After 30 Years, It’s Lights Out at 2-Screen Melody Theatre

THOUSAND OAKS —  After a year of struggling financially, the two-screen Melody Theatre has finally succumbed to the inevitable.

Unable to compete with the megaplexes that are sprouting everywhere in the Conejo Valley, the theater closed its doors for good after an 8 p.m. showing of “Striptease,” leaving seven part-time employees jobless.

“We just can’t make it,” theater manager Sally Sung said a few days after last Sunday’s closing, standing near a discarded Milk Duds box, orphan M & Ms and decades’ worth of accumulated lint. “It’s the competition, of course, from the newer Mann’s theater. People go, I think, for the newer thing.”

The story of the theater, wedged in the Park Oaks Plaza on Moorpark Road, is far from unusual: High rent, low attendance and competition from the big boys sliced the theater’s customer base to about 10% of what it was a few years ago, she said. “We lost a lot of money.” said Sung, although she declined to be specific.

And the slightly shabby Melody--with its stained carpets, aging projection equipment and often second-run movies--had plenty of competition.

The Conejo Valley--which only a few years ago was all but a movie theater desert--is growing multiplexes like tumbleweeds. The City Council in April approved a proposal that would bring a 12-screen Edwards theater to Moorpark Road. The area already has 17 screens and dozens more on the drawing board.

While no pedestrians or store owners at the strip mall were exactly surprised by the theater’s demise, they mourned the bygone days of movie houses and first dates, intimate surroundings and deep, cushy seats with plenty of legroom.

“You won’t find any mom-and-pop movie houses anymore,” said Steve Gormley, who owns the 1st String Sporting Goods store around the corner. “There aren’t too many mom-and-pop anythings anymore.”

To shopper Eve Wolfe, a 25-year Thousand Oaks resident, the Melody symbolized a time when the city was a small town, when parents safely could drop their children off for an afternoon matinee.

“I think it’s such a shame,” Wolfe said, remembering movie dates from her teenage and married years that took place at the Melody. “I always went to the older theaters because they were bigger, you weren’t crunched in. The Melody was a part of my growing up.”

The theater’s manager since 1981, Sung said her most vivid memory of the movie house was of wide-eyed children coming to see their first-ever movie with mom or dad.

To the chagrin of many, the Melody Theatre is not Ventura County’s only independent theater to be squeezed out. The lease for the Camarillo Cinema III--another theater that Sung manages for Hacienda Heights-based Tafon Enterprises Inc.--expired in July and will not be renewed, she said.

The two-screen Westlake Village Theater on Lakeview Canyon Road is in similar straits. The closing of small independent theaters is “happening throughout the country,” theater manager Anne Ball said. “I know our closing is imminent. I’m just waiting for the [multiplex] on the corner of Westlake and Thousand Oaks Boulevard to come in, the eight-screener. That will pretty much do it for us.”

Opened Oct. 13, 1965, by theater owner Jack Grossman, the Melody was a Thousand Oaks landmark, recalled film buyer Will Viner, Grossman’s grandson. The opening night showing featured “Billie.” Tickets were 35 cents.

Saddened by the closing of any independent venue, Viner said, “I think it’s just part of the evolution of our business, especially of late. It’s sort of like the dinosaurs--the new theaters come in; the old theater goes out.”

But multiplexes need not strike the deathblow to other small theaters, if they adapt by adding art house movies and cutting prices, Viner said. “The independents will always survive,” he said. “Just in the smaller markets.”