Ritz Theatre

The Ritz opened at 320 East Sixth Street on October 13, 1929, with Bert Lytell in The Lone Wolf's Daughter. Jay J. Hegman ran it as an independent house. In July 1937 it was expanded into existing space to plans by architect Hugo Kuehne, bringing it to 800 seats, and it was still showing films past 1950. In the early 1970s the Ritz operated as an adult theater, and new operators who took over in 1974 booked a mix of movies, plays and live music, and a local theater group made it a home for a while. Through the 1980s and 1990s the building was known as a live-music club, bar and pool hall on Sixth Street. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, which Tim League had opened in 1997 at 409 Colorado Street, reopened the Ritz as a cinema on November 1, 2007, after a renovation designed by Weiss Architecture, and pitched it as the successor to that original theater. Quentin Tarantino came for the debut. The Ritz became Alamo's flagship and the home of programs such as Master Pancake Theater and Terror Tuesdays. Alamo installed 70mm projection there; beginning August 24, 2012, it ran a 70mm series that included West Side Story, Cleopatra, Playtime and Baraka and ended with Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, which opened at the Ritz in 70mm on September 21, 2012. The Ritz and the Paramount were the only two Austin theaters with 70mm projectors. The Alamo Ritz also turns up in the brief downtown Austin location footage of Whip It, the roller derby film written by Austin derby veteran Shauna Cross and mostly shot in Michigan. The Ritz closed on March 16, 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. When Alamo Drafthouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 3, 2021, it announced that the Ritz would not reopen. Joe Rogan then bought the building and, after about two and a half years of development, opened it in March 2023 as Comedy Mothership, with a headliner room called Fat Man and a smaller stage called Little Boy. Cinema Treasures still lists the building with two screens and 798 seats.