From Deseret News archives:
Theater that ran old films holds grand memories
Art Proctor, who ran the theater for 43 years, was the Salt Lake Valley's patron saint of old movies. And the Avalon — and for shorter periods under Art's aegis, the now-defunct Blue Mouse and Vista theaters — were grand revival houses back in the day.
Art began showing older movies long before home video. If you wanted to see a classic film without cuts or commercial interruptions, you had to go to the 600-seat Avalon Theatre, at 3605 S. State.
When I moved to Salt Lake City in the late 1970s, I quickly became a regular, and I got to know Art casually. Then in 1980, when he opened his video store adjacent to the theater — also specializing in classics — we talked more often and became friends. (Quite a few years later, my family and I moved into Art's neighborhood — without knowing it until we saw each other at church one Sunday — and our wives also became friends.)
Now Art's, retiring. Well, sort of.
He has sold the Avalon and is taking a well-deserved vacation. But he hopes to come back after that and open another small video store with the more than 5,000 VHS tapes he still has (along with a couple of hundred DVDs) — all of them older/classic films.
Most of the tapes are out of print and not on DVD, so it is his hope that the market for renting these rare movies remains viable.
When Art opened the Avalon Theatre in 1963, it was a first-run house (his first film was "Taras Bulba," starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis).
He loved movies, especially the classics. But this was the 1960s, and stronger "adult" content was gradually starting to creep into films.
Over the next decade, violence, sex, nudity and foul language became more pervasive and more graphic, and Art wasn't happy with the direction cinema was taking.
He also began to feel that there weren't enough movies being made for adults, as Hollywood started to gear its product to the youngest common denominator.
So, in late 1973, Art decided to try an experiment. He brought in a black-and-white double-bill: the 1935 "Mutiny on the Bounty," and the 1936 drama "San Francisco," with that great climactic re-creation of the 1906 earthquake.
Art was smart enough to use radio advertising to let people know what he was doing, as well as his regular newspaper ads. And word-of-mouth helped fill the theater.
"It was a full house," Art said. "We had to turn people away. It broke my heart to say, 'You'll have to come back another night.' "
