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Tag: Bay Theatre

  • October 1st in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1961, the following ad for the Ivory Tower Bookstore ran in the Long Beach Independent. The Ivory Tower has appeared here in posts for May 5th and June 11  because the crackerjack editorial team here at “This Date in Seal Beach History” are fascinated by bookstores.


    The Ivory Tower was opened at 113 Main Street in September 1961 by Jim Scully and Norma Brisson, but Jim Scully was the personality and face of the business.

    Scully grew up in Butte, Montana where he excelled at gymnastics in school. In 1946, while he was studying Japanese in the Army, he took a spill in the gym and broke his neck and became a paraplegic.

    In spite of having only limited use of his hands and arms, he continued to study and write, graduated from UCLA in 1952, and took classes towards his masters at Long Beach State while running The Ivory Tower. He even found time to write a column for California Paralyzed Veteran News Bulletin, called “The Ivory Tower.”

    Late in the sixties, Scully married another paraplegic and even adopted a little girl.

    In a March 3, 1962 profile of Scully and the bookstore in the Long Beach Independent, he noted that Seal Beach had “grown from a sleepy little village into an artistic town. It could become the Carmel of Southern California.” Scully felt that the west side of Main Street (the side where the Ivory Tower operated) was more arty with a coffeehouse (probably the Rouge et Noir) and artistic shops while the east side had more traditional businesses. Scully saw his bookstore as “at the center of a blossoming cultural revolution.”

    The bookstore as described in March 1962, was not only filled with books, but modern art — some of it risque — adorned the walls and offered coffee, conversation and foreign magazines filled with propaganda. Scully also mentioned their bestselling book in 1962 was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at 50 copies sold in three days. “I wish we could get more.” 

    (At the time, many felt Tropic of Cancer was smutty and was the subject of many obscenity court cases until the Supreme Court declared it non-obscene in 1964. This explains why Scully had trouble getting more books and why it was such popular reading in 1962)

    It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Ivory Tower closed its doors for good, but I have faint memories of the store still operating around 1971 or 1972. It did not last much longer than that. It definitely was part of its era, along with the Arts Center, the Rouge et Noir, the Bay Theatre running foreign art films and the plays at the Peppermint Playhouse. (Although both of those businesses were on the east side of Main Street in 1961.)

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • September 1st in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1963, The Bay Theater offered a family friendly double feature of Walt Disney’s Savage Sam (the amalgamated Texas pothound!) and Jerry Lewis as The Nutty Professor — both in color! 

    Sept_1_1963_Bay_Theater_ad

    Savage Sam was Disney’s sequel to Ole Yeller.

    Nutty_Professor
    The Nutty Professor was the harrowing tale of a socially maladjusted scientist’s bitter struggle with his addictive personality.

     Theater opens at 1:15. Dial GE 0-1123 for show times.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

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    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.

  • July 24th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1976, “Grandma’s Candy Store” was shown twice in the afternoon at the Bay Theatre.  According to the Today’s Calendar section in the Los Angeles Times, the film was a documentary about the Seal Beach old town candy store.

    I’ve never heard of this film and haven’t found any other information about it. (There’s a slight possibility that it was a segment from a non-fiction children’s show) Does anyone remember this? I’d love to hunt this down.

    ADDENDUM: On January 30, 2018, I received an e-mail from Bill Owens, the filmmaker who created “Grandma’s Candy Store.” Here’s what he wrote about his film:

    So wonderful to read about my documentary, short, 7-1/2 minute, 16mm film, “Grandma’s Candy Store,” and your efforts to learn more about it.  I should know.  I’m the guy behind the camera who made the movie 40+ years ago.  The movie was a project of a class in 16mm Motion Picture Production at California Institute of the Arts, in 1974.  I lived in an upstairs apartment in the alley directly behind Grandma’s Candy Store.  I was just going through a stack of DVDs, here in Maryland, in late January, 2018, and I found a DVD of my movie and just watched it for the first time in 10-15 years.  It’s a sweet little movie. 

    The highlight of that summer of 1974 was making that little 7-1/2 minute movie, and watching the movie play at the Bay Theater a few blocks away.  …. The highlight of the movie’s history is I entered Grandma’s Candy Store in the Yale Film Festival of, I think, 1974 or 1975 in New Haven, Connecticut.  I won for Best First Documentary Film.  I especially remember attending the screening at the film festival.  The row in front of me was blocked off with holiday bunting.  My friends and I cracked up with laughter when Frank Zappa occupied the seats directly in front of mine just as the auditorium at Yale Law School lights went down.  Watching my film with Frank Zappa was the icing on the cake (no pun intended).

    At some point, I hope to entice a copy from Bill to share, but it’s great just to get the details.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • July 17th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1946, the Bay Theatre had its grand opening at 5:30 p.m. with a double feature of John Payne and Maureen O’ Hara in “Sentimental Journey” with “Miss Susie Slagle’s,” starring Sonny Tufts and Veronica Lake. (If you’re feeling like throwing a commemorative Bay Theatre grand opening party, both films can be seen free in their entirety on YouTube.)

    This double feature was replaced on July 19 by a double feature of “The Road to Utopia,” starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope with “Bell of Rosarita,” starring Tigger and Roy Rogers.

