Cinema 23 Fiveplex
Route 23,
Cedar Grove,
NJ
07470
Route 23,
Cedar Grove,
NJ
07470
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If you visit Michael and Bill’s website and scroll through the year-by-year listings of New York-area 70mm engagements, you’ll see that the Cinema 23 actually had a 70mm festival in 1970, and also ran “2001” in 70mm. So the theatre didn’t have to upgrade to 70mm projection to book “Star Wars” in late ‘77, as I had thought at the time. The website also makes it clear that Cinema 23 was one of several NYC-area theatres outside Manhattan that were equipped for wide-gauge projection in the '60s or pre-“Star Wars” '70s, even if many of them rarely used this capability.
Incidentally, at one time there was another theatre known as Cinema 23—in Montague, NJ, in the northwestern part of the state. Anybody have info on that?
Thank you Micheal Coate and Bill Kallay. WOW! What a COOL website you guys have. I expecially love the New York 70MM pages because I grew up in that area (well, OK, New Jersey) and have a hard time remembering whether something I saw was 70MM or not because I really didn’t know the technical details back then. Now I don’t have to worry about remembering cause you guys have documented it for me! I even found the answer to my E.T. question.
BTW, how was the screening of Star Wars at Cinema 23 compared with the Route 4 Tenplex? It must’ve been different because the screen was a bit smaller and the sound different. Does this theater still make money even though it’s facing competition from Kinnelon and Wayne?
On our website, Bill Kallay and I have posted a page of photos and newspaper ads from the CINEMA 23. I took the photos a few years ago when I was visiting the NYC area. One of the ads is (in my opinion) a really cool one for the theatre’s upgrading of their sound system to accommodate a run of “Star Wars” (which I believe was a moveover of the ROUTE 4’s print).
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This is the theater where I saw E.T. I don’t remember if it was shown in 70mil or Dolby 6 track or any thing. I do remember vividly that my dad cried at the end! I thought that was funny since I never saw him do that any other time.
One of the saddest chop-ups I’ve seen in a movie theatre. As a single-screen house, which at various times was owned by GCC and UA, this originally had a very large Panavision screen (although the aspect ratio only seemed to stretch to full 2.39:1 width in the last couple of years; before then, widescreen movies seemed to be projected at about 2.2:1) and a roomy, ‘60s vintage auditorium that probably seated about 800. For the first couple years that I went there, it was primarily a sub-run house, but then was modernized with 70mm projection and 6-track Dolby in time for Christmas 1977, when it played “Star Wars” to a packed house (it had played “Damnation Alley”—which was supposed to be 20th Century-Fox’s big sci-fi hit for '77, rather than the afterthought called “Star Wars”—in 4-track Dolby a couple months before). That sound system was always a little funny, though: it didn’t have good bass even in the subwoofer channel and the surrounds (all two of them) were always too obviously “on,” so that the sound coming from them didn’t blend with the sound coming from behind the screen. Even so, aside from this I never encountered subpar presentation there.
The last movie I saw in the original single-screen Cinema 23 was “Casualties of War” with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox. Next time I went back was 1990, after it had been carved up into five very small closets. Even the “main” auditorium was tiny, and evidently none of the theatres had ‘scope screens (and from what I hear, still don’t). After two or three visits (I remember the two-hour “Pretty Woman” stretching out to two-and-a-half hours because the projector kept breaking down), I gave up on the place. It’s been operating ever since, so I assume it does business, but it won’t get any more of mine.
Clearview bought this cinema in 1997 from Jesse Sayegh of Cedar Grove.