In 1980 this place was in a very run down condition and was run by Georgia Theater Company. When the Atlanta City Manager moved out of Lenox Square Theater and into the company HQ to be the new GM, he left behind a lot of paperwork that I had the pleasure of reading through.
One that I recall was a report he did on this theater. Everything from the dirty bathrooms to the peeling paint, lack of working speakers, uncut grass, and messy storerooms got a mention. The last line of the report sticks in my mind as he called it the dirtiest, most run down theater he had ever been involved with.
He included a long list of repairs and improvements that were needed to get the place into respectable condition, but I do not know if they were ever done. GTC was pretty conservative when it came to spending money on everyday necessities so they might have decided this location was not worth it.
This ad is from mid December 1970 and was for a two week filler booking leading up to the Christmas attraction which I believe was Alex In Wonderland, or maybe Brewester McCloud, I forget which. This booking was the first time I saw West Side Story, and what a great experience that was.
A couple of corrections. While it was in stereo, it was unfortunately not 70MM but 4 track 35MM mag. At this time The Atlanta still had the 36X95 foot ribbon screen with the 146 degree curve and while the 35MM image did not take up the entire screen, the deep curve always caused the edges to be out of focus. No matter, great movie.
Second, West Side Story did not have its initial run here, but just up Peachtree at the Rhodes Theater. At that time The Atlanta was still the Tower, or may have been undergoing its reconstruction as Martin’s Cinerama. One other note about the tag of “Original Roadshow Version.” The print was in good shape but the projectionist did not show the image during the overture or the closing credits, only the sound. When I started working here a little over a year later, I asked when why they did that. The answer: save having to change the carbons as often. Even in a nice house like this you would still find people too lazy to do the job right.
KP: Very much enjoyed your memories of this theater. This place and your experiences are the poster children for dozens if not hundreds of what we thought of as megaplexes for that day. Looking through your under construction pictures reminds me of at least half a dozen places I started working in while they were in that state. One in particular reminds me of this place as it had 5 auditoriums, Dolby in one house, and Eprad 2 channel in another.
I can recall two new theaters where we were installing drink machines and unboxing lobby furnishings as people were lining up at the door for the opening day. In one case they opened one house while seat and booth installation proceeded in the others.
They were pretty bland places and in some cases were identical as the company would not waste money on giving the theater a personality when they could just build the same place on a vacant lot. Did make it easy on me when I had to fill in at different booths around town as most of them had the same equipment.
“I saw some similar shows there, for example something set in a swamp with Claudia Jennings and many alligators…”
Backseater
That would be “Gator Bait.” Great drive in movie. Ran it at the NE Expressway Drive in in Atlanta with its co-feature of “Unholy Rollers” which was another Claudia Jennings movie we had run a couple of years earlier. Those were the days.
Yes, Joe is gone at the age of 89. There was a small private memorial service in the chapel of Crawford Long Hospital for family and a few close work associates. There is talk of a public memorial service in the future, but no word on if the Fox will offer to host it.
In a very appropriate alignment of events, James H. (Jimmy) Williams, a long time Atlanta projectionist died on the same day at age 90. Jimmy moved from the Roxy (also managed by ABC) in the late 50’s and worked as a regular Fox projectionist for many years. After the Fox reopened in ‘78 he would occasionally work a shift on the Summer Movie Series.
All of the old timers who were such a part of those great years are now moving on. Those of us who were young enough and lucky enough to have worked with them in their later years have some great memories, to say nothing of the many stories we post here.
You must have worked there before 1986 since that is when they removed that island concession stand, put the new one against the wall and surrounded that mirrored post with game machines. I started working the booth in 1985, so if we were there at the same time then I accept the compliment. The projectionist belonged in the booth, not downstairs socializing.
As for Steve Crisp, he was a good manager and friend. I first met him in 1972 when he was managing the Capri in Buckhead (Buckhead Theater on this site) which was the flagship of the Weis operation here. In the late 70’s when Weis sold out and left town Steve followed me as manager of the Loews 12 Oaks. Loews left town a couple of years later and Steve moved over to Akers and GCC replacing Larry Anderson as manager. Larry, who had moved over from Perimeter Mall to open Akers became a DM. Steve left Akers in 1986 to open the new Merchants Walk 8. In 1995, against his better judgement, he was talked into moving to Parkside which had opened in 1987 and had failed to find a manager who could get the job done. The fact that the southeast division office was located upstairs at Parkside did not help.
By the end of the decade the theater business had changed a lot from what it was when Steve and I started. I finally left Parkside, where I was the projectionist, in 1999. I lost track of Steve when he left a few months later and moved to Ashville NC. I regret to say that Steve died of a heart attack a couple of years ago.
Steve was a good friend and a good man to work for. He had the ability to be even tempered even in the most stressful or aggravating times, and was good at balancing the duties of management while making his theater an enjoyable place to work without having the staff running wild.
Dennis: Thank you for your comments. You know a lot more about GCC than I do since they only came to Atlanta in 1973 and I did not work for them until 1977. I can only speak for the Atlanta area, but we started getting shopping center theaters here in 1963 or so and those theaters had very large screens and much nicer seating, usually rockers, but even the stationary ones were better than those two position seats that GCC was still installing in 1978. I always thought that those two position seats were uncomfortable since the straight up position was too upright and the reclined position tended to make you feel like you were sliding forward. Maybe you had to be just the right size for them to feel right. Never the less, I never met a GCC manager or floor staff that did not hate the things since they all had to be pushed back upright during between show clean up.
As for the screens, I have worked in many theaters with shoebox auditoriums and small screens that were the result of twinning. However, as I said in my comment of 10/17/2005 (hard to believe that I have been writing on this site for over 10 years), Akers, as well as Southlake and Northlake, were built in this shoebox style by design and the poor presentation could not be blamed on twinning. By 1984 when the Gwinnett Place 6 was built they were beginning to make some improvements in auditorium shape and screen size and by 1986 with the Merchants Walk and Parkside 8’s they were finally building nicely designed theaters although there were still limiting their Dolby installations to two to four screens per location.
As I have said before on other GCC theater pages, I appreciated the presence of GCC in Atlanta as I made a good living working for them for a good many years. However, the first generation locations of Perimeter Mall, Northlake, Southlake, and Akers, had as poor a presentation as any theater I ever worked in. In Atlanta at least, those early locations were in very high profile places but by the time they were building the better quality theaters they were placing them either behind or on the back end of shopping centers or hard to find access roads.
All that said, the quality of the presentation never seemed to bother the public as they flocked to these shiny new GCC theaters for a good 15 years before the newer designs made them obsolete.
By the way, the DM’s in Atlanta in my time were Larry Anderson, Larry Pittman, Dave Pollard, and Jeff Lynn. Did you know any of them?
Chris, thank you for the compliment. I do my best although my memory does play tricks on me from time to time. It is nice to know that there are people out there who value such efforts.
As for your question, the above ad is on the correct page. This is confusing to someone who did not live it, but the easiest way to keep it straight is to remember that the other theater never had “Sandy Springs” in its name and kept the same owner the entire time. It opened as “Cinema 285” and before too long was renamed “Hammond Square Cinema” when the shopping center it was in was renamed. (The reason for all if this is in my intro for that theater on its page.) It was run by Georgia Theater Company for its entire run.
This location started off as “Sandy Springs Mini Cinema” the third of what would be a chain of five mini cinemas in the Atlanta region plus some out of town locations. In 1971 it was renamed “Sandy Springs Theater” by its franchisee when they pulled it out of the Mini Cinema chain when the chain was sold. In 1973 another new owner purchased all of the Atlanta properties and reunited them under the Mini Cinema name calling them “A Division of Conners Capital Corp.” (Except for the Peachtree Battle and Ansley Mall locations which had already been sold off.) In the summer of 1974, all of these plus the under construction triple on Franklin Road in Marietta were sold to Weis Theaters which was a major player in the Atlanta first run/exclusive run market.
