Via Metafilter comes this wonder blog post on the history of General Cinema:
General Cinema’s Feature Presentation
The photographs in the post are fascinating – there’s an adult seediness about them that’s missing from today’s tween holding areas; (at the time of course they were still making films for adults – though after the mid-70′s with Jaws, etc., the writing was on the wall, and actually looking at the pic below I’m not sure who Meteor was for).
I’d love to read a book right now on the evolution of the movie-going experience in the U.S. From the ‘self-winding’ pre-projection arcades, (which were seen by many at the time as an ‘unclean’ place to go = how ‘adult book stores’ are regarded today), through to the ‘let’s compensate for our disreputable past’ movie palaces, thorough to the adult lo-fi experience of the 70′s and 80′s to our present time of…well nobody knows for sure:
* convert theatres to digital projection, the better to show TV and live presentations?
* rip the seats out and lease the spaces for other development?
I mean, after years of hype, I went to see ‘Watchmen’ one day after it was released and the theatre was empty. So something’s going on here.
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More interesting photos at the now abandoned ‘General Cinema’s site: Cinema World Behind The Scenes
Man, great find!
There is one movie theater in Atlanta that still has that “old school” feel to it – the Tara on Cheshire Bridge Road – it's one of those four-theater buildings of old, with MASSIVE theaters like you see in the images linked. Just rows and rows of seats, with incredibly high ceilings that make you feel like you are really going to see a show.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the Tara does not show the blockbusters – either foreign films or the Slumdog/Doubt/Milk kind of features.
And your post made go looking for this: the old GC bumper before the feature presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6uHhUKURYE&play…
Growing up I never went to a General Cinema, (was in the Bay Area = we had a bunch of diff. theatre(s)chains – but yikes – that GC Bumper is like the tune to some scary video game that you can never master past the first level… !
That tune hasn't left me in over 30 years.
We used to have one theater that was located in one of our major malls, Phipps Plaza (an “upscale” mall located directly across the street from Lenox Square, another major mall – only in Atlanta) – I swear it was designed like something out of a Kubrick movie — isolated in one corner of the mall where there were absolutely no shops – just a seemingly unending corridor of two-story brick wall leading to this dual leveled theater with “futuristic” pinball-shaped chairs (had 2 or 3 theaters on the ground floor + 2 theaters upstairs on a 2nd level). Reminds me of “clockwork orange” visually in someways. Pretty certain now it was a GC theater as the link talks about how they took over some upscale stores like Neiman Marcus, which was located in this particular mall. Then add in that bumper music…
Man, great find!
There is one movie theater in Atlanta that still has that “old school” feel to it – the Tara on Cheshire Bridge Road – it's one of those four-theater buildings of old, with MASSIVE theaters like you see in the images linked. Just rows and rows of seats, with incredibly high ceilings that make you feel like you are really going to see a show.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the Tara does not show the blockbusters – either foreign films or the Slumdog/Doubt/Milk kind of features, so it is rarely full (almost impossible in this day and age).
And your post made go looking for this: the old GC bumper before the feature presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6uHhUKURYE&play…
Growing up I never went to a General Cinema, (was in the Bay Area = we had a bunch of diff. theatre(s)chains – but yikes – that GC Bumper is like the tune to some scary video game that you can never master past the first level… !
That tune hasn't left me in over 30 years.
We used to have one theater that was located in one of our major malls, Phipps Plaza (an “upscale” mall located directly across the street from Lenox Square, another major mall – only in Atlanta) – I swear it was designed like something out of a Kubrick movie — isolated in one corner of the mall where there were absolutely no shops – just a seemingly unending corridor of two-story brick wall leading to this dual leveled theater with “futuristic” pinball-shaped chairs (had 2 or 3 theaters on the ground floor + 2 theaters upstairs on a 2nd level). Reminds me of “clockwork orange” visually in someways. Pretty certain now it was a GC theater as the link talks about how they took over some upscale stores like Neiman Marcus, which was located in this particular mall. Then add in that bumper music…