ALVA—For over 90 years, the Jones family has been amusing audiences in the Alva area.
Homer Jones began honing his showmanship skills as a youngster, working as an usher in his father’s theater in Sherman, Texas.
At the age of 18, he moved to Oklahoma and acquired his first theater in Atoka. In the mid-1920s, he managed and purchased theaters in El Reno and Kingfisher. By 1928, he owned half-interest in the Alva Theatre Co., which operated the Liberty and Rialto movie theaters in Alva.
Homer was responsible for bringing the first “talking pictures” to Woods County in 1929 at the Liberty. Unfortunately, the Liberty, which had started out as the Grand Opera House in Alva, burned to the ground in 1934.
It was in 1931 that Homer, as the Jones Amusement Company, dedicated himself solely to running what was later nicknamed the “old” Rialto on the northside of Alva’s downtown square. Rialto was a huge single level theater at that time.
He built another movie theater with 400 seats on the southside of Alva’s downtown square called the Ritz in 1933 and a third movie theater with 400 seats just east of the Rialto called the Ranger in 1939.
Homer went on to gut the “old” Rialto, located at 516 Flynn, to modernize the movie theater. Rose Brothers Contractors razored the building in the summer of 1948, replacing it with a four-level structure of steel and concrete. He also had an air conditioning system installed throughout the building by U.S. Air-Conditioning Co. of Minneapolis, a rarity in America in those days.
Patrons would now enjoy the picture show in one of the 800 plush “push-back” lounge chairs facing the stage, offering them “ample room in passing in and out of rows without disturbing seated patrons,” wrote Homer in the program presented to every patron at the grand opening.
On the lowest level, called the subterranean level, was the Silver Lounge aka the concession stand. It included a stainless steel soda fountain and stools where patrons could enjoy soft drinks and sandwiches. A dress shop and a barbershop also were located on that same level.
Homer officially re-opened with the “new” Rialto on August 21, 1949. The introduction inside the first page of the program said:
“To our patrons, it is the policy of the Jones Amusement Co. to present its patrons the finest entertainment at all times. We have exerted every effort to assure your complete comfort and enjoyment in the new Rialto, the Ritz, and the Ranger theatres. We invite you to our programmes.”
In the early 1950s, admission to the Rialto was 45 cents for adults and 10 cents for children. The Ritz charged 40 cents and the Ranger, which offered westerns and reruns of older movies (listed as “re-issued photoplays”), only charged 30 cents.
However, with the advent of television, movie houses weren’t popular anymore, so Homer closed the Ritz and the Ranger sometime in the 1950s and sold the buildings.
The Ritz, which was east of Holder Drug, became a storefront for other businesses until it burned to the ground in 2004. According to Homer’s grandson Jesse Jones, the Ranger’s roof is semi-caved in, but the theater still stands much like it did back then, boarded up and vacant today.
As a teenager, Homer’s son Johnny Jones would help his dad at the Rialto after school and on the weekends.
Continually committed to entertaining audiences in the Alva area, Homer purchased Stadium Drive-In, the drive-in movie theater on the southwest side of Alva in 1971. For 15 years, up to 300 cars could park and watch the latest movies on a 40-foot screen.
After returning from serving in the Vietnam War, Johnny and his wife, Donna, managed Stadium Drive-In.
“I remember sitting out there with my mom and selling tickets,” Jesse said.
Johnny eventually took over running the Rialto by the late 1970s so Homer could retire.
Johnny was responsible for splitting Rialto’s single movie auditorium, which had a balcony, into two in 1981 so two movies could show at the same time. Twenty years later, he split the upstairs auditorium into two so Rialto could now have three movie screens.
As drive-ins across the nation went out of style, so did the one in Alva. Stadium Drive-In officially closed in 1985, with the exception of showing “Top Gun” the following summer for students at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. It later was a junkyard, but now sits as an empty field, the movie screen long gone.
