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Movie night memories

There's no business like show business - or in the case of John Paul Jones, the movie theatre business. "It's a happy business," Jones said. "You make people happy. You escape from reality. The skinny little runt becomes Arnold for an hour.

There's no business like show business - or in the case of John Paul Jones, the movie theatre business.

"It's a happy business," Jones said. "You make people happy. You escape from reality. The skinny little runt becomes Arnold for an hour."

Jones should know. He owned the last real movie theatre in Squamish, the Squamish Theatre on Cleveland Avenue (now currently occupied by Howe Sound Business Centre) until it closed in 1990.

Jones owned a theatre in the Mount Currie area of Pemberton prior to opening the Squamish Theatre.

"We used to run a drama Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was a crime show, and Saturday and Sunday was a western," he said. "You could pack a theatre."

Friday night he showed a horror movie, and he knew the tickets would sell.

People would come out to the movies in Mount Currie because there was no television, and the theatre offered the show and all the movie food staples - pizza, popcorn and soda.

But then the Joneses moved to Squamish and he found himself dealing with a whole new set of moviegoers.

"We tried a whole variety of shows, but they wanted a blockbuster," he said. "We showed Peter Pan. Opening night, nobody showed up.

"It was a whole different society."

Vancouver got all the first-run movies too, and the companies didn't want to send them to Squamish. Jones said Whistler would have a better chance of getting first run movies at the time because Whistler, unlike Squamish, was considered outside of Vancouver's patron pull area.

The Squamish Theatre couldn't even make money off the popcorn because people weren't buying it. "Down here people were frugal," Jones said.

The theatre in Squamish only had one screen, and sat about 250 people, but getting that many people out to one show wasn't working.

It got to the point where Jones would have his sons Ken and Tim hand out movie passes at their school to get kids to come to the shows. The tickets were good for one free child's admissions - so long as they brought a parent along.

"We handed tickets out to kids at school, parents paid, the theatre survived," Jones said.

But Jones remembered something comedian Jerry Lewis had said.

"The mini theatre was the thing Jerry Lewis saw coming," Jones said.

Jones said Lewis predicted 50- to 80- seat theatres grouped together with a shared snack bar and a variety of films playing - like the new Garibaldi Stadium 5 Cinemas - would become the norm.

"I was going to split the Squamish Theatre and put two theatres in it and reconfigure the whole thing," Jones said.

It ended up being too expensive, and it wouldn't pay for itself.

Jones thinks there may have been no way for the theatre to survive.

"The theatre was almost doomed from the start," he said.

But despite his own history, Jones is optimistic about the future of movie theatres in Squamish. Many of the challenges he faced don't exist anymore.

For one thing, the multiple screens at the new cinemas mean there are more choices.

"There's so many movies one might catch your eye," he said.

And the location of the new theatre is key for what Jones called "socialization."

"You go to Boston Pizza, you go see a movie, you go out with your friends and that's it," he said.

"I think the theatre business will survive again. It's been a long time coming."

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