This might not be exactly accurate, but it is the way the story was told to those of us who worked there at the time. The ad above is from the spring of 1974 based on what was playing. By this time I had graduated from college and was managing a theatre for Georgia Theatre Company. I can date this by the Papillon sub-run ad and the Great Gatsby ad to the right. (The Lenox ad was for Where The Lillies Bloom.) This was just a month or two before the chain was sold to Weis. The reason such a low rent film was playing in this neighborhood location was simple. The current owner, not nearly as nice to work for as the original people, owed money to all of the major studios for unpaid film rent plus National Screen and every concession supply house in town. The only distributors he could get product from were minor independents that he did not yet owe money to.
As to why Weis even got involved I do not know. They were a Savannah outfit and controlled that market, but they had no sub-run locations here. Maybe they wanted some or maybe they foresaw the coming of the end of the exclusive first run days and wanted a wider presence for the wide break patterns to come. If so they were very smart as in 1977 they got three of the four Atlanta bookings for Star Wars. However, they soon blind bid their way into the poor house and sold off their properties and left town.
Sandy Springs was the only one of their locations that did not continue on as a theater for at least a few years.
If you Google “James Duffy” you will get page after page of legal documents along with a few more newspaper articles. It looks as if he, at least in more recent years, was in the “getting sued” business rather than the movie business.
Before I started running projection booths I was in the management end although only as a theater manager, never any type of home office work. However, almost everyone in this business in Atlanta had heard of James Duffy. He first came to my attention when he bought up the old Georgia Cinerama, removed the wall and opened it as one of the first drafthouses. I think the actual name was Cinema ‘N Drafthouse. According to one of those leagal documents the McDonalds that now sits in the parking lot there bought the property and moved him out. The building is now a church.
Duffy then moved his operation to the North Springs and stayed there for several years although according to an article in the Knoxville paper, not without problems with the landlord, the IRS, and a whole slew of creditors. For a while he also controlled the old Capri Theater in Buckhead. In the late 90’s GCC, which was on its last legs, had some kind of relationship with Duffy and the DM office at Parkside (where I was working the booth at the time) had the Drafthouse people using some of that office suite.
When GCC shut down, Duffy took over the Hairston 8 and ran it as a dollar house under the EFW banner. The closest I came to working for him was in 2001 when one of the former GCC managers who was now working for Duffy called and asked if I was interested in running the booth at Parkside/Sandy Springs which they had just taken on. Their problem as it was explained to me was that one of their people wanted to show how well he could run the booth. This person went into the Parkside booth which had been closed for over a year and cranked up the sound to the point that several of the drivers were blown. I did not really want to get involved with EFW since I had heard of problems with bouncing paychecks and since this type of problem was really beyond my ability anyway I declined. I guess they finally got someone to get everything running although when I went back into that booth to work for George Lefont I found that they had just robbed the drivers out of some of the existing speakers that were not damaged so that some of the 4 channel houses only had about one and a half channels working.
From the stories in the papers, it seems that Duffy then went into the theatre building business in partnership with local governments, mall and property owners, and investors. Some very nice and impressive theatres were indeed built, but if those stories are true then everyone from the taxpayers to the ticket takers got left holding useless checks, or maybe no check at all when the theatre closed down.
I think that anyone who has been in this business very long has probably heard stories like this especially involving small independent operations, but this case with so many theatres spread over so many states is certainly imressive.
An August 2011 article in the Knoxville News Sentinel has this paragraph about the North Springs:
North Springs Cinema ‘N’ Drafthouse — Atlanta
One of the few Drafthouses the Duffys operated, the North Springs Cinema ‘N’ Drafthouse, opened in June 1991, just six months after McDonald’s purchased the property where the Duffys' prior Atlanta Drafthouse had been, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Less than seven months later, three construction supply companies sued for unpaid bills. Three judgments totaling $7,292.51 were ordered, one of which was paid off two years later.
In late 1996, U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents raided the theater, seeking $48,490.95 in unpaid payroll and corporate income taxes and late fees.
The theater had re-opened by March 1997, according to a Journal-Constitution report. The landlord filed an eviction suit for unpaid rent in September 2000, and the theater closed shortly after.
This is the link for the entire article:
http://www.knoxnews.com/business/duffy-theater-history-coast-to-coast
A Google search of James Duffy turns up many pages, mostly filled with court actions.
RStewart: Thank you for that comment. I looked on the North Springs page that I had commented on years ago and found a link to an article in the Naples Florida paper. It was an investigative report on a Naples Theatre owned by James Duffy and what happened to it. Even if you have no connection to any theater in it the article is well researched and makes for interesting reading. It is not a pretty story. Here is the introduction:
Court cases found: 69
Number of money judgments: 47
Judgment total: $24.6 million
Amount paid: $141,208.84
Total theaters found: 88
Number of theaters announced that never opened: 21
Number of theaters open less than 3 years: 37
Number of theaters open 3 years or more: 30
Number of states: 26
Number of theaters in Florida (most of any state): 17
I think that when Candler was first sold it was part of a block of mini cinemas and perhaps GTC did not want to take on the whole lot. Or, maybe they were interested but Weis outbid them. A couple of months earlier GTC had been involved in the strangest change of ownership I ever saw when they purchased the Parkaire Twin from Loews. (You can read that one on the Parkaire page if interested.)GTC was a pretty conservative outfit and maybe Parkaire took up all of the money they were prepared to risk.
Also, 1974 was shaping up to be a bad year at the Lenox Square since it was tied to the United Artists Pictures contract. I think that the top grossing film there all year was Sleeper which was really a Christmas 1973 release. Point is, although 1974 was a very good at several of the theaters I worked in, the owners were obsessed with Lenox. If things were bad there they might have been less inclined to expand.
In the fall of 1977 SD was twinned on each side and Christmas of 1977 and spring and summer of ‘78 were huge. When Weis left town a year of so later it is probable that they did not consider Candler worth worrying about to the point that they did not even track it. I recall that in late '80 or so SD was booked with Coal Miners Daughter. The manager called the booker to tell him that Candler, a dollar house at the time, was at that moment running that movie. The response from the booker was: “O, thanks. I forgot about that (blank)hole.”
As to its location, you are correct. I saw it every night when I was managing SD since I had to use the NBG right next to it for the night deposit drop. (The family that owned GTC also owned a lot of NGB stock.) However, the shopping center extends out towards Candler Road more than I remembered it so I could not find the exact spot when I last was by there.
Second point first. Being Ultravision, the South Dekalb auditoriums were almost square and had 540 seats. So when split they were not quite as long as Village and Suburban after twinning but with 338 seats were almost as big. In all three cases, they used the seats removed for the wall to add rows in front. I was only in the original Village a couple of times but I recall thinking that it had a wider and shallower auditorium than the Eastern Federal houses where I was working at that time.
I worked at the Village for most of the summer of 1974 and got to know the twins well. They might have been a little wider than South Dekalb because I remember that they had six seats per row on the new wall side and seven on the outer section. However South Dekalb and Suburban had rockers and the Village had smaller stationary seats so that might have been the reason. I was one of the unfortunates who was tasked with the job of pulling and reinstalling those Village and Suburban seats. At the Village, two men could move a seven seat row by themselves. At Suburban we had to break them up into threes.
As to your question about business, my stock answer is that any theatre, given the right movie at the right time will pack ‘em in. I can remember capacity crowds at almost every theatre I ever worked in. I even saw them shut the gate at the Starlight Drive In to avoid a gridlock because all of the fields were full and the driveways as well. I can remember full houses at the Village both before and after the dollar days which started about 1977 due to the opening of the GCC Northlake in the summer of '76.
Georgia Theatre almost never sold out of a location and I did see them close a few down, like the Hammond Square. So, since I was obviously wrong in my earlier comment about the Village closing in 1978 instead of maybe as much as 10 years later, it probably made money as a dollar house. If they got a big movie that had not played at Northlake they could do pretty well. Superman played at Stonemont and Buford Highway so Village was well positioned to draw new crowds when they got it.
As to the closing date of the Village, I think that can probably be guessed as sometime after 1987. That was the year Georgia Theatre sold out to United Artists Theatres. UA wanted an Atlanta presence without having to build one up so they just bought GTC just as Regal later bought up Storey. Those people came in here with a vengeance intent on getting rid of as many of the GTC people as they could as soon as they could. As they were only interested in locations like the Lenox, Southlake 8, Shannon 8, and Greens Corner, this applied to theatres as well.
