ZUOYING THEATER 左營戲院 :PART 3

This the third and last blog post about what was my favorite old theatre in Kaohsiung. You can read part one here and part 2 here. My 4th and final trip inside was after another random encounter. This time was with the owner’s son.

Most Sundays I am just biking around Kaohsiung looking for cool old houses, enjoying the sun and trying to work off the beer drunk from the previous night. They started demolishing the theatre around mid-May of 2019 and were working on it for a couple months so I often rode by it.

On one sunny Sunday afternoon, I was just watching the workers work and I saw this nice record player on the ground nearby and took a picture. A young guy came up and told me it was for playing music. I thought man, he must think that I am young or stupid, ha-ha. But after talking for a bit he said he was the owner’s son and was working with workers who were scavenging for valuable goods inside. He asked if I wanted a tour inside and I didn’t want to tell him that I was actually already inside it and I kinda wanted to go inside one last time anyway. So I said sure! This was what I saw.

I was excited to see the projection room and projectors one last time.

This was used for rewinding film. The projectionist would screen a reel, then rewind while the next one is screening so that it is ready to screen again at the next showing of the film.

For a long time after the theatre closed, and probably even before, many people lived in the rooms built around the theatre. There was lots of stuff leftover. So that’s why the owner had workers looking for anything of value.

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The owner’s son was kind enough to give me a couple gifts. He gave me an old ticket book to the movie theater, a Japanese coin from 1922, and there were so many old records, so it was hard to choose one, so I grabbed this one.

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It took a couple months to get stuff out and tear it down. It’s now just an empty lot ready for sale.

Unfortunately, this theater is no longer with us, so you can’t go say hi. However, just up the road, there is still the Qingshui Theater that you can go visit and say hi!