Theaters of Memory

    By the close of the 20th century it occurred to me that perhaps every place I'd seen a movie from childhood through my twenties no longer existed.
   Time and commerce had closed locations, and even eliminated entire theater chains. Today's post is about the first couple theaters I went to, among the many that now exist only in memory and a few photographs that others had taken and managed to find their way into various Internet archives.
   We moved down from Rhode Island into the house I would grow up in in the summer of 1966. This was shortly after my brother was born. I had just turned five that April.

If I'd ever been out to see a movie before all of that, I have no recollection of it. We were living in base housing up in Rhode Island (my father had been in his first career, as an officer in the U.S. Navy, since the late '40s), so it's entirely possible there was something from back when I was maybe 3 or 4 where I was dropped off at up there where they showed us a movie - it would make sense that there were some spots to entertain the kids and give the military wives a small break - but if that happened it left no memory I'm conscious of.

     So, the first movies I recall getting out to see were after our arrival in Levittown. Some Disney fare, starting in 1967, which I saw with my best pal of the era, Bob (then "Bobby") White, who lived about five houses down the block from me on Indian Creek Drive, and was just over five months younger than me. (Those five months loom larger back when one's only five years old.) Those we saw at the Towne Theater, over at the Levittown Shopping Center.
  A spot built in the 1950s as part of the planned community, and which by the late '70s would be showing its decline. Back then, though, it was thriving, and as my first movie theater it was my exemplar. Here I offer a few pics of the location, from earlier days.  One of the first theaters built after the introduction of CinemaScope, it boasted a screen

54 feet wide and 24 feet high. Built for independent operator Melvin J. Fox’s Fox Theatres Inc., the 1,036-seat house was designed by Philadelphia architect David Supowitz. It was, as most spots were back then, a single-screen theater.    Above is a shot of the the theater's interior, while here to the right is one of the lobby and concessions areas, all from the earliest days of the Towne's life.
  Oddly, as I researched the details - most of which were from articles in the '50s, surrounding the launch - it comes across as a far grander place than I remember. I'm sure some of that is because by the late '60s it simply wasn't being well kept up.
  Still, it at first seemed odd because the usual way memories from childhood are that things looked larger, if for no other reason than that we were so much smaller. (People often revisit childhood homes, for instance, and note surprise at how much smaller everything was than they remembered.) Pictures of the lobby and concessions area, for instance, are much more spacious than I'd recalled. After a few moments, though, it hit me why my memories from back when I was in my single digits were running this way: The only times I went there as a kid it was Saturday afternoon and a packed house. Most of what I was seeing from the time I got in line until we were in our seats were other kids and the legs and towering butts of their parents, blotting out most of the surroundings. It's little wonder the impressions that stuck with me were almost claustrophobic.
    Here we saw The Jungle Book, which was my first Disney animated experience on the big screen, and as best I can recall my first movie in a theater. While I enjoyed the story for the most part, I still clearly remember how the ending was terribly

disappointing to me. Mowgli deciding to leave his jungle friends behind to chase the tart with the water pot nearly ruined the film for 6 year-old me. This was the antithesis of a happy ending! Good lord, he may as well have just decided to go off to school!
  Murky, possible epiphany: Bubbling up in memory, emerging from the shadows, a possible contender for my "first movie in a theater" title, may be the English dubbed version of Santa Claus. That's a 1959 Mexican film, where Satan dispatches the demon Pitch to Earth on Christmas Eve, with a mission to corrupt some children and get them to turn on Santa. At times it's been referenced as Santa Claus vs The Devil, as Pitch tries to sabotage Santa's Christmas Eve run.
   I know this was one of those movies that was repackaged and run seasonally in various theaters through the '60s and '70s, and that I saw it early enough that it lurked as a fuzzy, not-quite-memory for years before the video era reminded me of it.  By the '90s Mystery Science Theater 3000 even

