Dobie Theatre

The Dobie Theatre sat on the second level of Dobie Mall at 2025 Guadalupe Street, across from the University of Texas campus. It opened as a twin-screen theater, with newspaper ads beginning October 4, 1973. From the late 1980s it was Austin's house for independent and art films, and it won awards for best film theater, best independent theater, best programming and best incubator of local film talent. In 1990 Richard Linklater's Slacker had its premiere there. A Cinema Treasures contributor who saw it remembers the Dobie as still a two-screen house then, with one long, narrow auditorium and one short, wide one, and recalls the theater being rebuilt as a four-screen complex around 1995 or 1996. In that later form each auditorium had its own decorative theme: Egyptian, French Tudor, Gargoyle Gothic and Space Age Art Deco. Landmark Theatres took over management in 1999. By 2009 money was tight; it appealed for business sponsors to cover $250 to $500 in rental fees per film for a midnight-movie series, saying the Austin film scene had drifted away from the Dobie over the previous five years and that it needed money for better seats, sound and projection. In spring 2010 Landmark said it would not renew its lease. At the same time Bill Banowsky, a former Landmark CEO, was preparing to open the Violet Crown Cinema downtown. The landlord, the Carlton Group, spent months looking for another operator who could return the four-screen house to its role as an independent film space, and Landmark closed the Dobie on August 22, 2010. In 2014 the owners talked of reopening it as a less expensive place to see movies, but it did not reopen. Cinema Treasures now lists the space as the Regus Austin Dobie Center, offices with a CVS pharmacy in part of the building.