Opening Night

For a generation of Moorpark residents, catching a movie has meant spending a good 15 to 20 minutes on the freeway. The city’s only theater closed in the ‘50s, killed by television, and even as the city’s population boomed in the ‘80s, no new movie house took its place.

That long drought of filmed entertainment ended Tuesday night with grand opening ceremonies at the new Moorpark Cinema 8, a neon- and stucco-encased multiplex on Los Angeles Avenue.

The eight-screen theater, part of the Mission Bell Plaza, is the product of a three-year effort by Moorpark officials and a Camarillo-based developer to fill what many in this city of 28,000 considered a glaring need.

“Whenever there was a survey of what services residents wanted, a theater was right there at the top of the list,” said City Councilman Bernardo Perez.

Cinema 8 is also the second multiplex to open in eastern Ventura County this fall and marks the entrance of another theater chain--Regal Cinemas of Knoxville, Tenn.--into what has quickly become a crowded movie market.

“It’s a natural progression for us,” said Mike Levesque, director of marketing for Regal. “It’s in an area where we’re not.”

The last time Moorpark had a movie theater, it was still a small farming town several decades away from incorporation. Back then, the Magnificent Moorpark Melodrama and Vaudeville Company on High Street was known as the El Rancho Theater, one of the few movie houses in the county, according to Melodrama owner Linda Bredemann. The cinema folded in the 1950s, she said.

“With the advent of television, it went downhill,” she said.

Plans for what would become Cinema 8 began in 1993, when the city’s Redevelopment Agency bought more than 30 acres north of Los Angeles Avenue, across from Liberty Bell Road. Talks with developer Neno Spondello Jr., a partner at Ventura Pacific Capital Co., began the following year.

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The agency loaned Spondello $3.5 million to build the Mission Bell Plaza shopping complex. He has until 2001 to repay the loan, according to agency manager Steven Hayes.

The proposed theater operator changed several times during construction. The first company, San Carlos Cinemas Inc., was purchased by Cine/MAX Cinemas Inc., Hayes said. Then, about six weeks ago, Cine/MAX pulled out. Spondello said the Palm Desert-based company was short on capital for the project.

Spondello immediately began discussions with Regal, a relative newcomer to Southern California. The company entered the California market last spring, buying eight multiplex theaters from a small chain, including locations in Whittier and Palos Verdes.

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Regal, with 1,272 screens in 20 states, usually builds its own theaters, Levesque said. But the Moorpark project allowed the company to enter a burgeoning market.

“We’re really identifying that area of the country as an important area of growth,” he said. “It was very fortunate for us, and we certainly took advantage of it.”

For Moorpark residents, the name of the owners seems less important than the availability of first-run movies for the first time in most people’s memory.

“Pretty cool--we got a movie theater in Moorpark,” said 14-year-old Bradley Scherer, surveying the game room just off the theater lobby. “Now I can just ride my bike over here, pay, go watch a movie. I live like five minutes away.”