By Bob Curtright
The Wichita Eagle

Call it “dinner movies” — sort of like dinner theater only with flicks instead of live actors.

That’s what Derby’s Silver Screen Cinema will be offering when it reopens in mid-May after remodeling to add a kitchen to prepare fresh pizza and some tables and chairs for moviegoers.

“Basically, we’ll be serving pizza and beer and showing movies,” said Stan Cox, who has owned the vintage theater for 3 1/2 years.

“It’s a way to keep old theaters in business. It’s a way for us to survive.”

Cox picked up the idea after visiting several so-called “movie grills” in Texas in the past year. It’s time for “dinner movies” in what has become a highly competitive — and overbuilt — local movie market that has seen the closing of four theaters since last fall plus the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy of two chains operating in Wichita.

Gone are the Pawnee Plaza (four screens), Cinemas East (six), Towne West Cinemas (five) and Towne East Twin (two).

In bankruptcy but still operating while reorganizing debt are Dickinson Theatres (Northrock 14 and Northrock 6) and Royale Theatres (Cinemas West, Towne East Buck House, Royale 8 in Newton and Crusader VI in Wellington).

“We have been pretty fortunate,” Cox said. “We have a loyal audience, so it hasn’t been all that bad. We were breaking even so we weren’t going to close.”

“I run it mainly as a hobby or sideline business,” said Cox, who also owns Machine Specialists in Wichita, which fabricates airplane parts.

But the change from a straight movie house to a niche business that combines food with entertainment will allow the business to grow.

The menu will be more than snacks but less than full restaurant meals, said Cox.

“We’ll offer probably four kinds of pizza by the slice and 15 kinds of bottled beer. We’ll also have buffalo wings and wine coolers.”

Movies at 5 and 7:30 p.m. nightly will continue to be older first- and second-run features to maintain the $3 bargain prices.

“We do best as second-run. Now with something more than popcorn, we think we have found our niche.”

Cox’s son, Chad, will run the new operation when he graduates from Wichita State University in business this spring.

The single-screen theater, built in the early 1970s in the El Paso shopping center in Derby, will actually provide two niche offerings.

Besides the food-drink-and-movie offering at night, there will also be children’s matinees in the mornings.

“We found there was a demand for children’s films year-round rather than just during the summer,” Cox said.

He plans to offer them at 10 a.m. and noon on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays for a ticket price between $1.50 and $2.

“We won’t be serving alcohol then, obviously. We’ll cover up all references to it while the kids are here.”

Cox repainted and freshened the theater in 1998 when he purchased it. The current remodeling involves installing a kitchen and pizza oven and replacing some of the theater seating with tables and chairs.

“We are actually decreasing our capacity from about 200 to about 150. We’ll still have about 100 theater seats in the center with tables and chairs on both sides for another 50,” he described.

“We’ve had the liquor license for three months, but we’re a little slow to get going.”

The grand reopening will be mid-May, but the actual date has not been set.

By Matt Moline
Special to The Capital-Journal

ELKHART, KANSAS
“The play’s the thing,” wrote Shakespeare, the resident playwright of merry old England.

But in the southwest corner of Kansas, the play is the only thing, thanks to the fledgling Morton County Community Theater Group.

Organized in 1997, the talented High Plains thespians’ group provides the only live civic theater within a 100-mile radius of Elkhart, the county seat.

Drama coach Temple Reed says the theater group has found an audience with local arts enthusiasts who routinely drive 150 miles — or more — to take in road show performances of popular Broadway-style entertainment, such as “Cats,” and “Riverdance.”

“You stop and think about it,” Reed said last week. “To have very much culture out here you have to drive to Amarillo or Wichita, and a lot of people here go to Denver for shows like ‘Les Miz.’ I’m not putting us up to that quality, but it shows that the desire for culture is here if they’ll travel that far.”

Besides snapping up tickets to MCCTG productions, the county’s leading citizens also have demonstrated their support, Reed says.

