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Movie palace. A movie palace (or picture palace in the United Kingdom) is a large, elaborately decorated movie theater built from the 1910s to the 1940s. The late 1920s saw the peak of the movie palace, with hundreds opening every year between 1925 and 1930. With the advent of television, movie attendance dropped, while the rising popularity of ...
Apr 15, 2013 · The Fox Theatre of Detroit was the studio’s midwestern flagship movie palace, built in 1928 at the dawn of sound films; it was the first theatre to include a speaker system. Among the glories of the Warner Brothers movie palaces are the Warner Hollywood Theatre, built in 1928 and today known as the Hollywood Pacific Theatre. It seated 2,700 ...
8 Movie Palaces. Is the two-dollar-a-seat picture theater in sight? One might believe from the trade periodicals serving the motion-picture industry that nickelodeons began to disappear about 1909-1910 in favor of movie palaces and that blue-collar crowds were being replaced by refined upper-class bejeweled audiences arriving at the theater in automobiles, while the films to be seen were all ...
- Red Velvet Curtain
- Uniformed Ushers
- Dish Night
- Ashtrays
- Newsreels
- Double Feature Plus A Cartoon
- Serials
- “Ladies Please Remove Your Hats” Signs
- Intermission
- Exquisite Décor
As patrons entered the movie theater prior to showtime, they naturally lowered their voices and spoke in hushed tones as they found their seats. There was something about the lush, heavy red velvet curtain covering the screen that gave the auditorium an aura of majesty and demanded that people be on their best behavior. When folks were seated, they...
Those gallant men and women who escorted you to your seats at the cinema used to dress in more finery than a decorated soldier. But that was at a time when movie ushers did much more than tear tickets and sweep up spilled popcorn; they kept an eye out for miscreants attempting to sneak in without paying, offered a helpful elbow to steady women walk...
One gimmick that kept movie theaters operating during the very lean 1930s was Dish Night. Money was obviously very tight during the Great Depression, and families had to be extremely cautious when it came to any discretionary spending. A night out at the movies was an unnecessary luxury, and cinema audiences dwindled. Theater owners lowered their t...
Movie theater seats didn’t come equipped with cup holders until the late 1960s, and even then it was something of a novelty that only newer cinemas boasted. What every seat did have for many decades before then, however, was a built-in ashtray. You can probably guess why that particular convenience has gone the way of the dodo bird: fire regulation...
Before TV became ubiquitous, most Americans had to get their breaking news from the radio or the daily newspaper. But neither one of those sources came equipped with moving pictures. Hence, the newsreel, a brief “you are there” update on what was going on in the world, was invented. Newsreels were commonly shown prior to the main feature and was th...
Movie patrons of yore certainly got a lot of bang for their buck (actually, more like their 50 cents) back in the day. Very rarely would a cinema dare to show just a single motion picture—patrons expected a cartoon or two after the newsreel, and then a double feature. That is, two movies for the price of one. Usually the second film was one that wa...
A staple of the Kiddie Matinee was the Chapter Play, or Serial. Always filled with action and adventure, and either cowboys or space creatures, these 20-minute shorts were continuing stories that ended each installment with a cliff-hanger. And if even if the producers sometimes cheated and the hero managed to survive an automobile explosion even th...
Going to the movies was a much more formal occasion in the 1920s and '30s, and even the 1950s. Ladies and gentlemen dressed accordingly—women in dresses or smart suits (never their house dress that they wore while washing the dishes and vacuuming) and men in suits and ties. And no man nor woman would leave the house without a hat completing their o...
Remember what we said above about double features and serials and such? During that era, the projectionist needed time to change reels, which resulted in five or 10 minutes of “dead air.” Theaters put that down time to good use by rolling promotional reels to remind patrons of the cornucopia of delicious snacks just waiting for them at the concessi...
There’s a reason that some of the larger downtown theaters in big cities were called movie palaces—thanks to elaborate architecture and decorating the Riviera or the Majestic were probably the closest most Americans would get to a palatial setting. Such cinemas were called “atmospheric theaters” because they were built and decorated with a theme, o...
- Kara Kovalchik
Movie palaces played an important part in creating and sustaining the “Golden Age of Hollywood," which many say had its apex in 1939 with Gone With the Wind and the Wizard of Oz. During the ...
Feb 22, 2021 · Feel the sadness as one by one the theaters are boarded up, abandoned, neglected, and ultimately torn down. Going Attractions doesn’t end in the 1970s but goes in-depth in the nostalgia that comes with restoring the last few remaining palaces sprinkled across the country. We just want to see a movie, so who cares if we’re sitting in a dark ...
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They were the places where cinema came to the masses and the studios successfully exploited such venues as they did the movie stars under contract to them. The first movie palaces were built in 1913. The story of Loew's Corporation in New York is representative. Building on his success and to secure his own suppliers of movies, Marcus Loew ...
