Channel Islands Cinema

The “Winnie The Pooh” Film That They Showed During Its Opening Day Is Called “Winnie The Pooh And The Honey Tree”.

In the late 1960s, my grandparents lived in a retirement community in Port Hueneme, and I remember coming here as a young kid with my grandmother while staying with them one weekend. We saw a double-feature of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “Yours Mine and Ours” (Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda). That building struck me as very modern and ritzy, especially since the rest of the surrounding area was either agricultural or harbor-y at the time. Sadly, I drove past it a couple of years ago, long closed and somewhat vandalized, waiting to be torn down for the new shopping center to be built.

Completely demolished as of March 20, 2011.

I began working at the Cinema Carriage Square in the summer of 1973. At that time it had a single screen seating capacity of about 1200. The loge seats occupied the last dozen or so rows of the auditorium, were padded and slightly larger than the standard seats, and they gently rocked. They also added 50 cents to the regular admission price of $2.50. Users armed with flashlights would escort guests to their seats. During the winter of ‘73, the theater closed for remodeling and reopened in early '74 as a “Twin Cinema”. Not really twins, one theater had 750 seats and the other 300. The final film shown on the original single screen, was fittingly, “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand.

The CINEMA CARRIAGE SQUARE opened as a single screen on Feb. 18, 1966. Over the years, the theatre went through a series of owners, including Statewide, Loew, SRO and Pacific.

First appearing in city directories in 1968, the Cinema Carriage Square Theatre (at 111 West Gonzales Road) was a two-screen theatre for a long time until the 1980s, at which point the three screens (and extra concession stand) in the rear of the building were built. Went to the final evening last night (Sunday) to see “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed” and everything was proceeding as if the next day promised more screenings. The very simple crackerbox five-plex has some very large auditoriums and I’d been going there for 20 years (not continuously, of course). The managers retained their jobs (it was a Regency Theatre) but their surly tones (which could have been stress), graffitied walls and general overall state of the theatre was sad. A small sparrow flew into the lobby and vanished. It was not a good sign.