A year ago, an anonymous local donor put up the money to buy Elkhart’s former movie house, the Doric Theater, as the future permanent home of the theater group — to the tune of $15,000 as an investment in the community’s cultural future.

In a subsequent gesture of good will, the benefactor lowered the amount of the theater group’s loan by $2,000, Reed says.

“Right now, we don’t have a home base,” Reed said. “We just finished recording a radio play, which is our first venture with that. We recorded it in the back room of a barber shop in Rolla because we liked the acoustics.”

A 1940s-style radio re-creation of the Jimmy Stewart motion picture “It’s a Wonderful Life” is scheduled to air on Morton County’s three cable TV systems later this winter, Reed says.

Although Morton County is one of the most sparsely populated counties in Kansas, Reed has no problem finding talented actors among the county’s 3,315 citizens.

“Our mission statement is that we want to expose the entire community to all aspects of theater,” Reed said. “And all the backstage stuff and posters and advertising, plus the acting — and the cleanup.”

Amazingly, Reed’s biggest challenge as director is to assemble cast members for play rehearsals, she says.

“Most of the time, we’re only able to have one rehearsal where everybody is together,” said Reed. “That can be a real problem. We spend most of our time scheduling a play’s scenes, so if somebody can’t be there on a particular night, we don’t practice their scene.”

This season’s schedule calls for six full-fledged productions, including a Feb. 10 premiere in nearby Ashland of Lawrence playwright Kay Kuhlmann’s “How the West was Fed,” a play about the 1870s-era waitresses who came West to work at restaurants along the Santa Fe Railway.

Last October, the theater group tackled another Kuhlmann stage vehicle, “Run Like the Wind,” which tells the story of the late Glenn Cunningham, the Morton Countian who won a silver medal in the 1936 Olympic games’ 1,500-meter run.

Until funds can be raised to renovate the old Doric Theater in downtown Elkhart, population 2,500, the MCCTG functions much like a wandering band of medieval minstrels — performing at Elkhart’s VFW hall for one production, moving on to the city auditorium for the next.

Next June, the MCCTG players are scheduled to present historical vignettes of the area’s Santa Fe Trail history in an outdoor setting at the huge Cimarron National Grasslands near Elkhart.

Reed is a former English teacher and dramatics coach at Rolla High School, one of two high schools in the county. She retired in 1992.

by Rosalyn Drew
Elkhart Tri-State News

When the Doric Theatre came into being around 1918 it was built for live stage performances and silent movies.  Dark now for many years, the theatre will once again come to life with the sounds of stage and crew.  Morton County Community Theatre Group has purchased the building from Top Ranked Investments, Inc.  the group has been approved for a loan and will apply for grants, seek donations and hold fund-raisers.

In its early years, The Doric Theatre on Main Street in Elkhart was a stage for vaudeville acts touring the circuit.  The one most remembered by Virginia (Coop) O’Brien of Tulsa, OK, whose father managed the Doric for several years, was the Hazel Hurd Players starring Hazel and her husband, Fred Twyman, from Kingman, KS.  They put on plays along with the silent movies.  Irene Sweem (who would marry the projectionist and manager, Bill Coop in 1924) played the upright piano positioned at the front of the stage in the orchestra pit to accompany the silent movies.

Enter the “talkies” in 1925.  The stage is once again renovated to accompany a new projection screen and sound system.  The days of traveling vaudeville troups are over and the fly screens, painted scenery backdrops, (so called fly screens because the had to be changed on the ‘fly’)-were rolled up to make way for the updated equipment.  The Doric continued showing the latest in cinema entertainment, often under the management of Bill and Irene Coop, until 1953.  Bill passed away in ‘53 and Irene managed the movie house another year.  When rent on the building continued to rise, Irene finally gave up the management in 1954.  The Doric remained off and on under other
management for several years.

