After 29-Year Run, Final Credits Roll for the Prestigious Cinema Grossmont

The Cinema Grossmont in La Mesa, where such movies as “Dances With Wolves,” “Gandhi” and “The Right Stuff” have had their San Diego County debuts, will close sometime during the summer, after a new “eight-plex” opens nearby.

The theater, which opened in 1962, is one of only three single-screen, 1,000-seat movie houses still left in the county. But Tom Magee, president of the Grossmont Shopping Center, where it is situated, said the theater, like many of its ilk, is no longer profitable.

Pacific Theatres, the Los Angeles-based chain that owns the Cinema Grossmont and the Grossmont Mall triplex, which is not scheduled to close, “is building this eight-theater complex below the center, so the big house will close after those open,” Magee said.

Magee is one of several partners in the Trolley Stop 8, now under construction at the corner of Jackson Drive and Fletcher Parkway. Just a few blocks away, the 30-year-old Family Fun Center recently closed because of the building of a controversial freeway off-ramp.

“If the trend continues, we’ll be left with no single-screen commercial theaters to show films in the way they’re meant to be shown--with a big screen and big sound,” said Andy Friedenberg, president of the Cinema Society and Visual Arts Foundation of San Diego County. “The whole ambience of sitting in a movie palace may soon be gone, at least in this city. If you want to see a big-screen presentation, pretty soon you may have to drive to Westwood to see it, and that saddens me.”

Friedenberg called the Cinema Grossmont “a perfect theater,” an assessment with which many of its past and present employees agree.

“I think it’s a great loss to the community, no question about it,” said Dale Hyder, the theater’s projectionist since 1984. “There’s not much better that I’ve been around. The theater has always been well-maintained, and we’ve always had the best sound system. And, we have the biggest screen in the county--30 feet by 60 feet.”

Len Brower, former manager of the Cinema Grossmont, who now works for Mann Theatres, said the demise of La Mesa’s movie palace had been “an unkept secret” for months. He called the theater “a showcase” and one of the best in the country for viewing movies.

“The level of excitement goes up when it’s sold out and there’s 1,000 people in there,” Brower said. “The Surround Sound kicks on, and you feel the bass inside your chest, and I’m sorry, but it’s something that just can’t be duplicated--in your home or in a smaller theater.”

Despite his love for the theater aesthetically, Hyder, the projectionist, said he supported the decision by its owner, Pacific Theatres, and the Grossmont Shopping Center to close it. He said occasional showings have had only one customer sitting in an otherwise empty theater.

“When you used to be able to book exclusive runs--which you can’t any more--you could do very, very well with that big a house,” Hyder said. “Because we were the only theater in the county that had a certain movie, we could make it in a big way. But, with the advent of video, and each movie being released in 2,000 theaters at once. . . . Well, for 1,000-seat theaters, that was a death warrant.”

“The problem with single-screen theaters is, you only get one shot,” Milton Moritz, a spokesman for Pacific Theatres, said from his Los Angeles office. “In a multiplex, such as the new Trolley Stop 8, with eight pictures playing, you have that many more chances of striking pay dirt. They’re just not building those kinds of theaters any more--anywhere in America--and multiplexes have proven much more effective economically.”

Magee, of the Grossmont Shopping Center, said two theaters in the Trolley Stop 8 will have about 450 seats, as do some of the multiplexes around the county. The 450-seat theaters are comparable in size to the chain of one-screen Landmark Theatres in San Diego--the Cove in La Jolla, the Guild in Hillcrest, the Park in North Park and the Ken in Kensington.

But film buffs say such theaters cannot compete with the richness of the moviegoing experience found in the three 1,000-seat houses, the Cinema Grossmont and the Cinema 21 and Valley Circle in Mission Valley.

“I’ve always loved the showmanship and the action with a big movie and a big crowd in places like the Cinema Grossmont,” Hyder said. “There’s nothing like it, you can’t beat it. It’s how movies were meant to be seen, and it’s fading from American life.”

“The whole experience of big-screen, big-sound presentation will now be minimized to a 450-seat auditorium in a multiplex, and it’s just not the same,” said Friedenberg of the film society. “And, although several of the 450-seat houses have 70-millimeter capability, that’s not the same either. Seventy-millimeter is designed for the big theaters.” The standard gauge of movie film is 35-millimeter.

Hyder, Friedenberg and other members of the film community say they’ve heard that Mann Theatres, the Los Angeles-based owner of the Valley Circle and Cinema 21, may close those soon, leaving the county without a single 1,000-seat theater for movies.

“We have no plans at this time (to close them),” said William Hertz, spokesman for Mann Theatres, which four years ago sold the 42-year-old, 900-seat Loma Theatre in Loma Portal to a developer, who converted it to a bookstore. “That’s really the answer--there’s nothing planned at this time. It’s kind of a generic answer, but I can’t give you anything concrete, other than ‘no comment.’ ”

Moritz of Pacific Theatres said “no exact date” has been selected for closing the Cinema Grossmont, but Magee of the shopping center says it will come soon after the opening of the Trolley Stop 8, which has already broken ground near the Grossmont Center trolley stop. Magee says the Cinema Grossmont will be “converted to retail use.”

At the moment, Moritz said, the theater is “enjoying a productive run” of Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves,” which has received 12 Academy Award nominations. “The Doors,” director Oliver Stone’s movie about the life and death of rock star Jim Morrison, will open at the theater Friday.

Moritz said the theater has been selected as one of the few in the country to present “The Doors” with a brand-new, high-tech digital sound system.

But Hyder said the state-of-the-art sound system is only being given a tryout in the Cinema Grossmont. Its future, he said, will be as the sound system at the Trolley Stop 8.