All of the drive ins and the rest of the indoors were soon closed up and their employees let go. No effort was made to match the managers, projectionists, or janitors with openings that the theatres they were keeping open. Indeed, those people had been moved out with the same undisguised glee as the people at the closed up locations were. Those of us lucky enough to stay in the business by finding jobs at other theatres had the pleasure of watching this initial group of thugs kicked out when UA went through an ownership change, and later that group hit the road when Regal took over.
That story may be exaggerated somewhat, but it is what I was told. Actually, it makes some sense. GTC never met a theatre that it considered too small to build or twin. The final incarnation of the Lenox Square Theatre, their pride and joy, had two theatres in what had once been the lobby of the original #1 house. They seated 110 and 118 respectively and had such tiny screens that the sides of the scope picture and the top and bottom of the flats were cut off.
GTC had an odd habit of buying up theatres that they really had no use for just to keep the competition from getting them. In the 10 years or so that I worked for them this happened four times. The theatres were the Loew’s Parkaire, the Garden Hills, the Georgia Cinerama (Georgia Twin on this site) and this one. In each case there was a successful GTC nearby that they wanted to protect, in this case, South DeKalb.
While they were willing to buy and operate them that did not mean that they were willing to compete with their own locations or operate them at a loss. I had forgotten until I looked up its page that the Septum started out as a four, but when word got out that it was on the way, that is when GTC started to look to get out. Having Conyers to yourself (except for the Moonlit) was one thing, but they were not interested in trying to operate Salem Gate against a brand new quad.
I doubt that GTC would ever have put in the type of money involved to quad the Salem, but it made for a good story. And, since Septum ended up buying it, maybe it is true. Now, maybe someone can tell me why GTC never bought the Candler Twin.
I can not say for sure when this location closed, but it was probably later than 1964. Cobb Theatres took over the operation of the Waters Drive Ins and their only indoor, the Eastwood Mall in the late 60’s.
You are absolutely correct Joe. I don’t know why I did not notice that. Not only that but there are not one but two pages for the current AMC 16 and to make matters worse I actually commented on one of them, something I have no recollection of. Guess that is what too many hours of listening to film click through the gates does to your mind. I never worked at any of these theaters and never was inside the quad or the 16, so my only information comes from my memory of the newspaper ads (back when there were ads in the paper) and talking to someone who once ran the booth for AMC.
Raymond Stewart is pretty knowledgeable about theater history in Atlanta and he seems to think that the space of the Cineplex was incorporated into the AMC. Maybe Josh can confirm this one way or the other. In the meanwhile I will let someone else clean up the mess regarding the duplicate pages and the question of having a separate page for the Market Square. While I only know a little of the history of the theater on this page, I know nothing dependable about the other two.
Maybe I should spend my time checking to see if there are any other rogue comments of mine out there.
Dennis: Thank you for posting that picture. I have never seen a view of the theater from the Martin days. That group standing in front is too large to be the theater staff I would think. Do you know who it is?
Like most first generation malls, North DeKalb underwent a rebuild in the mid 80’s. The theater wing was torn down and what stores of the original mall were left were remodeled as was the surviving mall area. (The theater was never actually part of the mall but had an outside entrance just outside the southern entrance to the mall area.) The Cineplex quad that was located in a newly built area on the west side of the mall was not officially one of their “Jewel Box” designs but looked a lot like them.
It was at this point that the mall was renamed Market Square probably because the mall was located in almost dead center DeKalb County and had two newer malls located to the north within the county limits. When it was built as the Atlanta areas first enclosed mall in the early 60’s it may have been located in the northern part of the population map, but by the mid 80’s it was central DeKalb in all respects. Some marketing expert probably came up with the new name which did not last long. Everyone likely to shop there knew where North DeKalb Mall was and before long the name was changed back to North DeKalb.
I do not know how long Cineplex stayed there, but I would guess that it was at the same time that they closed their Jewel Box theaters which were all 6plexes that AMC took over this location. I think that it was still a quad then and AMC increased it to eight. Later they doubled it again to 16. To answer you question Dennis, the Cineplex quad was located somewhere within the footprint of the existing AMC 16.
PS: Thanks Dennis for that great picture you posted on the Suburban Plaza page.
Several of the Birmingham area drive in pages list Waters as the operator or owner before they sold out to Cobb in 1968.
I attended this theater several times, mostly for the type of summer kiddie show that would charge a minimal ticket or more likely six Coke bottle caps for admission. In other words they were in the snack bar business on those mornings. The program would consist of cartoons, a short, and a feature. The only title I can remember of all of those was “Onionhead” with Andy Griffith. On those mornings my mother, or one of the other neighborhood mothers would drop off a carload of us single digit age children and then be waiting at the curb a couple of hours later to pick us up. (We would also attend shows like this downtown at the Alabama although on those occasions there would usually be an older sibling, maybe 13 or 14 in charge.) Then it was home for lunch and an afternoon of play or maybe helmetless bike riding. A different era for sure.
The only regular night time feature I recall seeing here was “Sink The Bismarck.” Ocassionally the four big first run downtown theaters, the Alabama, Ritz, Empire, and Melba would be booked up and a first run feature would open at the Homewood, or even the Shades Mountain Drive In, also a Waters theater.
I can vaguely recall when this place closed up and 1963 seems about right. I do remember being shocked that a movie theater would close up. I had no idea what was in store for me in this respect. Of the dozens of theaters I worked in during my 40 or so years in this business there are only two still operating and very few of the closed ones are still standing.
One odd thing about this location is that when it closed it became a Schwinn Bicycle store, as mentioned above. I was also the owner of a bike from this store, my Christmas present in 1964. It is no longer Schwinn, if they even make those anymore, but it is still a bike store. That means that in its 80 or so years of existence this building has served only two roles: A movie theatre for about 30 and a bike shop for the last 50 or so.
Built by the Martin Theatre Company in 1964 as the Eastgate. The shopping center and theatre soon underwent a name change to Suburban Plaza, probably because there was already an Eastgate Shopping Center on Columbia Drive near I-20. It opened in January 1965 on the same day as the Village and the Westgate Twin. Premiere feature was “Those Callaways.”
This was a time of big change for the Martin Company. Long a dominant presence in small towns across the southeast, it seems that in the late 50’s they decided to enter the big city first run market. The vehicle for this entry was to be the 3 strip Cinerama format which had started in 1952 and seemed to be gaining momentum entering the 60’s. Martin built at least four large and very plush theatres designed with Cinerama in mind. The ones in Seattle, St. Louis, and New Orleans were new construction while the one in Atlanta was a makeover of the old Tower Theatre.
In the Atlanta area there had been a Martin presence next door in Cobb County which in those days was not considered part of the Atlanta metro area. They had several drive ins and the indoor Strand on the Marietta square and the Belmont in the Belmont Hills Shopping Center in Smyrna. In 1960 they purchased the old Rialto just down the street from the Loew’s Grand. They soon tore it down and rebuilt it as a beautiful 1200 seat first run showplace. The Tower, located next to the Fox in midtown was completely rebuilt and became the 3 strip Martin Cinerama. When it became apparent that 3 strip was on its way out, Martin moved up I-85 to North Druid Hills Road and built a 70MM single strip Cinerama house and named it the Georgia Cinerama. After this, is seems that they decided there was a future in the suburban second run business and they opened the Village, Eastgate (Suburban Plaza), and Westgate Twin.
I was not living in Atlanta then so I do not know how these neighborhood theatres fared, but about 1968 Martin obviously had a change of heart. This may have been the time that the company was aquired by Fuqua, but regardless, they came to the conclusion that they were on the wrong track. They disposed of the four Martin Cineramas. The one in Atlanta which was notable for its 90 week run of The Sound Of Music, went to Walter Reade. (All of these theatres have pages on CT.) They kept the downtown Rialto and the Georgia Cinerama, but the Strand, Belmont, Village, Suburban, and Westgate were purchased by Georgia Theatre Company which operated them for the rest of their days. I do not recall exactly when they were closed but comments on some of their pages indicate the mid to late 80’s.