It was early 1980 when the last bit of film flickered from the projection room.  Since then the building has been the home of many different businesses.  Once, in the early ’90s, it was a clothing factory.  Following that it housed a boot repair shop with the operators living in the building.

“Any original part of the interior is gone,” explained Temple Reed, board member of the Group.  “We in the Theatre Group know little about the building. We’ve been asking around for any pictures of the of the interior in its original stage, or even later,” she said, “but we haven’t come up with any leads. So putting it back like it once was is almost impossible.” She went on to say that ‘restoration’ so to speak is not he way the Group will go with the building.  But ‘renovation’ will better suit their needs.

Reed was very excited when she was told that OI’Brien has offered to sketch out the interior as it was.  “That would be wonderful.  To have something to go on would be great!” she said.  “We’ve talked to an architect and she has looked at the building.  She said it is feasible to do what we want to do with the building and still keep the building’s character,” she said.

A letter from O’Brien, “has been the biggest help and we’re very grateful to have it,” said Reed.  “I’ve mad numerous copies and shared it with members of the Group and at the Kansas Arts Commission meeting in Dodge City. Officials there are encouraging us to pursue registering the building on the National Registry of Historic Buildings.”  This would likely open the door to additional grants for restoration.  At the same time, Reed expressed concern that such a listing might hinder the Theatre Group’s ability to make the building functional to meet their needs.

Reed went on to say she would love to hear from anyone with any information about the Doric. The Tri-State News would like to have your stories about the Doric, too.  “We would like to know who the original builder was , when the building was built, who its owners were, things like that,” Reed said. “The building obviously ahs a great history.  It would be fascinating to piece it all together.”

Having been gutted and made into apartments, the Doric isn’t quite ready for it’s next show, but the Morton  County Community Theatre Group hopes to change that.  With the help of O’Brien and others, they hope to breathe new life into the building, a former landmark of Elkhart’s Main Street.

By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star

In the movie classic “Frankenstein” a creature is pieced together from parts of dead bodies.

Think of the new Rio in downtown Overland Park as a theater pieced together from parts of dead movie houses. The result, however, is way too charming to be called a monster.

In a restoration process that has taken nearly seven years, the 54-year-old theater — which hasn’t shown a movie in a quarter of a century — has been gutted and remade into an old-fashioned single-screen movie palace using fixtures saved from condemned theaters throughout the Midwest and kept in storage until now.

“It’s a little jewel, a piece of unique character for Overland Park,” declares David Jenkins of Salina, president of the Kansas Historic Theaters Association.

The restored Rio — which in earlier incarnations was the Overland Theater, the Kimo South Theatre and the Theatre for Young America (the last a live performing company) — will have its first moment in the spotlight at 9 p.m. Wednesday in a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring Kansas Gov. Bill Graves.

The doors at 7204 W. 80th St. open to paying customers Friday with screenings of John Ford’s film “The Hurricane” starring John Hall, Dorothy Lamour and state-of-the-art special effects circa 1937. (Ticket prices are $6.75 for evening shows, $4.50 matinees or for seniors and children any time.) It was “The Hurricane” that was playing at the Overland Theatre when it opened on Christmas Day in 1946.

That will be followed on July 7 by screening of a newly restored version of Billy Wilder’s classic “Sunset Boulevard” with William Holden and Gloria Swanson. On July 14 the Rio will begin its regular schedule of new foreign and independent films with “Six Days in Roswell,” described as a sort of a “Waiting for Guffman”-type spoof about UFO mania.

Moviegoers will discover in the Rio what Wade Williams (who owns the theater along with twin brothers Brian and Ben Mossman) calls “the ’40s Palm Beach look.” The theater is an atmospheric, pastel art deco bonbon trimmed with tropical motifs.

Williams and the Mossmans bought the building from the City of Overland Park in 1993, after it had been vacated by long-time tenants Theatre for Young America, who are now in a performing space in the Mission Mall. City fathers feared that the facility would become an empty eyesore in the heart of their business district; Williams and the Mossmans proposed turning it into a classic example of a small-town movie house.

