What was the Camelview 5?
For forty-two years, if a film had subtitles or an Oscar buzz and no car chases, it opened in the Valley at the Camelview. Harkins Theatres opened it on June 17, 1973, as a twin cinema at 7001 E. Highland Ave., a block west of Scottsdale Road and next to Scottsdale Fashion Square. It was the last theater the chain’s founder, Red Harkins, opened before his death in 1974. Four years later an enclosed mall, Camelview Plaza, rose beside it with the same name.
It grew to five screens in 1990 and became the Valley’s art house: foreign films, independents and documentaries, and the Oscar contenders that played only there for weeks before going wide. Out front stood Red Harkins’s “mushrooms,” neon-topped sculptures he had once imagined with dancers on top.
The mall’s expansion finally took the lot. The Camelview 5 closed on December 10, 2015, and a week later Harkins opened a 14-screen Harkins Camelview at Fashion Square across the street. The old building came down in November 2016. The mushrooms survived.
How it worked
The building. A free-standing theater on an outparcel, with land leased from whoever owned the mall next door, which by the end was Macerich. It opened as a twin; one Cinema Treasures commenter says its first name was the Cinema 7 and that it became the Camelview in 1974. The expansion to five screens came on July 13, 1990. A former employee remembers the largest auditorium at about 450 seats and the smallest at about 55.
The programming. By the 2010s KTAR could describe it as a theater that showed “strictly foreign and independent films.” That former employee’s memoir, on the Laughing Place site, names the runs regulars remember: Lost in Translation, and Brokeback Mountain, Little Miss Sunshine and Juno, each exclusive to the Camelview for at least two weeks before playing anywhere else in the Valley, and a 1980s revival of Fantasia that, the memoir says, helped save the theater. The Scottsdale International Film Festival, founded in 2001, made the Camelview its home until it moved to the Harkins Shea 14 in 2011.
The mushrooms. Red Harkins named the concrete-and-neon sculptures in front his mushrooms. His son Dan told FOX 10 his father “had a vision that we would have dancers on top and we would have fireworks.” They weigh more than two tons.
The end
In 2013 Macerich asked the city for about 142,000 more square feet at Fashion Square and began talks with Harkins about a new theater. About 2,000 people signed a petition to save the old one. Harkins closed it with a Camelview Classics week (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Annie Hall, Fargo, Cinema Paradiso, Amélie) and a last day of regular art-house bookings on December 10, 2015. The new Harkins Camelview at Fashion Square opened on December 17, on the second floor above Dick’s Sporting Goods, replacing both the Camelview 5 and the mall’s own Fashion Square 7 with 14 screens and a lobby bar.
The empty theater spent 2016 as a training ground for Scottsdale police SWAT teams. On July 14 a crane lifted off the mushrooms, which were repolished, given new neon, and moved to Harkins’s support office. Wasson Commercial Contracting demolished the building in November 2016.
The sources, and what they leave open
Main sources: the Cinema Treasures listing and its comments, for the address, opening date and 1990 expansion; KJZZ (2013 and 2015) and KTAR (2013) on Harkins history and the expansion; FOX 10, KTAR and KJZZ (2016) on the mushrooms; AZ Big Media on the demolition; Phoenix New Times on the closing schedule, which we’ve only read in search excerpts; Bigscreen and Wikipedia’s Scottsdale Fashion Square article on the new theater; and a former employee’s memoir on Laughing Place for the programming.
What’s unsettled:
- Screens at opening. A twin by Cinema Treasures; KTAR’s 2013 story says it opened with three screens.
- The name. “Cinema 7” until 1974 rests on one commenter. Harkins and the press called it the Camelview, and from 1990 the Camelview 5.
- “The longest running theater in Phoenix history.” Dan Harkins’s phrase to FOX 10 in 2016. It’s the owner’s claim, and we haven’t checked it against the Valley’s other long-lived houses.
- The site today. Macerich proposed a 150-foot mixed-use tower for the parcel in January 2016. What was built instead is Fashion Square’s Goldwater Boulevard restaurant row; Phoenix New Times’s listing puts Ocean 44 on the site.
- The festival’s first year. Our festival page says the 2001 debut was at the Camelview. The festival’s later history confirms it was the Camelview’s for years, but we haven’t found a 2001 program naming the venue.
A correction elsewhere on this site. Our Camelview Plaza and Fashion Square pages used to say the theater “moved into” the mall in the 1990s, and that Fashion Square reached Camelview Plaza by bridging Camelback Road. The theater stayed in its own building until 2015. Camelview Plaza was joined to Fashion Square by a bridge over 70th Street, now Goldwater Boulevard; the Camelback bridge came in 1998 and leads to the Nordstrom wing. Those pages have been corrected.
Why it matters
The Camelview was where a metro area of multiplexes kept its art house, run by a family chain that could have closed it many times and didn’t. It also links two eras of the Harkins company: Red Harkins’s last theater, and the site that his son traded for one of the chain’s flagships. The building is gone, but the name is on the new marquee, and the mushrooms are still around.