What was the El Camino?
In 1972 most of Scottsdale still lived south of Camelback Road, and that’s where its newest movie house went. The El Camino Theatre opened on March 1, 1972, at 2040 N. Scottsdale Rd, half a mile north of McDowell, with Twiggy in Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend. It had one big screen and 800 seats, which made it a theater for first-run studio pictures, in the line of the Kachina a couple of miles north.
It changed hands with the national chains: ABC Intermountain built it, Plitt Theatres took it over in 1975, and Cineplex Odeon in 1985. In June 1982 it opened Blade Runner.
Then it disappears from the record. Nobody we’ve found wrote down when it closed. By 2020 it was a fenced, empty building that had last served as an auction house, and it was torn down late that year. The Formation apartments stand at its address.
What’s on record
The opening. Cinema Treasures has the grand-opening ad: ABC Intermountain Theatres, the Rocky Mountain arm of ABC’s theater chain, opened the El Camino on March 1, 1972. A 2020 blog post describes it as a free-standing single-screen house, and nothing suggests it was ever split into smaller auditoriums.
The offices, and a killing. Cinema Treasures places ABC Intermountain’s Arizona executive offices in the building. On April 11, 1974, a manager fired from the company’s Indian Drive-In shot and killed a retired employee there. A bullet hit the marquee, which was advertising Super Cops.
The films. A first-run house through the 1980s. An Arizona Republic ad posted on Cinema Treasures shows Blade Runner playing there on its opening weekend, June 1982. Commenters remember The Road Warrior, Chariots of Fire and The Gods Must Be Crazy.
The end. Cinema Treasures says only that the building was “converted to other uses.” A blogger who photographed it in May 2020 found it fenced, with a broken front window, and said it had been “some sort of weird auction house.” Demolition came late that year. The Formation apartments now carry the 2040 N. Scottsdale Rd address. No source we’ve found says in so many words that they were built on the theater’s lot, but the address is the same.
The sources, and the gaps
Main sources: the Cinema Treasures listing, its photos and comments; a 2020 post on the Wandering Justin blog about the Valley’s abandoned theaters; and the Formation apartments’ own listings.
What’s unsettled:
- When it closed. The biggest gap. The usual “1980s or 1990s” has no source.
- The architect. Unknown.
- The offices and the 1974 shooting come from Cinema Treasures alone.
- The demolition date. “Late 2020” is from user-contributed Cinema Treasures data; we’ve found no news report.
- A mix-up to avoid. Cineplex Odeon also ran a theater at 4343 N. Scottsdale Rd, in the Scottsdale Galleria on the old Kachina site, which went to AMC in 1994. It’s a different building.
Where the answers are. The Arizona Republic’s theater listings from the late 1980s and 1990s, which would show when the El Camino dropped out; the Republic and Scottsdale Progress for April 1974; and the City of Scottsdale’s demolition permit for 2040 N. Scottsdale Rd.
Why it matters
The El Camino was south Scottsdale’s movie palace in the years the city’s center of gravity was moving north. The Kachina, the Kiva and the Round-Up were older; Camelview and the multiplexes came after. It went the way of the single-screen houses, and then sat empty long enough to be forgotten before it came down.