Twin Citians have fond memories of the Cooper Theatre, based on reader reaction to my write-up today about a new DVD of How the West Was Won. The “Northwest Home of Cinerama,” located in St. Louis Park before being torn down in 1991, played that epic western on its 105-foot-wide curved screen for a stunning 88 weeks after the film opened there on March 14, 1963. The Blu-ray version of HTWWW mimics the Cinerma presentation that everyone of a certain age remembers from seeing the movie back in the day.

The good news is that those people have a place to share their Cooper memories — besides via unending phone calls to your friendly neighborhood Technobabble writer. I’m talking about Cinema Treasures, a website devoted to movie-theater preservation that has a page set aside just for the Cooper.

For example, Ken Amundsen recalls traveling to the Big City from Wisconsin as a boy and then taking a bus to the Cooper just to see HTWWW. He killed time before the movie started by spending all of his money, 75 cents, on a bowl of ice cream at a restaurant across the street. “For a 14-15 yr old hayseed from Wausau WI, this was all a great adventure,” he writes. “The Cinerama experience was all I had imagined it would be, and if anyone cares anymore, I was there.”

Of course, the Cooper showed hundreds more movies in the decades after HTWWW opened there, and the people who were there for them share those memories, too. Check it out, along with the new DVD.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:07 am and is filed under DVDs, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.