Cinema Treasures
The ultimate guide to movie theaters.
Ross Melnick and I started Cinema Treasures in December 2000 to celebrate and help save classic movie theaters.
Since then, moviegoers have turned it into the world’s most comprehensive guide to movie theaters, with more than 62,000 of them listed. It covers their histories, their architecture, and what became of them. The community has uploaded more than 400,000 photos. Roger Ebert called it “the ultimate website about movie theaters.”
The site has been rebuilt more than once along the way, from Perl CGI, to PHP, to a modern Rails app. It’s been a substantial engineering challenge, since it’s really a mashup of Wikipedia, Yelp, and Flickr at the scale of tens of thousands of theaters and hundreds of thousands of photos.
I single-handedly designed and built the entire website, including theater browsing and search tools, the photo galleries, and the admin dashboard, and I still work on it today.
The Cinema Treasures logo was designed by my friend Luke Mysse.
