General Cinema Essex Green I-III
5 Rooney Circle,
West Orange,
NJ
07052
5 Rooney Circle,
West Orange,
NJ
07052
5 people
favorited this theater
Showing 23 comments
Please update, became a Triplex on june 15, 1979, ad in phtos
How Bout an ad for when it was a triplex?
and became a twin cinema on March 31st, 1972. Small ad in the photo section.
This opened on June 22nd, 1966. Grand opening ad in the photo section.
http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2018/04/west_orange_essex_green_shopping_center.html
Which showed empire.
Their so-called flagship theatre, ( you must remember we are talking about the 60’s and 70’s) was the Menlo Park Cinema in Edison NJ (one screen ‘60 –'76, two screens '76 –'91)
Was this General Cinema’s flagship theater in NJ at the time?
Head projectionist Jimmy Heckel, opened up the booth at the new location. I worked with him for about the first year. I don’t know where Jimmy went to after that. I opened that theater as a manager and stayed until after AMC took over.
and BTW the Essex Green I-II-III address was not Rooney Circle, at least when I worked there all our mail came to a Prospect Avenue address.
Just a where are they now moment, John Monsport the longtime manager of the Essex Green I-II-III and his wife who was the manager at the Rusty Scupper restaurant (now a Courtyard by Marriott hotel) now run the AmericanPlace Movies on Route 202 in Flemington.
thanks Bill Great 2001 ad.My friend Nick in Tampa sent me a copy like that from the Tampa paper.don’t see ads like that anymore,Heck don’t see ads much at all and quite frankly most movies stink today anyways.
Right across from where Essex Green was (now a shop-rite) its successor will become a fork and screen theater.
I was employed by the GCC Essex Green Cinemas from September 1987 to September 1988 and enjoyed working with a lot of the people there. BTW does anyone happen to know what became of our two projectionists Jimmy Heckle and George (I can’t remember his last name).
Correcting my comment above: The 1966 issue of Boxoffice used a variant spelling of the architect’s name. It should read Maurice D. Sornik.
The original Essex Green Cinema opened as a single screen house seating about 1000 in 1966. The October 10 issue of Boxoffice that year ran a brief article about the new General Cinemas house. It said that Maurice D. Sornick was the architect.
The April 10, 1972, issue of Boxoffice reported that the theater had been renamed the Essex Green Twin Cinemas on the opening (March 29) of a second auditorium accommodating and additional 800 seats.
The June 4, 1979, issue of Boxoffice said that General Cinema’s Essex Green was slated to reopen as a triplex on June 15. The conversion was accomplished by splitting the second auditorium in two. The original main auditorium remained open during the conversion.
I grew up in Maplewood and Roseland and remember going to the GCC Essex Green Cinema on many occasions. In particular, I remember going to a James Bond movie marathon there during the 1970’s and seeing the original Superman there during late 1978 or early 1979. It was just down the hill from Stern’s Department Store (now a Macy’s). Once the old theatre was demolished and moved to it’s new location up the hill, a new Shop Rite Supermarket was built in the area where it was situated.
My favorite theater when I was a kid. I’ll always remember seeing my first movies here.
On 12/11/97 an Essex police officer was injured during a training exercise in this vacant theater. A bullet rebounded off of a target and hit him in the leg.
The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), Dec 12, 1997 p038
Looking at that ad, if I have counted correctly there are only six of the 22 theatres listed that are still open today, and only one—the Lafayette in Suffern—in the same configuration it was back in 1969. The Wayne, the Hudson Plaza, the Warner (Ridgewood), the Warner-Route 4, and the Washington Cinema all still exist but have been subdivided since then.
The two smaller auditoriums in the Essex Green Cinema weren’t add-ons; the original Theater #2 was subdivided, in 1979 I think, and Dolby Stereo was installed in all three halls at that time. The two original (identical) auditoriums both had huge “light board” screens, and the remaining full-sized auditorium eventually was equipped with 70mm projection and may have been the first theatre in NJ to receive THX certification. I have many good moviegoing memories of the place as a teen and into my early 30s; its successor, a nine-screen stadium complex originally opened by GCC in its final few years before being sold to AMC, is pretty unmemorable.
You mean a Co-Op ad?
That’s called a Coop Display ad. The distributor gives a certain amount for a large ad, the cost to be split between those theatres listed underneath who were opening with the film. The local paper probably had a smaller directory, sometimes with paste-up artwork and showtimes for their individual theatre.
1969 ad for 2001 courtesy of Bill Huelbig:
View link