What was the Tee-Bar-Tee?
On June 18, 1948, Scottsdale got its first real movie house. Malcolm White was already running Whitey’s bar on the corner of Main and Scottsdale Road. He would be the town’s first mayor three years later. He built a theater a few doors east on the south side of Main Street and named it the Tee-Bar-Tee, after a cattle brand, with a marquee to match. The town had just started calling itself “The West’s Most Western Town,” and White was one of the people who meant it.
It seated about 450. In 1955 it was renamed the Kiva Theatre. In 1963 it passed to Louis K. Sher’s Art Theatre Guild, a national art-house chain that had moved its headquarters to Scottsdale, along with the Cinema Portofino across the street. For a few years the Kiva was an art house.
From the early 1970s it was an adult theater, the longest chapter in its life and the one the city least wanted. It closed in the early 1990s, and the building was gutted for shops. But the front survived. Walk Main Street and you can still see the old movie house above the storefronts.
Four lives on Main Street
The Tee-Bar-Tee, 1948–1955. It wasn’t quite the first screen in town. Johnny Rose’s pool hall on Brown Avenue showed silent movies on Saturday nights in the 1920s. But it was the first building made for films, and it was part of the Western costume Main Street was putting on: a false front, a wooden sidewalk and hitching rails, by the Historical Society’s description. A photograph of it appears in the 1951 Scottsdale High School yearbook. By the early 1950s Valley Theatres, part of Harry L. Nace’s chain, was running it.
The Kiva, 1955–1963. The rename came on October 17, 1955. It was the year White opened his other theater, the Round-Up Drive-In on Thomas Road, and the year the Kiva Craft Center brought a new crowd of artists to Fifth Avenue. “Kiva,” the Pueblo ceremonial room, matched the Southwestern design the town was selling.
The art house, from 1963. Louis Leithold held the leases on the Kiva and the Cinema Portofino, across Main and a few doors east. That building had held the Village Patio shops, which the Historical Society calls the town’s first shopping center, opened in 1947. In September 1963 Leithold sold the leases to Louis K. Sher’s Art Theatre Guild, which ran foreign and art films across the country and had moved its headquarters to Scottsdale. The Kiva played the art-house fare of the day, such as Mondo Cane in 1963. For a town of about 10,000, two art-house screens facing each other on Main Street were unusual.
The adult theater, early 1970s to about 1993. Hard-core bookings started around 1970, according to Phoenix New Times’s 1990 profile of Sher. A print of Deep Throat was seized there, and the city pressed for the theater’s closing for years. Cinema Treasures dates the adult era to 1972–93. The Portofino across the street went the same way and closed in 1985. The Kiva outlasted it by about eight years.
After the movies
Cinema Treasures says the building was gutted and turned into a mini-mall with most of the facade intact. A library photo record says it was briefly a performance hall in the 1990s before shops moved in. Later tenants report the floor leveled, the ticket booth kept and the projection room still upstairs. In the late 2010s the space held an Australian bakery and bar at 7217 E. Main. The building has no historic designation that we’ve found.
The sources, and what they don’t settle
What’s solid. The opening date, the 1955 rename and the art-house and adult eras come from Cinema Treasures, whose listing includes the grand-opening ad. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s key-events timeline confirms White as builder and describes the Western front. Phoenix New Times (Dewey Webb, November 7, 1990) covers Sher, the Art Theatre Guild and the adult years. The city’s history newsletter, which we’ve only been able to read in search excerpts, gives about 450 seats, the location and the surviving marquee.
What’s unsettled:
- Seats: about 450 (the city and New Times) or 386 (Cinema Treasures).
- The builder’s name: Cinema Treasures says “Martin White,” a slip for Malcolm.
- The address: Cinema Treasures lists 7125–7219 E. Main St., which is too wide a range. The surviving tenants put it at about 7217–7219.
- When Nace took over: by 1950, or July 1956.
- When it closed: about 1993, by Cinema Treasures. The 1990 New Times article shows it still open.
- Spielberg: Cinema Treasures, some commenters and a Cinema Scope review of The Fabelmans say Spielberg went to Saturday matinees at the Kiva. His Arizona years, 1957 to 1964, would allow it, but no biography we’ve seen names the Kiva, and Phoenix New Times names the Kachina as his favorite. We treat it as likely but unconfirmed.
A correction elsewhere on this site. Our Malcolm White profile used to say he built the town’s first movie theater in 1941, the same year as Whitey’s. The theater opened in 1948. The profile has been corrected.
Where the answers are. The Scottsdale Progress and Arizona Republic for June 1948 (the opening), October 1955 (the rename) and the 1970s–90s (the court cases and the city’s campaign against it); the City of Scottsdale’s building permits for the conversion to shops; and the Scottsdale Heritage Connection’s photographs.
Why it matters
The Tee-Bar-Tee was the Western theme applied to a movie house, built by one of the men who invented that theme. Over its life the same room was a cowboy-branded small-town cinema, an outpost of a national art-house chain fighting censorship, and an adult theater the city wanted closed. Its facade is still on Main Street, though most people walking past don’t know what it was.