    This double feature was replaced on July 21 by “Tomorrow Is Forever” starring Claudette Colbert, George Brent, and Orson Welles with Alfred Drake and Janet Blair (and a very young Sid Caesar in his feature film debut) in “Tars and Spars.” This means that the this 1946 Bay Theatre photo can be reliably dated (and aren’t we all looking for reliable dates?) to July 21 or 22 before the bill was replaced by Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in “Saratoga Trunk” and a “selected short.”

    The Bay started out as the independently owned Beach Theatre in November, 1945 and was closed on June 23, 1946 to be furbished and renamed by the new owner, the Fox West Coast theatres chain. You can get a closer look at the box office in this post for December 24, 1955.

    The Bay Theatre has been closed for a few years since the death of the previous owner, but it is currently being refurbished with an expected re-re-opening later in 2019.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.

  • June 23rd in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1946, Fox West Coast Theatres ran this ad in the Long Beach Independent announcing that Seal Beach’s Beach Theatre had been acquired by the chain.

    The Beach Theatre had been operating independently since the 1945 Thanksgiving weekend, but the last actual movie listed in the Los Angeles Times Independent Theatre Guide for the Beach Theatre was “Gulliver Travels” on May 4, 1946. After that, the guide only listed an ominous “Call Theatre for Program” for the Beach. After June 25, the Beach disappeared completely from the Independent Theatre Guide.

    This is the only known photo of the Beach Theatre. After much squinting and some trial and error searching on IMDB, I’ve been able to identify the double feature showing at the Beach as “Shine On Harvest Moon” (1944) and “Pillow to Post” (1945). This pinpoints the photo as having been taken between March 26 and March 29, 1946.

    Both films were Warners Brothers World War II era productions and probably felt old-fashioned to 1946 post-war Seal Beach audiences.

    “Shine On Harvest Moon” is a fictionalized biography of early twentieth century Broadway stars, Nora Bayes and Jack Norwoth and stars Ann Sheridan, Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson and Irene Manning with a cast of Warner Brothers stock character actors rounding out the bill.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9y6pjgzJQ8&w=560&h=315]

    Although the Beach Theatre showed some films that would go on to become classics, “Shine On Harvest Moon” and “Pillow to Post” are typical of the sort of double features The Beach booked.

    “Pillow to Post” is a by-the-numbers wartime comedy starring Ida Lupino as an inexperienced but patriotic traveling saleslady working for her father’s oil rig supply company to take up the slack when he can’t find a male salesman because they’re all in the military. Needing a place to sleep in a small town, the only available slot is at an auto court that accepts only married military couples. She “enlists” a reluctant lieutenant played by William Prince to pretend to be her husband, and complications and hiliarity ensues. Of course, they fall in love and decide to get hitched for real by the end.

    The most notable thing about this film is a musical cameo by Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra with Dorothy Dandridge playing at a roadside tavern.

    You can see the movie trailer for “Pillow to Post” on TCM’s web site by clicking here.

    Over seven decades later, one can only speculate what happened to the Beach. An educated guess would be that the theatre’s operations were under-capitalized, and the construction of the theater had drained the cash reserves to point where the owner couldn’t meet his business costs from box office receipts alone.

    The Fox West Coast Theatres chain shut down the theater “to prepare for our new policy,” a wonderfully uninformative turn of phrase. The Beach Theatre building was remodeled, and the remodeling wasn’t mere cosmetics. A new screen and sound system was installed, which suggested that the Beach’s film presentation was lacking, another factor that may have lead to its demise.

    The Beach Theatre was gone forever, but it would soon be reborn, but you’re going to have to wait until July 17 to find out about that.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

    This Date in Seal Beach History also has an online store hosted at Cafepress where you can order shirts, tote bags, stationery, and other gift items imprinted with vintage Seal Beach images. Visit the online store by clicking here.

  • Mermaids and Jewel Thieves

    The Bay Theatre – 1955

    This image comes to us care of a past Seal Beach resident, Bob Robertson. The photo was taken by Bob’s father, Bill Robertson, owner of the Seal Beach Post and Wave newspaper.

    click on the image for a larger view

    The Bay Theatre was built in 1947 and survives today as a rare single screen survivor in the age of multiplex theaters and high definition home theaters.

    Movie posters for “Jupiter’s Darling” and To Catch a Thief are hanging in the “next attraction” frames next to the box office.  There’s a possibility that this is early 1956 since movies weren’t released as wide and stayed in circulation much longer than today.  “Jupiter’s Darling,” released in February 1955, starred Esther Williams and Howard Keel and was a notorious box office flop for MGM.  “To Catch a Thief,” released in September 1955, is considered a classic Alfred Hitchcock film by many and starred Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

    Does anyone out there recognize any of the people in this photo or remember what the occasion was?  And while we’re at it, why don’t you share your favorite memories of the Bay Theatre in the comments?

    ADDENDUM:  Does anyone remember a Hollywood film being shot on the hill before the homes were built, and then the film being shown at the Bay after it was released?

    Be sure to check back every for more historical photos and stories of Seal Beach.

    – Michael Dobkins

    Have you enjoyed this and other This Date in Seal Beach History posts?

    If so, please consider making a small donation of a dollar or more to help defray the online subscriptions and other research costs that make this blog possible.

    Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.