The Rio’s new look begins on the exterior, where the Mossmans — who did the bulk of the restoration work themselves — have covered the facade in pink marble, installed new movie poster display cases (several of them salvaged from a condemned theater in St. Louis), raised a new made-to-order marquee and added so much pink and green neon lighting that, according to Williams, the Rio now has more neon than any theater of its size in the United States.

Most of the neon was created by Finis Necessary, an 86-year-old Independence resident who has been working in neon since the 1930s. In a 60-year-plus career Necessary has designed, installed and maintained the neon lighting on such now-leveled area theaters as the Pantages, Orpheum, Isis, Main Street and Gillham, as well as the still-operating Uptown.

The original box office was removed years ago, so Ben Mossman built the Rio’s glass-brick box office from scratch. Finding the right kind of vintage art deco glass brick was tricky; three kinds were used in restoring the Rio, most of it purchased from area collectors.

Once inside the small lobby a visitor’s eyes are drawn upward to a sort of rotunda that was created by removal of the old ceiling. From the center dangles a huge chandelier of brass and art deco frosted glass that originally hung in the old Isis Theatre at 31st and Troost.

“We were pulling that chandelier out of the Isis even as they were tearing out the rear wall of the building,” Brian Mossman said of the emergency salvage effort.

The side walls of the rotunda introduce the palm tree motif that is carried throughout the Rio. The delicate stylized palms here are fashioned from quarter-inch steel rods. They were painted a pastel blue-green and are illuminated with green lights hidden at their bases.

Even the carpeting underfoot has a jungle-frond pattern.

The concession stand is dominated by a cherry red 1938 popcorn machine. It was salvaged by Williams and the Mossmans from the Abilene Theatre in Abilene, Kan., which went out of business earlier this year after being damaged by a microburst during a thunderstorm.

“Pretty much everything in here that looks old is old,” Brian Mossman said while conducting a recent preliminary tour of the facility.

Over the bathroom doors are metallic-looking (actually, they’re painted plaster) original signs dating to the ’20s. The Men’s sign features a portrait in relief of a dapper fellow with a cigarette in his mouth, the smoke curling around him.

But the Rio’s piece de resistance is its 281-seat auditorium.

Those who last saw the auditorium when it was occupied by a children’s theater may be amazed by the transformation. The tiered seating installed for live theater was pulled out and the natural slope of the auditorium revealed. Virtually every surface has been replastered and repainted.

The palm tree motif continues around the upper walls of the auditorium, while the lower part features tongue-and-groove paneling specially milled to create a bamboo effect. Recessed red, amber and blue lights can be adjusted to create different moods, depending upon the movie being shown.

The seats with cupholder armrests, while relatively new, have been recycled as well. In a previous life they were in the now-defunct Blue Ridge Cinema at I-70 at Blue Ridge Road.

“Each theater built in the ’40s and ’50s had its own identity,” Mossman said. “It was just part of the showmanship of operating a theater.”

That showmanship was very much on the minds of Williams and the Mossmans, who make up the Fine Arts Theatre Group, a business devoted to restoring and operating vintage movie houses. Since 1983 they have operated the Fine Arts Theatre on Johnson Drive in Mission; a few years later they restored the Englewood Theatre in Independence, a repertoire house at 10917 Winner Road that shows classic movies.

While the Rio will book the same sort of fare shown at the Fine Arts, Williams and the Mossmans regard it as their premiere screen. In it they will book the most in-demand titles, perhaps playing the same films showing at Westport’s Tivoli Manor Square Theatre, the city’s other “art house.”

Why did it take nearly seven years to finish work on the Rio?

Mostly, say the Mossmans, because they insisted on doing most of the work themselves, from painting to laying a new sewer line.

