Emory Theatre

I believe this theater actually lasted into 1979. It had become a dollar house. The last movie that played here was Animal House. My brother and cousin saw it there the Saturday before it burned. This was the first weekend of 1979. The next day, a fire started in a restaurant in the section it was in and burned everything in that part all the way to Everybodies pizza.

closed 1978

I worked concession at the Emory starting in the early winter of ‘63, when I
was a junior at Bass High School in Little Five Points.
On November 22, 1963 I was off, but my friend Steve was working that evening.
And of course we all remember what had happened on that date.
Some time during the course of the evening, John King, then the manager, ordered
Steve to remove the marquee billing and replace it with the message “Respects to JFK."
Fred Storey, owner of the Storey Theaters chain came by and had the marquee changed
back, pronto. Steve was pissed – changing that marquee was a lot of work, especially for
sixty cents an hour.

Great Story on Another Great GEORGIA theatre!Thanks for all the pictures and personal stories!

Newspaper ad from August 1964 and a write up on the feature opening that day:

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I went to the Emory Theater, especially for Sat. morning cartoons, from when I was old enough (moved to the area in 1943) to when we moved to Decatur in the Fall of 1949. (We then moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1950.) We lived near Druid Hills School, where I went from the first grade til the beginning of the 5th. Anyway, we generally walked down, except when we could persuade our parents to drive us. I remember, after paying my 12 cents on Sat. mornings, being reprimanded by theater staff for putting my legs over the back of the seat in front of me, as I watched Mighty Mouse, et al. The Decatur and DeKalb were more expensive—14 cents! :-0 We went there at other times of the week, but I mainly remember those great times on Saturdays. We (my brothers and sister and I) were down there some afternoons during the week, taking dance lessons at Mrs. Bagwell’s, on the same side of the street. I remember walking by Jones Pharmacy on the way from home—-great ice cream treats! I went into the other pharmacy, located at the corner of the Emory complex, near the gas station, as I remember, but I just mainly looked at magazines in there. Jones Pharmacy, by the firehouse, was my favorite. I’ll have to let my older brother know about this site; he would remember more.

One of the things that you learn very quickly in researching the history of theatres is the claims that managers make, have to be taken lightly until further research can verify the claim.
It was very common for a manager to inflate the number of seats or how much something cost, or that it was the latest in heating and cooling. Many times the numbers of seats were inflated by about 50% and the cost of something was usually doubled, Hey these guys had to be promoters and sales peopple along with being a manager. Just from what I remember of the theatre it could not be more than 500, and as it seems it was slightly less.

The Emory Theatre opened Oct 7, 1938. According to Tom Miller the theatres first manager the house woulod seat around 600.

The fire was January 2, 1979, my grandmother’s birthday. I grew up about a half-mile from it, as the crow flies. I remember the stores that were in the building (from the left):

A cookie shop, Emory Cinema, a yogurt shop, Dawgwood Sandwich Shop (where the fire started), Doo-Dah Records (I bought Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” there for $3.88 from R.E.M. guitarist Pete Buck, maybe), University Bookstore, Emory Florist and Morgan Cleaners.

Pages from the bookstore’s inventory blew all over the neighborhood, including into my yard.

I wish that an art cinema would open in Decatur (which now has more probably 40 restaurants and several buildings of condos, etc.) and all the foot traffic that could keep a theater going.

Animal House had been playing there for several weeks when the building burned. The next movie that was to have played there was Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke.” How weird would that have been? I’m sure I have a photo of the cinema in some old high school yearbooks and I will scan & post.

I worked at Everybody’s Pizza 1978-1979 before heading off to college. On the afternoon of the Emory Village fire I was at Pryor Tire, about a block West of Boulevard and what is now Freedom Parkway. While they were putting two new tires on my Toyota SR5, I asked if I could climb the spiral staircase to the roof of the building and check out the view of the Atl skyline. From up there I could see a wide plume of black smoke which I thought was closer to Ponce De Leon. About 30 minutes later I was helping Everybody’s staff push heavy Blodgett Pizza ovens away from the endangered side of the building, praying the small service alley on the side of our building would save our jobs, which is what happened. The fire raged most of the night, and dazed firemen wandered in for free pizza and coffee, trying to catch their breath between fire and Winter. The next morning the ruins of Emory Village were made all the more surreal festooned with huge, exploding sprays of ice stalagtites sparkling in the early light. Kids poked steaming lumps of black ice in search of unlikely surviving lps. Besides the theatre, the fire took The Emory Bookstore, a relative cultural mecca in it’s day (featuring a neat large poster of Middle-Earth). Thousands of fluttering pages from literary classics littered the intersection for days. We also lost a sandwich shop called Steverino’s, another called Dogwood’s, a pre-Turtles record store (Crickets?-where evidently the typically difficult music snob behind the counter was REM’s Peter Buck), and possibly Ed Green’s breakfast joint, but I think that had already burned out prior to the blaze. Good ‘Ol Days across the street, featuring sandwiches cooked in flower pots, was spared. Defining adolescent/teen film moments for me at Emory included Animal House, 2001/A Space Odyssey, Harold and Maude and Yellow Submarine.
Atlanta had a lot of neat little theatres in the seventies. The Plaza was still a porn theatre with a hole in the back wall, but my highschool pals and I were constantly talking MARTA to midnight shows at the Silver Screen for “The Valley Obscured By Clouds” and “Rainbow Bridge”, to The Screening Room for “How I Won the War”, “Clockwork Orange” and “Rocky Horror”, to the Film Forum for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” and “Easy Rider”, to the Rialto for “Blackula” and any Bruce Lee, Garden Place for “Alice’s Restaurant” and “Cuckoo’s Nest”. (Your memories may vary.)

In the 80’s I lived at the Rhodes and saw every Bergman, Pasolini, Felini, Cassavetes, Wenders, Herzog, Renoir, Schlondorf, Truffaut, Bunuel, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Godard, Almodovar, etc., they showed. Usually 2 films by a director, changing daily. Now, those were the days!

>>does anyone know the name of the little brown theatre that is now a ballet studio that is about a ½ mile from Emory? My friend who lives down there can’t find the name of it. Everytime I visit Atlanta I go to that really good pizza parlor near the little brown theatre and see if I can get a name for it.<<

Hmmm, if you’re talking about it being in Emory Village, I’m stumped. I moved nearby in 1958 and my brother still lives there.

There was only one movie theatre within ½ mile of Emory Village or Emory University. That would be the Emory (and stretching, maybe the Toco Hill).

I don’t have a clue. It can’t recall there being another cinema that close to the Emory.

Correction: The original format on the 1959 BEN HUR technically should be referred to as MGM Camera 65 (later known as Ultra Panavision 70). Here’s a link to a GREAT website with wonderful information on widescreen formats and color printing:

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Unfortunately, I went away to school in 1970 and lost track of the many of the developments in Atlanta’s movie theaters. It hurt when the Paramount was torn down in 1960. The demolition of the Roxy and the Loew’s Grand seemed to add insult to injury.

If the Fox had been down it would have been an unpardonable sin.