Almonte Cinema 6
2956 SW 59th Street,
Oklahoma City,
OK
73119
2956 SW 59th Street,
Oklahoma City,
OK
73119
2 people
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Previously operated by: Commonwealth Amusement Corp., Hollywood Theaters, United Artists Theater Circuit Inc.
Nearby Theaters
Opened on June 19, 1981 by Commonwealth Amusement Corp. It was closed on December 17, 1999.
Contributed by
Lauren Grubb
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Recent comments (view all 17 comments)
Now thats old school.
Yes it is but i enjoyed it.It was a time to chat with the girls,If they were real good they did everything for me,except count the money.About the time you would finish Box office, the concessionstand girl would come in with her money.Since we never had Cash registers or COMPUTERS it is amazing we hardly came up short. But like you said LOEWS had a separate Concession that you never had to worry about.
I guess this is off topic.I have been trying to stay on Topic!
the theater is completely desrtoyed as i am rewiring it at this time. stupid tweakers broke in and destroyed what they didnt steal. the screens are ripped down, speakers either broken or destroyed, and in the projector room every thing is gone.
Mike – not sure you will ever read this, but I think I worked for you when I was in high school :) I worked @ Almonte 6 from 86-87. Not sure you were there the whole time, we had managers changed out sometime but I cant remember when lol.. I worked in the snack bar :) My all time fave job w/ amazing memories!! <3
June 19th, 1981 grand opening ad in photo section
Visited the remains of the Almonte 6 on November 16, 2015. Still empty and partially taken apart, with the projection booth exposed and the bases of the old projectors still in place – too heavy to move, I’m sure. I’d love to know if the safe is still in place in the manager’s office. New photos posted in the picture section.
More Almonte 6 miscellanea:
Originally a Farris Shanbour/Oklahoma Cinema Theatres project—his largest to that time—but he died a month or two before its opening, and the ownership for this one was sold to Commonwealth. Some of the veteran IATSE projectionists from Shanbour’s North Park Theatre transferred here. Oddly, although neither company had had anything to do with one another until then, both chains dressed their lower staff in the exact same black and red polyester-fiber uniforms.
The Almonte Mall itself has always been an small, standard, unpretentious one-block strip mall in a comfortably working-/middle-class-part of town a half-mile from the interstate and 2 miles from the airport, which may partly have decided its construction. Dow 100-level industries and billion-dollar-level real-estate developers at that time however did not run to establish factories and mansions in far southwest OKC so why the Almonte 6 was built there—knowing full well that both the cable TV and home-video/VCR revolutions were about to occur with no huge population spike predicted for the nearby area and not even placed at a particularly high-traffic intersection (the 2-miles-away SW 74th & Penn crossing has always been more of a local headache)—was never revealed.
There was a community rumor the ushers here were particularly on the lookout for auditorium jumpers.
The largest auditorium, directly behind the front lobby, had 70mm capability although it was hardly ever used for the life of the theatre. 2010 with Roy Scheider was exhibited here in that format on its December 1984 U.S. opening day.
This is where I got my first job in 1982. Raiders of the Lost Ark was playing in theater 3. Bob Ostercamp was the Manager and Henry was the pojectionist. Susan Gunn was one of the ticket counter girls. Lisa (forgot her last name), Tiffany Alvarado, the rest of the names escape me. Good times for a 14 year old!
The Almonte Shopping Center launched theatre-less in 1963. But Commonwealth Amusement Corp. Circuit changed that with the addition of the Almonte Cinema 6 on June 19, 1981. At the same time, Commonwealth added the Oklahoma Cinema Circuit’s locations of North Park Theater 4, French Market Twin, and Heritage Park Mall Cinema Three. United Artists bought out Commonwealth. It started to weed out smaller theaters. The Almonte 6 made the cut operating all the way until October of 1996 when UA dropped it at the end of the month likely at the end of a 15-year opt out on a lease.
Hollywood Theaters picked up the Almonte in December of 1996 and then all of the discarded GCC locations as of August 15, 1997. It ran its expanded portfolio with the Almonte 6 staying first-run to 1999. But the launch of megaplexes including Cinemark Tinseltown and the AMC Quail Springs 24-plex was a disaster to Hollywood Theater’s aging multiplexes. It closed the Almonte theater briefly in May of 1999 to reposition the aging six-plex to a dollar house along with the Quail Springs 6 location. But with a marketplace overstated with aging discount houses, both the Almonte 6 and Quail Springs 6 were quick casualties. The Almonte closed on December 17, 1999. The Quail Springs closed two weeks later. Hollywood would continue to shed locations including the Brixton 8 until it had just one theater in the market in January of 2008.