Mark Kearney, local historian, professor and trivia guy, has an article in this month’s London CityLife magazine about the Capitol Theatre:
The lobby doors are locked, but if you peek through you see bits of paper on the floor, two step ladders leaning against a wall, and some debris on the wine-coloured carpet that leads past the snack bar to the two cinemas inside. The box office window has a small crack, and the entranceway could use a good sweeping. … [N]ow, everything at the Capitol is as silent as the movies it used to feature…. [B]eauty and age are rarely respected in this business anymore.
The Capitol, née the Allen, is the site of what could be my ideal movie theatre. (See The Majestic.) Unfortunately I don’t have the cash or business acuity to make it work. But I can dream….
Step by step
The first thing I’d do is work on the sound. Correction: on the soundproofing. When it opened, the Allen was a single 1200-seat auditorium; in the mid-’70s, as the Capitol under Famous Players, it was split into two smaller cinemas. Perhaps movies weren’t played as loudly then, or maybe Famous just skimped on the renovation, but it suffers from what seem at times to be paper-thin walls. I’ve got a friend who’s an engineer specializing in acoustics, noise and vibration, and he could fix that up in a flash.
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