As far as this location is concerned I never saw it until 1974. I had worked for GTC during college and after graduation went to work for them full time until I could find a job more in line with my post college plans. They sent me to the Village as assistant manager and then added a couple of days at the Suburban Plaza as relief manager. This was during the summer of ‘74 and the only two movies that I can recall from my Suburban days are SPY*S and Born Losers. Neither was much of a hit and this 700 seat house was never even half full during any of my time here.
In the meantime, the Village, which had been twinned in the spring of ‘74 was doing great business. The extra screen not only added business but allowed the bookers to commit to the longer runs that were required to get the better bookings. In October of '74 the Suburban was closed for three weeks and twinned in an identical manner. The booth lost its 6000’ reels and gained two first generation Christie Autowind Two platters. I do not recall anything else being done to the theatre then or at any other time.
Business improved but never to the point of what the Village did. Having the North DeKalb a couple of miles away and the Scott Drive In just around the corner cut down on the choice of bookings. In 1976, General Cinema opened the Northlake 2 Triple next door to the Village and pretty soon that theatre was in the same condition as Suburban. Both locations went through the dollar house stage and I think that was their situation when they closed.
Suburban was demolished and a Winn-Dixie grocery store was built just in front of its footprint with the back loading dock area occupying the old theatre spot. I was by the site in 2006 and found that the grocery store had been demolished and a small strip of retail stores built in its place. I have not been there since, but I have heard that a Wal-Mart Supercenter is planned for that location and the entire shopping center might be gone by now. Other that these memories, the only notable thing that I remember about the Suburban Plaza Theatre is that it was and still is the only theatre I ever worked in where there was a lawn mower parked behind the screen and where the manager had the duty of cutting the grass around the building.
I think that this location was built about 1970. I first recall seeing it from I-20 on my way to college in Milledgeville in 1972. It must have had some sort of independent ownership. It would occasionally place ads in the Atlanta paper, but always stand alone or CAP. Never part of a a chain. Around 1982 it was purchased by Georgia Theatre Company. I remember the time because I was working at South DeKalb at the time and they peeled off several of my good employees who lived in Conyers and sent them here.
A couple of years later it was acquired by the Septum chain. I thought this odd since Septum was in the process of building the Conyers 8. The story I heard from the GTC office was they wanted to get rid of Salem Gate and tried to sell it to Septum but were turned down. GTC then informed Septum that if they did not want it then they were going to double it to a quad and compete for all first run product. Septum bought it and soon closed it down, but I think that it was re-opened at least once under independent ownership.
There is an Evan Busman whose father Bob owned the Septum chain who comments on this site occasionally on Septum Theatre pages. Maybe he can ad some more detail.
Mike, back on 6/21/2010 you made a mention of a manager named Neal. Would you happen to remember his last name?
It is odd that this theatre stayed open for 23 years and managed to avoid the twinning plague. Those great Ultravision theatres were almost square and as a result were prime candidates for twinning, or should I say “shoeboxing”?
Thank you for that note Michael. I am sure that 89 week run is a record for here or any other theatre in Atlanta. I do not know how long GWTW played in its initial run at the Loews Grand starting in 1939, but that is the only one that I would think even comes close.
I think that you are correct about the four consecutive years of Julie. Mary Poppins, Sound of Music, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie ran from fall of 1964 until late fall of 1967. If Julie had repeated her Broadway role, it would have been five in a row since Camelot followed Millie here and ran until May 1968. It still could have been five if Martin had decided to book Star instead of Camelot since they opened at at the same time.
I have worked in a lot of theatres in my time, but this one is my all time favorite. I started in February 1972 wearing a tux and escorting patrons to their reserved seats for Fiddler on the Roof. I left in September 1973 after the incredible business done by Super Fly TNT and Chinese Connection led the Weis Theatre Company to buy out the lease from Walter Reade.
This was a great place for a new theatre employee to work. Four stories of backstage dressing rooms, two Cinerama projection booths, a huge basement, and an additional projection booth and entire upper balcony hidden above the false ceiling provided endless areas to explore.
Because the downtown theatre business was undergoing such changes during this time there was a wide variety of bookings. In addition to the roadshows Fiddler and Man of La Mancha, there was the 70MM reissue of This Is Cinerama (which occasioned the 35 by 95 foot Cinerama screen to be reinstalled) Junior Bonner, Concert For Bangladesh, Elvis, KC Bomber, Girls Are For Loving, Russ Meyer quadruple features, kiddie shows of The Alamo, and midnight shows of War and Peace.
There was no place like it at the time and never will be again. Now, it is just another parking lot.
“As for the grand-opening date for the Arlington Park Square 8, I knew it was only a matter of time before the CT editor came along and deleted my comment and revised the overview to, insultingly, make it appear the original contributor had it right from the get-go. Am I the only one who thinks this editorial policy needs to be reconsidered?”
Comment by Michael Coate 3/17/15.
Michael, I certainly agree with your last paragraph in you comment of 3/17. I think that it is fine for the editor to correct bad information in the introduction, but some kind of notation along the lines of “Editor’s Note” should be used to show it was added later. There are pages where I have spotted an error in the introduction and written a comment correcting it. Later, an editor has come by and incorporated my information in the introduction, just as was done here. At least they deleted your comment. On some of mine, they left my comment intact making it look as if I was correcting something that was the same as what I was writing.
Also, I think that whenever they change the text of someones writing, such as with the introduction of this page, they should delete the name of the person who first wrote the intro. After all, although that is not the case here, who is to say that the information that was added was correct? Maybe the original post was correct and changing it amounted to hanging incorrect information on someones name.
Another problem along these lines is the practice of deleting posts without any type of notation such as “Post Deleted By Editor” or “Post Deleted By Member.” In my post above, I refer to the first post by scheifler where the wrong opening date was mentioned. It also made mention of a late change in the layout due to copyright problems with the blueprints. This entire post was removed by the editor which caused the second post by scheifler to now be the first one and it has nothing to do with what I was talking about. There are many pages on CT (and not just involving me) where people have commented on photos, links, or information contained in comments that no longer exist.
Dallas, I have never seen any of these theatres, but I did work for GCC for many years in Atlanta. I find your writing very interesting since it in many ways matches events that were taking place in Atlanta at the same general time. Keep up the good work. It is information such as this that make CT such an interesting forum for those of us who worked in theatres.
As a northsider, I never attended this theatre and only drove past it once. I believe it opened Christmas 1974 with its prime feature being Godfather Part 2.
Starting in 1971 Weis went on a big expansion in Atlanta converting the old Peachtree Art into the Weis Cinema, opening and then twinning the Broadview, buying the Peachtree Battle Mini Cinema and then in the summer of ‘74 the rest of the mini cinema chain, finishing and opening the Franklin triple, and then building this one. I never worked for Weis so I can not say for sure, but I think that Arrowhead and Broadview were the only ones that were Weis built. All of the others were pick ups of existing theatres and since the Broadview was a conversion in an existing shopping center that would make this one the only one built new from the the ground up.
Weis used the same decorator in all of their Atlanta locations and this resulted in a lot of curves, bends, odd colors and strange lighting in the lobby areas as described above. I personally did not care for the style, but it certainly attracted attention. Mike Rogers has described the Weis Cinema in Augusta as having some sort of lighted tunnel that you walked through.
Weis was a believer in putting up big advances to outbid the competition for the best movies, and in the first half of the 70’s this worked well for him, especially in the Buckhead theatres, Capri and Fine Art. Love Story, Ryans Daughter, Poseidon Adventure,
Godfather, American Graffiti, Last Picture Show, just to name a few. When the exclusive run practice started to ease up and outlying areas started to get the big bookings Weis started building places like this. He hit it especially big with Star Wars when he opened it here, Franklin Road, and Doraville on opening day. Loew’s Tara was the only non Weis booking for Star Wars.
In the late 70’s some bad booking choices combined with the arrival and / or expansion of national chains AMC and GCC caused Weis to sell off most of his properties outside of his hometown of Savannah. Some locations went to AMC, Lefont, and Drafthouses and others closed up. This one hung on for a while but the birth of the multi-plex and mega-plex meant the end for anything less thatn 12 screens.
In 1980 this place was in a very run down condition and was run by Georgia Theater Company. When the Atlanta City Manager moved out of Lenox Square Theater and into the company HQ to be the new GM, he left behind a lot of paperwork that I had the pleasure of reading through.
