MAKING A FILM PALACE FOR NEW TIMES

It is hard to look 20 or 30 years into the future and imagine someone becoming nostalgic about a movie theater named Cineplex Odeon Universal City Cinemas.

The name would seem more appropriate for the subhead in an annual report than for the marquee of a movie palace. But a movie palace it is--or will be July 1, when the 18-screen, 6,000-seat complex opens on its hilltop pad next to the Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City.

“This hasn’t been done since Radio City Music Hall,” said Cineplex Odeon Chairman Garth Drabinsky as he stood in the unfinished lobby of his company’s newest theater. “There isn’t anything like it anywhere.”

The comparison to Radio City Music Hall is a stretch. You could put the Universal Cineplex inside that 1932 Manhattan landmark and still have room for the Rockettes to kick up their heels.

Radio City, which hasn’t functioned as a movie theater since 1979, has 6,000 seats in one room. The ceiling in the auditorium itself is about four times the height of the Universal Cineplex and the new theater’s “majestic sky-lit entrance lobby” boasts dimensions--70 feet wide, 46 feet high--that are about the same as those of the screen at Radio City.

But Drabinsky can be forgiven the hyperbole. Times have changed. Television wiped out the movie palaces that favored urban moviegoers from the ‘30s through the ‘50s. Compared to what most moviegoers are used to, the Universal Cineplex will be awesome enough.

The theaters, with from 200 to 900 seats, will feature state-of-the-art projection and sound systems. Four of the theaters will be equipped for 70-millimeter presentations.

The two-level 120,000-square-foot complex--dressed out in an Art Deco motif with marble floors and columns and pastel walls--has 16 theaters downstairs and two upstairs. The two largest theaters also have balcony entrances off the escalators at the second level, to the left and right of a French cafe.

There are huge glassed-in spaces, a floral garden and skylights to ease the wait in the hallways outside the blocks of theaters. Two identical concession stands, about the size of volleyball courts and equipped with more than 50 cash registers, flank the Tara-style lobby stairway.

For showmanship, it’s a quantum leap from the matchbox suburban multiplexes we’re used to, and it will add plenty to Drabinsky’s image as the leader of the current theatrical renaissance.

Drabinsky, a 38-year-old Canadian, was on no mission to rescue American exhibition when he made plans to build an 18-screen film complex at Toronto’s new Eaton Center in the late 1970s. He was an entertainment lawyer who had interests in film production and distribution.

“I didn’t plan to spend the rest of my life in exhibition, I was practicing law,” Drabinsky said. “We just started with the idea of building an art house complex.”

The Eaton Center Cineplex, a maze of small theaters with mostly 16-millimeter projection, with adjacent restaurants and shops, was a magnet for the young adults living in the dense residential high-rises of downtown Toronto.

The complex was so successful Drabinsky decided to try it in another urban center and settled on the top floor of the new Beverly Center in West Hollywood.

“I remember opening night, all of the pundits in the industry were coming to watch me post a closing notice on the theater,” Drabinsky said. “They never got that opportunity.”

The Beverly Cineplex, despite its minuscule screens and tiny auditoriums, has been one of the great success stories in the history of movie exhibition. The 14-screen complex has, as Drabinsky loves to report, the highest per-seat income of any theater in North America.

What the Eaton and Beverly cineplexes proved was that people will still go out to movies if the experience is convenient and comfortable. Just imagine what it would be like if the presentation of movies--projection, sound, screen size--were first-rate.

In the last five years, Drabinsky’s Cineplex Odeon Corp. has revived film-going and made a few fortunes doing it. Cineplex has been on a buying and building spree, renovating old theaters, erecting new ones. It is now the largest exhibition company in North America, with more than 1,500 screens in nearly 500 locations.

Drabinsky said Cineplex Odeon, with 90 full-time architects, designers and project managers on the staff, has 3 million square feet of theaters under construction, which will add 400 screens to the total.

Locally, Cineplex has six-screen multiplexes either planned or under construction in Santa Monica and Marina del Rey. The redesigned four-screen Plitt at Century City will open soon. The recently refurbished Art Deco houses--the three-screen Fairfax and the single-screen Showcase Cinema on La Brea Avenue--are reportedly doing land-office business. Next spring, Cineplex will take over the UA Egyptian in Westwood.

Drabinsky said that when everything is in place, he will be able to open a major studio movie in four Los Angeles venues simultaneously.

But the Universal Cineplex--on the premises of Cineplex’s 50% partner, MCA-Universal--will be the crown jewel, and Drabinsky is neither shy nor modest about declaring its importance to the local film economy.

“This will be the house where every film will premiere in L.A., period,” Drabinsky said.

“Every director, producer and studio will want to have this as their presentation. There will be premieres, galas, trumpets blaring--all the majesty and spectacle of going to movies will be reproduced here.”

The $16.5-million Universal-Cineplex will not displace Westwood as the prestige address for first-run movies. Despite the inconvenience of traffic and parking, Westwood Village is arguably the most inviting spot on Earth for movie lovers. There are 10 theaters with a total of 19 screens within a few blocks of one another, and most of them are wonderful.

There are more shops and restaurants than you’ll ever need, and a street scene to go with them.

But the Universal-Cineplex will undoubtedly take a bite out of Westwood’s industry business. Studios will be able to host some incredible parties in the vast lobby of the complex, and premieres there could be easily controlled. Parking (free to the public) is a few hundred feet away, in a just-completed enclosed six-story structure.

Drabinsky said he has already begun talking to people about having the complex as the site of the major international film festival that Los Angeles has never succeeded in having.

Cineplex Odeon and Drabinsky have their detractors. Many of his competitors resent Drabinsky’s messianic image, saying he has gotten where he is by following the scent of money, not by trying to rid America of sticky theater floors.

Some financial analysts who are skeptical about the future of movie exhibition say Cineplex is spreading itself too thin, that its success is short term in a business where actual ticket sales have hovered at about one billion admissions annually for 20 years.

Drabinsky acknowledged that up to now, Cineplex has succeeded primarily by taking business away from other theaters. But he said there are signs of a real resurgence in movie-going. Ticket sales are up 16% this year over the first six months of 1986, video sales are beginning to level off and the studios are beginning to make movies that appeal to a wider range of audiences.

For moviegoers, optimism is always a risky outlook and if the quality of big studio movies is getting better, it is at an imperceptible pace. But in the case of exhibition, being pulled into the ‘80s by Cineplex Odeon, it is time to admit, at the very least, that the glass appears half full.