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2006 |
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THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
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Conway's two decades
without a movie theatre
of TheColumnists.com
Conway, South Carolina,
where my b.w. Sara and I go when the snow starts to fly in New
York, hasn’t had a movie theatre in 20 years.
That’s about to change. A 12-screen movie complex is coming
to this little town of 12,000. No longer will folks have to make
a 40-minute roundtrip drive to the seaside city of Myrtle Beach
to see a picture.
I know that news won’t be raising any eyebrows in Hollywood.
But it will bring back plenty of memories to Conway folks who
still remember the glory days when the town had not one but two
movie houses.
“We all loved going to the show," Sara recalled. She
was born and raised in this river town. “As a little girl,
I thought there were real people up there. I wondered why they
all were gray.”
She and her friends grew up looking up at the silver screen at
the Carolina and the Holliday theatres. They were only a few
blocks apart on Main Street in the heart of the downtown area.
People thought The Carolina was a grand showplace. In the 1930s
and 1940s, its 999-seats made it the third largest movie house
in the state. It was air-cooled (by fans), had a balcony (for
blacks because it was in the Jim Crow era), and a long, 120-foot
lobby with a terrazzo floor and posters of coming attractions.
Sara’s friend, Elizabeth Mathis Click, remembers a dime
was all she needed for a magic afternoon. “I bought a penny
sucker at Mr. Moore’s candy store on Fourth Avenue. Then,
I paid nine cents to get into the Carolina.”
Westerns were popular. One day a cowboy greeted Sara in the lobby
as he twirled his lariat. He turned out to be Roy Rogers, promoting
one of his early B-pictures.
Others who made personal appearances included Al “Lash”
LaRue, a cowboy actor whose main weapon was not a gun but an
18-foot bullwhip coiled at his holster, and minor matinee idol
William Lundigan.
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Typical films that played The Carolina Theatre in the 1940s: From left, Whip-wielding cowboy Al 'Lash' La Rue; a standard lobby poster for a La Rue western; Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys, who showed up in person to promote his new movie.
Kids could sit anywhere. But if they misbehaved, they risked a showdown with the manager, Edna Copeland. Swift as an arrow, she would fly down the aisle. Trouble-makers found themselves blinking in the afternoon sunshine.
Mrs. Copeland’s iron rule was legendary. William T. Goldfinch recalled how kids stood in awe of her. “If you misbehaved, she would ban you from the theatre for perhaps a month—and keep track of it, too. Your sentence could not be mitigated, no matter who you were. She sat in the auditorium during every performance and watched over the theatre like a hawk.”
Her tough demeanor did not always carry the day. The Carolina had a spacious stage, and there were occasional live shows. In 1950, hundreds crowded in to see Cheetah, the famous chimpanzee who appeared in the Tarzan pictures. When Mrs. Copeland introduced the act, Cheetah suddenly took off after her and chased her off stage.
“He leapt forward into the audience,” Goldfinch wrote. “Like lightning, he climbed row after row of seats. Then, he scaled a column, bounding into the balcony where he caused a great commotion before being summoned back to the stage by his owner-trainer.”
Years later, Goldfinch learned the chimp was not the real Cheetah. A Darlington man owned him.
Movies changed three times a week. On Saturday afternoon, there was a double feature—mostly westerns--and a serial. That was the busiest day because farmers and country folks came to town. But Saturday matinees were off limits for some, including Sara. “My Mother thought I would be exposed to a lot of germs.”
Still, there was no TV then and movie-going became a part of every kid’s life. Sara started going in the late 30s and kept right on through 1949, the year she was graduated from high school. At college—she went to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.—she found she had missed a lot of pictures. “Kids from big cities talked about movies that never came to Conway.”
Even so, she saw classics like Wuthering Heights (1939) with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, Pride and Prejudice (1940) with Olivier and Greer Garson, and even Hitler’s Children (1943) with Bonita Granville, a sensational picture for its time.
It told about Hitler’s campaign to get teen-age girls to produce more babies for The Third Reich. That kind of movie was taboo for Conway’s youngsters. But Sara and her pals figured out how to slip away and devised a cover story to tell their parents if they asked where their daughters had been.
After it closed in the 1980s, the Carolina sat empty for years. The front part was eventually sold and turned into stores. Inside the theatre itself, the seats were removed and the once princely movie house was used to store tires. Plans are now being made for the building to become a banquet hall for weddings and other social occasions.
The Holliday, built by Joseph W. and John Monroe Holliday of nearby Gallivants Ferry, opened in 1947. It had 650 push-back seats, and blinking neon lights outside that lit up the marquee and part of Main Street at night. Old-timers remember seeing the bright glow as they drove into town over the Waccamaw River Bridge.
But the Holliday’s distinguishing feature was its crying room. Mothers sat there with their babies as they watched the movies.
The glassed-in room was supposed to be sound-proof, but not everybody thought it lived up to that claim. “It was all right when there was one baby,” Sara said. “But when there was a bunch in there and they all started crying, you could hear it all over the theatre.”
The Holliday closed in 1986--ending the downtown movie house era. Four years later, a fire gutted it. The Theatre of the Republic, a local amateur acting company, took it over and renovated it in 1999. The movie house became the Main Street Theatre. A registered National Historic Landmark, the theatre is today the site of stage plays and musicals put on by its active community theatre company.
Now a new movie era is starting. A modern theater complex is opening. It will mean people won’t have to make that 40-mile roundtrip all the way to Myrtle Beach to see a picture.
For old-timers, things will be different. There won’t be a double feature Saturday matinees with serials. The theatre won’t be charging kids nine cents. It won’t have a no-nonsense lady manager. Or a stage show with a chimp running wild.
But those scenes will live on in memory.
©2006 by David Zinman. The Zinman caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo of the old Holliday Theatre is from Conway's historical archives for Main Street. The "Oscar" logo and the phrase "Academy Awards" are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. This column first posted on Feb. 27, 2006.
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