One that I recall was a report he did on this theater. Everything from the dirty bathrooms to the peeling paint, lack of working speakers, uncut grass, and messy storerooms got a mention. The last line of the report sticks in my mind as he called it the dirtiest, most run down theater he had ever been involved with.
He included a long list of repairs and improvements that were needed to get the place into respectable condition, but I do not know if they were ever done. GTC was pretty conservative when it came to spending money on everyday necessities so they might have decided this location was not worth it.
This ad is from mid December 1970 and was for a two week filler booking leading up to the Christmas attraction which I believe was Alex In Wonderland, or maybe Brewester McCloud, I forget which. This booking was the first time I saw West Side Story, and what a great experience that was.
A couple of corrections. While it was in stereo, it was unfortunately not 70MM but 4 track 35MM mag. At this time The Atlanta still had the 36X95 foot ribbon screen with the 146 degree curve and while the 35MM image did not take up the entire screen, the deep curve always caused the edges to be out of focus. No matter, great movie.
Second, West Side Story did not have its initial run here, but just up Peachtree at the Rhodes Theater. At that time The Atlanta was still the Tower, or may have been undergoing its reconstruction as Martin’s Cinerama. One other note about the tag of “Original Roadshow Version.” The print was in good shape but the projectionist did not show the image during the overture or the closing credits, only the sound. When I started working here a little over a year later, I asked when why they did that. The answer: save having to change the carbons as often. Even in a nice house like this you would still find people too lazy to do the job right.
Thanks for posting the ad.
KP: Very much enjoyed your memories of this theater. This place and your experiences are the poster children for dozens if not hundreds of what we thought of as megaplexes for that day. Looking through your under construction pictures reminds me of at least half a dozen places I started working in while they were in that state. One in particular reminds me of this place as it had 5 auditoriums, Dolby in one house, and Eprad 2 channel in another.
I can recall two new theaters where we were installing drink machines and unboxing lobby furnishings as people were lining up at the door for the opening day. In one case they opened one house while seat and booth installation proceeded in the others.
They were pretty bland places and in some cases were identical as the company would not waste money on giving the theater a personality when they could just build the same place on a vacant lot. Did make it easy on me when I had to fill in at different booths around town as most of them had the same equipment.
“I saw some similar shows there, for example something set in a swamp with Claudia Jennings and many alligators…”
Backseater
That would be “Gator Bait.” Great drive in movie. Ran it at the NE Expressway Drive in in Atlanta with its co-feature of “Unholy Rollers” which was another Claudia Jennings movie we had run a couple of years earlier. Those were the days.
Yes, Joe is gone at the age of 89. There was a small private memorial service in the chapel of Crawford Long Hospital for family and a few close work associates. There is talk of a public memorial service in the future, but no word on if the Fox will offer to host it.
In a very appropriate alignment of events, James H. (Jimmy) Williams, a long time Atlanta projectionist died on the same day at age 90. Jimmy moved from the Roxy (also managed by ABC) in the late 50’s and worked as a regular Fox projectionist for many years. After the Fox reopened in ‘78 he would occasionally work a shift on the Summer Movie Series.
All of the old timers who were such a part of those great years are now moving on. Those of us who were young enough and lucky enough to have worked with them in their later years have some great memories, to say nothing of the many stories we post here.
You must have worked there before 1986 since that is when they removed that island concession stand, put the new one against the wall and surrounded that mirrored post with game machines. I started working the booth in 1985, so if we were there at the same time then I accept the compliment. The projectionist belonged in the booth, not downstairs socializing.
As for Steve Crisp, he was a good manager and friend. I first met him in 1972 when he was managing the Capri in Buckhead (Buckhead Theater on this site) which was the flagship of the Weis operation here. In the late 70’s when Weis sold out and left town Steve followed me as manager of the Loews 12 Oaks. Loews left town a couple of years later and Steve moved over to Akers and GCC replacing Larry Anderson as manager. Larry, who had moved over from Perimeter Mall to open Akers became a DM. Steve left Akers in 1986 to open the new Merchants Walk 8. In 1995, against his better judgement, he was talked into moving to Parkside which had opened in 1987 and had failed to find a manager who could get the job done. The fact that the southeast division office was located upstairs at Parkside did not help.
By the end of the decade the theater business had changed a lot from what it was when Steve and I started. I finally left Parkside, where I was the projectionist, in 1999. I lost track of Steve when he left a few months later and moved to Ashville NC. I regret to say that Steve died of a heart attack a couple of years ago.
Steve was a good friend and a good man to work for. He had the ability to be even tempered even in the most stressful or aggravating times, and was good at balancing the duties of management while making his theater an enjoyable place to work without having the staff running wild.
Dennis: Thank you for your comments. You know a lot more about GCC than I do since they only came to Atlanta in 1973 and I did not work for them until 1977. I can only speak for the Atlanta area, but we started getting shopping center theaters here in 1963 or so and those theaters had very large screens and much nicer seating, usually rockers, but even the stationary ones were better than those two position seats that GCC was still installing in 1978. I always thought that those two position seats were uncomfortable since the straight up position was too upright and the reclined position tended to make you feel like you were sliding forward. Maybe you had to be just the right size for them to feel right. Never the less, I never met a GCC manager or floor staff that did not hate the things since they all had to be pushed back upright during between show clean up.
As for the screens, I have worked in many theaters with shoebox auditoriums and small screens that were the result of twinning. However, as I said in my comment of 10/17/2005 (hard to believe that I have been writing on this site for over 10 years), Akers, as well as Southlake and Northlake, were built in this shoebox style by design and the poor presentation could not be blamed on twinning. By 1984 when the Gwinnett Place 6 was built they were beginning to make some improvements in auditorium shape and screen size and by 1986 with the Merchants Walk and Parkside 8’s they were finally building nicely designed theaters although there were still limiting their Dolby installations to two to four screens per location.
As I have said before on other GCC theater pages, I appreciated the presence of GCC in Atlanta as I made a good living working for them for a good many years. However, the first generation locations of Perimeter Mall, Northlake, Southlake, and Akers, had as poor a presentation as any theater I ever worked in. In Atlanta at least, those early locations were in very high profile places but by the time they were building the better quality theaters they were placing them either behind or on the back end of shopping centers or hard to find access roads.
All that said, the quality of the presentation never seemed to bother the public as they flocked to these shiny new GCC theaters for a good 15 years before the newer designs made them obsolete.
By the way, the DM’s in Atlanta in my time were Larry Anderson, Larry Pittman, Dave Pollard, and Jeff Lynn. Did you know any of them?
Chris, thank you for the compliment. I do my best although my memory does play tricks on me from time to time. It is nice to know that there are people out there who value such efforts.
As for your question, the above ad is on the correct page. This is confusing to someone who did not live it, but the easiest way to keep it straight is to remember that the other theater never had “Sandy Springs” in its name and kept the same owner the entire time. It opened as “Cinema 285” and before too long was renamed “Hammond Square Cinema” when the shopping center it was in was renamed. (The reason for all if this is in my intro for that theater on its page.) It was run by Georgia Theater Company for its entire run.
This location started off as “Sandy Springs Mini Cinema” the third of what would be a chain of five mini cinemas in the Atlanta region plus some out of town locations. In 1971 it was renamed “Sandy Springs Theater” by its franchisee when they pulled it out of the Mini Cinema chain when the chain was sold. In 1973 another new owner purchased all of the Atlanta properties and reunited them under the Mini Cinema name calling them “A Division of Conners Capital Corp.” (Except for the Peachtree Battle and Ansley Mall locations which had already been sold off.) In the summer of 1974, all of these plus the under construction triple on Franklin Road in Marietta were sold to Weis Theaters which was a major player in the Atlanta first run/exclusive run market.
This might not be exactly accurate, but it is the way the story was told to those of us who worked there at the time. The ad above is from the spring of 1974 based on what was playing. By this time I had graduated from college and was managing a theatre for Georgia Theatre Company. I can date this by the Papillon sub-run ad and the Great Gatsby ad to the right. (The Lenox ad was for Where The Lillies Bloom.) This was just a month or two before the chain was sold to Weis. The reason such a low rent film was playing in this neighborhood location was simple. The current owner, not nearly as nice to work for as the original people, owed money to all of the major studios for unpaid film rent plus National Screen and every concession supply house in town. The only distributors he could get product from were minor independents that he did not yet owe money to.
