Interstate Theatres

Interstate Theatres began with vaudeville. Karl Hoblitzelle, born in St. Louis in 1879, rose from office boy to acting director of works for the demolition of the St. Louis World's Fair. Concessionaires there pitched him a circuit of vaudeville houses in the South and Southwest. In the spring of 1905 he and his brother George joined them in organizing the Interstate Amusement Company, a Missouri corporation, with Karl putting in $2,500. That fall the company opened Majestic Theatres in Dallas, Fort Worth and Waco and the Empire in San Antonio.

Hoblitzelle became president in 1906 and screened every act. A 1914 notice to performers barred profanity and ethnic ridicule. Interstate added a Majestic in Houston, and its Dallas flagship, a 2,800-seat Majestic designed by John Eberson, opened on April 11, 1921. The Dallas Majestic added films to its vaudeville bills in 1925 and later turned to movies as vaudeville faded. The 1977 National Register nomination for the Dallas Majestic says Interstate's houses were the first in the Southwest to install air conditioning and the first wired for sound. They also offered earphones for the hard of hearing, crying rooms and children's seats.

Intending to retire, Hoblitzelle sold most of his theater interests to RKO; a company history dates the closing to May 1930. When RKO and Paramount went into receivership in January 1933, he reorganized their Texas theaters as Interstate Circuit and Texas Consolidated Theatres and was president of both by 1935. In July 1934 his general manager, R. J. O'Donnell, wrote from the Majestic Theatre Building to the Texas branch managers of eight film distributors. He demanded that any film playing Interstate's first-run houses at 40 cents or more never play a later run for under 25 cents or on a double bill. At the time Interstate ran 43 first- and second-run theaters in six Texas cities, and Texas Consolidated ran 66 more in Texas and New Mexico. On February 13, 1939, in Interstate Circuit, Inc. v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed that the distributors had conspired with each other and with Interstate in violation of the Sherman Act. Justice Stone wrote the opinion.

During World War II Hoblitzelle often took war bonds or scrap donations as admission. By the mid-1940s Interstate had some 165 theaters. Its Wilshire in Dallas opened on October 4, 1946, with what Cinema Treasures calls the South's first demonstration of television. In 1951 the circuit was sold to Paramount, but the Dallas Majestic stayed with the Hoblitzelle Foundation, which Karl and Esther Hoblitzelle had formed in 1942. The Interstate name carried on: its Palace showed Dallas's first CinemaScope film, The Robe, on September 24, 1953, and the Wilshire closed in 1978 as an ABC Interstate theater. The Majestic showed films until July 1973 and was given to the City of Dallas in 1976. Hoblitzelle died in Dallas on March 8, 1967.