Crazy Horse Theatre
980 Market Street,
San Francisco,
CA
94103
980 Market Street,
San Francisco,
CA
94103
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Reopened as Egyptian on June 28th, 1978. Small ad uploaded.
Listings for Cinema started on December 3rd, 1949. no special ad.
Opened as Newsreel on December 15th, 1939. The Telenews stepped up their newspaper ad budget when this opened.
1973 photo as the Crest added courtesy of Michael Thomas Angeloā€ˇ.
Man a lot of A.K.A.s on this one.
Crest should be added as an AKA.
Here is an approximate timeline regarding the various incarnations of this building. Some of the akas are missing from the caption.
980 Market:
Lesser Nickelodeon 1909
Grauman’s 1910
Maio Biograph 1912-1924
Circle 1924-1932
New Circle 1932-1939
Newsreel 1939-1949
Cinema 1949-1958
Crest 1958-1978
Crest Theatre in 1967.
Egyptian 1978-1981
Electric 1981-1994
Crazy Horse 1994-
Have often wondered why Hollywood never filmed a biopic about the colorful life of legendary showman Sid Grauman.
Rumor says that during the Klondike Gold Rush, Sid Grauman ran a highly successful brothel in Dawson City, Alaska. When Sid heard that flickers were attracting hordes of ticket buyers he converted the downstairs saloon into a daylight nickelodeon, while still maintaining his profitable upstairs cat house. Eventually the nickel and dime cinema began to bring in almost as much loot as did his soiled doves. By Autumn of 1908 gold became tapped out and Dawson City was floundering, it was then that Grauman absconded with the funds of his fancy ladies leaving the girls flat broke to face an oncoming harsh winter alone and broke.
Sid moved to San Francisco and opened this profitable, no frills movie house. The rest of the story can be found amoungst these many pages of CT …
That is, in fact, the Warfield.
Is that the Warfield next to the Crest in the picture directly above? It’s the only theater in SF that ends in “ELD”.
Two notes: When it was the Egyptian, it was operated by Mike Thomas.
Also, when it was the Electric, it primarily showed triple bills, mostly of the horror/sleaze variety. Towards the end of its run as a theater, the Electric showed hard porn.