Walter Reade

For other uses, see Walter Reade (disambiguation).

Walter Reade Sr (1884–1952) was the man behind a chain of theatres which grew from a single theatre in Asbury Park, New Jersey to a chain of forty theatres and drive-ins in New Jersey, New York and neighboring states that lasted into the mid seventies. Known as the “Showman of The Shore,” his name was associated with big, beautifully kept single movie theatres of Hollywood’s golden age. He was born in 1884, lived in Deal, NJ, and considered Asbury Park the home base of his organization. He had six theatres there: The Mayfair, St. James, Lyric, Ocean, Paramount and Savoy. He soon became embroiled in fighting the corruption in Asbury Park from 1946 onward after he started a newspaper that had some unfavorable things to say about his adversaries.^[1]

Walter Reade Jr (1916–1973) was the President and Board Chairman of the Walter Reade Organization, which owned and operated theatres in Manhattan, New Jersey, Boston and upstate New York. As the son of the company founder, Walter Reade Jr. served as an executive in the company. When his father died in the early 1950s, he assumed control of the company, and continued in that position until his death.

The Walter Reade Organization also distributed and sometimes financed foreign films for showing in American theatres and sold packages of dubbed foreign films for American television. The company financed Ulysses. Reade was described by Joseph Strick, the director of that film, as "a big, bluff man who wore a fresh carnation every day"^[2].

Reade started Continental Film Distributors in 1954 to distribute foreign films in the USA. In 1961 Walter Reade acquired Sterling Television renaming Reade-Sterling the Walter Reade Organisation in 1966. The company posted a major financial loss in 1964, due to the failure of "art house" foreign films with the American public (the company was responsible for releasing most of the films of Jacques Tati, and for also releasing the Canadian film The Luck of Ginger Coffey). Reade declared "You can't take major awards to the bank" and began a program of more commercial releases such as a double feature of the British Hot Enough for June retitled Agent 8¾ to make it sound more like a James Bond spoof and the Japanese Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster in 1965^[3]. Reade also presented Behind the Great Wall, in "AromaRama", at the DeMille Theater in New York. The theater's air conditioning system was used to circulate various scents to provide an olfactory experience in addition to the sights and sounds. By three weeks, AromaRama beat a competing system, Scent of Mystery, in Smell-O-Vision.^[4] Reade's biggest success was releasing and exploiting Night of the Living Dead in 1968.

The firm also owned the Charles Cinema in Boston, which opened on April, 1967, and closed in December 1976. Major engagements included Easy Rider in 1969 and Star Wars in 1977. (The space was later operated by other exhibitors, but finally closed for good in 1994).^[5]

Sheldon Gunsberg later took over the company from Reade when he was killed in a skiing accident in Switzerland.^[6] The company filed for bankruptcy in 1977, emerging four years later. Columbia Pictures purchased 81% of the organization in 1981, buying the company completely in 1985, but later sold it to the Cineplex Odeon Corporation on June 26, 1987.^[7]

Notes and references

1. ^ New York Times: Feb 5, 1952. p. 29'
2. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=oFCshLKnLvIC
3. ^ p.208 Heffernan, Kevin Ghouls Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 2004 Duke University Press
4. ^ Avery N. Gilbert, What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (Crown Publishers, 2008), pp159-162
5. ^ Michael Blowen, Boston Globe, "Charles to Close: Curtains for Hub's Last Big Screen", October 6, 1994, Living Section, p69
6. ^ Sheldon Gunsberg, 78, Film Producer Who Headed Theater Chain - New York Times
7. ^ Dick, Bernard F. (1992) "Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio" (p. 38). The University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-1769-0. Retrieved on March 23, 2011.

• New York Times; September 25, 1985. "The Walter Reade Organization Inc., an operator of 11 motion picture theaters in Manhattan, said yesterday that it had signed a letter of intent to sell to Columbia Pictures Industries the balance of its shares not already owned by Columbia. The transaction was valued at about $19.9 million. Columbia, a subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company, already owns 41.7 percent of Walter Reade's 5.5 million shares."

External links

Continental Distributing at IMDB http://www.imdb.com/company/co0197188/