featured it on one of its programs. It's a wild mishmash of legends, odd sci-fi, and religion. It includes a musical number meant to spotlight children around the world, which I recall seemed particularly dreary. I see there's at least one copy of it lurking over on YouTube, so I'll drop that here in a moment for those with the whim, time, fortitude and alcohol to give it a look. Anyway, I have a vague memory of seeing it on a larger screen, and it's possible - since it was packaged as seasonal kid's fare - that THAT was something Bob and I were taken to/dropped off at for part of a December Saturday back as early as '66. Had I seen it when I was older I'm fairly sure the memory would be clearer. I think I was young enough that the novel experience of going out to a movie, combined with the dubbing and it having been an already worn copy with obvious jump-cuts due to splices, was a confusing fever dream for me. I haven't spoken to Bob in several years now, but if I do again I'll try to see what he remembers.

  Between '67 and '68 we caught a couple of the live action films starring Dean Jones: Black Beard's

Ghost (with Peter Ustinov in the eponymous role) and The Love Bug, both of which I remember us really enjoying. The former was my first exposure to Ustinov. It occurs to me now that it probably set him in my mind ever after as a comedic actor, such that I've probably always seen more of the whimsy in any role he played. This was even when he wasn't meant to be a sympathetic character, such as when he played Emperor Nero - not at all intended to be a sympathetic character - in Quo Vadis, which I got around to seeing (in school)

probably around '75 or '76. 
    In the case of The Love Bug it was my first exposure to Buddy Hackett, and I recall when I mentioned him to my mom she didn't have a high opinion of him because of his general reputation as a comic who tended to work "blue" if not closely contained.
  As I recall, for The Love Bug, the theater had an appropriately-painted VW Bug on display outside the theater.

   In late 1974, following a brief closure for renovations, they split it into two screens, as they attempted to compete with the chain theaters, but most of the years I went there mostly it a single screen. It reopened on November 27th as the Towne Twin, as seen in this ad from the area's newspaper, the Bucks County Courier Times. 
   Clearly the intent was to try to offer very different types of films in each of the two theaters, so as to appeal to as large a potential audience as possible. What initially struck me as odd was that the Disney film (Lt. Robin Crusoe U.S.N.) was from eight years earlier (1966), though in looking into it I see that Disney gave it a major theatrical re-release in '74. It was the second of three Disney films starring Dick Van Dyke, and the last film overseen by Walt himself. I guess they thought the collective positives, along with the country finally being in a post-VietNam era, might make for a friendlier reception for a military-centered film..?
    As best I can recall, the last time I went to the Towne Theater may have been circa 1983, when friend Pat and I caught  the 1983 3D movie Treasure of the Four Crowns, a B-list adventure flick trying to fill a budget artifact adventure niche between Indiana Jones movies. It would easily have been in the "direct to video" category just a few years later. By that point the Towne Theater was well on its way to being a mouldering dump.  By early 1988 the Towne Theater closed, and was shuttered. I can't easily dig up how long it sat that way before they finally tore it down. At last check some municipal building had roughly taken its place.
    So, the first theater I remember going to was also almost certainly the first one to disappear.
    One really curious trick of memory in retracing this is that I cannot clearly recall which theater(s) my mother and I went to in 1971/'72, where I saw my first R-rated movies - as I'd written about back in late September. Bizarre, that.
   For whatever reason back in those years early I find myself only remembering the specific theaters where I saw specific movies with other kids. It's certainly possible that one or more of the ones I saw with mom were at the theater location I'm about to mention, but I couldn't make the claim with any sense of assurance, and it's over 11 years too late to even be able to ask my mom what she remembers. 
   While waiting for memory to suddenly serve me up an epiphany, I'm going to attribute most of that to the combination of being less intent on my surroundings when I was traveling about with my mother - I was guided, then, rather than having to pay attention to much aside from the movie - and that when she and I went to the movies it was in the evening, as opposed to heading in and emerging from the movies in the stark brightness of the afternoon.

