Final Credits Roll at County’s Biggest Theater

The Cinema Grossmont, home to such movies as “Ghandi” and “The Right Stuff” and whose last movie involved the death of a president, lived up to longstanding rumors of its own demise last week, when its Los Angeles-based operator closed the theater for good.

The death of the Grossmont, located in the La Mesa shopping center that bears the same name, leaves San Diego County with only two large-screen movie houses with at least 900 seats: the Cinema 21 and Valley Circle, both in Mission Valley.

The Grossmont, which opened in 1962, was, with almost 1,000 seats, the county’s largest movie house and the one with the largest screen--30 by 60 feet. The theater closed Monday with the last showing of “JFK,” Oliver Stone’s opus about the Kennedy assassination.

Dan Mitchinson, a local disc jockey who had lobbied to keep the theater open, said that, despite gathering more than 1,000 signatures on a save-the-Grossmont petition, he failed not only in saving the theater but never heard from its owner, Pacific Theatres of Los Angeles.

“They didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge all the calls or letters, much less the petition,” said Mitchinson, who works for KCBQ-FM. “I’m a third-generation native San Diegan. I remember seeing everything from James Bond adventures to ‘JFK’ at the Grossmont.

“How we intend to keep any history in this town when we keep destroying the past is just beyond me. The reason they’re closing it is obvious--Pacific just opened an eight-plex nearby. You can’t make as much money with one theater as you can with eight, so once again it comes down to the almighty buck.”

Representatives for Pacific Theatres declined to return phone calls Friday, but last year, Milton Moritz, a spokesman for the company, said the opening of the Grossmont Trolley Stop 8 Theatres, just down the hill, would no doubt mean the end of the Cinema Grossmont.

“The problem with single-screen theaters is you only get one shot,” Moritz said at the time. “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.”

Mitchinson said the recent opening of the Trolley Stop 8 bothers him for a different reason. One of its investors is Tom Magee, president of the board of Grossmont Shopping Center and the landlord of the ill-fated Cinema Grossmont.

A year ago, Magee told The Times he was one of several partners in the Trolley Stop 8 venture, even though the shopping center of which it’s a part--Grossmont Trolley Center, at Jackson Drive and Fletcher Parkway--is a competing enterprise.

“Yes, we’re a separate and distinct entity from Grossmont Shopping Center,” Clay Perkins, the manager of Grossmont Trolley Center, said Friday. “So, yes, in effect, we’re competitors.”

Reached Friday by The Times, Magee offered a terse no comment about his role in the competing complex and the closure of the Cinema Grossmont.

“I just don’t have any comment,” Magee said. “It’s closed. I have no further comment about anything.”

Mitchinson said ever-increasing rumors point to Mann Theatres, the Los Angeles-based owners of the Valley Circle and Cinema 21, closing down at least one of those houses and selling the land. Mann closed the historic Loma Theatre in Loma Portal in 1987.

But a spokeswoman for Ben Littlefield, the executive vice president and chief operating officer for Mann Theatres, said Friday, “The rumor is wrong; we are not closing our theaters in San Diego.”

Even so, the passing of the Cinema Grossmont is “all by itself enough to feel sad about,” said its longtime projectionist, Dale Hyder, who now works at the Trolley Stop 8.

“I personally think it’s a shame to lose our biggest screen, 30 by 60 feet,” said Hyder, who started working at the Grossmont in 1970. “It’s the way motion pictures ought to be seen. But I can understand it from a business standpoint, too.

“Some nights we were showing a movie to only one person. And some nights no one at all would come. It’s funny, ‘JFK’ had a pretty good run there, but toward the end, it was slowin’ down, too.

“The first movie I ever worked there was ‘Little Big Man’ with Dustin Hoffman,” Hyder said. “We used to run private screenings for charity benefits. You’d have 1,000 people dolled up in all their finery. But now . . . well, I guess the theater is a long way from those nights now, isn’t it?

“Things come and go, and this one just went.”