Few theaters have had a bigger impact on my life than the 12-screen Cinema Center of Palmyra.  The reason is simple:  I'd have probably never fallen in love with my adopted hometown, perhaps never even driven through it, had my desire to check out any theater within driving distance not brought me there on a lazy May afternoon in 1999.  I don't remember a lot of The Thirteenth Floor, the Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin-produced sci-fi thriller that built its' entire ad campaign around its' one really memorable moment, but the theater made an immediate impression.  So did the town upon whose outskirts it sat and seven year later, I would move here.  For three years, I had the pleasure of a dozen screens five minutes away from home, until I drove by today to find only these words on the marquee:  "WE ARE CLOSED"  The windows were covered by movie posters and a sign on the front door informed the employees who'd waited on me in some cases for a decade that their checks would be mailed to them.  Turns out that an announcement had been made two days prior, when the media was informed at 9:26 on Wednesday night that the current shows were the last.  My hometown theater, for now, is no more.

But that's how the Cinema Center died.  The purpose of the Theaters Project is to record how it lived, and in the beginning, the Cinema Center of Palmyra was cutting-edge.  AMC's Colonial Commons 9 was the Harrisburg/Hershey/Lebanon area's standard-bearer for screen in the mid-90's, but entrepreneurs Doris and Marvin Troutman did them three better, opening their first Cinema Center on January 15, 1998 in what, for moviegoing purposes, was the middle of nowhere, a full half-hour drive from Colonial Commons and the 4-screen United Artists location at the Colonial Park mall, about ten minutes down the road from a 2-screen United Artists theater at the Lebanon Valley Mall that closed shortly thereafter.  No fewer than a dozen screens graced this location, and for a time, it became a destination for those art house movies that play in only two or three area theaters.  When the Cinema Centers became a chain with the opening of The Cinema Center of Camp Hill in 2005, that era came to a close.  The Cinema Center coexisted comfortably with Hershey's Cocoaplex Cinema for years, but in 2006 (yes, one month after I came to town), the Great Escape chain reclaimed the Lebanon Valley Mall with a deluxe 10-screen facility with stadium seating.  In the fall of the following year, the same company opened the area's elite location, an all-digital monolith at the Harrisburg Mall.  These two facilities bracketed the Cinema Center, ending its' glory years.

But there I go again.  I have come here to praise the Cinema Center, not to bury it, and in its' day, it was a fine theater indeed.  A spacious lobby was bracketed by a pair of "arcades", larger than the alcoves that house a couple of games at most theaters.  There were plenty of video games both new and classic (I love a good Galaga machine), but it was the pinball that mostly held my attention, particularly a cool Star Wars machine that lasted a few years (I loved to hear C3PO shout "Shoot the Death Star!" when bonus points loomed).  This was a great place to kill time if you got to the theater a little early or to hang around afterwards if you felt that way.  I remember seeing Apocalypto on a weeknight in late 2006 when a fog bank the likes of which I haven't seen before or since settled over town.  I held up in the theater playing Arakanoid (for those not in the know, it's like Super Breakout only with a heavy dusting of sci-fi backstory) for a little while before finally venturing out into fog so thick I couldn't even see my house from the curb when I finally parked.  But at least I got to see that twist ending first.  Wow!

Next you came to the concessions, the area in which, for my taste, the theater lagged most severely behind others over the last few years.  The popcorn was excellent, don't get me wrong, and the usual candy selection was available.  The maximum drink size was a little small, but they did offer Minute Maid Light Lemonade, something not a lot of theaters can say.  But the menu was otherwise limited, and as a big nacho guy, I didn't appreciate their brand of bagged nachos and the unduly spicy little cup of nacho cheese that came with them.  So it was pretty much popcorn or bust.  I did like the machine they put in a few years back that allowed you to add your own "buttery flavoring" to your popcorn.

