Big-Screen Movie Houses Going Way of Dinosaur

The Cinerama Theatre in East San Diego closed Sunday night. Its obituary has, by now, a familiar ring: Large, one-screen movie house shuts down because a developer wants to build a shopping mall that has no room for a large one-screen movie house.

The last movie there was “Top Gun,” an odd choice--or perhaps a sublimely ironic one--since the Cinerama is the latest in a fleet of large one-screen houses to go the way of a jet being shot out of the sky. The legendary Loma Theatre in Loma Portal closed several months ago to make way for yet another lane of frilly boutiques.

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it one little bit,” said Richard Koldoff about the closing of the Cinerama, which opened about the time John Kennedy became president. Koldoff was projectionist for a short time after the theater opened and then continuously from 1970 to 1984.

He remembers such Cinerama hits as “How the West Was Won” and “The Brothers Grimm,” which featured the controversial--and ultimately doomed--process of three-paneled Cinerama projection (hence the theater’s name). He remembers long runs for “Deliverance,” “Amadeus” and “The Exorcist” and a theater that many in town felt was the best place to see a movie.

“It’s another great big mammoth screen (75 feet wide by 31 feet high) that’s gone by the wayside,” Koldoff said.

“This is a very bad, very serious situation,” said Andy Friedenberg, director of the Cinema Society of San Diego. “Because these single-screen theaters cannot be duplicated. They’re part of our history, a history that’s fading.”

Jay Swerdlow, vice president of the Los Angeles-based Pacific Theatres chain that operates the Cinerama, was quick to point out that his corporation is blameless. Pacific leases the building from the landowner, the Douglas Allred Co., a San Diego development group intent on building an expanded shopping center on the University Square site. Allred has allowed Pacific to replace the Cinerama with a “sixplex,” a new cinema complex with six screens, but none anywhere near as large as that of the 900-seat house it replaces.

“We all dislike seeing one of the old palaces of yesterday leave the scene,” Swerdlow said. “But it was not our decision.”

Pacific operates the Cinema Grossmont in La Mesa’s Grossmont Shopping Center. It and Mission Valley’s Cinema 21 and Valley Circle theaters are the last of San Diego’s large-screen houses. So, the question is, is it safe?

“We hope so,” Swerdlow said. “But we don’t own that shopping mall either.”

Vanquishing Shyness

Ann Boe of Encinitas grew up with a painfully shy personality and has known her share of pain. A few years ago, Boe decided she had had enough, and since then she has quietly but forcefully moved into position as one of the top public speakers in the nation.

Not long ago, she was named top public speaker in the United States by a group that recognizes such achievements for her presentation “Is Your Net Working?” It has worked so successfully for Boe that she’s getting a book published. You can probably guess the title.

Boe’s net is working so well that she recently signed a deal with the Tupperware people, based in Orlando, Fla., to be keynote speaker at its convention scheduled for late August. Her role is firing up salespeople with three or four days of intense motivational speaking.

Boe is so effusive, it’s hard to imagine her ever having a down day. What’s her secret?

“Believe in yourself, have confidence,” she said. “You should want to serve your audience. You should totally forget about you and fall in love with those folks you’re addressing. Believe me, it will pay off.”

Moved to Poetry

More than 80 students showed up voluntarily at San Diego’s Hoover High School recently for the central city school’s first-ever write-off. The competition, with $50 first-place awards in four categories and special T-shirts to all, was the culmination of a yearlong Saturday enrichment program that drew hundreds of students from both Hoover and its feeder elementary schools to classes ranging from computing to Chinese language to clay-making.

Principal Doris Alvarez invited Poway High School English instructor Frank Barone to talk to the students before the writing began. Barone was one of the teachers who helped establish the countywide writing program now used in many districts. Barone was so impressed by the sea of multiethnic faces in his audience that he composed a poem for the occasion:

They come this May morning

not to compete on a green athletic field

or mingle with crowds

in a brightly lit shopping mall . . .

Rather than trying on clothes

in music-filled shops

they dress up their blue-lined papers

with poetry

to show this other necessary skill

this other art

this power to create.