I just recently spent a lazy Sunday evening enjoying the classic film Roman Holiday. Made in 1953, the movie starred Gregory Peck and introduced Audrey Hepburn, who won an Oscar for this debut and went on to a long and distinguished career. Such fare was the staple of our local movie houses in the heyday of Manila’s downtown scene in the 1950s. Our present-day Metro Manila Filmfest held every Christmas season seeks to bring back some of the old sheen, but sadly not in the fabulous Art Deco or ‘50s-modern film palaces of Escolta, Avenida Rizal, and Claro M. Recto.
The first cinemas at the turn of the century were simple, darkened rooms set up at the back of shops along the Escolta and some of the other shopping streets in Santa Cruz. Short films, mostly from Europe, were also often featured together with “bodabil” acts in established theaters in Manila, such as the Manila Grand Opera House.
The 1910s saw the first purpose-built cinemas like the Ideal Theater on Avenida Rizal. The theater opened right before Christmas of that year. It was a joint venture of the Roces, Teotico, Basa, Tuazon, and Guidote families. They chose the name Ideal because it meant the same in Spanish and English. In the first three decades of the 20th century, newspapers, magazines, and eventually radio, were still bilingual. The theater was originally a wooden accessoria-like structure but its success quickly led to a concrete structure that seated 400. Admission price just before the war was 20 centavos for the orchestra and 40 centavos for the balcony.
I cannot trace the original designer but with the advent of longer feature films from Hollywood, the owners brought in pioneer architect Juan Arellano to renovate the theater. It was known as the Old Ideal because in the 1930s, as ownership was consolidated under the Roces family, the theater was rebuilt with a new design by the young and talented architect Pablo Antonio Sr.
Antonio was one of a handful of second-generation Filipino architects who had studied or trained abroad and came back to introduce a new architectural style identified with the glory years of American movie theaters — the Art Deco style. The streamlined geometry, Flash Gordon rocket-ship curves, and abstracted ornamentation defined the product of a new movement that sought to replace the Neo-classical architecture prevalent then with a more modern style.
The New Ideal was actually the second theater that Antonio designed. The first was the Lyric Theater on Escolta. This premier shopping street of pre-war Manila saw another Art Deco masterpiece, the Capitol Theater, designed by Antonio’s contemporary Juan Nakpil in the 1930s. The Ideal flourished in this peace-time era and continued to prosper after the war. It showed mostly MGM productions and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1960 with the showing of William Wyler’s Ben Hur. Wyler also directed the earlier Roman Holiday.
More Art Deco theaters appeared as downtown Manila became the Great White Way of Asia. The Times Theater on the newly widened Quezon Avenue opened in 1941 just before the onset of the war. These movie houses brought the magic and glitz of Hollywood to Manila. The Ideal, Lyric, and Times also introduced another innovation — neon signs. The neon lights of America’s Broadway were imported and saw use as illuminated marvels on Manila’s growing downtown district. The lights and the magical entertainment of movies brought people from the provinces. Eventually, all major towns and cities in the Philippines built their own neon-embossed Art Deco theaters.
After the war, some of the first structures to be repaired or rebuilt were the movie houses. Quezon Avenue, Rizal Avenue, and Claro M. Recto became the movie-house district with theaters like the Galaxy, State, and Avenue adding to the older ones. It was the golden age, too, for Filipino movies and the movie star system. The LVN and Sampaguita studios produced dozens of films a year, making the Philippines rank next to India and the US at one time in total production.
The Sixties was the last decade that these theaters ruled as mass entertainment. The workhorse Ideal could bring in the crowds till then. It had, by the swinging ‘60s, been expanded to 1,500 seats. In the Seventies, however, suburban cinemas like the gigantic New Frontier Cinema in Cubao and the Rizal in Makati attracted moviegoers with less crowded and polluted surroundings, more parking, and a newfangled amenity called the mall.
The last two decades of the 20th century saw the demise of the downtown movie house. The Filipino movie industry, except for independent films, has slowed to a trickle, replaced by the less-than-delightful fare on television. Hollywood still rules in the 21st century in cineplexes. The 4, 6, 8, 10 or more clusters of mini-theaters now form just an element in the ubiquitous big-box complexes that have replaced our downtowns, markets, and public plazas.
Cinemas today carry the name of the mall or shopping center that house them. Few have individual names. Developers tend to just designate them by number, letters or colors; thus conferring them with as much character as the levels of parking facilities. They have ceased to be the venues, too, for the display of the creative talent of our architects.
The loss of the old Art Deco and post-war movie houses has also spelled the loss of a vibrant type of urbanism. Downtowns and street life have become internalized and so-called urban life commodified in quasi-public spaces. Here, the public is controlled by advertising, retail, and fast food daily, force-feeding millions instead of nourishing any real sense of community, cultural enrichment or citizenship.
But this may be too much to ask from the buildings we build or the movies we make. Or is it? Let’s leave it at that and let me end with some advice: Please take care when you do your last-minute shopping. Pickpockets and bag snatchers stalk the shopping malls and bazaars, so watch out. But better pout — there are also bigger thieves and scoundrels lurking in the shadows. They are hoping the holidays mask the scandals of the past year and the even more heinous plots for the new year.
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.