“The hardest part of the job,” said Ben Mossman, “was trying to do the Rio and our other jobs.” Ben Mossman manages the Englewood, Brian Mossman runs the Fine Arts, and Williams a few years ago launched a line of videos based on his collection of vintage science fiction and horror films.

“Fifty years from now people will remember going to the Rio Theatre in Overland Park and how beautiful it was,” predicted theater historian Jenkins. “Fifty years from now are they going to have the same kind of memories of the multiplex at the mall?

“No, and that’s why these old theaters need to be saved. As far as I’m concerned, these guys are heroes.”

To reach Robert W. Butler, movie editor for The Star, call (816) 234-4760 or send e-mail to bbutler@kcstar.com

By Eric Swanson
Globe Reporter

A statewide association is trying to convince people that supporting historic theaters is good for their community.

The Kansas Historic Theatres Association was formed a year ago to support non-profit historic theaters across the state and to convince communities to support them. The association’s board of directors had a meeting Wednesday afternoon at the Dodge Theatre.

The Dodge Theatre joined the association as its first associate member in March, said association president David Jenkins.

“When I saw this theater and I met Mike (Burkhart, owner of the theater), I was so impressed that I came back and told the group that we had to find some way to get for-profits in there,” said Jenkins, who is executive director of the Fox Theatre in Salina.

As an associate, the Dodge Theatre can participate in all association activities except fund-raising.

Membership will also allow Burkhart to exchange information and ideas with the other directors, he said.

The association currently has 11 members, including the Jayhawk Theatre in Topeka, the McPherson Opera House in McPherson and the Orpheum Performing Arts Center in Wichita. Its directors are either the executive directors of non-profit theater associations or presidents of those associations’ boards of directors.

The members believe that supporting historic theaters is good for a community’s economic and artistic health, said board member Doug Jernigan, who is affiliated with the Jayhawk Theatre.

The association scored a major triumph during the last legislative session, when the Legislature approved a bill that helps communities redevelop historic theaters. The House approved the bill 122-3, and the Senate approved it 33-6.

The bill allows a non-profit historic theater to estimate the amount of sales-tax revenue it will generate over a certain number of years, Jenkins said. The theater’s directors can then go to local government officials and ask for that money in advance.

The city can use whatever method it chooses to give the theater the money, and the theater will repay it with the sales tax money that would otherwise have gone to the state.

“This is not a handout from the state. The state isn’t giving us a cent,” Jenkins said. “Nothing like this has been passed in this country for historic theaters. Kansas is the first.”

The legislation does not apply to for-profit theaters such as the Dodge Theatre, he said.

By BARBARA HOLLINGSWORTH
The Capital-Journal

ABILENE — Since becoming a movie theater in the 1930s, the Plaza Theatre, 408 N.W. 2nd, has served as a rite of passage for Abilene’s youth.

Last month, Abilene lost the Plaza Theatre, its only movie theater. Part of the roof and a wall of the 120-year-old former opera house collapsed, leaving the theater unsalvageable.

“It’s a part of everybody,” said co-owner Cathy Strowig, who began working at the theater when she was 13 and spent Saturday afternoons at the matinee. “When you’re in middle school in a small town, that’s where you go for your first piece of freedom.”

That is one reason Abilene Unified School District 435 superintendent Jim Lambert is concerned.

“I think the theater has impacted the community, but the group we’re always thinking about is the middle school-age kids,” Lambert said of about 360 Abilene students in sixth, seventh and eighth grade. “It was almost a rite of passage for kids that age in this community.”

The theater gave these students, who weren’t old enough to drive, a place to escape from their parents and be independent, he said. Now the nearest theaters are 20 miles away in Junction City or 30 miles away in Salina.

Both Lambert and city officials said they would like to see private enterprise develop another theater. Strowig said she probably won’t continue in the business. She teaches in Salina and said she operated the theater as a service to the community.

If no one steps forward, the school district possibly would develop a theater in the school or as a school-to-work program, which wouldn’t be a first in Kansas.

