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SPANISH FORK — The makeover of a longtime Spanish Fork theater is almost complete.
The Boothe Brothers Theatre (165 N. Main St.) has been under renovation since spring, and business owner Curt Gordon said he hopes to have renovations completed by the end of February 2017.
Once completed, the 250-seat building will host a slew of activities. Gordon envisions a building for the performing arts, family parties, religious parties, martial arts and maybe one that movies could be shown at family parties.
“I see this being a community house for all kinds of events,” he said.
It should be no surprise that Gordon has his eyes set on preserving and restoring one of Spanish Fork’s oldest entertainment outlets. After all, it’s a place he’s known for a long time. He recalled a specific time in which he watched the 1983 movie “Phar Lap” with his grandfather, who was a farmer that didn’t get much time off the farm but loved horses, and the rest of his family.
“I remember going there when I was just a kid and watching movies,” he said. “I went to lots of movies there through the years.”
He also worked at the Boothe Brothers Theatre 18 years before obtaining ownership of the building in February and beginning his push to renovate it.
His family’s history with the theater predates that, too. His grandmother would walk 5 miles there and back to see movies in the 1930s and 1940s.
The theater has a vast history spanning more than 100 years. The theater, which originally cost $14,000 to build, opened in September 1912. The auditorium held 400 chairs. There were wicker rocking chairs in the balcony.
An operating room, which was a small 10-foot by 12-foot room, held two projectors. The stage was 20 feet in length and 6 feet in depth.
While most of its history has been a movie theater, it began more as a vaudeville theater before transitioning to motion pictures.
“They started doing movies later on,” Gordon said. “It played movies up until about 1996, which is when Boothe Brothers bought it and put a stage in and they’ve been, more or less, doing community service there since about 1998.”
The original building lasted until 1948 when it burned down. It was reopened again in 1950 and has lasted in its spot since, despite serving as different names. According to Cinema Treasures, it has also been known as the Royal Palace Theatre and Main Street Movie in the time between its original opening and 1996.
The building has been home to a blues music venue since that mid-90s purchase, with a monthly Blues Jam beginning in 1999 and Real Rock Band — a “School of Rock”-type program, where budding musicians are paired with each other to form a band to further learn how to play their instruments — beginning in 2008.
While Gordon sees a new future for the building, he said he’d like to keep the building much like it once was. That’s something that can be difficult especially with decades-old plaster as fragile as it is.
“We’ve actually done a pretty good job preserving everything that was already there instead of knocking it out and putting up drywall or something,” he said.
In doing so, he’s preserving a little piece in Spanish Fork history.
