Movie theater
The Snowdon Theatre, Montreal, Quebec
A movie theater or cinema is a venue, usually a building, for viewing movies. Most cinemas are commercial operations catering to the general public, which attend by purchasing a ticket. The film is projected with a movie projector onto a large projection screen at the front of the auditorium. Some movie theaters are now equipped for digital cinema projection, removing the need to create and transport a physical film print.
A typical multiplex (AMC Promenade 30 in Woodland Hills, California).
Outside of North America most English-speaking countries use the term cinema, while "theatre" usually refers to live-performance venues. In the United States, the customary spelling is "theater", but the National Association of Theatre Owners uses the spelling "theatre" to refer to cinemas.
Colloquial expressions, mostly used for cinemas collectively, include the silver screen, the big screen (contrasted with the "small screen" of television) and (in England) the pics, the flicks, and the flea pit, which derives from the long standing belief that the seats were infested with fleas as they were so uncomfortable to sit on, resulting in frequent fidgeting.
A "screening room" usually refers to a small facility for viewing movies, often for the use of those involved in the production of motion pictures, or in large private residences.
A movie theater in Australia
The Gateway Theatre in Jefferson Park, Chicago was a Movie Palace for the Balaban and Katz theater chain. The theater's Baroque spire is a replica of the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
The first theater dedicated exclusively to showing motion pictures was Vitascope Hall, established on Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana in 1896. The first permanent structure designed for screening of movies was Tally's Electric Theater, completed in 1902 in Los Angeles, California. The 1913 opening of the Regent Theater in New York City signalled a new respectability for the medium, and the start of the two-decade heyday of American cinema design. Los Angeles promoter Sid Grauman began the trend of theatre-as-destination with his ornate "Million Dollar Theatre" (the first to signify its primary use for motion pictures with the "theatre" spelling), which opened on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles in 1918. In the next ten years, as movie revenues exploded, independent promoters and movie studios (who owned their own proprietary chains until an antitrust ruling in 1948) raced to build the most lavish, elaborate, attractive theatres. These forms morphed into a unique architectural genre—the movie palace—a unique and extreme architectural genre which came to an end with the deepening of the Great Depression. The movie chains were also among the first industries to install air conditioning systems which gave the theatres an additional lure of comfort in the summer period.
This November 7, 1897 ad shows the actual programming of Vitascope Theater, one of the first motion picture theaters specially built for that purpose. In its first year, 200,000 people attended. It was in Buffalo, New York. However, during the rest of this period, between 1891-1900, films did not achieve much popularity.
Several movie studios achieved vertical integration by acquiring and constructing theatre chains. The so-called "Big Five" theatre chains of the 1920s and 1930s were all owned by studios: Paramount, Warner, Loews (owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Fox, and RKO. All were broken up as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust case.
Other older movie theaters, such as the Texas Theatre in Dallas, Texas, have been deemed historically significant and undergone restoration. The Texas Theater is shown here in 2008 with replica marquee and appears as it did in 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested on the premises. The building today hosts live theater.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
Video: Movie Theater Anthropologists
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