Coming soon: A renovated Village movie theater

eCoronado.com covered this back in March 2009 – here is an update from the Union Tribune: If all goes according to plan, construction will begin in April and the theater is set to open before next Thanksgiving. CORONADO — Coronado’s vacant Village Theater — a single-screen, Art Deco cinema where generations of residents grew up watching the likes of Johnny Weissmuller, Elizabeth Taylor and Tom Cruise — is about to undergo a major renovation. An agreement between the city and Los Angeles-based Five Star Theatres guarantees the 9,000-square-foot movie house will be reopened in one year. In return for a Community Development Agency grant of nearly $2.7 million, Five Star Theatres has agreed to renovate and run the theater until 2026. Nine years after the 1947 theater closed following an early December screening of Jim Carrey’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the Village sits unoccupied between an Orange Avenue bank and dry cleaner, its once-polished terrazzo sidewalk dull, its marquee blank and its large auditorium filled with worn equipment and furniture covered in dust. The Village Theater’s quaint facade, including the original ticket booth, the tall blade “Village” sign and terrazzo, will remain largely intact, but the main auditorium will be revamped by noted theater designer Joseph Musil into a three-screen cinema. “Regrettably, we have to carve it up,” Five Star owner Lance Alspaugh said. “I’m not happy about it, but it was the only way anyone could have done it. The good news is we’ve retained a designer that is very impressive. He redid the El Capitan in Hollywood,” he said, referring to the Hollywood Boulevard landmark. Alspaugh said he would have preferred to restore the single screen and build a smaller screening room, but it did not pencil out for the expensive first-run movies he has committed to showing. His company has lately specialized in restoring older theaters around the country. Read the entire Union Tribune article here.