What was the Kachina?
For almost thirty years, the biggest movies in the Valley played on Scottsdale Road. The Kachina Theatre opened on November 10, 1960, with Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8: a single screen and about 600 seats in a modern house designed by Ray Parrish for Harry L. Nace’s chain, the same company that ran the Kiva and the Round-Up.
In 1963 it became the Valley’s Cinerama theater, with a giant curved screen and, at first, three synchronized projectors. How the West Was Won ran 39 weeks there, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 40, and 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in May 1968 for 25. Two decades later it was still the place for a big premiere: in May 1983 Return of the Jedi opened as a “70MM exclusive.”
A teenage Steven Spielberg lived a few miles west in Arcadia from 1957 to 1964. Phoenix New Times calls the Kachina his favorite theater, and it appears in the background of The Fabelmans, his film about those years. The Kachina closed and was demolished in 1989 for the Scottsdale Galleria, which failed. Galleria Corporate Center stands on the site now.
The Cinerama years
The Cinerama Remembered series on Cinema Treasures lists the Kachina’s road-show engagements with their runs:
- The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, May 1963, 13 weeks, three-strip
- How the West Was Won, August 1963, 39 weeks, three-strip (Arizona Highways reported its opening as a triumph for the Nace chain)
- It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, May 1964, 40 weeks, 70mm
- Circus World, The Greatest Story Ever Told (21 weeks) and The Hallelujah Trail, 1965
- Battle of the Bulge, December 1965; Doctor Zhivago, 1966; Khartoum, December 1966
- 2001: A Space Odyssey, May 29, 1968, 25 weeks
- Ice Station Zebra, November 1968, and a reissue of Krakatoa as Volcano in 1975
A road show at the Kachina meant reserved seats, an overture and an intermission, in a fast-growing town that people drove to from all over the Valley.
The last summer
The theater ended where it started, with big studio pictures. Former staff on Cinema Treasures remember midnight shows of Batman and The Abyss in 1989, a closing ceremony, a last Gone with the Wind, and seats and fittings handed out when the building came down. The Scottsdale Galleria mall rose on the site and its neighbor, the Scottsdale Towers, and failed within a couple of years. A Cineplex Odeon in the mall sat roughly where the Kachina had stood. Galleria Corporate Center took over the buildings.
The sources, and the gaps
Cinema Treasures is the main record: the listing (address, about 600 seats, demolished), the opening ad and first film, the Parrish attribution from Boxoffice (April 10, 1961), the 1983 Jedi ad, and the staff memories of 1989. Its Cinerama series gives the engagements. Phoenix New Times (February 24, 2025) dates the theater 1960–89 and makes the Spielberg and Fabelmans connection. Joan Fudala’s “Local Legends” places it where Galleria Corporate Center is now.
What’s unsettled:
- Spielberg. New Times calls the Kachina his favorite; a review of The Fabelmans in Cinema Scope notices it in the background and names the Kiva on Main Street as the theater he went to for Saturday matinees. Neither cites Spielberg. Both theaters were open in his Arizona years.
- Harkins. Cinema Treasures lists Harkins among the operators, without dates.
- The screen. A Cinerama fan site describes a 90-foot screen and a December 1989 demolition; we’ve only seen that in a search excerpt.
Where the answers are. The Arizona Republic’s theater ads, 1960–89; Boxoffice’s 1961 article on the building; the city’s 1989 demolition permit for 4305 N. Scottsdale Road; and Spielberg’s biographers.
Why it matters
The Kachina was where Scottsdale saw the biggest films of its time, on the biggest screen in the Valley, when the town itself was still small. It was also part of the movies’ own story about Arizona: a teenager in Arcadia went there and grew up to make films about that childhood. It’s gone, but it still shows up on screen in The Fabelmans.