The Marquee, 1986?
by Jim Lewallen and Douglas Gomery
North and South Carolina are surely two of America’s most beautiful states. North Carolina claims sandy coastal plains, a prosperous piedmont and the towering (for us on the East coast) Appalachian mountains. Its cities are numerous and spaced throughout the state. Asheville is in the far western part, near the mountains. Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Durham cluster near the center. Charlotte, the largest city, is in the south near the South Carolina border.
South Carolina also has a beautiful coastline with an important port city in Charleston. The state’s capitol, Columbia, was placed at the center of the state and stands as South Carolina’s lone other major metropolis.
Surprisingly, if one is interested in the history of movie theatres in these two mid-Atlantic states, one finds precious little. We could locate nothing at all in Ben M. Hall’s The Best Remaining Seats. David Naylor’s update contains little more — a single reference to Greensboro, North Carolina’s CAROLINA theatre (2100 seats). Richard Stoddard’s book length bibliography, Theatre and Cinema Architecture, includes no mention of a North or South Carolina movie palace.1 Indeed Gomery’s own "The History of the American Movie Palace: Reading for Profit and Pleasure," published in Marquee, also contains no mention of the cinemas of the Carolinas.2
It is as if movie theatres did not exist in either North or South
Carolina. A quick glance at any Film Daily Yearbook from the 1930s or 1940s proves that wrong. Thus we ask, why has nothing been written? If North Carolina and South Carolina are such wonderful places, why does there seem to be so little written about their movie palaces?
The answer is simple. There are few movie palaces in the first place. In the 1920s when most movie palaces were built, there were few theatres built in the Carolinas of any grand scale. In 1930, at the height of the movie palace boom, North Carolina had only 15 theatres of 1,000 seats or more. And South Carolina had only two: the GLORIA (1800) in Charleston, and the CAROLINA (1350) in Spartanburg.
Remember that in the 1920s North Carolina and South Carolina were rural states. (The New South is a product of the 1970s.) All of North Carolina in 1930 had less people than Chicago. South Carolina in 1930 had less people than Philadelphia.
In sum, the Carolinas, during the Golden Age of the building of the movie palace, were rural states dotted with what would have been called in the North big towns rather than true major urban centers. Specifically North Carolina had only five cities in the 1920s with more than 50,000 persons: Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Durham and Asheville. And these "Big Five" had a sum total of 42 theatres in 1930.
South Carolina was even more rural. It had two cities (Charleston and Columbia) with populations over 50,000. These two cities had only a total of twelve theatres listed in the Film Daily Year Book, 1931. Greenville (29,000) and Spartanburg (29,000) ranked third and fourth in population in the state.
It is thus not surprising that the Carolinas saw the construction of a total of 17 theatres of 1,000 seats or more before the Great Crash. Movie palaces were a product of urban America. The New York’s and Chicago’s provided the demographic conditions which gave rise to the movie palaces, not medium sized communities of the rural South. But that is not to say that there was no interest in the cinemas of the Carolinas. There surely was. Indeed the movie operations of both North and South Carolina were dominated throughout the Golden Age of the Movies (the 1930s arid 1940s) by the most important theatre empire of all — the Paramount Publix Corporation.
Through ownership of the Wilby-Kincey chain, a subsidiary of Paramount-Publix from 1926 to 1950, the important cinemas of the Carolinas were programmed with the biggest and best movies Hollywood offered. Indeed the booking of Carolina’s movies was not done in Raleigh or Charleston, but in New York from offices high atop the Paramount Building on Times Square. Carolinians paid their nickels and dimes for movie shows and this money then flowed through Paramount’s regional offices in Charlotte directly to the headquarters of Paramount Publix in New York.
Two men founded a string of theatres in the South in the 1910s which led to the rise of the Wilby-Kincey chain which merged into Publix in 1926. Robert B. Wilby first entered the film business in Selma, Alabama in 1911 on what he described later as "a very thin shoestring." He had graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1908 and was casting about for a career. He found a patron in S. A. Lynch and together with men like H. F. Kincey they built theatres in small to medium-sized communities throughout the South. Less is known about H. F. Kincey, but with Wilby and Lynch he sold out to Publix in 1926. Kincey took up shop in Charlotte, North Carolina while Robert Wilby operated in Atlanta. Both served as managers for the Publix operations in their respective territories. Theatres were in the Carolinas as well as Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia.
