LOOKING BACK

Young Chang

The story of Costa Mesa’s first movie theater ended rather sadly in

1997.

Nothing dramatic -- no fires or anything wretched like that. It just

whittled away over the decades. Went from the place to be to the place

you wouldn’t be caught dead in.

Today, a Borders Books, Music & Cafe stands in the Mesa Theatre’s

place.

The theater was built in 1948 and was owned by the Edwards family, of

Edwards Theatres.

“It was really popular at first, of course, because it was the only

thing around,” said Mary Ellen Goddard, a historian at the Costa Mesa

Historical Society.

George Grupe, a longtime Newport Beach resident and historian for the

Newport-Mesa area, said the theater was one of the fanciest movie houses

in all of Orange County, at first.

It was new and nice and, in the 1950s, was the only theater that was

showing “Caine Mutiny,” starring Humphrey Bogart.

“People stood in line,” Grupe said.

Sure, the Lido Theater in Newport Beach was built in the 1930s, but it

was a city away and didn’t offer the Mesa Theatre much competition.

Other venues started sprouting up in the mid-1960s, though, when the

Edwards chain opened a location on Harbor Boulevard and Adams Avenue.

Over the decades, the Mesa Theatre became unkempt and downright

filthy, Grupe said.

“And most of those theaters had trouble because they were

single-screen theaters. It cost a lot of money to have a projectionist

just for one screen,” he said.

The Mesa Theatre had just one screen, and rumor has it that the

projectionist from the Lido Theater used to wind up a movie over in

Newport Beach, jump in the car, play a movie for the Mesa Theatre and

leave it to chance that nothing would happen to the film during the ride

to and from each theater.

By the ‘90s, the Costa Mesa venue started running old films that

played on television. Ticket prices dropped to $1.

“But nobody would be caught dead in the place,” Grupe said.

Yet Goddard said she’s encountered fans of the theater even recently.

“A couple people came in the historical society the other day and said

they missed it and had grown up with it,” she said.

* Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a historical

Look Back? Let us know. Contact Young Chang by fax at (949) 646-4170;

e-mail at [email protected]; or mail her at c/o Daily Pilot, 330 W.

Bay St., Costa Mesa, CA 92627.