Neodesha went 35 years without a movie theater before high school students in an entrepreneurial class opened a theater three years ago, Neodesha USD 461 Superintendent John Burke said.

“We opened a theater at the high school,” he said. “We purchased the equipment and had connections with people who could get us good films.”

The school board closed the operation after 20 weeks until junior high students approached the board, still wanting a theater. Students used grant money and found a more prominent location in December 1997. After renovating the building, they opened the 130-seat theater for business.

In response to Abilene having a similar project, Burke advised them to focus on finding a good location and developing a sound business plan.

“The last thing would be to hang in there because it’s not perfect all the time, but I’d encourage him,” he said. “It’s wonderful when the school and community work together.”

While Abilene may get another movie theater, Abilene will lose a piece of history in the 600-seat, art deco Plaza Theatre. It opened as the Bonebrake Opera House in 1879, and was converted into a movie theater when Strowig’s grandfather bought the building in 1930. The theater was the site of three world premiers, and presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his first news conference there.

“A lot of people had their first date or first kiss there,” Strowig said, recalling a neighbor who met her husband there. “The stories around town are everywhere.”

A 120-year-old building that housed the city’s only movie theater is too badly damaged to salvage and will be torn down, one of the owners said Wednesday. The building housing the Plaza Theatre in downtown Abilene will be torn down over the next 30 days, said co-owner Cathy Strowig.

Part of the roof and a wall of the building collapsed last month.  “We all pretty much came to the same conclusion. There just isn’t going to be enough left — after you tear down what needs to be torn down — to save,” Strowig said. “The damage is too much. If it were just the roof or something, it would be different. But the supports were damaged also.”

The building opened as an opera house in 1879. Demolition means that the art deco designs, wall hangings and balconies that made the building stand out won’t be saved.  Strowig owns the building with several other members of her family. The family is just one of eight independent theater operators in Kansas and has operated the movie house since 1931.

By CHRIS GRENZ
The Capital-Journal

If they can’t, the town will lose one of its finest treasures. Presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower conducted his first news conference in the downtown movie house that opened in 1910. Abilene residents have had countless evenings — and first dates — at the theater for as long as townsfolk can remember.

Cathy Strowig, who runs the theater owned by her mother, Betty Strowig, said an insurance adjustor and engineer inspected the building Wednesday. The engineer plans to file a report with the insurance company by today. But Strowig said she likely won’t see the inspection results until next week.

No one was in the building just after noon Sunday when the roof collapsed. The collapse likely was caused by a weakening of the structure by a series of severe thunderstorms and downpours, Strowig said.

She said “a good chunk” of the roof came crashing down inside the theater. The entire roof probably will have to be replaced, she said. The west wall also collapsed, and the north wall is unstable and has been shored up with boards, she said. A falling support beam tore through the theater’s screen, which was among the largest in the state.

Strowig said she isn’t sure if the damage can be repaired. If it can, she said, the project won’t be cheap.

“I know to remove that roof and replace the two walls that are unsound will be an enormous, enormous project — very expensive,” she said.

Strowig was allowed into the building for five minutes this week to retrieve what few items she could grab. She took mostly historical items from the office, including photographs, documents and the microphone Eisenhower used to declare his candidacy.

Another business, Last Chance Graphics, was located inside the theater and also sustained damage. Next door, an antique store lost the roof over a storage area, Strowig said. Representatives from those businesses couldn’t be reached for comment.

The theater’s damage has been upsetting to the Strowig family. They completed an extensive renovation of the theater six years ago, and a digital sound system that was installed last year was heavily damaged in the collapse.

“It’s been a part of our family for so long,” said Strowig, whose grandfather purchased the building in 1930 and converted the 600-seat theater to motion picture use. “It’s upsetting. It’s like losing a member of our family.”

The idea of losing the theater has been hard for the entire town, Strowig said.