After a stop to get your ticket torn, it was back to the twelve screens themselves.  Most of them were quite similar:  this was the last of the area theaters to be built without stadium seating, and the screens tended to be medium-sized, not huge but not so small that you noticed.  With two exceptions:  it seems that this really should have been an 11-screen facility, and a straight walk back from the entrance lay two screens I unaffectionately called "The Closets".  Roughly eight seats across with screens maybe 1/3 the size of the regular ones, those screen really felt like a single theater cut in half.  They played host exclusively to films at the end of their runs, so one had to be hesitant about visiting the Cinema Center to see something just hanging on to its' spot after a long release.  If I were to buy the building, the wall between those two screens would be coming down, believe me!

But there was one screen that was really special, designated Screen 11 on the tickets, because it housed what for my money was the area's best sound system all the way to the end.  Maybe it was just an issue of acoustics:  far easier to pull off a truly bone-rattling sound spectacle in a smaller auditorium than a gigantic one.  But either way, I have really fond memories of listening to the movies on that screen, none better than at U-571, where I felt the concussive impact of depth charges seemingly more than the characters on the screen.  Two other moments stand out:  The Server around which the climax of Pulse occurs produces one of the best, most emmersive sound effects I've ever heard in a movie, doubly so on that screen.  And while the movie was as fascinating to think about as it was mediocre to watch, Book of Shadows:  Blair Witch 2 is a real surround-sound experience for reasons that become clear upon its' intriguing, movie-negating twist ending.  But I watched it with an small audience that made me a little bit nervous.  And as such, those whispery voices coming from every last corner of the auditorium... spooky!

Other moments that stand out:  being so totally taken by surprise by the quality of Suspect Zero, Mr. Brooks and Doubt; a fun night where my sister and I were the only two people experiencing the glory of DOA:  Dead or Alive; a positively spiritual experience watching Elizabethtown with a crowd that shuffled out with the indifference pretty much everyone else directed toward that utterly undiscovered Cameron Crowe classic; braving a brutal snowstorm to catch a one-week engagement of The House of Flying Daggers and feeling like it was totally worth it.

And the last one, the uniquely silly spectacle of Crack:  High Voltage right at the end of April.  Yup, I've got to confess that I hadn't been to my local theater in a few months:  although I've been getting there almost two dozen times a year since I lived so close, I'd come to think of it as an odd-season theater, for checking out the smaller movies of the fall and spring while soaking up the larger spectacles of the holiday movie seasons at those snazzy newer houses.  The worst, most underpopulated summer movie season of my adult life hasn't helped:  I haven't been going ANYWHERE to the movies as many weeks as not lately.  But it was just about Cinema Center season again, as we turn the corner toward fall.  As business had flagged, the owners had cut admission prices in a big way, and all shows had been $5.50 since late last year.  The place was packed every time I went during this year's wildly successful winter movie season, and I saw Gran Torino, Taken and Last Chance Harvey there during that time.  But perhaps mine wasn't the only attention that wandered the last few months:  I loathe the post-millenial business sensibility that calls for all bad news to be kept a secret.  I'd have gone to pretty much anything that was showing Wednesday night to say goodbye had I had any notice.

Might the Cinema Center rise again under new ownership?  I know I spent much of the evening daydreaming of buying the place myself, making The Closets and perhaps the screen next to them into a single, massive digital 3D screen, booking art house oddities on a few of the screens the way I'm always complaining that no one does.  Offering movie discussion groups, a classic film series, all the things that bind a community to a theater.  But will someone with the money to do so enact such a vision?  Probably not.  Of all the things you can retroactively install into a theater, stadium seating is pretty much impossible, and that's the Cinema Center's greatest deficit.  And twelve screens is a lot for the kind of second-run locations that have kept the movie houses of a previous generation open in many communities.  So, it falls to the Cocoaplex to be my "neighborhood theater", a few miles further away, not a part of My Town.  It was fun while it lasted, but in a bad economy with more than double the area screens that were around just ten years ago, no every movie palace will survive.

But we pause, remember, and smile at the thought of coming out of The Condemned with that "THAT'S why I go to the movies!" buzz.  Because that's why I go to the movies, and it was nice to do it so close to the home The Cinema Center of Palmyra introduced me to.