Dunes Cinema 1 & 2
8000 Melton Road,
Gary,
IN
46403
8000 Melton Road,
Gary,
IN
46403
2 people
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This opened on February 23rd, 1973. Grand opening ad in the photo section.
Demolished sometime in the first half of 2016.
Funny you mentioned The End of Dark Star(and am prfsnlwannabe on flickr, btw), since I know I saw what looked like a preview clip with the opening classic GCC 1977(or 1980?) preview and feature presentation clips. It was still upstairs on the floor, when I revisited this theater yesterday for the first time in 2 years.
One of the Dunes' last films shown may have been the 1974 sci-fi flick: “Dark Star”. Until this year, a tangled mess of film containing the final few seconds or so (“THE END OF DARK STAR”) could be found scatted about the projection room.
Many of the theaters that GCC opened in the Greater Cleveland-Akron area in the 1960s opened as singles or twins – Southgate Cinema, Shoregate Cinema, Chapel Hill, etc. These were all in malls or adjacent to them.
Sad photos guys.Never realized GCC had that many twins.When i started with them in 1982 I thought everything was triples or quads in Malls.You guys had alot of GCC twins up there.Bet all the one-sheets are long gone.I would have to explore if up there.
Here is another photo:
http://tinyurl.com/y2denes
The Dunes was in a rougher area then the other two GCC twins (Ridge Plaza and Crossroads) so this was the place where the action films, blaxploitation films and horror films usually ended up. The Dunes also played first run films and Disney to appeal to everyone but the theatre was sort of branded with the rough image. It was unusual for a film to play more then a week or two and there was almost always a film change on one of its screens weekly. The theatres themselves were nothing special but not bad. I didn’t go there often as usually the films they played were playing at one of the other two theatres which were closer to home for me when I was growing up. Some of the films I saw there included: “The Man with the Golden Gun”, “Lepke”, “The Car”, “The Domino Principle”, “The Cat From Outer Space”, “Gus”, “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training”, “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo”, “When A Stranger Calls”, “Brass Target”, “The Black Hole”, “Crossed Swords”, “Family Plot” and “Night of the Juggler”.