“We may have owned the building, but everybody in town thinks that’s their theater,” she said. “It’s a tremendous loss for the community. Like everything else in a small town, it’s just always been there and now when it’s gone, it really hits you.”

By MATT MOLINE
Special to The Capital-Journal

ABILENE — For the first time in nearly 90 years, the lights have gone out on the marquee of Abilene’s historic Plaza Theater movie palace, heavily damaged by a Sunday afternoon roof collapse. No one was in the building, and no one was hurt.

Falling debris from the roof also damaged a brick wall of the historic structure, leaving a gaping hole on the west end of the theater, which first opened as a downtown movie house in 1910. An adjacent business, Last Chance Graphics, also was damaged in the 12:04 p.m. collapse, according to an Abilene Police Department dispatcher.

Theater co-owner Cathy Strowig said the structure may have been weakened in a series of violent thunderstorms that struck Abilene more than a week ago.

“We did have some leaking in the roof after those storms, and we had the insurance guy in,” Strowig said, “but nobody saw anything to indicate something of this magnitude.”

A screening of the Sean Connery film “Entrapment” had been set to begin at 7 p.m. Sunday.

The roof failure also sent a support beam crashing through the theater’s screen, believed to be one of the largest in the state.

Strowig said the theater’s new digital stereo sound system also was heavily damaged. The equipment, housed behind the screen, had been replaced in 1998, she said.

The theater was built in 1879 as the Bonebrake Opera House. Strowig’s grandfather purchased the theater in 1930, converting the 600-seat auditorium to exclusive motion picture use.

Dwight Eisenhower, who grew up in Abilene, had his first news conference as a presidential candidate in the theater in June 1952, and several movies have premiered there.

Six years ago, the Strowig family completed an extensive renovation of the theater, including a project that restored the theater’s lobby to its 1930s appearance.

“We’ve always continued to work on it,” Strowig said. “With a building this old, you’re always trying to make improvements and trying to keep it up. So many people in Abilene know it as the place where they had their first date.”

Strowig said she planned to meet with engineers and insurance adjusters this week to determine whether the old theater is salvageable.

“I don’t know if this is the last picture show or not,” Strowig said. “If it is, the community has really had a big loss.”

By Christopher R. Negelein
Globe Reporter

As the lights went down in the Dodge Theatre and the Warner Bros. Co. logo came onto the screen, one could believe that it was 60 years ago Sunday.

The same movie, “Dodge City,” was showing that day as well as last weekend. The reshowing is in honor of the 60th anniversary of the movie’s premiere at the Dodge Theatre, said Joe White, event coordinator for the Dodge Theatre.

The theater celebrated the event by inviting those who attended the show the first time, White said. The theater also had Warner Bros. memorabilia on display.

Among some of the items were props used by Charlie Chaplin and a film reel containing a western short with Gene Autry.

While the theater carries the atmosphere of its 60 years, the interior had a renovation last year and looks closer to what it did back then, said Frank Sanchez, a premiere attendee. He was 17 years old at the time.

“I saw some of the stars there at the time,” he said. “I was a bell boy for the Fred Harvey at the time.

“I delivered telegram messages to them, but to me, they were just customers. Other people in town were trying to get autographs from me.”

Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, who was relatively unknown at the time, were in Dodge City for the premiere.

Before Sunday’s show, those attendees like Sanchez, were given a standing ovation from the 140 people in the audience. Then a slide show of historic pictures from the premiere was shown.

As the movie began, one could notice the colors were different than what viewers are used to now. While the show was still enjoyable, the colors looked a little fainter.

The first few scenes had a train full of rich men traveling the Wild West of Kansas in a steam train that chugged down the track. In a few moments, the train raced a stagecoach headed to the “infamous” Dodge City and rendezvoused with Errol Flynn’s character.

It might of been a little difficult for a modern audience to believe that Kansas was the dangerous frontier portrayed in the film. For some, it may have seemed such a past was completely gone from Dodge City.

Until a person left the theatre and heard the train as it click-clacked down the track.