, but the project failed to attract anything to do with the arts that lasted even a full year; the most successful business on the street was a Wargaming enterprise & even they moved to a better location. So the sign that points the way to the “Arts” street needs to be changed to “Redneck Christians” street, since the sorely abused Roxy is just about the most “successful” “business” there. The only good thing about the Roxy’s present use (unless one is also a right-winger for Jesus) is that the hillbillies that run it can’t afford to gut it & destroy any chance that it might someday be restored as a cinema. The waterfront has been recently restored or improved to be more than parking lots & ferry terminal, & some Bremertonoids hope the improvements will filter up along the streets where most of the businesses are marginal or the storefronts unrented, & it’s the biggest pipedream of all that the Roxy is not eventually going to be hollowed out & turned into a discount shoestore. www.weirdwildrealm.com
The Duwamish Drive In Theater was on 99 Highway/Pacific Highway/Evergreen Highway (all names are correct for the same highway) right where you’d cross over the Duwamish River bridge into Seattle. It was so near the Boeing Plant that Boeing employees were its primary customers, & night shift workers could sometimes time it to go right from the theater to work. Also, if you’d missed the double-bill at the Midway Drive-in fifteen miles south on the same highway, it would play the following week at the Duwamish, so you had a second chance. It was one of the first of the regional drive-ins to give up the ghost in the late 1970s, reopened once or twice for brief failed attempts, then sat unused for another decade or so as a reminder of days gone by. Today it has Boeing buildings on it because company expansion took over the land, but old trees planted by my great-grandfather back when it was a drive-in still shade the back edge of the property overlooking the river. www.weirdwildrealm.com
In the 1970s we called it the El Rauncho because the place was so raunchy. On Thursdays it was $2 a carload, so we’d cram six or eight kids in a car. There’d be triple bills & sometimes they’d show FIVE films so that the last film was playing as the morning sun was rising. The third, fourth, & occasionally fifth film would be like 64-minute monster cheapies & we could almost never stay awake for the last one. I can remember only once being awake enough for the very last film, & it was a badly dubbed European (possibly Russian) science fiction film with a crazy story that probably had nothing to do with what the story was in its original language. It was so bad that after that I never even wanted to try to stay for the last film. www.weirdwildrealm.com
The screen at the Midway Drive-in was also a claustrophically skinny three-story “house” in which the manager lived in the 1960s & 1970s. It wasn’t much of a place to live in but hey, free rent. I was friends with the family when small & really liked climbing around in their skinny house. My great-grampa was the grounds cleaner & we had free popcorn up the wazoo, which was popped elsewhere & shipped in & stale as popcorn can get without turning into compost. In the 1950s many cars had “spotlights” attached to the driver-size window, & every night before the movie would start, there would be a game of “Spotlight” on the screen — a film of little moving squiggles & objects that people would follow around with their cars' spotlights.
Minor correction to the commentary that mentioned the Three Smoothies as “probably a tap group.” They were a singing trio consisting of brothers Little Ryan and Charlie Ryan, plus Arlene “Babs” Johnson. And they were very milquetoast.
-paghat the ratgirl
A correction for the commentator who thought the El Rauncho was torn down in the 1960s. It closed mid-August 1979, & I’m unsure how soon thereafter it was torn down. The last films it ever showed were “Love At First Bite” with “Old Dracula.”
When it first opened in July 1954 it was the first theater in the region that provided both Stereo & Cinemescope widescreen, so it was briefly state of the art, even though it got run down more quickly than any other outdoor screen. The first doublebill it showed was “Pony Express” with “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,” which were by no means new movies, so it was down-market from the start. The original owners were O. L. Chinquy, Elton Fay, & Lloyd Honey. www.weirdwildrealm.com
I remember that in the 1960s this theater would project advertisements out the upper window onto the wall of the building across the alley. The only movie I can recall seeing there was Bambi which really messed with my head, animals being burned alive. Later when it became a porno house I was still pretty young & it seemed so weird that I’d seen Bambi in a porno theater.
There was another cinema right straight across the street from the Roxy called the Renton Theater (today designed Renton Civic Theater but it doesn’t show films). In the late 1960s these theaters were already scummy but it was quite an “event” for teenage film fans because there’d be two cinemas worth of patrons (mostly young) filling the sidewalks & sometimes even blocking the street before & between shows, & even kids who weren’t going to see any films showed up with their skateboards (Renton did not have much after-hours traffic to worry about, other than people coming to the two cinemas). The street between the two theaters became a defacto teen hang-out area. But in the 1980s the then-owner of both cinemas, Roger Forbes, turned them into porno houses.
In the 1990s the Roxy was entering its sixth decade of existance & was managed by Arif Azhar who played only Indian films, & it was the only Indian filmhouse in King County, so Seattle’s Indian restaurant community would arrange group auto journeys to Renton. Absolutely no upkeep had been done for the place, but it was glorious to have such access to Bollywood musicals.
