Nob Hill Theatre
950 California Street,
San Francisco,
CA
94108
950 California Street,
San Francisco,
CA
94108
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The Nob Hill Theatre is also seen in “The Lineup” (1958), with “An Affair to Remember” and “Twelve Angry Men” advertised on the canopy.
The Nob Hill Theatre is seen briefly in the 1948 feature “Impact”.
Grand opening ad in the photo section.
I saw several films at the Nob Hill Theatre in the late Fifties and early Sixties, when I was a kid. It was an art house by then, and I especially remember seeing “I’m All Right Jack,” with Peter Sellers, and “Lawrence of Arabia,” with whatshisname. It was a real vest-pocket theatre, so it certainly did not have 199 seats, and it was closed in 1964 to make way for an expanded Tonga Room. The radio studios of KSFO were also tenants of the Fairmont. PW
Plans to convert the Normandy Room of the Fairmont Hotel into a theater were afoot as early as 1919, according to an item in the April 16 issue of Building & Engineering News:
I’m not sure if the Nob Hill Theatre of 1944 was located in the former Normandy Room or not. It seems unlikely that the Fairmont would have been installing a movie theater as early as 1919, so that project might have been for a legitimate house. I don’t know if these plans were carried out or not.Joe; In the 1941 & 1943 editions of Film Daily Yearbook there is a Nob Hill Theatre listed with 199 seats (Closed in both editions). Unfortunately, no address is given.
A card in the L.A. Library’s California Index cites an item about a San Francisco house called the Nob Hill Theatre in Motion Picture Herald of November 17, 1934.
As it seems unlikely that Jack Tillmany’s 1944 opening date for this theater is incorrect, I would imagine that the item concerned an earlier theater of the same name. Has anybody got a San Francisco directory from the period they could check for an address? The earlier Nob Hill Theatre might be missing from Cinema Treasures, or it could be a missing aka for another theater in the neighborhood that’s already in the database.