Towne Cinema

Grand opening ad posted.

The reason for its closure is because of the Town & Country Mall’s out-of-town landlord’s increasing costs of rent (from $900 to nearly $3,000 a month) and poor revenue. Throughout its 20-year run, nearly 16,000 moviegoers visited the Towne for first-run films. At its final years, a total of 10 employees worked at the Towne, but nine of which had a second job, with one being a teacher and another a janitor for the Tifton Aluminum. Melvin Hines Jr., the Towne’s manager, was the only employee that didn’t have a second job.

On its final night on September 7, 1989, with “Ghostbusters II” on the screen, a little closing party happened for around 60 people, including its employees, with a cake decorated with the words “Carmike Cinemas” enclosed in a circle with a diagonal line slashing through them, parodying the Ghostbusters logo. One of the last moviegoers that went to the Towne Cinema was Freddy Ingram who spoke to the Tifton Gazette that they didn’t know it was their last night.

Throughout its last few years of operation, the Towne Cinema served as the only movie theater in Tifton following the closure of the downtown Tift Theatre as a movie theater in April 1987. The Towne’s September 1989 closure left Tifton without a movie theater for more than three years, leaving people to see first-run movies in Cordele, Moultrie, Valdosta, Fitzgerald, or Albany, until the launch of the Tifton Cinema 6 elsewhere on Virginia Avenue on February 19, 1993.

Hines replied to the Tifton Gazette that Carmike was already in the middle of planning on a multiplex theater nearby at the time of the Towne’s closure. There was a fight, as in April 1991, the Tifton-Tift County Chamber of Commerce attempted to prove that the county of 35,000 has enough fans to support a new theater being built. The chamber has distributed surveys to residents across Tift County, but the city of Tifton will force to sell to a theater company just as if it were an industrial prospect.