Indeed, following Paramount’s flirtation with bankruptcy in the 1930s, Wilby and Kincey actually were able to buy back a minority interest in their former theatres. After the 1950 consent decree they would actually take back control and try to manage the movies in the Carolinas to profitability through the turbulent 1950s.
But throughout the Golden Age of the movies, Wilby-Kincey took their orders from Paramount’s New York office. They were not alone. By 1930 the Paramount chain dominated film exhibition in most of the Old South from the Carolinas to Texas as well as the upper Midwest and parts of New England. From 1925 to 1930 Paramount had expanded from about 300 theatres to more than 1200. Wilby-Kincey was just one small acquisition in the merger mania. Indeed most of Paramount Public’s growth took place through acquisition rather than construction.
By 1930 Publix — with Wilby-Kincey as one small player — had the biggest theatre chain in the world. It controlled Canada as well as the aforementioned markets in the United States. An estimated two million persons attended Publix theatres each day. To give one just a sense of the size of this operation, consider that Paramount employed some 12,000 musicians at the end of the silent era, more than any other organization in the world.3
The problem for the cinemas in Carolina was that they were considered just one small outpost in a very large empire. Paramount cared far more about operations in Chicago than a dozen cities in the Carolinas. Indeed in a ranking compiled by the U.S. federal government in 1940 of the 92 cities in the United States with populations of 100,000 or more, only Charlotte made the list. And in 91st place. So few dollars flowed through Carolina theatres that Paramount with all its riches was just not willing to invest the dollars to provide picture palaces that Chicagoians took for granted.4
But the Carolinians shared one trait with their neighbors to the North — civic pride. It was easy to tell the key (Paramount owned) picture palace in any North Carolina city. Just look for the letters C-A-R-O-L-I-N-A on the marquee. Since Charlotte was the biggest city in the region, its CAROLINA was surely the most important. Charlotte not only was the largest city in either Carolina, it was the center for film distribution and film booking between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta.
The exterior of the office building which housed Charlotte’s CAROLINA Theatre as well as retail space was divided into three parts, each with its own architectural theme. The lobby of the theatre was, however, only the width of a narrow storefront.5 This was to make the best use of the land for making money. The office space provided more profits per square foot than the theatre, or at least that’s what its builders reasoned.
Designed by R. E. Hall of New York and C. C. Hook of Charlotte, architect and engineers, the CAROLINA had 900 seats in the orchestra and 550 in the balcony. The design was generally Spanish Renaissance. The first note of this Spanish design came with the box-office of wrought iron. (In its press releases of the day Paramount Publix heralded the Spanish design as one most appropriate for Southern theatres.) The fixtures throughout the auditorium were also constructed from wrought iron as well as wood and leather. Spanish (and Italian) pottery, terra cotta jars, wrought iron lantern top torches, old brass and copper jugs, reproductions of old paintings, mirrors and seemingly endless drapes made all parts of the Charlotte’s CAROLINA a feast for the eyes.
Opened on 7 March 1927, this house became the centerpiece of the North Carolina operations of the Paramount-Publix chain. It served as such until the late 1960s. It closed in 1978.
Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Durham also had CAROLINA theatres.
The CAROLINA in Winston-Salem has become the Roger L. Stevens Center for the Performing Arts. It was designed in 1929 by architects Stanhope Johnson and R. O. Bannan of Lynchburg, Virginia. Like its sister theatre in Charlotte, this Carolina was also embedded in a larger building, in this case an apartment/hotel complex of 11 stories. It had slightly more than 2,500 seats when it opened and was the second largest in North Carolina during the 1920s, flagship for the Paramount chain.
The North Carolina School for the Arts first considered using the theatre in 1971, but it was not until 1982, after a nearly ten million dollar transformation, that it became the Roger L. Stevens Center. The facility was redesigned to be a professional training ground for all facets for production of live performance as well as for roadshows plus as well as becoming the permanent home of the Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra, the Piedmont Chamber Orchestra, and the North Carolina Dance Theatre.
The architects raised the stage so that dressing rooms, storage rooms and rehearsal halls could be accommodated. The new 1,385 Roger L. Stevens Center opened 22 April 1983 and currently serves as a major center for the arts in central North Carolina.6
The CAROLINA Theatre of Greensboro was refurbished in 1980 by the United Arts Council into a performing arts center. (The theatre originally opened in October, 1927.) It has become a showcase for a variety of live performances and special film events.
