Mars Theatre
400 Main Street,
La Porte City,
IA
50651
400 Main Street,
La Porte City,
IA
50651
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This theatre started life as a grocery store. In the l940’s, the wooden floor was sloped, and the rest of the building was remodeled to turn it into a neat little 300 seat movie house. It was named the Mars Theatre, after it’s owner, Marvin Fosse. Usually playing three different sets of programs during any given week, the Mars Theatre was austere (like it’s predecessor, the Pastime Theatre), but it was the center of small town life on Friday and Saturday nights well into the very early-1950’s.
When local TV came upon the scene, and because the theatre could not book pictures anywhere near their release date (along with the fact that many of its potential patrons travelled 15 miles to the Big City of Waterloo and its Paramount Theater), business began to decline and the theatre started closing on selected weekdays.
In the mid to late-1950’s, the theatre was closed. It later was reopened on weekends and operated at various times by Terry Philpott and/or Mike Geater, (who installed it’s first CinemaScope screen) either individually or in partnership. Sadly, by the early-1960’s, the handwriting was on the wall and the theatre was once again turned into a (short-lived) grocery store. It is now a furniture store.
Contributed by
Mike Geater
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Recent comments (view all 6 comments)
This theatre started life as a grocery store. In the 1940’s, the wooden floor was sloped, and the rest of the building was remodeled to turn it into a neat “little” 300 seat theatre. It was named the Mars, after it’s owner, Marvin Fosse. It usually featured three show changes in any given week. The Mars was never any kind of a movie palace but it (like it’s predecessor the Pastime) was the center of small town life on Friday and Saturday nights into the very early 50’s. When local TV came upon the scene, and because the theatre could not book pictures anywhere near their release date, and with many of it’s potential patrons traveling 15 miles to the “big city” of Waterloo to see their movies new, many in the Paramount (movie palace), business began to decline and the theatre started closing on selected weekdays. In the mid to late 50’s, the theatre was closed. It later was reopened on weekends and operated at various times by Terry Philpott and/or Mike Geater. (who installed it’s first Cinemascope screen). But by the early 60’s the handwriting was on the wall and the theatre was once again closed and returned to it’s roots as a (short-lived) grocery store. It is now a furniture store.
The Mars Theatre was located at 400 Main Street and it seated 332 people.
I thought it was named Mars after the planet, not Marvin. I should ask my mom (Shirley) and she would probably know (although she didn’t marry Marvin till 1951).
Paul Fosse (Son of Marvin Fosse)
I got this from Shirley Fosse (Marvin’s Wife, my mom):
Neither. His first cousin’s wife, Claire, Howard’s mother, worked for the Mars candy company in Minneapolis before she and Ogden married.
Thanks Mike, TV certainly killed alot of small town Theatres and that is too bad when one sees what TV has become.
The Mars Theatre at the site of a former Kline department store opened its doors on August 22, 1940 with Humphrey Bogart in “It All Came True” with no extra short subjects.
Information about the Mars Theater goes as follows: The Mars Theater is a replacement of the old Pastime Theater, which will have its own Cinema Treasures page soon. As of 1940, the building’s installations featured a large rectangle marquee with black changeable letters on a white board. The three orchid doors are chrome fitted and their glass crescent-shaped. Inside the lobby features walls carrying out the orchid shade, setting off the natural-colored birch doors. There is also a 4ft long fluorescent fixture overhead and the floors are marble. There is also an office leading up into the stairway and the cashier’s office next door. The foyers features a mix of turquoise, blue, and wine colors, featuring one soft blue wall nearby which contains a full-length hand-printed floral design in wine color. The dusty rose fountain has a horizonal fluorescent tube over at which casts a similar colored light. The furniture features a love seat, davenport and two matching straight chairs of chrome, turquoise, and wine leather. There is also a chrome table which with the chairs will be used for registering patrons for special evenings.
The auditorium floors features fluorescent carpeting that is woven with fluorescent materials in the yarn and when activated by invisible rays will glow in the dark making the aisles clearly visible in the darkened theater without interfering with the brilliance of the film. All of the 332 seats ware deep-upholstered in rust colored and automatically fold up giving a patron going between rows more room in which they move. The rows of seats marked by fluorescent tubes to prevent stumbling are slightly curved to provide better vision, and the seats are scientifically arranged on the floor so that the person ahead will not be in direct line between the patron and the screen. The walls of the auditorium are both beige and brown Nu-wood, arranged in a pattern to improve the acoustics. The wall fixtures are designed that combinations of red, blue, green, and yellow nay be used or a fusion of all may be created. The screen is a Dupont thin sheet of plastic which fastened to a fabric background making a seamless screen, and the surface is punched full of thousands of tiny holes about as big as a pinhead. These are invisible from a few feet away but allow the free passage of sound.
In the basement of the theater are both lounge and restrooms for both genders. Unfortunately the lounge wasn’t even finished on grand opening though due to the painters have been waiting for at approximately six weeks for the plaster to dry. Also in the basement is a room which owners plan in time to fix into a private game room. At the front of the theater above the lobby and foyer is the projection room and an apartment for the manager. A unique feature of projectors are the lenses which have been acquired. They are the same projection lenses that were used during the real original production of “Gone With The Wind” bringing it a very unique touch to the screen. The opening of the theater was even more unique due to the fact that famous actors from Bob Hope to Fred MacMurray to Claudette Colbert and Dorothy Lamour all congratulated the owner Marvin Fosse and the management of the Mars Theatre for their opening on the front page of the La Porte City Progress Review.
The Mars Theatre had several short closures from the mid-1950s to the early-1960s, but was later closed for the final time in the early-1960s.