The Hoyts Take Over
In December 1940, Paramount was off to manange Union Theaters leaving the Capitol under the control of Hoyts Theaters. During this time, Melbourne’s first millionaire Lucas Estate owned the Capitol Building. This made the Capitol a financially stable asset for years to come. The final movie shown by Paramount was ‘Design for Living’. The change over to Hoyts was very much and overnight deal. On 26th December 1940, the first movie show under the Hoyts banner was ‘Irene’ (Walters, T 2009).
Even though Hoyts was a fairly big company back then, they still lacked capital. In an idea to accumulate capital, Hoyts sold 100 million pounds worth of shares. 20th Century Fox purchased all of these shares. This helped Hoyts upgade existing theaters such as the Capitol and build modern suburban theaters such as Padua (Brunswick) and the Windsor Theater (Walters, T 2009).
Then Around 1942, 20the Century Fox realized the Victorian manager and the managing director for Hoyts had a conflict of interest in other picture theaters such as the Century Theater and the Albany Theater in Melbourne. They were both sacked immediately. Ernest Turnbull, the managing director of Gaumount British Dominion Films, became the new Managing director of Hoyts. This was a good move by Fox, since he is an Australian and would be more accepted by Australian shareholders. Overtime Fox bought out the Australian shareholders and by the late 1960’s the Capitol was named the Hoyts Capitol. This had and negative effect on the Melbourne Capitol, as now it would play second fiddle to the Hoyt’s flagship, the Regent Theater. Most movies that were shown during the Hoyts ownership were of an action or and western type (Walters, T 2009).
As Australia celebrated 1950, the Melbourne Capitol did not celebrate it that well as its glory days were coming to a close. The longest running season at the capitol that year was ‘Broken Arrow’. It ran for 6 weeks. That year the capitol saw 18 programs screened. This was the least number of screenings in a year since the opening of the Capitol Theater in 1924 (Walters, T 2009).
Due to Cinemascope’s arrival in 1953, there were large amounts of films in the wide screen that needed to be released. This meant that films that were screened during 1954-55, were over 2 years old.During that 10-year span, the Capitol only managed to present 230 programs. Things were not looking too bright in the 1960’s either (Walters, T 2009).
The first Cinemascope film screen at the Capitol was Violent Saturday on 11 June 1955. As a marketing strategy, the Capitol remained opened for 24 hours that day. When television arrived in 1956, the Capitol’s future was even more in doubt. By 1958, television winning the wan over the cinema industry, the Capitol Theater was in big trouble, reduced to mainly B Grade double feature on a weekly change policy. In this very hostile environment, Hoyts knew their two giant picture palaces could not survive and one or both had to go (Walters, T 2009).
In October1963, the lease that was acquired by Hoyts, lapsed. Even though there was interest shown by MGM and Warner Bros to take over the lease, it all came to nothing. There was a fear that the Melbourne Capitol Theater could be demolished and converted into shops and offices (Navaretti, P 2000).
