Movies were the toast of Tacoma
Tacomans seeking amusement on a drizzly December day in 1898 consulted The Daily Ledger, where ads promoted the play “House of Bondage” at the Tacoma Theatre and vaudeville at the Star, the Grand and the Pantages.
But the future of fun was unfolding on Pacific Avenue, where enterprising widow Sally Sloan was pulling pedestrians out of the rain and into the Searchlight Moving Picture Theater, one of the first movie houses in America.
Sloan owned a Lumiere Cinematographe, a hand-cranked French contraption that delivered dim, flickering images onto a sheet of white canvas. From the bottom of the Donnelly Hotel she lured customers with music blaring from the 5-foot brass horn of a Gramophone Grand Talking Machine.
A dime bought a seat for 20 movie clips, including the sinking of the USS Maine.
Moving pictures were cutting-edge technology 110 years ago, but Tacoma was that kind of town: a bustling city of 36,000 with Gold Rush money, a port full of ships, the world-class Tacoma Hotel and trainloads of Easterners accustomed to top-notch theater. They got it when the 1,300-seat Tacoma Theatre opened in January 1890.
The four-story stone, brick and terra cotta edifice consumed a city block at Ninth Street and Broadway. Its ceiling was adorned with colorful frescoes, and its stage, “largest on the Pacific Coast,” accommodated 100 actors and eight horses in a 1905 production of “Ben-Hur.”
Sarah Bernhardt, Lily Langtry, Jeanne Eagles, Anna Pavlova, Harry Houdini and John Philip Sousa were among the luminaries who trod the Tacoma’s boards.
The well-heeled hired boys to wait as long as 15 hours for tickets to big attractions. They dined at the renowned Tacoma Hotel restaurant and arrived at the theater in smartly appointed carriages beneath an arched stone porte-cochere, safe from mud and rain.
Live theater flourished, and in January 1918 Alexander Pantages opened an 1,186-seat playhouse across the street from the Tacoma Theatre. But movies had evolved from curiosity to craze, and farther down Ninth Street Charlie Chaplin films were packing them in at the Hippodrome, formerly the Grand.
Modern “motion photography” had arrived in 1912 with “Rainey’s African Hunt,” which showed animals at watering holes. Most people still preferred the watering holes that lined downtown streets, at least until plot-driven movies arrived in 1914 with the Colonial and Apollo theaters.
Movies and their less-expensive tickets became the rage. Later in 1918, the 726-seat Rialto Theater joined the Tacoma and the Pantages on Ninth Street, but it catered to cinema with a downsized stage and smaller orchestra pit.
Converted theaters installed fancy pipe organs, and at the Victory Theatre on Pacific Avenue – the original Tacoma Pantages – an orchestra serenaded silent films.
Movie houses crept into the neighborhoods. The Rex in the Lincoln district and the Sunset on Sixth Avenue opened in 1919. The Realart opened on South Tacoma Way in 1920, and a vaudeville house on McKinley Hill, the Park, switched to movies in 1922. By 1925 even Gig Harbor had a movie theater, the 450-seat Empress.
A theater chain began to grow in 1922 when John Hamrick bought the Apollo at 11th Street and Broadway, renamed it the Blue Mouse, then opened the Blue Mouse “Junior” on North Proctor Street in 1923.
The Tacoma Theatre threw in the towel. It was sold for $450,000 in 1925 to the Rhodes brothers, who cut the stage back to add 500 seats and a 1,000-pipe organ. Its 1927 reopening as the Broadway drew 20,000 people to a downtown gala.
Movies were the toast of 1927. The 1,800-seat Heilig opened in the Masonic Temple on St. Helens Avenue, and Tacoma debuted its own movie: “Eyes of the Totem,” a creation of H.C. Weaver Productions near Titlow Beach. A Hollywood crew filmed “The Patent Leather Kid” at Camp Lewis.
With vaudeville in its death throes in the early 1930s, Hamrick pounced. The Pantages had been sold in 1930 to become the RKO Orpheum movie theater. Hamrick took over in 1932, calling it the Roxy. The Heilig became John Hamrick’s Temple in 1931, and in 1933 Hamrick bought the Broadway and renamed it the Music Box.
Hamrick’s downtown Blue Mouse was the first in Tacoma with a talkie, Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer” in 1928, and the Music Box was the first to screen an all-color movie, “Becky Sharp,” in 1935.
Hamrick was a savvy promoter. In 1932 he lured moviegoers to the Bela Lugosi horror classic “White Zombie” by offering $10 to any woman who could sit through a midnight preview without screaming.
When Mae West’s “She Done Him Wrong” came to town in 1933, Hamrick’s ad labeled it as “of no interest to children under 16.” The poor kids missed out on the Pope Pius XI short that preceded the naughty main feature, but adults flocked to the forbidden fruit.
In 1933 Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler attended the premiere of “Tugboat Annie,” based on Tacoma’s own Thea Foss. “Tugboat Annie Sails Again” drew Ronald Reagan and Hedda Hopper to Hamrick’s 1940 triple premiere at the Roxy, the Music Box and the Blue Mouse.
By 1938 there were seven downtown movie theaters and nine in the neighborhoods. With so many people in theaters, ushers were trained in “panic prevention” in case of air raids during World War II.
By 1948 Tacoma was home to 21 theaters, including the Star-Lite Motor-In on South Tacoma Way.
Technology was the star of the 1950s. The Temple boasted a “magic” Pan-A-Vue screen. Stereophonic sound arrived in 1953, and Cinemascope followed in 1954. People donned funky glasses for 3-D movies. Drive-ins became the nocturnal realm of car-crazy teenagers.
But technology also brought television, and moviegoing declined as “I Love Lucy” kept people home. TV led to the downfall of the Blue Mouse, demolished in 1961 to make way for Tacoma’s moving sidewalks.
In 1963 a faulty fan started a fire at the Music Box, sending 100 people watching Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” into flight. Eyewitnesses wept as the venerable Tacoma theater burned.
Downtown crowds dwindled when the Tacoma Mall opened in 1965, and the 1,200-seat Tacoma Mall Theatre became the city’s cinematic centerpiece in 1968. The palatial theater featured a 70 mm Cinerama screen and an enormous lobby crowned by four glass chandeliers custom made in Belgium.
The theater was converted to the two-screen Tacoma Mall Twin in 1974, but progress, a familiar villain in local theater history, brought it down after 35 years. Unable to compete in the era of digital film and high-tech megaplexes, it was razed in 2002. A doughnut shop serves as its tombstone.
By the late 1970s, the Roxy and the Rialto had closed, leaving downtown without movies and setting the scene for a stage renaissance that began with restoration of the Pantages in 1983. Theatre on the Square was built next door, and the Rialto was refurbished in 1990.
The Temple Theatre survives inside the Landmark Convention Center.
More than a century after Sally Sloan brought moving pictures to the City of Destiny, the North End’s Blue Mouse is the sole single-screen theater in a sea of high-tech megaplexes.
But in 1995 cinema returned downtown in a theater that shares the name of one of the vaudeville houses it vanquished long ago: the Grand.
Pat McCoid: 253-597-8272
This is one of a series of stories appearing during The News Tribune’s 125th year. Every Sunday we look at what happened during the same week sometime in the past 125 years.
