The Movie Theatre and The Present Day
As vaudeville suffered a major decline in the 1930s, the Keith-Albee began to run movies. By the 1970s grand movie houses were being torn down to make way for larger cinemas. However, the citizens of Huntington chose to save the theatre from closure and the wrecking ball. The Hyman family decided to convert the grand Keith-Albee into three separate theatres. A fourth theatre was later added in a former retail space. In 1986, the Keith-Albee was placed on the National Register of Historical Places in conjunction with several blocks of downtown Huntington. The Marshall University Foundation took a 99 year lease on the theatre back in 1990 and renovations were conducted in the 1990s. In 2004, a large cinema opened in Pullman Square, seriously damaging the Keith-Albee's business. On January 22, 2006, the Keith-Albee stopped being an active movie theater. After a brief transfer to the Marshall University Foundation, Keith-Albee Performing Arts Center, Inc. has taken control of the theatre and will convert the Keith-Albee into a performing arts center. Throughout 2006, contractors and volunteers have worked to repair years of wear and to restore portions of the theatre to their original form. Along with many less visible projects, the partitions installed at the height of the theatre's days as a movie theatre were removed, reducing the three rooms to the original one. On December 12, 2006 the Keith-Albee hosted the world premiere of the movie We Are Marshall with actors Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox and director Joseph McGinty Nichol attending. The theatre makes a cameo appearance in the movie.
The theatre will be the site of many Marshall University and local performances for years to come. It was the site of Marshall's Artist Series Spring International Film Festival in 2007.
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Famous quotes containing the words movie, theatre, present and/or day:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the thing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn’t seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The catastrophe
Buried in the stair carpet stayed there
And never corrupted anybody.
And one day he grew up, and the horizon
Stammered politely. The sky was like muslin.
And still in the old house no one ever answered the bell.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)