The Last Picture Show

A monument to yesterday’s America came tumbling down Thursday as skip-loaders and trucks began demolishing the Winnetka 6, the last operating drive-in theater in the San Fernando Valley.

Demolition of the drive-in, of the type that came to symbolize the 1940s and 1950s, marked the start of a building boom aimed at adding as many as 50 new movie screens in two giant complexes to the northwest Valley.

The last picture show at the drive-in at Winnetka and Prairie avenues was Sunday. Several weeks of work began Thursday to raze the drive-in, owned by Los Angeles-based Pacific Theaters, to make way for a state-of-the-art, 26-screen megaplex, company officials said.

In addition to offering more than two dozen screens, the new megaplex will include an as-yet undisclosed number of restaurants and shops.

The 26 screens will make the Chatsworth facility one of the largest in the state and the largest multiscreen complex in the Valley, eclipsing the 16 at the AMC Theaters in Woodland Hills and the 18-screen Cineplex Odeon at Universal City.

“The site is under construction and we are fast-tracking it to open on Memorial Day,” said Chan Wood, Pacific Theaters’ executive vice president and head film buyer.

As work crews set about transforming the drive-in into a walk-in, however, owners of Northridge Fashion Center, about a mile to the east, reaffirmed their intention to construct a 20- to 24-theater complex beginning in March.

“I don’t know about the other [project],” said Donn Fuller, senior vice president of Dallas-based MEPC American Properties, owner of Northridge Fashion Center. “But we have made our commitment to move forward.”

The Northridge theater complex will be built in the northwest corner of the mall, along Plummer Street, and will include three new restaurants to be operated by companies that currently have no outlets in the Valley, Fuller said. If all goes as planned, he added, the complex will be ready to open by spring 1998.

For movie lovers in the West Valley, the dueling multiplexes raise the dizzying prospect of choosing between 50 movie screens within a mile of each other.

But cinema owners who are pouring millions into the massive new theaters face a far more vexing question: Is too much entertainment being crammed into too little space?

“Today you cannot build 25- to 35-screen megaplexes that cost $25 million to $35 million each and expect to have a reasonable return on your investment,” said Wood.

He added that Pacific Theatres expects to prevail, based on the quality of its new facility and its plan to be open for business nearly a full year before its rival in the Northridge mall.

Still, there was the possibility that both theaters could coexist in an environment in which people appear to be flocking to the movies, industry observers said.

“More tickets are being sold today than at any other period since the 1950s,” said Jim Kozak, communications director for the National Assn. of Theater Owners. “And that number is expected to grow.”

The dollar increase has been even more dramatic, Fuller said, and 1996 will mark the highest domestic theatrical gross in history, surpassing the previous record of $1.3 billion, recorded last year.

Still those numbers do not help drive-ins, which flourished as car sales boomed in the 1940s and 1950s, giving movie fans the mobility to reach sites where suburban land was then cheap. Drive-ins peaked at 4,063 screens in 1958, the theater owners association says.

With the closing of the Winnetka 6--a latecomer built in 1975--the national number now drops to 848. Pacific Theaters, which also owns the site of the Van Nuys Drive-In Theater on Roscoe Boulevard, closed that one earlier this year, leaving traditionalists to mourn that only the Winnetka site kept alive a slice of Americana in the Valley.

“That theater holds a lot of memories,” said Francine Oschin, spokeswoman for Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents Chatsworth. Many constituents, she said, “find it sad that the economics of today are such that certain nostalgic parts of our lives aren’t feasible.”

But, she sighed: “It’s a megaplex world in which we’re living.”