   By the early '70s my default movie house became the Eric Fairless Hills. Marginally closer to home, but not so much that we didn't depend on a car to get us to and from. Here I've found a shot from he late '60s, which is pretty much how it still looked by '71 or so, when it was added to my personal map.       It was part of a suburban shopping center, such name as it may have had eludes me, as everyone I knew just referred to it by the name of the big discount store that seemed to anchor it: Big C. It's funny how in the years since, dropping that name either sparks a memory in locals of sufficient age and history in the region, or summons a puzzled look since that's more likely something they've only heard used as a colloquialism for cancer. Anyway, that was a large, corner store, there with a record store, a camera shop, a book store, a stationery store, and others I don't immediately recall. 
     It wasn't an indoor mall, but was laid out with broad, paved walkways that were covered by broad, outdoor coverings, so even on rainy days people could stay dry while walking from store to store once inside the perimeter. That Eric movie theater was a freestanding building a two-lane distance apart from it (whoever took the above picture was standing on that promenade), and there was a bowling alley, also a separate building, just off to the right of that view of the theater.
  Here, I recall seeing (among others, I'm sure, and not bothering to shuffle them into chronological order) Escape From the Planet of the Apes, a double-feature of House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, Soylent Green, Ben (the sequel to Willard -- which I never got to see on the big screen; this sequel included a huge, early, title track hit for a solo Michael Jackson, which was practically weeping out of radios everywhere in the summer of 1972)

    Also seen there during that span, the horror anthology film Asylum, The Poseidon Adventure, and Roger Moore's first turn as Bond, Live and Let Die, which was also my first big screen view of 007. If and when I think of any others I saw there during that period, I'll edit them in.
   Most, though not all, of those were ones I saw with buddy Bob White, though that was after a break of a couple years.
   (Flashback to the late '60s: We got off the school bus, down by the power lines, and soon sped up our block to see a fire truck and a great deal of commotion around the remains of the house Bob's family had been renting. This sudden, smoky displacement sent them on a journey, including an extended stay with relatives, where it was a couple years before they settled in a new place not so many miles away, and we got to reconnect.)

   That Eric location was also where, in 1977, I saw Star Wars - also with Bob, but also with new friend from high school, Pat M. (There's a related story, but it involves a different theater and is more of a digression than I want to get into right now.)

    On Groundhog's Day 1979, a Friday night after work (I picked up a part time job at a drug store during senior year of high school), it was also at this Eric that the movie portion of my first date with Sue (who I'd marry a few months over six years later) happened, as we went to see the still-in-theaters Halloween, which had been there since the previous October. Movies hung on in theaters so much longer back then.
    It continued to be part of the mix as we rolled into the '80s, when most (though not all) of my movie-going became dates with Sue, though the '80s quickly saw this becoming just one of many theaters we'd hit. I can't recall offhand what and when the last movie was I saw at that Eric. It may have been the 1990 color remake of Night of the Living Dead, which I ended up seeing solo that October. Something about that's not fitting quite right in memory, though.
  That location closed circa 1995 (a bit of info gotten from an online search) and I don't recall even being aware of that at the time. We'd moved a little farther away the year before, and between having two kids and my having acquired a draining work commute back in '88 (which I'd more or less keep until 2000), it was eventually just another place that wasn't there any longer when I finally came around thinking about it again.
   I'll save memories of the other theaters for a possible sequel piece, which I'll get around to eventually once I've accumulated enough points of interest bother with it.
        So, how have the places you saw your earliest big screen movies fared? Maybe by virtue of either living in a bigger city, or in a more protective small town, a place you saw films many years ago has been loving preserved, perhaps rescued and restored as a local historic site when it was on the verge of being demolished? I've been in one or two of those sort of places over the years, but in each case I was a latecomer.
                                          -Mike

(Note: This is another transplant from the Consortium of Seven blog, which I wrote back in January 2020.)