As to why Weis even got involved I do not know. They were a Savannah outfit and controlled that market, but they had no sub-run locations here. Maybe they wanted some or maybe they foresaw the coming of the end of the exclusive first run days and wanted a wider presence for the wide break patterns to come. If so they were very smart as in 1977 they got three of the four Atlanta bookings for Star Wars. However, they soon blind bid their way into the poor house and sold off their properties and left town.
Sandy Springs was the only one of their locations that did not continue on as a theater for at least a few years.
If you Google “James Duffy” you will get page after page of legal documents along with a few more newspaper articles. It looks as if he, at least in more recent years, was in the “getting sued” business rather than the movie business.
Before I started running projection booths I was in the management end although only as a theater manager, never any type of home office work. However, almost everyone in this business in Atlanta had heard of James Duffy. He first came to my attention when he bought up the old Georgia Cinerama, removed the wall and opened it as one of the first drafthouses. I think the actual name was Cinema ‘N Drafthouse. According to one of those leagal documents the McDonalds that now sits in the parking lot there bought the property and moved him out. The building is now a church.
Duffy then moved his operation to the North Springs and stayed there for several years although according to an article in the Knoxville paper, not without problems with the landlord, the IRS, and a whole slew of creditors. For a while he also controlled the old Capri Theater in Buckhead. In the late 90’s GCC, which was on its last legs, had some kind of relationship with Duffy and the DM office at Parkside (where I was working the booth at the time) had the Drafthouse people using some of that office suite.
When GCC shut down, Duffy took over the Hairston 8 and ran it as a dollar house under the EFW banner. The closest I came to working for him was in 2001 when one of the former GCC managers who was now working for Duffy called and asked if I was interested in running the booth at Parkside/Sandy Springs which they had just taken on. Their problem as it was explained to me was that one of their people wanted to show how well he could run the booth. This person went into the Parkside booth which had been closed for over a year and cranked up the sound to the point that several of the drivers were blown. I did not really want to get involved with EFW since I had heard of problems with bouncing paychecks and since this type of problem was really beyond my ability anyway I declined. I guess they finally got someone to get everything running although when I went back into that booth to work for George Lefont I found that they had just robbed the drivers out of some of the existing speakers that were not damaged so that some of the 4 channel houses only had about one and a half channels working.
From the stories in the papers, it seems that Duffy then went into the theatre building business in partnership with local governments, mall and property owners, and investors. Some very nice and impressive theatres were indeed built, but if those stories are true then everyone from the taxpayers to the ticket takers got left holding useless checks, or maybe no check at all when the theatre closed down.
I think that anyone who has been in this business very long has probably heard stories like this especially involving small independent operations, but this case with so many theatres spread over so many states is certainly imressive.
An August 2011 article in the Knoxville News Sentinel has this paragraph about the North Springs:
North Springs Cinema ‘N’ Drafthouse — Atlanta
One of the few Drafthouses the Duffys operated, the North Springs Cinema ‘N’ Drafthouse, opened in June 1991, just six months after McDonald’s purchased the property where the Duffys' prior Atlanta Drafthouse had been, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Less than seven months later, three construction supply companies sued for unpaid bills. Three judgments totaling $7,292.51 were ordered, one of which was paid off two years later.
In late 1996, U.S. Internal Revenue Service agents raided the theater, seeking $48,490.95 in unpaid payroll and corporate income taxes and late fees.
The theater had re-opened by March 1997, according to a Journal-Constitution report. The landlord filed an eviction suit for unpaid rent in September 2000, and the theater closed shortly after.
This is the link for the entire article: http://www.knoxnews.com/business/duffy-theater-history-coast-to-coast
A Google search of James Duffy turns up many pages, mostly filled with court actions.
RStewart: Thank you for that comment. I looked on the North Springs page that I had commented on years ago and found a link to an article in the Naples Florida paper. It was an investigative report on a Naples Theatre owned by James Duffy and what happened to it. Even if you have no connection to any theater in it the article is well researched and makes for interesting reading. It is not a pretty story. Here is the introduction:
Court cases found: 69
Number of money judgments: 47
Judgment total: $24.6 million
Amount paid: $141,208.84
Total theaters found: 88
Number of theaters announced that never opened: 21
Number of theaters open less than 3 years: 37
Number of theaters open 3 years or more: 30
Number of states: 26
Number of theaters in Florida (most of any state): 17
The link for the entire story is here:
http://www.naplesnews.com/community/bonita-banner/james-duffy-atlanta-cinema-movie-theater-fraud-lee
I think that when Candler was first sold it was part of a block of mini cinemas and perhaps GTC did not want to take on the whole lot. Or, maybe they were interested but Weis outbid them. A couple of months earlier GTC had been involved in the strangest change of ownership I ever saw when they purchased the Parkaire Twin from Loews. (You can read that one on the Parkaire page if interested.)GTC was a pretty conservative outfit and maybe Parkaire took up all of the money they were prepared to risk.
Also, 1974 was shaping up to be a bad year at the Lenox Square since it was tied to the United Artists Pictures contract. I think that the top grossing film there all year was Sleeper which was really a Christmas 1973 release. Point is, although 1974 was a very good at several of the theaters I worked in, the owners were obsessed with Lenox. If things were bad there they might have been less inclined to expand.
In the fall of 1977 SD was twinned on each side and Christmas of 1977 and spring and summer of ‘78 were huge. When Weis left town a year of so later it is probable that they did not consider Candler worth worrying about to the point that they did not even track it. I recall that in late '80 or so SD was booked with Coal Miners Daughter. The manager called the booker to tell him that Candler, a dollar house at the time, was at that moment running that movie. The response from the booker was: “O, thanks. I forgot about that (blank)hole.”
As to its location, you are correct. I saw it every night when I was managing SD since I had to use the NBG right next to it for the night deposit drop. (The family that owned GTC also owned a lot of NGB stock.) However, the shopping center extends out towards Candler Road more than I remembered it so I could not find the exact spot when I last was by there.
Second point first. Being Ultravision, the South Dekalb auditoriums were almost square and had 540 seats. So when split they were not quite as long as Village and Suburban after twinning but with 338 seats were almost as big. In all three cases, they used the seats removed for the wall to add rows in front. I was only in the original Village a couple of times but I recall thinking that it had a wider and shallower auditorium than the Eastern Federal houses where I was working at that time.
I worked at the Village for most of the summer of 1974 and got to know the twins well. They might have been a little wider than South Dekalb because I remember that they had six seats per row on the new wall side and seven on the outer section. However South Dekalb and Suburban had rockers and the Village had smaller stationary seats so that might have been the reason. I was one of the unfortunates who was tasked with the job of pulling and reinstalling those Village and Suburban seats. At the Village, two men could move a seven seat row by themselves. At Suburban we had to break them up into threes.
As to your question about business, my stock answer is that any theatre, given the right movie at the right time will pack ‘em in. I can remember capacity crowds at almost every theatre I ever worked in. I even saw them shut the gate at the Starlight Drive In to avoid a gridlock because all of the fields were full and the driveways as well. I can remember full houses at the Village both before and after the dollar days which started about 1977 due to the opening of the GCC Northlake in the summer of '76.
Georgia Theatre almost never sold out of a location and I did see them close a few down, like the Hammond Square. So, since I was obviously wrong in my earlier comment about the Village closing in 1978 instead of maybe as much as 10 years later, it probably made money as a dollar house. If they got a big movie that had not played at Northlake they could do pretty well. Superman played at Stonemont and Buford Highway so Village was well positioned to draw new crowds when they got it.
As to the closing date of the Village, I think that can probably be guessed as sometime after 1987. That was the year Georgia Theatre sold out to United Artists Theatres. UA wanted an Atlanta presence without having to build one up so they just bought GTC just as Regal later bought up Storey. Those people came in here with a vengeance intent on getting rid of as many of the GTC people as they could as soon as they could. As they were only interested in locations like the Lenox, Southlake 8, Shannon 8, and Greens Corner, this applied to theatres as well.