In recent years there has been some attempt to preserve the old Roxy as a historical site. It’s crummy architecture & no great loss if it comes down frankly, but Renton does not have much of the original town left, & it would be a nice bit of nostalgia even though it was never one of the movie palaces, it was second-rate from the day it was built. www.weirdwildrealm.com
The Lewis & Clark was considered fairly lower-class venue even in its heyday when it had but one screen; people who remembered movie palaces (or were able to attend one or another of the few remaining movie palaces) lamented this new suburban look for theaters alongside stripmalls. After it was turned multi-screen it lost whatever slight charm it once had. Originally it was painted throughout with murals about the Lewis & Clark Expedition, painted by a local muralist who history seems to have forgotten, but who in the 1950s & 1960s & early 1970s had her murals in A&P Grocery, The Spanish Castle dance club, the Pioneer Village restaurant in Federal Way (on the inner walls of authentic pioneer homes that had been moved to a single spot as a tourist attraction that failed big time), & all manner of businesses most of which have since been demolished.
With renovation to turn the Lewis & Clark multiplex, some portions of the murals remained, interupted by new walls. By the late 1980s the place always smelled bad & was an eyesore inside & out, & when during its last gasp it came to be used as a hillybilly revivalist christian enclave, it was obvioiusly time to tear it down. It was never in the running for any kind of architectural treasure, it was “early stripmall” all the way, a semi-enclosed complex that was a precursor to the wholly enclosed malls to follow.
I think the only nostalgia anyone can feel for it is that it was a hang-out for sub-working-class teenagers who would accumulate in or around the bowling alley (but never bowl) & there’d be minor “rumbles” in the parking lot & the sixteen year old boys would bully & beat the crap out of the thirteen year olds, & junior highschool girls would have their first sex acts with junior-college boys in that parking lot, then sometime after midnight the cops would harrass all the kids who’d go home & come back the next weekend. But in the 1970s when the first big enclosed mall was built (Southcenter), it marked the end of the Lewis & Clark parking lot as even a teen hangout, & seriously, it might as well have been torn down way back then.
The Lynwood is in part a dream-cinema doing everything that a film-lover would do with a filmhouse, but it’s not in all regards a dream-cinema for attendees. It’s strangely located out in the middle of nowhere, but worth the journey as it’s the only Kitsap County venue that shows more than the usual commercial releases or recent second-runs. I finally stopped driving out to it because it was getting unhealthy: if it got lucky with good attendance, lacking air conditioning, it was like watching a film from inside an Easy Bake Oven. Parking can be difficult as well, as it has next to none.
Today the Roxy is an unpleasant hick-Christian coffeehouse with almost no patronage except on Sunday but stays open because of tax exemptons & church volunteerism. It dominates a street that was some years ago designated an “arts” street which was supposed to appeal to tourism & get the abandoned buildings rented, but the project failed to attract anything to do with the arts that lasted even a full year; the most successful business on the street was a Wargaming enterprise & even they moved to a better location. So the sign that points the way to the “Arts” street needs to be changed to “Redneck Christians” street, since the sorely abused Roxy is just about the most “successful” “business” there. The only good thing about the Roxy’s present use (unless one is also a right-winger for Jesus) is that the hillbillies that run it can’t afford to gut it & destroy any chance that it might someday be restored as a cinema. The waterfront has been recently restored or improved to be more than parking lots & ferry terminal, & some Bremertonoids hope the improvements will filter up along the streets where most of the businesses are marginal or the storefronts unrented, & it’s the biggest pipedream of all that the Roxy is not eventually going to be hollowed out & turned into a discount shoestore. www.weirdwildrealm.com
The Duwamish Drive In Theater was on 99 Highway/Pacific Highway/Evergreen Highway (all names are correct for the same highway) right where you’d cross over the Duwamish River bridge into Seattle. It was so near the Boeing Plant that Boeing employees were its primary customers, & night shift workers could sometimes time it to go right from the theater to work. Also, if you’d missed the double-bill at the Midway Drive-in fifteen miles south on the same highway, it would play the following week at the Duwamish, so you had a second chance. It was one of the first of the regional drive-ins to give up the ghost in the late 1970s, reopened once or twice for brief failed attempts, then sat unused for another decade or so as a reminder of days gone by. Today it has Boeing buildings on it because company expansion took over the land, but old trees planted by my great-grandfather back when it was a drive-in still shade the back edge of the property overlooking the river. www.weirdwildrealm.com
In the 1970s we called it the El Rauncho because the place was so raunchy. On Thursdays it was $2 a carload, so we’d cram six or eight kids in a car. There’d be triple bills & sometimes they’d show FIVE films so that the last film was playing as the morning sun was rising. The third, fourth, & occasionally fifth film would be like 64-minute monster cheapies & we could almost never stay awake for the last one. I can remember only once being awake enough for the very last film, & it was a badly dubbed European (possibly Russian) science fiction film with a crazy story that probably had nothing to do with what the story was in its original language. It was so bad that after that I never even wanted to try to stay for the last film. www.weirdwildrealm.com
The screen at the Midway Drive-in was also a claustrophically skinny three-story “house” in which the manager lived in the 1960s & 1970s. It wasn’t much of a place to live in but hey, free rent. I was friends with the family when small & really liked climbing around in their skinny house. My great-grampa was the grounds cleaner & we had free popcorn up the wazoo, which was popped elsewhere & shipped in & stale as popcorn can get without turning into compost. In the 1950s many cars had “spotlights” attached to the driver-size window, & every night before the movie would start, there would be a game of “Spotlight” on the screen — a film of little moving squiggles & objects that people would follow around with their cars' spotlights.