It is time to fire up the Way Back Machine.
As we celebrate the waning days of summer (somewhere that’s not the southwest where we have summer for another two months), I thought it might be fun to take a look at the movie theaters that were scattered around the Las Vegas Valley when I was growing up there back in the day. Back then, movie theaters were one of the recreational places we had on a hot summer day.
The Cinerama Theater -there weren’t very many of them built-but, surprisingly in Las Vegas, we had one. Located on Viking Road just off Paradise, this was a terrific theater. It opened on January 13, 1965 with the John Wayne potboiler, “Circus World”. In 1967, MGM studios re-released “Gone With the Wind” in 70mm and my mother took me to this theater for the first time. I fell in love with it. I dragged my friends there to see many a film, including “Fantasia”, “The Hindenburg” and “The Three Musketeers”. For a time, between the Cinerama’s Dome, the Convention Center Rotunda and the Landmark Hotel that section of Paradise Road was mid-century modern nirvana. Like all great things in Classic Las Vegas, it was not to last. The Rotunda got torn down and replaced with the larger, low-rise Convention Center and the Cinerama was sold to a church and the ultimately demolished. I still miss it. Many people often confuse this theater with the Cine-Dome multiplex that was located on South Decatur Blvd. back in the 1980s and 1990s. They aren’t related.
