new york | If you’re 100 years old, you’re in luck.
You can enjoy a film at any Loews theater in the country for free, for the rest of the year. And there are many throughout the Bay Area to choose from, including the Loews Metreon Theatres & IMAX in San Francisco. For the location of a Loews near you, log on to www.enjoytheshow.com.
In addition, those whose first or last name is Marcus were also offered free tickets earlier this month.
It’s a marketing touch to celebrate the May 7 birthday of the late Marcus Loew, who opened some of the world’s first movie theaters about a century ago.
His birthday previews the actual centennial of the company he co-founded on Nov. 14, 1904, the People’s Vaudeville Co. Now called Loews Cineplex Entertainment, it’s America’s oldest movie theater chain and the world’s fourth largest, with 3,300 screens in the United States, Spain, Korea and Mexico.
Loew lived a rags-to-riches New York tale.
Born in 1870 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to poor Jewish immigrants, he was 6 when he started hawking oranges and newspapers, sleeping in the streets to beat the competition when customers awoke.
In 1905, Loew opened his first penny arcades, then turned a Cincinnati arcade that projected tiny images into a full-fledged movie theater. He did the same with an arcade on Manhattan’s West 23rd Street and three others in the city.
By the 1920s, theaters run by Loew warmed up spectators with a mishmash of ballerinas, singers and other vaudeville performers, plus newsreels — before the organ- or orchestra-accompanied silent film.
His bottom-line idea was to turn movies into the entertainment of choice for the masses.
Loew needed more product for his growing silver-screen empire, so he engineered a series of business mergers that resulted in the creation of the MGM studios, headed by Louis B. Mayer.
“Without Marcus Loew,’ said film historian Ross Melnick, “MGM would never have been formed, and films like ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ might never have been made.’
But Loew’s first love remained the theater.
“We sell tickets to theaters, not movies,’ he said of the several hundred movie houses that made him super-rich.
The one-time Lower East Side boy bought an 82-room mansion by the ocean in Glen Cove, on Long Island, with a private movie theater planted among palms and banana trees.
He died of a heart attack in 1927, at 57, ending an era that transformed popular culture worldwide — with the most American of art forms.
Decades later, two youths appeared at Loews theaters, first as ushers, then as stars of the silver screen: Elvis Presley and Ben Affleck. Another star, Barbra Streisand, has said she remembers spending many childhood hours at one of her favorite spots, a Loews theater in her Brooklyn neighborhood.
The company now owns, operates or has an interest in 324 theaters, including 150 in the United States. They include state-of-the-art venues such as 12-screen Loews Lincoln Square on Broadway, with a 3D IMAX theater reached by the country’s longest non-supported escalator — about the length of half a Manhattan block.
In Times Square, Loews E-Walk boasts a $1 million marquee that can beam more than 2 million digital colors into the Crossroads of the World.
Both Manhattan theaters were designed by David Rockefeller to evoke the Art Deco glamour of the movie palaces of the past, with exotic details like Lincoln Square’s jungle scene.
In San Francisco, the Loews Cineplex is part of the Metreon center, which houses restaurants, shops and an IMAX theater.
A centenarian attending a film for free might well remember movie tickets that cost peanuts —about a nickel in 1905 — compared with Loews’ current high of $10.25 in New York. In San Francisco, adult tickets are $9.75, $7.50 for seniors or at matinees.