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}} The Paramount Theatre is a 3,040 seat Art Deco movie theater located at 2025 Broadway in downtown Oakland, California, USA. When it was built in 1931, it was the largest multi-purpose theater on the West Coast, seating 3476. Today, the Paramount is the home of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Oakland Ballet, it regularly plays host to R&B, jazz, blues, pop, rock, gospel, classical music, as well as ballets, plays, stand-up comedy, lecture series, special events, and screenings of classic movies from Hollywood's Golden Era. ==History== The Paramount Theatre was built as a movie palace, during the rise of the motion picture industry in the late 1920s. ''Palace'' was both a common and an accurate term for the movie theaters of the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1925, Adolph Zukor's Paramount Publix Corporation, the theater division of Paramount Pictures, one of the great studio-theater chains, began a construction program resulting in some of the finest theaters built. Publix assigned the design of the Oakland Paramount to 38-year-old San Francisco architect Timothy L. Pflueger, (1892 - 1946) of Miller and Pflueger. The Paramount opened at a cost of $3 million on December 16, 1931.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Tours Rediscover Oakland Landmark. San Francisco Chronicle )〕 Pflueger was also the designer of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. The Art Deco design referred to the ''1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes'' in Paris.〔Menten, Theodore, ''The Art Deco Style in Household Objects, Architecture, Sculpture, Graphics, Jewelry,'' Courier Dover, (1972), ISBN 0-486-22824-X〕 The term Art Deco has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the art and fashion of the early 20th century.〔Mackrell, Alice. ''Art And Fashion,'' Sterling Publishing Company, Inc., page 116, (2005) - ISBN 0-7134-8873-5〕 Its exterior, with its high tile mosaic of enormous figures and a projecting Paramount sign which can be seen up and down the street, is impressive, but it is the interior that rises to unequaled heights. A high grand lobby, with side walls made of alternating vertical bands of warm green artificial light panels and muted red piers, and with both ends and ceiling decorated with an almost luminescent grillwork, forms a regal introduction. Rare and costly materials are everywhere: hand-adzed quartered oak, Hungarian ash crotch, bird's-eye maple, Balinese rosewood, Malaysian teak, and Italian marble. The auditorium is unmatched for its refulgent splendor, with gilded galaxies of whorls and gold walls with sculpted motifs from the Bible and mythology. Outside and in, the Paramount radiates the dream-world escapism with which sought to beguile its customers.〔Smith, G. E. Kidder. ''Source Book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present'', Princeton Architectural Press, page 372, (2000) - ISBN 1-56898-254-2〕 The Paramount organ was built by Wurlitzer for the Paramount Publix theaters: a four-manual, twenty-rank model called the Publix I (Opus 2164), which cost $20,000 in 1931. The gala premiere on December 16, 1931 was attended by Kay Francis, star of the opening film, ''The False Madonna'',〔(The False Madonna (1931) )〕 and cast members Conway Tearle, Charles D. Brown, Marjorie Gateson, and William Boyd (not yet known as Hopalong Cassidy). Notable guests included California's governor James Rolph and Oakland mayor Fred N. Morcom. Tickets were first-come, first-served: sixty cents for the balcony seat and eighty-five cents for a seat in the orchestra.〔Stone, Susannah Harris. ''The Oakland Paramount,'' Lancaster-Miller Publishers, page 18, (1982) - ISBN 0-89581-607-5〕 The program also included a Fox Movietone News newsreel, a Silly Symphony animated cartoon ''The Spider and the Fly'', and the music of the Paramount's own 16-piece house orchestra, under the direction of Lew Kosloff. Last on the program was the stage show Fanchon & Marco's "Slavique Idea," a forty-minute revue featuring Sam Hearn, comedians Brock and Thompson, dancer LaVonne Sweet, the acrobatic Seven Arconis, Patsy Marr, and the Sunkist Beauties in a chorus-line finale. In June 1932 the Paramount closed its doors, unable to meet operating expenses of more than $27,000 per week. Competing with Paramount was the Fox Oakland Theater, which had opened in 1928. The Paramount stayed closed for nearly a year. The days when movie theaters could support not just the showing of movies, but entire orchestras, stage shows, and uniformed attendants, were over, just as the Paramount was being completed. When it reopened in May 1933, it was under the management of Frank Burhans, the manager of the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. He was commissioned to get the Paramount out of debt, and his method for achieving this was to operate without either a stage show or an orchestra, and to unscrew light bulbs in an effort to reduce energy expenses. The Paramount showed the best of the new motion pictures, including such features as ''Dancing Lady'' (1933) with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, ''Dames'' (1934) with Dick Powell, and ''The Gay Divorcee''(1934) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The Great Depression gave way to World War II, and the Port of Oakland became a major departure and arrival point for servicemen. The Paramount's comfortable chairs and spacious lounges were a favorite gathering place. In the 1950s, popcorn machines and candy counters were installed, and on the lobby walls the incandescent lights were taken out and replaced by neon tubing in red and blue. In 1953, it played the first CinemaScope movie ''The Robe'' with Richard Burton and Jean Simmons. The 1957 Elvis Presley's ''Jailhouse Rock'' attracted a thousand young people. At the end of the 1950s theaters were losing patrons to television, but the Paramount management responded with talent shows, prize nights, and advertising campaigns. For a second time the Paramount closed on September 15, 1970, because it no longer was able to compete with smaller movie theaters in the suburbs. The Paramount's last film was ''Let It Be'' (1970) with The Beatles.〔(Now playing -- grand nostalgia )〕 In 1971, a Warner Bros. movie, ''The Candidate'', starring Robert Redford, was filmed using the interior of the Paramount as one of the principal locations. Hope surfaced in October 1972 when the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, in need of a new home, purchased the Paramount for $1 million, half of which was donated by the seller, National General Theatres—formerly the Fox Theaters-West Coast—with the other half coming from generous private donors. The popcorn machines and candy counters were removed. With the help of restoration project manager Peter Botto, new, wider seats were installed, the distance between rows was increased to provide more leg room, and a replica of the original carpet was laid throughout the theater. Two bars, one on the mezzanine and one on the lower level, and a new box office were added. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were consultants for the restoration, with Milton Pflueger & Associates assisting. The Paramount reopened on September 22, 1973 in its original 1931 splendor. Two years later, the Oakland Symphony Orchestra went bankrupt and gave the Paramount to the City of Oakland for $1, with the stipulation of guaranteed bookings for the next forty years. Seeing an opportunity, a group of seven private citizens banded together and approached city officials with the idea of managing and operating the Paramount on behalf of the city as a nonprofit organization. They agreed, and the management structure has remained to this day. Walking into the main lobby, with its gold ornamentation along the walls, curving staircase, and glowing light fixtures, is like taking a trip back through Old Hollywood. Public tours of the Paramount Theatre are given on the first and third Saturdays of each month, excluding holidays and holiday weekends.〔(Paramount Theatre Tours )〕 Documented in 1972 by the Historic American Buildings Survey, the theater was entered into the National Register of Historic Places on August 14, 1973, became a California Registered Historical Landmark in 1976〔(California State Historic Landmark #884 )〕 and a U.S. National Historical Landmark in 1977.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paramount Theatre (Oakland, California)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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