{"id":754,"date":"2011-04-05T11:48:34","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T11:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/?p=754"},"modified":"2011-04-05T11:51:11","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T11:51:11","slug":"forgotten-cinema-the-city-center-theatres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/2011\/04\/05\/forgotten-cinema-the-city-center-theatres\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten Cinema: The City Center Theatres"},"content":{"rendered":"
The area of Orange, running beside Interstate 5, has long been known for a string of popular cinemas. From the Orange Drive-In<\/a>, to the Cinedome Theatres<\/a>, and to the present day AMC Block 30<\/a>, this short stretch of real estate has been home to\u00a0movie going hotspots for seventy years. Yet, amid these period titans, there once stood a theatre that never quite achieved the\u00a0same popularity, despite offering one of the best presentations in the county.<\/div>\n
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The City Center\u00a0Theatres <\/a>were opened by ABC, on April 7, 1972, as a satellite addition to the, then high end and extremely popular, City\u00a0Shopping Center.\u00a0Featuring two 700+ seat auditoriums, the facility was designed in a somewhat similar fashion to ABC’s\u00a0much lauded Century City\u00a0cinema complex; forgoing aesthetic charm\u00a0in favor of offering the best in presentation quality. The theatre’s\u00a0cold box exterior and bland earth tone decor providing little hint that this place was truly designed for a “big” movie experience.\u00a0Continually keeping pace with the day’s technology, the theatre’s equipment was regularly upgraded and even included a run with the fleeting Sensurround sound system. Even after changing operators, to Plitt, the City\u00a0Center\u00a0continued a focus on presentation; perhaps, finding it’s greatest notoriety with an extended run of “Star Wars” in 1977 (a generation of county cinephiles still rave about the experience).<\/div>\n
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Perhaps, owing to it’s isolated location on the perimeter of the shopping center,\u00a0this grand movie experience\u00a0always struggled against stiff competition from the near bye Century Cinedomes and a\u00a0lesser cinema United Artists ran within the City Shopping Center. By the 80’s, the theatre changed hands once again, being taken on by\u00a0the Cinedomes’ operator, and was tragically divided in to a four screen venue. Losing the\u00a0theatre’s\u00a0single notable attribute, the\u00a0subdivided version of the City Center quickly followed the overall mall’s decline.<\/div>\n
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By the 90’s, the City Center had become a move over discount location for Century, showing films that had already run their course at the Cinedomes. Adding to the theatre’s woes, the shopping center had\u00a0taken a dramatic turn for the worse and became a hangout for a less desirable element. Following a fatal shooting in the theatre’s lobby, the end came relatively swiftly and the\u00a0venue was closed for good. After the property was purchased in the\u00a0mid\u00a090’s, by the Mills Corporation, the entire center was torn down and redeveloped as the Block of Orange lifestyle center in 1998. Today, the former site of the theatre is nothing more than another row of spaces in the complex’s parking lot.<\/div>\n
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While long forgotten, the City Center Theatres\u00a0and their former namesake shopping plaza have\u00a0manifested themselves in an oddly cyclical bit of history, as the present day theatre and complex now\u00a0struggle with the same shifting fortunes that once doomed their predicessors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The area of Orange, running beside Interstate 5, has long been known for a string of popular cinemas. From the Orange Drive-In, to the Cinedome Theatres, and to the present day AMC Block 30, this short stretch of real estate has been home to\u00a0movie going hotspots for seventy years. Yet, amid these period titans, there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":758,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}