The 1,000 seat CAROLINA in Durham has also been saved. Yet another Paramount flagship, this city’s sole surviving downtown theatre was built by the city as an auditorium in 1926. Paramount took it over three years later. In the 1970s it had gone ‘downhill’ but was saved by the city and now serves as a center for the performing arts.
But there have been other success stories in the small towns of the Carolinas. Just consider the following examples:
Asheville, North Carolina — It has been reported that the 500 seat SUNSET was reopened in 1985 for live entertainment. It operated as the SUNSET until 1975, closed, reopened as the FLICK, closed and is now saved.
New Bern, North Carolina — The MASONIC Theatre of New Bern was opened in the nineteenth century. Like many a center for live entertainment it presented movies from the 1910s to the 1970s. It is reported that it now receives occasional use by local theatre groups.
Sumter, South Carolina — It has also been reported that the 93 year old Opera House in Sumter, South Carolina will be restored and used as a Performing Arts Center.
But it should be remembered that remodeling and updating theatres was not a discovery made in the 1970s. Many North Carolina and South Carolina theatres were remodeled and updated long before that.
Many were remodeled in the late 1930s. A second set of ‘updates’ came twenty years later. The Carolinas, like much of rural America, got television later than the major cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. thus even as late as 1954 it made sense to try to update and remodel. For example the company which bought the STATE Theatre in Raleigh when Paramount was forced to sell it did just that.
It took a handsome house open in the mid-1920s and completely transformed it. The front was draped in neon. An new air conditioning system was added as well as a 46 foot CinemaScope screen. New seats were added and the seating capacity reduced by 100 seats. Unfortunately this did not save the theatre from the onslaught of television and suburbanization in the booming Raleigh-Durham area.
Unfortunately, as was true in most of the United States, remodeling and updating failed to save the bulk of our movie palaces. Most of the cinemas of the Carolinas are now gone. Just consider the cases of the NATIONAL of Greensboro, North Carolina and the RIVIERA of Charleston, South Carolina.
The NATIONAL closed in 1966. Thus ended the 45 year life of one of the Carolina’s finest houses. The theatre opened 23 November 1921 with vaudeville. It continued with live entertainment until nearly the end. The touring acts ranged from Elvis Presley in the 1950s to tours of major Broadway shows such as "Mister Roberts." The Big Bands made one of their North Carolina stops at the NATIONAL.
The fate of the NATIONAL, like so many, was crystal clear. Its owner in 1966, North Carolina Theatres, Inc., closed the NATIONAL because it was opening the TERRACE in the Friendly Shopping Center during the same month.
The RIVIERA in Charleston, South Carolina lasted nearly two decades longer. The 1939 art deco house had more than 1,100 seats and a giant 45 by 35 foot screen. It had been open only off and on since 1977. In the end it tried various policies to attract theatre goers but none including classic Hollywood films worked.
And so it goes. The Carolinas have as good a record as any part of the United States in saving theatres. But in the end most movie palaces have gone with the wind. We must write the history of all theatres, and not let them fall through the cracks of history. This article has begun such a project. We have only provided the most basic survey. The bulk of the research remains to be done. We hope we have provided a beginning.
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1Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats (New York: Bramhall House. 1961); David Naylor, American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of Fantasy (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981), page 217; Richard Stoddard, Theatre and Cinema Architecture: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978).
2Douglas Gomery, "The History of the American Movie Palace: Reading for Profit and Pleasure," Marquee, Volume 16, Number 2 (Second Quarter, 1984), pages 5-10.
3For more on the Publix chain see Douglas Gomery, "The Movies Become Big Business: Publix Theatres and the Chain Store Strategy," Cinema Journal, Volume XVIII, Number 2 (Spring, 1979), pages 26-40.
4U.S. Senate, "Investigation of Concentration of Economic Power," Temporary National Economic Committee, Monograph No. 43. "The Motion Picture Industry — A Pattern of Control," 75th Congress, 3rd Session, pages 8-14.
5For a set of plans and one photograph of the auditorium see R.W. Sexton and B.F. Betts, American Theatres of Today, Volume I (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1927), pages 110-111.
6Educational Facilities Laboratory Division, Movie Palaces: Renaissance and Reuse (New York: Academy for Educational Development, 1982), pages 85-88.