Loew's Tara | |
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 | |
| Address | 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road NE Atlanta, Georgia |
|---|---|
| Operator | Plaza Theatre (Atlanta) |
| Type | Art house Independent film |
| Construction | |
| Opened | 1968 |
| Reopened | 2023 |
The Tara Theatre is an art house movie theater located in Atlanta. The theater specializes in the showing of independent films, the only theater in Atlanta to do so exclusively.[1]
The Tara Theatre was opened in June 1968 by Loew's Theatres. It embodied the modernist architecture popular at the time. Originally called Loew's Tara, the theater's name memorialized the fictional Tara plantation, home of the O'Hara family in Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind.[citation needed] Tara opened with a 70mm, stereophonic presentation of the film Gone with the Wind on its 60-foot screen. This single screen with seating for 1,000 was later twinned. In the 1970s, one of the twin theaters was twinned itself, and a separate fourth theater was added onto the building. The theater became part of the local Lefont theater group in the 1980s. At the end of that decade, United Artists Theaters bought the Tara and used part of the building as a regional corporate office until United Artists, along with Edwards Theatres, was merged into the new parent company Regal Entertainment Group in 2002, but was still operated under the United Artists label for a time. Shortly afterward, the Tara was remodeled to feature silver, streamline moderne-inspired details in the interior and above the portico, faux art deco advertisements, and large hanging portraits of classical Hollywood movie stars, such as Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Charlie Chaplin.[2]
The Tara was closed by Regal in November 2022.[3]
The Tara was then re-opened in May 2023 under local ownership that also owns the nearby historic Plaza Theatre.[4]