At A Theater Near You : Cinema multiplexes are popping up everywhere, doubling the count of county screens in the past year. And more are heading your way.

Remember “cocooning,” the 1980s buzzword that proclaimed Americans were staying home more?

Marketing researchers hypothesized that the recession and the VCR were causing people to hole up in their homes, bundled with family and a bucket of Ben & Jerry’s. As the reasoning went, first-run movies were too expensive, the streets too dangerous and time too valuable for people to leave their sofas.

It logically followed that movie theaters would wither, to be replaced by whirring videotape. It never happened. Instead, in the late 1980s, theater chains started a nationwide construction boom that is now reverberating through Ventura County.

Santa Paula just got its first multiplex. Moorpark’s first should be up in time for Christmas. Camarillo didn’t have a multiplex until four months ago and now has another one in the works. Fillmore, Port Hueneme and Ojai are the only county cities without giant theater complexes.

In the last year, the number of screens in the county has doubled. Eighteen more screens will open by summer, raising to 101 the number of screens in the county--an astounding five times more than there were 10 years ago.

And more theaters are being proposed.

If given approval by the Thousand Oaks City Council, Edwards Cinemas hopes to open a 12-screen movie complex by Christmas at the corner of Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Hodencamp Road. Along with 12 theaters, seating between 280 and 350 people each, Edwards wants to build retail stores.

In Ventura, city planners are seriously discussing a theater complex as the catalyst for a downtown revival. AMC has expressed interest in putting a 20-screen movie house--with 4,000 seats--at the corner of Santa Clara and Palm streets in the Figueroa Plaza redevelopment area.

Oxnard is trying to entice developers to put a movie theater in the downtown business district but has no concrete proposals, a city official said.

Why the sudden surge in movie theaters? Some say the movie chains want to capitalize on the growing audience for Hollywood’s burgeoning number of blockbusters and bombs.

“There’s just more product vying for screen time,” said Brett Havlik, general manager of Wallace Theaters, which opened the seven-screen theater in Santa Paula this month. “When companies like Disney go from making 10 or 13 films a year to making 40, you need more room to play them. All of a sudden we’ve got 200 films a year.”

And people to watch them. Despite the VCR, regardless of cable and new television networks, people are setting movie attendance records. Although 1995 has started more slowly than expected, 1994 was the biggest year ever at the box office: Nearly 1.3 billion tickets were sold nationwide, according to the National Assn. of Theater Owners.

Ventura County is seen as “a good market,” said Mike Tiemeyer, district supervisor for Edwards Cinemas. “There’s a lot of growth potential in the area.”

The county has always been grossly under-screened for its population size, according to industry standards. Exhibitors divide the county into four zones-- Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks-Westlake, Ventura-Oxnard, Camarillo--and each zone can support from 13 to 24 screens. Until the recent boom, none of the zones even reached the minimum.

Camarillo has had the most dramatic turnaround. The city--part of the Ventura-Oxnard zone until the 12-screen Edwards opened last December--will have 23 screens when the 11-screen United Artists complex opens next month, making Camarillo the most densely screened zone in the county.

The next area in the county to experience multiplex madness will be the Ventura Freeway corridor that crosses the county line, insiders say.

“In the next five years, you’ll see theaters on every exit ramp between Thousand Oaks and Agoura,” a theater executive predicted.

To those who mourn the demise of Ventura’s Mayfair Theater and hope Fillmore’s Towne Theater can be restored, the boom in multiscreen theaters may signal tougher times ahead for one- and two-screen movie houses. Not only will their customers gravitate to the modern complexes, but the old theaters will be further down on the exhibitors’ food chain, meaning they get fewer top releases.

Suddenly under siege by multiplexes, Sally Sung, manager of the Camarillo Cinemas at Paseo Camarillo, said she’s considering making her four-screen theater into a bargain house or art house.

That should come as good news to movie-goers such as Philip Arlen of Ventura, who speaks for many fans when he complains that new theaters with more screens simply mean more lackluster programming.

“I like lots of popular movies,” Arlen said, “but I also like some that are not so popular. It’s not elitism, it’s just a matter of taste. ‘Heavenly Creatures,’ ‘Tom and Viv,’ some of the old films. What if they took one of those 12 screens and programmed--what do you call them?--oddball movies and changed them every few days? People like me would respond to that.”

Arlen said that as it stands now, the Mann Buenaventura is the only theater where he can reliably find small, arty and oddball films instead of “Beverly Hills Cop XVII.”

Theater owners, of course, only want to book movies that draw a lot of people--especially to a downtown area. “Entertainment destination” is the new name applied to multiplex theaters that anchor commercial developments such as the one proposed in Ventura. The theaters serve as a magnet to draw people downtown instead of to the suburban mall.

“Multiplex theaters are a good urban-design tool,” said William Fulton, a planner and essayist from Ventura. “It’s a good attraction to get people to go to a certain place--a pedestrian retail center where they can feel safe like CityWalk (at Universal Studios) or the (Third Street) Promenade in Santa Monica.”

Both those developments have theaters as their centerpiece and both have been widely embraced by moviegoers who like to window shop before the feature, have dinner afterward and then maybe get a drink at a nearby bar.

“When people walk out of the theater, guess what? They want to do something instead of get in the car and drive off,” Fulton said.

That’s why Fulton cheers the Ventura proposal but jeers the Edwards Camarillo Palace 12 for being surrounded only by parking lots. “It’s just out there all by itself,” he said.

Is it possible to saturate the market? The Arizona Republic reported in 1993 that a theater-building binge in Phoenix caused ticket prices at some theaters to drop to $5.50 and at least one theater to go out of business.

Some predict it could happen here.

“My personal opinion is that (Ventura County) will be over-screened soon,” said Lew O’Neil, senior vice president at Metropolitan Theatres, which dominates the Santa Barbara market. “But then, it’s been under-screened for 10 years.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Coming attractions

The county has 83 movie screens with another 17 set to open by summer.

1) Edwards Cinemas hopes to open a 12-screen movie complex by Christmas at the corner of Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Hodencamp Road. A tentative scheme calls for a building with retail stores on the bottom floor and 12 theaters seating between 280 and 350 people.

2) Moorpark will get a nine-screen theater in the same shopping center as Kmart on N. Los Angeles Avenue. The Santa Rosa-based San Carlos Cinemas will break ground on the project in May. The company says the theater should be open for the Christmas season.

3) Ventura planners are seriously discussing a theater that could contain as many as 20-screens. The theater would most likely be located at the corner of Santa Clara and Palm Streets.

4) Oxnard is trying to entice developers to put a movie theater in the downtown business district. There are no concrete proposals so far.

5) United Artists is ready to open an 11-screen theater on Camarillo’s east side, near theintersection of Camino Ruiz and Adolfo Road on May 19.

***

Legend

Existing Multiplex Theaters Camarillo (1) Oxnard (1) Santa Paula (1) Simi Valley (3) Thousand Oaks (1) Ventura (2) ***

Proposed Theaters Moorpark (1) Oxnard (1) Thousand Oaks (1) Ventura (1) ***

Under Construction Camarillo (1)