Yesterday I was taking my time driving down from my home in Lecompte to Lake Charles so I decided to take a detour into Glenmora to take a look around and I was surprised to find an old movie theater downtown. I've been through several small Louisiana towns and I'm always shocked that there is rarely an old movie house to be found.
The Pringle (you have to love that name) reportedly opened 1942 and the price of a ticket was a whopping five cents. The theater entertained the residents of Glenmora for sixty years until it closed it's doors for good in 2009.
I initially questioned that date of 2009 due to the fact that surprisingly a poster for the 1999 Julia Roberts and Richard Gere comedy Runaway Bride is still in one of the glass cases in front of the theater.
There have been several attempts to reopen the Pringle including a 2019 campaign by local high school students that set up a GoFundMe (No longer active) and a Facebook page (Go Here) to try and raise $50,000 to update the theater's projector to a modern digital format. Unfortunately that seems to have failed.
As for me I can't help but think that if I ever won the lottery I would buy the Pringle and restore it. Being a fan of classic movies I would use it to showcase films from the golden age of Hollywood and put on a movie festival or two. I wouldn't do it for the money (because I won the lottery) but for the love of movies.
As for now (or until those numbers on the back of the fortune cookie pay off) the Pringle sits abandoned but not forgotten.
*Update*
Here is a post that a former resident named Brian Granger shared with the Facebook group Abandoned Louisiana after I shared this article.
The theater was always owned by Mr WC's dad as far as I know, but the name was different before it burned. Mr WC went off to war and it burned while he was gone. To spare him the stress, his father did not tell him about it. Mr WC was surprised to see a new theater when he returned from WW2 (he was a navy radio man on the USS Hornet)."
Here is where to find the Pringle theater:
Here are my photos:
Brian also sent me this picture of the original theater before it burned down in the 1940s.
Here are my photos:
Check Out:
I remember seeing white chicks there 😄. That came out around 2004-2005 I believe
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