Circle A Theatre
121 E. Main Street,
Pawhuska,
OK
74056
121 E. Main Street,
Pawhuska,
OK
74056
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The Circle A Theatre was opened on November 21, 1937 with Cary Grant in “The Awful Truth”. It became a movie theatre screening mainly Westerns. The Circle A Theatre was closed on November 11, 1951 with Allan Lane in “Rough Riders of Durango”. By 2007 the building stood vacant and boarded up. It was still the same in 2025.
Contributed by
Lauren Durbin
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Recent comments (view all 3 comments)
Stevie Joe Payne remembers the Circle A Theatre in the early 1950s. As he describes it, this was Pawhuska’s western movie theater. Just about every town big enough to have multiple theaters had a cowboy house in those days, where the kids would go for Saturday matinees of movies with stars like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
These theaters often had names suggestive of the old west, like the chain of several houses called the Hitching Post Theatre in the Los Angeles area. Circle A sounds like the name of a ranch. Western theaters went into decline in the 1950s, when all the old movies and a lot of new half-hour cowboy shows began running on television. Most of L.A.’s Hitching Post Theatres were re-branded as art houses, showing foreign movies, but most of the western theaters in small towns or suburbia just shut down. The Circle A probably didn’t survive the 1950s.
The Circle A Theatre launched on November 21, 1937 with Cary Grant in “The Awful Truth” along with an unnamed cartoon and a MGM News Of The Day newsreel.
On July 27, 1948, the Circle A Theatre almost suffered destruction from a fire after a trailer reel caught fire from a projection jam. This happened during intermission before Dick Powell’s “To The Ends Of The Earth” along with the Noveltoon “The Bored Cuckoo” and a newsreel.
Arthur Abbott launched the Circle A with a western themed rustic interior on November 21, 1937 with Cary Grant in “The Awful Truth” (opening ad in photos). The main attractions were the westerns programmed here. When those westerns were a staple for early television, the business model became challenging. The Circle A headed toward the sunset on November 11, 1951 with “Rough Riders of Durango.”