All of the drive ins and the rest of the indoors were soon closed up and their employees let go. No effort was made to match the managers, projectionists, or janitors with openings that the theatres they were keeping open. Indeed, those people had been moved out with the same undisguised glee as the people at the closed up locations were. Those of us lucky enough to stay in the business by finding jobs at other theatres had the pleasure of watching this initial group of thugs kicked out when UA went through an ownership change, and later that group hit the road when Regal took over.
Sometimes payback is not a bad thing.
That story may be exaggerated somewhat, but it is what I was told. Actually, it makes some sense. GTC never met a theatre that it considered too small to build or twin. The final incarnation of the Lenox Square Theatre, their pride and joy, had two theatres in what had once been the lobby of the original #1 house. They seated 110 and 118 respectively and had such tiny screens that the sides of the scope picture and the top and bottom of the flats were cut off.
GTC had an odd habit of buying up theatres that they really had no use for just to keep the competition from getting them. In the 10 years or so that I worked for them this happened four times. The theatres were the Loew’s Parkaire, the Garden Hills, the Georgia Cinerama (Georgia Twin on this site) and this one. In each case there was a successful GTC nearby that they wanted to protect, in this case, South DeKalb.
While they were willing to buy and operate them that did not mean that they were willing to compete with their own locations or operate them at a loss. I had forgotten until I looked up its page that the Septum started out as a four, but when word got out that it was on the way, that is when GTC started to look to get out. Having Conyers to yourself (except for the Moonlit) was one thing, but they were not interested in trying to operate Salem Gate against a brand new quad.
I doubt that GTC would ever have put in the type of money involved to quad the Salem, but it made for a good story. And, since Septum ended up buying it, maybe it is true. Now, maybe someone can tell me why GTC never bought the Candler Twin.
I can not say for sure when this location closed, but it was probably later than 1964. Cobb Theatres took over the operation of the Waters Drive Ins and their only indoor, the Eastwood Mall in the late 60’s.
You are absolutely correct Joe. I don’t know why I did not notice that. Not only that but there are not one but two pages for the current AMC 16 and to make matters worse I actually commented on one of them, something I have no recollection of. Guess that is what too many hours of listening to film click through the gates does to your mind. I never worked at any of these theaters and never was inside the quad or the 16, so my only information comes from my memory of the newspaper ads (back when there were ads in the paper) and talking to someone who once ran the booth for AMC.
Raymond Stewart is pretty knowledgeable about theater history in Atlanta and he seems to think that the space of the Cineplex was incorporated into the AMC. Maybe Josh can confirm this one way or the other. In the meanwhile I will let someone else clean up the mess regarding the duplicate pages and the question of having a separate page for the Market Square. While I only know a little of the history of the theater on this page, I know nothing dependable about the other two.
Maybe I should spend my time checking to see if there are any other rogue comments of mine out there.
Dennis: Thank you for posting that picture. I have never seen a view of the theater from the Martin days. That group standing in front is too large to be the theater staff I would think. Do you know who it is?
Like most first generation malls, North DeKalb underwent a rebuild in the mid 80’s. The theater wing was torn down and what stores of the original mall were left were remodeled as was the surviving mall area. (The theater was never actually part of the mall but had an outside entrance just outside the southern entrance to the mall area.) The Cineplex quad that was located in a newly built area on the west side of the mall was not officially one of their “Jewel Box” designs but looked a lot like them.
It was at this point that the mall was renamed Market Square probably because the mall was located in almost dead center DeKalb County and had two newer malls located to the north within the county limits. When it was built as the Atlanta areas first enclosed mall in the early 60’s it may have been located in the northern part of the population map, but by the mid 80’s it was central DeKalb in all respects. Some marketing expert probably came up with the new name which did not last long. Everyone likely to shop there knew where North DeKalb Mall was and before long the name was changed back to North DeKalb.
I do not know how long Cineplex stayed there, but I would guess that it was at the same time that they closed their Jewel Box theaters which were all 6plexes that AMC took over this location. I think that it was still a quad then and AMC increased it to eight. Later they doubled it again to 16. To answer you question Dennis, the Cineplex quad was located somewhere within the footprint of the existing AMC 16.
PS: Thanks Dennis for that great picture you posted on the Suburban Plaza page.
Several of the Birmingham area drive in pages list Waters as the operator or owner before they sold out to Cobb in 1968.
I attended this theater several times, mostly for the type of summer kiddie show that would charge a minimal ticket or more likely six Coke bottle caps for admission. In other words they were in the snack bar business on those mornings. The program would consist of cartoons, a short, and a feature. The only title I can remember of all of those was “Onionhead” with Andy Griffith. On those mornings my mother, or one of the other neighborhood mothers would drop off a carload of us single digit age children and then be waiting at the curb a couple of hours later to pick us up. (We would also attend shows like this downtown at the Alabama although on those occasions there would usually be an older sibling, maybe 13 or 14 in charge.) Then it was home for lunch and an afternoon of play or maybe helmetless bike riding. A different era for sure.
The only regular night time feature I recall seeing here was “Sink The Bismarck.” Ocassionally the four big first run downtown theaters, the Alabama, Ritz, Empire, and Melba would be booked up and a first run feature would open at the Homewood, or even the Shades Mountain Drive In, also a Waters theater.
I can vaguely recall when this place closed up and 1963 seems about right. I do remember being shocked that a movie theater would close up. I had no idea what was in store for me in this respect. Of the dozens of theaters I worked in during my 40 or so years in this business there are only two still operating and very few of the closed ones are still standing.
One odd thing about this location is that when it closed it became a Schwinn Bicycle store, as mentioned above. I was also the owner of a bike from this store, my Christmas present in 1964. It is no longer Schwinn, if they even make those anymore, but it is still a bike store. That means that in its 80 or so years of existence this building has served only two roles: A movie theatre for about 30 and a bike shop for the last 50 or so.
Built by the Martin Theatre Company in 1964 as the Eastgate. The shopping center and theatre soon underwent a name change to Suburban Plaza, probably because there was already an Eastgate Shopping Center on Columbia Drive near I-20. It opened in January 1965 on the same day as the Village and the Westgate Twin. Premiere feature was “Those Callaways.”
This was a time of big change for the Martin Company. Long a dominant presence in small towns across the southeast, it seems that in the late 50’s they decided to enter the big city first run market. The vehicle for this entry was to be the 3 strip Cinerama format which had started in 1952 and seemed to be gaining momentum entering the 60’s. Martin built at least four large and very plush theatres designed with Cinerama in mind. The ones in Seattle, St. Louis, and New Orleans were new construction while the one in Atlanta was a makeover of the old Tower Theatre.
In the Atlanta area there had been a Martin presence next door in Cobb County which in those days was not considered part of the Atlanta metro area. They had several drive ins and the indoor Strand on the Marietta square and the Belmont in the Belmont Hills Shopping Center in Smyrna. In 1960 they purchased the old Rialto just down the street from the Loew’s Grand. They soon tore it down and rebuilt it as a beautiful 1200 seat first run showplace. The Tower, located next to the Fox in midtown was completely rebuilt and became the 3 strip Martin Cinerama. When it became apparent that 3 strip was on its way out, Martin moved up I-85 to North Druid Hills Road and built a 70MM single strip Cinerama house and named it the Georgia Cinerama. After this, is seems that they decided there was a future in the suburban second run business and they opened the Village, Eastgate (Suburban Plaza), and Westgate Twin.
I was not living in Atlanta then so I do not know how these neighborhood theatres fared, but about 1968 Martin obviously had a change of heart. This may have been the time that the company was aquired by Fuqua, but regardless, they came to the conclusion that they were on the wrong track. They disposed of the four Martin Cineramas. The one in Atlanta which was notable for its 90 week run of The Sound Of Music, went to Walter Reade. (All of these theatres have pages on CT.) They kept the downtown Rialto and the Georgia Cinerama, but the Strand, Belmont, Village, Suburban, and Westgate were purchased by Georgia Theatre Company which operated them for the rest of their days. I do not recall exactly when they were closed but comments on some of their pages indicate the mid to late 80’s.
