Author/Photographer Benita VanWinkle

Foreword by Henry B. Aldridge, Emeritus Professor, Eastern Michigan University

 

PREORDER NOW for April 23, 2026 delivery, National Theatre Day  www.baueranddean.com

Hardcover, 608 pages, more than 510 photographs (mostly color), 9.25 x 8.50 inches

$75.00 USD           ISBN: 978-1735600147

 

A photography book celebrating hometown movie theaters across America

 

A visual feast for anyone who loves historic architecture or going out to the movies, this book features hundreds of photographs of single-screen movie theaters built before 1965 when the multiplex began to dominate the entertainment landscape. Photographer Benita VanWinkle began searching out hometown movie theaters to photograph in 1982. For more than forty years, she has captured every architectural type, from the simple Calicoon Theater in Calicoon, New York, which was built from a repurposed Quonset hut, to the grand Ohio Theater in Columbus, Ohio, with its dazzling chandelier. Her photographs depict magnificent Art Deco detailing and fanciful concoctions blending elements of disparate cultures, striking marquees and elaborate roadside signs whose neon lights still attract audiences to the once ubiquitous drive-in theater.

            The images presented in this book are a selection of the thousands of photographs VanWinkle has taken for her documentary project entitled Please Remain Standing—a call to preserve the community theaters that remain. Once the cornerstone of a town’s social life, the American movie theater has been fading from our national consciousness. With each advance in technology over the past century—the introduction of sound, digital projection, home streaming—many movie theaters facing financial hardship have closed. Recently, however, a remarkable number of towns and cities have successfully restored and revived their local movie theaters. VanWinkle also documents historic buildings that once screened movies but have been adapted for a range of alternative functions in order to survive. These buildings, once dedicated to the moving image, now serve as churches, Masonic Temple lodges, live theater venues, restaurants, and in one case, a dentist’s office.

            Extensive captions give brief histories of the individual theaters, while VanWinkle’s striking photographs invoke an excitement for the days when many of us went out to the movies as a matter of routine, whether a Friday night first date or a family outing to see a double feature on a Saturday afternoon. The hundreds of movie theaters—and drive-ins—illustrated represent a time when members of a community sat down together in a darkened auditorium, sharing the experience of watching a film, strangers unified through tears and laughter. As VanWinkle continues to crisscross the country to document these architectural gems, she celebrates how these historic movie theaters still occupy an important place in the hearts of most communities.