The Liberty theater opened in May 1917 in the space formerly occupied by the Palace.
This advertisement shows that during the year 1922, the Liberty theatre was holding daily matinees of films and the price for a ticket was still around 10 to 15 cents.
The above advertisement shares how eight reels was considered a “big show” back in this day. Eight reels would have been roughly 88 minutes long. Nowadays we see this as an average length for films. This also shows that adults had to pay a little bit more money (20 cents) to see a show of this length. A child’s ticket is only 10 cents making it much easier for families to go to the movies since child tickets are significantly cheaper.
One interesting promotional strategy used at the Liberty was to create and distribute commemorative coins embossed with the theater name and a picture of Rudolf Valentino to promote his film The Eagle in 1925. Coin images from LinkVilleCoins, “ROSEBURG, ORE. LIBERTY THEATRE RUDOLPH VALENTINO TOKEN" (accessed May 2018).
The local newspaper called the Liberty theater a “dead horse” for how many times it gets closed and reopened under new management. It seems like the theatre is not able to compete with the other local theatres at the time, such as the Majestic and the Antlers. Sound came to the Liberty at the end of 1929 and moviegoers enjoyed "All Talking" shows for another year. Although the Liberty had its last movie shows in late 1930, it continued operating as a multipurpose event space for Roseburg, providing wrestling and boxing matches in 1931 (1, 2), preachers (3), and eventually re-opening as a community theater space in 1936 (4).
