I find myself at that age where it's hard not to take it personally when you hear that an institution that has outlived its value to all but a few "nostalgians" is going to be taken out of existence.
For me and for fellow Little Rock baby boomers, the latest of said places is the old United Artists Cinema 150, the dome-shaped movie theater in the Village Shopping Center at Asher (where Colonel Glenn Road ends) and University avenues.
The shopping center was sold last month and the new owners have decided to tear down the dome-shaped building, according to a Jan. 10 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette story. Its obsolescence -- especially as a single-screen theater -- led to the demise of what was referred to in the story as "one-half of the first dinner-and-a-movie date place in Little Rock." (The other half, the former partial-service Mexican restaurant Casa Bonita, also located in the center, went to Restaurant Heaven a long time ago.)
The theater opened in 1968, the same year I moved to Little Rock with my mother and siblings, so its age corresponds exactly with my time as an Arkansan. It wasn't the prettiest thing on the landscape, but you just knew it had to be a special place to be so spacey-looking. The theater was named the 150 because movies were projected on a wide, curved screen using Dimension-150 technology.
According to the blog of former movie producer Tim Jackson (Revhollywood.wordpress.com), the numerical portion of "Little Rock's UA Cinema 150 was one of several elite cinemas built around the country using UA's D-150 projection system."
"D-150 was United Artists' answer to Cinerama -- the 70mm widescreen format," Jackson wrote.
I confess that my memories of exactly how many and which movies I saw there have grown fuzzy. I do recall viewing Capricorn One, the fake-a-visit-to-Mars thriller, there. I sniffed my way through Mr. Spock's "death" in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
What I remember loud and clear: the theater's coolness factor. It had stadium seating before that term became common in movie theater-dom. I remember -- at the risk of sounding like a cliche -- how movies came to life on that curved screen. Compared to more conventional theaters of the time, which offered boring rows of gently sloping seats, the 150 made a patron feel special.
The theater closed in 2003 ... as a theater. It had a brief afterlife as The Village, a concert venue. The last thing I attended there was a 2007 jazz concert with Kirk Whalum and Lalah Hathaway. Many a day I've driven past the place and thought it a shame that the place was going to waste.
Perhaps the property-management company spokesman quoted in our story is correct. Perhaps removal of the Grand Old Dome will be a boost to the center, whose visibility is somewhat obscured by the building and whose site might be better lent to a new restaurant or other business. But it's always sad to see another piece of Americana being chipped away by changing tastes, fickle patrons and modern progress.
Those who benefited from the theater's glory days -- not to mention, its boost to social and love lives -- realize we shouldn't dwell too much on the past lest we become like the faded Hollywood actress Norma Desmond in the silver-screen movie Sunset Blvd. or Lola in the late-'70s Barry Manilow hit song "Copacabana." But we also realize there's value in preserving some of the things that, to us, represented a simpler, sweeter, special time and supply us with happy memories in this cray-cray world.
Alas, too few of us feel this way about old movie theaters. The Cinema 150 is just the latest in a number of historic, single-screen theaters that have been put out of their misery in recent years due to shiny new movie multiplexes.
If that old place could talk, it might say something similar to the remark made by Sunset Blvd.'s Desmond after a reference by protagonist Joe Gillis to her having once been a "big" star: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small."
I am big, the UA Cinema 150 might say. It's the industry's and the customers' thinking that outgrew me.
The following address has been approved for all emailers:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 01/18/2015