My pal Vincent Astor knows more about movie theaters in Memphis than anyone I know, and he may disagree with me here, but when people talk about fancy picture palaces, they always think of the Orpheum (or Malco), but in my mind the grandest of them all was the Warner.
And thanks to my other pal (I have only about three or four) Larry Drannon, I have a pair of Polaroids that he took in July 1969 of the old Warner Theatre on Main Street, just before it was demolished to make way for Commerce Square, for years home of the National Bank of Commerce tower.
Look closely, in fact, and on the marquee you can see that "Coming Attractions" mentioned —not a movie, as you might expect — but Commerce Square. It was lights out for the Warner.
And that's a shame, because not only was it a beautiful building, but it had quite a history. Sit back and let me tell you something about that, okay?
In 1926, one of the highest-paid performers in vaudeville appeared on stage in Memphis. He certainly hadn’t made his name as a singer or dancer, and he couldn’t play a note, but it was standing-room-only when the Sultan of Swat — yes, Babe Ruth himself — stepped into the lights at the Pantages Theater downtown and chatted about his amazing career with the New York Yankees.
Built in 1921 as part of a nationwide chain, the Pantages, which stood on the east side of Main Street between Monroe and Union, was considered the grandest theater in town. A brilliantly lighted marquee stretched the full width of the gleaming white, terra-cotta facade, and every inch of the interior was covered in ornate, gilded plasterwork. When the theater first opened, it staged vaudeville acts — W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton were other stars who played there — and showed silent films. In 1930, it was sold to Warner Bros. Pictures to showcase their new “talking pictures” and the name was changed to the Warner Theater. The first “talkie” Memphians saw at the Warner was General Crack, starring John Barrymore.
The 1,900-seat theater thrived for three decades, an especially popular attraction in the summer, when families drove downtown to enjoy the newfangled invention called “air conditioning.” But the Warner — and its sister theaters downtown, including the Malco, Loew’s Palace, and Loew’s State — began to struggle in the 1960s, when smaller theaters opened in the suburbs and audiences began to stay home and watch television. In 1963, Memphis Press-Scimitar columnist Edwin Howard observed that the Warner, “one of the important links in the Pantages vaudeville chain of the 1920s, [is] still going strong as a motion-picture palace.”
Just five years later, however, officials with the National Bank of Commerce selected that block of Main Street for a 33-story office tower. On December 8, 1968, after the showing of Coogan’s Bluff, the Warner closed. The contents were auctioned off, and bulldozers brought down the old vaudeville palace a few months later. As I said earlier, if you were paying attention, Commerce Square stands on the site today.
PHOTOS COURTESY LARRY DRANNON
