Continental Theatre

rivest266 on December 6, 2022 at 12:48 pm

closed March 15th, 1981.

Continental Theatre closing 16 Mar 1981, Mon Tulsa World (Tulsa, Oklahoma) Newspapers.com

Coate on November 16, 2016 at 6:30 pm

Scott Neff… That 10/21/1965 date was for the opening of the Continental in Oklahoma City.

davegkuhn… The Southroads Mall opening of “Star Wars” was June 24th, 1977 (not in May).

OKCdoorman on November 15, 2016 at 10:18 pm

Man, when they closed a theatre in this town, they covered it—on page 1! (“Tulsa’s Continental Theater Has Its Last Picture Show/Site Yielding to Office Complex,” Monday, March 16, 1981, Tulsa World).

Opened on the day of the second “Watts Riots,” Wednesday, March 16, 1966, with a five month-old movie, Carol Reed’s film of Irving Stone’s book, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY in an invitation only premiere for the Tulsa Psychiatric Foundation (public seats the next day.)

Closed for good practically on its 15th birthday (kennyjrz memory is correct) with TV producer Jerry Leider’s troubled feature remake of THE JAZZ SINGER, on Sunday, March 15, 1981. Manager Van Lee Lowe was already contending with reduced staff (“Another girl quit Thursday.”) when the curtain finally went down (“This is a shame…”).

kennyjrz on September 14, 2014 at 8:38 am

I remember going to the last showing of the last movie that played here, when I was a sophomore in high school. It was “The Jazz Singer”, with Neal Diamond.

BillyOK on January 16, 2014 at 7:38 pm

Isn’t this were STAR WARS debuted in the Summer of 1977?
I believe I went to a Midnight showing there.
We moved away from T-Town in 1986.

Joe Vogel on June 13, 2012 at 3:55 pm

Seating capacity is usually given by the person who submitted the theater. I suspect that some of them just guess at it. If the submitter doesn’t provide a seat count, theater editor Ken Roe sometimes adds it. For American and Canadian theaters I think he usually uses the capacity listings in The Film Daily Yearbook.

The yearbook doesn’t always give accurate seat counts. It relied on owners and managers to provide the numbers, and they would sometimes falsify them, usually under-reporting in order to beat the projectionist’s union’s rule that houses with more than 1,000 seats had to hire two projectionists. There were also cases of simple careless editing that would lead to an under-report.

It’s also the case that some theaters actually were greatly reduced in capacity over the years because, as business declined, balconies and galleries would be closed to the public to save on maintenance and insurance costs. Some old houses that had the greater part of their seats on upper levels would end up reporting nothing but the orchestra floor capacity, which was sometimes quite small.

There were other, lesser factors leading to reduced seating capacity. Operators of aging theaters would often cannibalize working seats from the front of the house to replace seats in other parts of the auditorium that had been broken. That would lead to a creeping decline in capacity. Old theaters also lost some capacity when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, forcing them to remove some seats to provide space and access for patrons in wheelchairs.

There have also been a few cases where operators would remove every other row of seats, in order to provide more leg room for today’s taller patrons. It’s much cheaper than completely re-seating a theater, and can buy a house with declining patronage a couple of extra years of operation.

No doubt many of the theater pages at Cinema Treasures do seriously under-report seating capacity, but there are also many cases where the capacity of a fairly large theater has actually been significantly reduced, and the numbers given are accurate even though they seem too small.

Joe Vogel on May 22, 2009 at 12:10 am

Two things: First, the Continental did not have stadium seating, as the introduction currently states. Like the other two Continental Theatres built by Barton, it had continental seating, an unbroken block of seats with the aisles confined to the sides of the house.

Second, the architect’s surname is spelled Garrett, with a double t. This can be seen in the article about the Oklahoma City Continental Garrett wrote for Boxoffice Magazine, which is linked from the comment by Oklahomo Cowboy’s comment of July 7, 2007, above.

diva1962 on August 8, 2007 at 10:27 am

I remember going to see Dr. Doolittle at this theater when I was a child (the Rex Harrison vehicle). The had lollipops for the children under the seats.

jchapman1 on May 21, 2007 at 10:59 am

One example of the kind of problems the Continental experienced was when they spent a lot of money booking and promoting an exclusive, reserved seat engagement of Julie Andrew’s new big budget, road show attraction “STAR”, at advanced prices. I was a high school student when I went to see this movie on opening night. Surprisingly there were only about a hundred people in attendance. One of the ushers told me advanced tickets sales were sluggish for every performance, and since the film had been promoted as reserved seating, no walk in trade was showing up. By the time the Continental got radio spots and newspaper ads out announcing open ticket sales at popular prices, word had spread that “STAR” was a stinker.
See the Oklahoma City Continental listing for good exterior/interior photos. Both houses were identical.