As far as this location is concerned I never saw it until 1974. I had worked for GTC during college and after graduation went to work for them full time until I could find a job more in line with my post college plans. They sent me to the Village as assistant manager and then added a couple of days at the Suburban Plaza as relief manager. This was during the summer of ‘74 and the only two movies that I can recall from my Suburban days are SPY*S and Born Losers. Neither was much of a hit and this 700 seat house was never even half full during any of my time here.
In the meantime, the Village, which had been twinned in the spring of ‘74 was doing great business. The extra screen not only added business but allowed the bookers to commit to the longer runs that were required to get the better bookings. In October of '74 the Suburban was closed for three weeks and twinned in an identical manner. The booth lost its 6000’ reels and gained two first generation Christie Autowind Two platters. I do not recall anything else being done to the theatre then or at any other time.
Business improved but never to the point of what the Village did. Having the North DeKalb a couple of miles away and the Scott Drive In just around the corner cut down on the choice of bookings. In 1976, General Cinema opened the Northlake 2 Triple next door to the Village and pretty soon that theatre was in the same condition as Suburban. Both locations went through the dollar house stage and I think that was their situation when they closed.
Suburban was demolished and a Winn-Dixie grocery store was built just in front of its footprint with the back loading dock area occupying the old theatre spot. I was by the site in 2006 and found that the grocery store had been demolished and a small strip of retail stores built in its place. I have not been there since, but I have heard that a Wal-Mart Supercenter is planned for that location and the entire shopping center might be gone by now. Other that these memories, the only notable thing that I remember about the Suburban Plaza Theatre is that it was and still is the only theatre I ever worked in where there was a lawn mower parked behind the screen and where the manager had the duty of cutting the grass around the building.
I think that this location was built about 1970. I first recall seeing it from I-20 on my way to college in Milledgeville in 1972. It must have had some sort of independent ownership. It would occasionally place ads in the Atlanta paper, but always stand alone or CAP. Never part of a a chain. Around 1982 it was purchased by Georgia Theatre Company. I remember the time because I was working at South DeKalb at the time and they peeled off several of my good employees who lived in Conyers and sent them here.
A couple of years later it was acquired by the Septum chain. I thought this odd since Septum was in the process of building the Conyers 8. The story I heard from the GTC office was they wanted to get rid of Salem Gate and tried to sell it to Septum but were turned down. GTC then informed Septum that if they did not want it then they were going to double it to a quad and compete for all first run product. Septum bought it and soon closed it down, but I think that it was re-opened at least once under independent ownership.
There is an Evan Busman whose father Bob owned the Septum chain who comments on this site occasionally on Septum Theatre pages. Maybe he can ad some more detail.
Mike, back on 6/21/2010 you made a mention of a manager named Neal. Would you happen to remember his last name?
It is odd that this theatre stayed open for 23 years and managed to avoid the twinning plague. Those great Ultravision theatres were almost square and as a result were prime candidates for twinning, or should I say “shoeboxing”?
Thank you for that note Michael. I am sure that 89 week run is a record for here or any other theatre in Atlanta. I do not know how long GWTW played in its initial run at the Loews Grand starting in 1939, but that is the only one that I would think even comes close.
I think that you are correct about the four consecutive years of Julie. Mary Poppins, Sound of Music, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie ran from fall of 1964 until late fall of 1967. If Julie had repeated her Broadway role, it would have been five in a row since Camelot followed Millie here and ran until May 1968. It still could have been five if Martin had decided to book Star instead of Camelot since they opened at at the same time.
I have worked in a lot of theatres in my time, but this one is my all time favorite. I started in February 1972 wearing a tux and escorting patrons to their reserved seats for Fiddler on the Roof. I left in September 1973 after the incredible business done by Super Fly TNT and Chinese Connection led the Weis Theatre Company to buy out the lease from Walter Reade.
This was a great place for a new theatre employee to work. Four stories of backstage dressing rooms, two Cinerama projection booths, a huge basement, and an additional projection booth and entire upper balcony hidden above the false ceiling provided endless areas to explore.
Because the downtown theatre business was undergoing such changes during this time there was a wide variety of bookings. In addition to the roadshows Fiddler and Man of La Mancha, there was the 70MM reissue of This Is Cinerama (which occasioned the 35 by 95 foot Cinerama screen to be reinstalled) Junior Bonner, Concert For Bangladesh, Elvis, KC Bomber, Girls Are For Loving, Russ Meyer quadruple features, kiddie shows of The Alamo, and midnight shows of War and Peace.
There was no place like it at the time and never will be again. Now, it is just another parking lot.
“As for the grand-opening date for the Arlington Park Square 8, I knew it was only a matter of time before the CT editor came along and deleted my comment and revised the overview to, insultingly, make it appear the original contributor had it right from the get-go. Am I the only one who thinks this editorial policy needs to be reconsidered?”
Comment by Michael Coate 3/17/15.
Michael, I certainly agree with your last paragraph in you comment of 3/17. I think that it is fine for the editor to correct bad information in the introduction, but some kind of notation along the lines of “Editor’s Note” should be used to show it was added later. There are pages where I have spotted an error in the introduction and written a comment correcting it. Later, an editor has come by and incorporated my information in the introduction, just as was done here. At least they deleted your comment. On some of mine, they left my comment intact making it look as if I was correcting something that was the same as what I was writing.
Also, I think that whenever they change the text of someones writing, such as with the introduction of this page, they should delete the name of the person who first wrote the intro. After all, although that is not the case here, who is to say that the information that was added was correct? Maybe the original post was correct and changing it amounted to hanging incorrect information on someones name.
Another problem along these lines is the practice of deleting posts without any type of notation such as “Post Deleted By Editor” or “Post Deleted By Member.” In my post above, I refer to the first post by scheifler where the wrong opening date was mentioned. It also made mention of a late change in the layout due to copyright problems with the blueprints. This entire post was removed by the editor which caused the second post by scheifler to now be the first one and it has nothing to do with what I was talking about. There are many pages on CT (and not just involving me) where people have commented on photos, links, or information contained in comments that no longer exist.
Dallas, I have never seen any of these theatres, but I did work for GCC for many years in Atlanta. I find your writing very interesting since it in many ways matches events that were taking place in Atlanta at the same general time. Keep up the good work. It is information such as this that make CT such an interesting forum for those of us who worked in theatres.
As a northsider, I never attended this theatre and only drove past it once. I believe it opened Christmas 1974 with its prime feature being Godfather Part 2.
Starting in 1971 Weis went on a big expansion in Atlanta converting the old Peachtree Art into the Weis Cinema, opening and then twinning the Broadview, buying the Peachtree Battle Mini Cinema and then in the summer of ‘74 the rest of the mini cinema chain, finishing and opening the Franklin triple, and then building this one. I never worked for Weis so I can not say for sure, but I think that Arrowhead and Broadview were the only ones that were Weis built. All of the others were pick ups of existing theatres and since the Broadview was a conversion in an existing shopping center that would make this one the only one built new from the the ground up.
Weis used the same decorator in all of their Atlanta locations and this resulted in a lot of curves, bends, odd colors and strange lighting in the lobby areas as described above. I personally did not care for the style, but it certainly attracted attention. Mike Rogers has described the Weis Cinema in Augusta as having some sort of lighted tunnel that you walked through.
Weis was a believer in putting up big advances to outbid the competition for the best movies, and in the first half of the 70’s this worked well for him, especially in the Buckhead theatres, Capri and Fine Art. Love Story, Ryans Daughter, Poseidon Adventure, Godfather, American Graffiti, Last Picture Show, just to name a few. When the exclusive run practice started to ease up and outlying areas started to get the big bookings Weis started building places like this. He hit it especially big with Star Wars when he opened it here, Franklin Road, and Doraville on opening day. Loew’s Tara was the only non Weis booking for Star Wars.
In the late 70’s some bad booking choices combined with the arrival and / or expansion of national chains AMC and GCC caused Weis to sell off most of his properties outside of his hometown of Savannah. Some locations went to AMC, Lefont, and Drafthouses and others closed up. This one hung on for a while but the birth of the multi-plex and mega-plex meant the end for anything less thatn 12 screens.