What was the Round-Up?
By 1955 Scottsdale’s first mayor, Malcolm White, had already given the town a bar, Whitey’s, and a movie house, the Tee-Bar-Tee on Main Street. That November he added a drive-in. The Round-Up opened on Friday, November 4, 1955, on Thomas Road south of town, with a Martin and Lewis comedy and a John Payne Western, and room for 740 cars.
It was dressed for “The West’s Most Western Town.” The first sign, shown in a 1956 Scottsdale High yearbook ad signed “Malcolm White, Proprietor,” was a neon cowboy on a bucking horse, his lasso looping the words ROUND UP. White didn’t keep it long. In July 1956 he sold his interest to Harry L. Nace, whose chain ran it for the rest of its life and enlarged it to 972 cars in 1964. By then a giant neon cowboy stood beside the marquee, pointing at the name.
The Round-Up ran for twenty-four years. Its last ad appeared on February 24, 1980, and in 1985 The Sycamore at Scottsdale apartments went up on the lot.
A drive-in for a car town
Why a drive-in. Postwar Scottsdale grew fast and grew on wheels. The 1950 census counted about 2,000 people; by 1960 there were more than 10,000, many of them young families in the new subdivisions south of town. A drive-in let a family watch a movie without a sitter, and teenagers liked it for other reasons. The historian Joan Fudala calls it “a popular family and teen destination from the 1950s to 1970s.”
Who ran it. Boxoffice magazine reported in July 1956 that Nace had bought “Mayor Malcolm White’s interest” in Valley Theatre Corp., making him sole owner of the Round-Up and the Kiva. The same item announced 150 stadium-style walk-in seats and 270 new car speakers. By 1964, as part of the Foreman-Nace chain, the drive-in added two ramps for 972 cars, new box offices, a snack bar twice the size and new restrooms. Virgil Rowe was the manager.
The two cowboys. The original lasso sign was replaced by a giant standing cowboy figure in hat, yellow shirt and boots, pointing at a tall Round Up script sign above the marquee. Photos date him to about 1963, and a night photograph from about 1979 shows him outlined in neon. He’s often described as thirty feet tall, but nobody seems to have measured him, and nothing suggests he moved.
What’s there now
The Sycamore at Scottsdale, 370 apartments in 21 buildings at 6599 E. Thomas Road, built in 1985. Nothing marks the drive-in.
The sources
Cinema Treasures carries the essentials: the 1955 grand-opening ad, the Scottsdale Progress capacity figure, the 1956 and 1964 Boxoffice items quoted by commenters, the yearbook ads and the dated photos of both signs, and the last ad of February 24, 1980. Joan Fudala’s 2025 “Local Legends” column adds the local memory. Property listings date The Sycamore to 1985.
What’s unsettled. Capacity at opening (740 by the Progress, 700 by one drive-in directory). The closing year: a drive-in directory says 1985, but the same page gets other facts wrong, and 1985 is when the apartments were built. When the lasso sign gave way to the pointing cowboy, sometime between 1956 and about 1963. The screen’s size. What happened to the cowboy.
Where the answers are. The Arizona Republic’s movie listings for early 1980; the city’s demolition and building permits for the Thomas Road parcel, 1980–85; and Scottsdale High School yearbooks, which carried the drive-in’s ads for decades.
Why it matters
The Round-Up is the second of Malcolm White’s two cinemas and the other half of how postwar Scottsdale went to the movies. The Tee-Bar-Tee was on Main Street for people who walked downtown; the Round-Up was on Thomas Road for families who drove there. Both got the cowboy treatment. The indoor theater’s front still stands, and the drive-in is completely gone. Its successor as the city’s drive-in, the six-screen Scottsdale 6 on McKellips Road, opened in 1977 and lasted until 2011.