A tiny hometown theater compared to the metro multiplexes, Rialto struggled to stay relevant in the 1980s so Johnny jumped on the movie rental bandwagon.
Jesse remembered his dad renting VHS tapes from a spindle out of the concession stand, which was still downstairs at that time. When Rialto gained the business space next door, Johnny had the adjoining wall knocked out to create the video store and new concession stand.
VHS rentals “saved Rialto from closing,” Johnny told the Enid News & Eagle in 2008. He ran the video store while Jesse ran the theater.
One of the other struggles the movie theater has contended with in recent decades is movie studios require up to 65 percent of ticket sales. Jesse said the more prominent or popular a film is, the more the studios take from theater profits.
As such, concessions are where theaters make their money, not movie tickets, he said. That’s why his dad started promoting “happy hour” to the community and the college back in the 1980s, to attract customers in the door with soda and popcorn outside of movie showings.
With the advent of home viewing through streaming, VHS and DVD rentals went by the wayside and the video store closed in 2019. Jesse, who has managed Rialto full-time since 2015, lamented that decision not long after because the pandemic hit the very next spring and about killed Rialto.
It took over a year after the pandemic for Hollywood to recover and make movies, Jesse said, so Rialto showed mostly previously released films until the summer of 2021. It was still difficult, however, to get people out of the house and into movie theaters.
He opened Showtime Nutrition next door to Rialto last spring to help bring in extra income. The shop offers healthy shakes, energy teas, hot chocolate, and more along with Herbalife supplements.
Jesse said last summer was the first time in ages that Rialto filled all of its seats. That was in part because of the long-anticipated release of “Twisters”, an Oklahoma-based movie exclusively filmed in the state. The original “Twister” was filmed in nearby Wakita, so busloads of filmgoers flocked to Rialto. Then “Wicked” hit the movie theaters in November, so Rialto saw a spike in audiences again.
He hopes Rialto will continue to see filmgoers’ interest in the big screen experience.
“It’s a battle to get people in the doors,” Jesse said. “We’re one of the last independently owned movie theaters in Oklahoma.”
Rialto is the only family-owned movie theater in Northwest Oklahoma. Fairview’s Royal Theatre and Buffalo’s movie theater are run by volunteers, and Woodward and Guymon’s multi-screen movie theaters are owned by Kansas-based chain Mitchell Theatres.
“I book all the movies and talk to the studios myself,” Jesse said, adding he doesn’t use a booking agent or have representatives negotiate on his behalf.
Jesse was responsible for moving Rialto into the new age of digital projection.
Like all movie theaters prior to 2010, Rialto showed movies from 35mm film that was rolled up on gigantic film reels in film cans and laced through the projection system.
It originally took two people to run a movie showing, Jesse said, with one to sit and watch the film reel to make sure it didn’t snag or melt during the showing and one to rewind the film reel so it would start from the beginning the next showing.
Now thanks to the digital era, Rialto shows movies downloaded from a hard drive the size of a standard sheet of paper. No staff is required to sit with it anymore.
“I can schedule a whole week (on the projector computer) when to start on the movie screen,” Jesse said.
Each of the three projectors have their own film hard drive right now. Jesse said studios would prefer Rialto to upgrade to satellite so the films can be directly emailed to the projector computers, but he’s not ready to make that investment yet.
“At least we don’t have to worry about film breaking or melting anymore,” he said.
Will Rialto continue to amuse Alva in the future with the fourth generation of Joneses? Both of Jesse’s college-age children help out when they’re not busy with classes or sports, but he doesn’t know yet if they will take over the family business when the time comes.
“I hope Rialto will always be here,” Jesse said. “I’d hate for it to end with me.”
Rialto shows movies nightly at 7 p.m. as well as 2 p.m. on the weekends. The concession stand is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 1-8 p.m. Tickets are $9 for adults and $7 for kids, seniors age 60 and older, and NWOSU students with ID.