Centennial
Circuit
One Saturday in 1904, Marcus
Loew began charging audiences 5 cents a head to take in a
1-minute “movie show.” The
exhibition colossus that bears Loew’s name, now said
to be worth in excess of $1.5
billion, has evolved into America’s first century-old
cinema chain.
by alma freeman
Marcus Loew was in his 30s before he saw his first movie.
And though it represented a threat to
the arcade business he was operating at the time, Loew
embraced it at once. “There
was only one thing to do with the film opposition and that
was join it as soon as I could,” he told Forbes magazine
in a 1924 interview. “I made up my mind on a Thursday
to try films, and we opened the show on Saturday.”
One wonders what Loew – who never saw a twin cinema
or a movie made in three-hue Technicolor, and who passed
away one month before the release of the first talkie, would
make of Loews Cineplex’s 24-plex in Greater Philadelphia,
or its sprawling, futuristic Metreon in San Francisco.
Loew was born in 1870 to impovershed
immigrants on New York’s
Lower East Side, and his early, erratic work history included
stints with news vendors, a map maker, a textile manufacturer,
a gentlemen’s clothing store and a furrier. While still
a teen, he published a short-lived newspaper. From 1894 to
1904 he amassed a considerable sum of money as a manufacturer
of silk capes. He invested in real estate and managed real
estate investments for a neighbor, the popular comic stage
actor David Warfield.
It was the fur business that first brought
him into contact with furrier (and future Paramount Pictures
founder) Adolph
Zukor. In 1903 Loew and Warfield bought a $20,000 stake in
Zukor’s Automatic Vaudeville Business, heralded as
an immediate success.
A year later, Loew and Warfield sold
their Automatic shares to launch the company that would
evolve into both the Loews
Cineplex theatre chain and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie
studio: a penny arcade dubbed “The People’s Vaudeville” at
172 W. 23rd St. near 8th Avenue. With the success of the
23rd Street site, Loew opened three more arcades in New York
and one in Cincinnati. It was during a trip to the Cincinnati
site that Loew happened upon, in neighboring Kentucky, his
first projected motion picture show. And it was there that
he declared arcades relics of the past.
Quickly augmenting his Cincinnati Penny Hippodrome with
chairs borrowed from a neighborhood undertaker, Loew organized
a
1-minute screening and sold 4,993 5-cent tickets the first
day. He never looked back.
Upon returning to New York, he immediately
converted all of his arcades to nickelodeons. Within six
months he was
operating 42 such enterprises throughout the city. The company’s
name would change to Loew’s Theatrical Enterprises
in 1911.
The Loew’s Orpheum bowed in 1913
with record seating for 3,200. By 1920, 80 million moviegoers
were attending
Loews facilities each year, and the circuit was seating 150,000
moviegoers daily.
With the advent of movie palaces, Loew’s expenses skyrocketed.
Not only were the newer facilities much more costly to build,
it became increasingly expensive to rent quality features
crucial to a cinema’s success.
In those final years of the silent era, anxiety
over ensuring a steady commercial product stream precipitated
Loew’s
1920 purchase of a 5-year-old movie studio, Metro Pictures. “We
undertook producing pictures to be assured of big features
for our houses,” he told Forbes four years later. “An
interesting phase of the motion picture business under present
conditions is that one poor picture will lose more money
for a theatre than a good one would can earn. Although we
buy them all over the world there is no oversupply of the
sort that will fill large houses week after week.”
In 1924 Loew acquired Goldwyn Pictures
and Louis B. Mayer pictures, combining them with Metro
to form what became known
the following year as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The purchase not
only gave Loew control of what would become one of Hollywood’s
most successful movie studios, it gave him control of nearly
500 screens nationwide.
Longtime Loew’s exec Nicholas Schenck inherited the
company’s reins following its namesake’s unexpected
passing in 1927, and Schenck kept both Loew’s and MGM
profitable under what many businessmen found the most difficult
of circumstances, namely the Great Depression. MGM was the
only studio to show a profit during the era and, to this
day, no movie has sold more tickets than a film produced
during Schenck’s tenure, the 1939 MGM epic “Gone
With The Wind.”
Loew’s underwent a dramatic transformation in 1954
when it complied with a Justice Department consent decree
and divested itself of MGM, its production-distribution subsidiary.
By 1960 the Tisch family would gain control of 25 percent
of Loew’s Theatres stock and hotel mogul Lawrence Tisch
would be named the corporation’s new chairman and CEO.
By the mid-1960s, Loews Theatres (the apostrophe appears
to have been largely discarded by this point) had dwindled
to 69 screens.
“When I joined [Loews] in 1963,” longtime Loews president
Bernie Myerson told NATO News in 1989, “we didn’t
have one theatre outside New York City that was part of the
original circuit. Not one. They were either sold or demolished.”
By July 1985, the month the Tisches
sold its Loews Theatres division to a group led by media
mogul Jerry Perenchio, the
circuit had re-expanded to 226 screens in six states. Seventeen
months later, Perenchio’s group would sell the circuit
to TriStar Pictures. Almost exactly one year after that,
on Dec. 17, 1987, the Coca-Cola Co. merged TriStar and Columbia
Pictures, and Loews emerged a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures
Entertainment (CPE).
In its first year under Coke and Columbia,
Loews went on a spending spree, gobbling up the assets
of no fewer than
four other major cinema chains. At the start of 1988, it
was the nation’s 12th-largest circuit; by year’s
conclusion, it was the 5th-largest.
And while Loews enjoyed an impressive
run of consolidation, that run was dwarfed by the one engineered
just a bit earlier
by upstart rival Cineplex Corp. Between June 1984 and
January 1988 Cineplex acquired nine major North American
cinema
chains, among them Canada’s 297-screen Odeon circuit
and 574-screen Plitt Theatres.
Sony Corp. of America, which bought
CPE and Loews from Coca-Cola in 1989, puchased Cineplex
Odeon nine years
later, and in
1998 merged the two exhibition giants into a single,
2,700-plus-screen megachain, Loews Cineplex. Like other
supersized U.S. theatre
chains of its era, it filed for Chapter 11 in 2001
but emerged several months later. Loews Cineplex did so
with
the help
of its new parent company, Canadian giant Onex Corp.
Amusement, said Marcus Loew near the
end of his career, “is
a staple commodity ranking right after the prime necessities
of life in its appeal to the public. People buy entertainment
with an eye to what they are getting for their money, and
I have always believed in giving them good measure.”
With 2,835 screens at 281 sites worldwide
(including 110 screens in its New York City birthplace),
Loews
today maintains
one of the largest presences in major metropolitan
areas and prides itself on its considerable role
in both mainstream
and specialty exhibition.
The circuit also continues to update
its image, pioneering preshow entertainments, health-conscious
concessions,
online and home ticketing, new-mom screenings,
traveling film
festivals and more. One senses Loew – who founded the world’s
first century-old movie chain with quick thinking and risk-taking – would
not be entirely displeased. 
