Aging ‘Queen’ needs rescue

• By STEVEN K. LANDRY
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Sep 7, 2009

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EUNICE — Before Bogart’s Rick Blaine left his beloved Ilsa at the Casablanca airport, or Dorothy skipped off to Oz, and even before dear Scarlett O’Hara got jilted with a “frankly” and a “damn” from Rhett, the Queen Cinema has been ensconced in this small prairie city.

Built in 1937, rebuilt in 1947 after a fire, the three-auditorium theater still stands along Walnut Street off Main Street, right near La. 13.

At this point the only movie theater left in town barely stands at all, said seven-year manager and Eunice resident Jude Guillory, 39, during a recent tour of the old structure.

His message: God, or somebody, needs to save the Queen.

“I’m just the manager,” he said, smiling. “I don’t own the place. But I can assure you, if this place was cleaned up the way we want, it would be an asset to the whole community here. No doubt.”

Guillory, whose wife’s family, the Kellers, built the original Queen, has written to the state’s historical group to procure a grant, to no avail. A new buyer could be forthcoming, he said, and the current multi-theater owner lives in Florida and told Guillory he could possibly be interested in renovations.

But nothing is firmed up yet. The costs could run to at least $100,000, Guillory said, hurrying to switch on the air conditioners for that night’s two new films: “Halloween II” and “Final Destination.”

“Watch your step,” he said several times during his pre-show ritual.

The Queen — the “show,” as people of a certain age used to call it — is rife with leaking ceilings, patched-up floors, iffy air conditioning, squeaky chairs in feel-the-breath-on-your-neck proximity to each other and other creaky maladies that, perhaps, could not pass muster with other cities’ building codes.

As expected, smells and their attendant memories abound: moldy curtains, stale popcorn, and first dates.

“I hadn’t paid to get into this place since I was 16, whenever I started dating my wife,” Guillory said of their 20-plus-year relationship. “These same seats have been here since I was a kid. Had my first date here.”

Reginald Keller, now 82, said his dad, Claude, built the theater because others were trying to get to the cash-only business before he did.

“He always had cash, you gotta remember that,” Keller said from his Eunice home near the Queen. “It wasn’t much, but at that time cash was hard to come by.”