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	Photo: Jennifer Loring

Probably about 1915, the year D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp premiered, a young boy named Robert L. Lippert sat in a darkened theater somewhere in Alameda, captivated by the silent moving pictures he saw flashing on the large screen. He probably didn’t know it yet, but the movies were soon to become his life’s work.
    “It all started when I was 8 years old. I gave out programs at the Strand Theater in Alameda. I just kept going from there,” Lippert said in a 1956 interview.
    Robert L. Lippert was a movie producer, theater owner and innovator. Born in San Francisco, he was raised in Alameda and died here in 1976, after nearly 60 years in the movie industry. He produced 246 features between 1946 and 1966, first for his own production companies in San Francisco and Hollywood, Screen Guild Productions and Lippert Pictures, and later, for 20th Century Fox. His film credits include such classics as the original The Fly and the ground-breaking Rocketship X.M. He helped launch future stars such as Jack Nicholson, Richard Chamberlain, Peter Falk and Angie Dickinson.
    As a theater owner, Lippert built and opened his first theater in Richmond in 1942. He pioneered drive-in theaters in Northern California in 1945, starting in Fresno, and opened one of the first multiplex theaters ever in Alameda in 1965. Lippert Theatres, a chain of indoor and drive-in theaters, grew to 118 at its height.

Lippert’s Beginnings in Alameda

    Born on March 11, 1909, Robert Lippert was left on the doorstep of the Catholic Charities Orphanage. Two years later, Leonard and Esther Lippert of Alameda adopted him. Lippert got his start showing films for 1 cent on an 8mm projector in the basement of his parents’ home at the corner of High and Madison streets. Lippert’s son, Bob Lippert Jr., now 77, still remembers visiting the house several times and seeing the sign in the basement that read, “Movies 1 cent.”
    Lippert was an entrepreneur from an early age who wasn’t afraid to work hard. A profile of him at age 14 in the San Francisco Bulletin called him a “boy wonder.” As a freshman at Alameda High School, he lived at 1726 Lincoln Ave., not far from his first theater job as a projectionist at the Bay Theater at 1206 Lincoln Ave. He also had four paper routes and published and edited several newspapers, including The Alameda News, and worked as a salesman in Strom Electric Co. on Park Street as its “radio expert.” Later, Lippert took over the theater when it closed, using the money he’d earned from one of his newspapers to do so.
    The movies were always an integral part of Robert Lippert’s personal and professional life. Lippert and his wife of 50 years, Ruth Robinson, first met in the dark during the screening of a silent movie at Washington School. He was the projectionist, and she was a student.
   They eloped to San Jose three months later. Lippert was a 17-year-old senior at Alameda High School and his bride was 16. After they returned to Alameda, Lippert dropped out of high school, worked as a typesetter during the day for two years at Dettner’s Printing Shop and showed movies at night.
    In 1929, when “talkies” were introduced, the enterprising Lippert rented sound equipment and toured 11 western states, showing off the new movies with sound at grade school and high school auditoriums. He also traveled up and down California with Andy Pagano, a school chum, showing movies. Pagano, founder of Pagano’s Hardware, served as Lippert’s projectionist.
    In the late 1920s, Lippert ran two theaters, including the Bay Street Station Theater. He used to manually pump the organ for one of them and was a projectionist in the other. In August 1931, at Lippert’s Lincoln Theater/Bay Street Station, movies cost 10 cents for a child and 20 cents for an adult.
    The Lipperts struggled to survive during the Depression, and Robert Lippert took a job as a theater manager in Oakland to help pay the bills. “I remember he was running three theaters in Oakland. He was making $25 a week. My mother was a cashier, making seven dollars a week,” says Lippert Jr., the couple’s only son. They also had a daughter, who was born in 1938.
    Lippert Jr. literally grew up in theaters. “I always knew my father as a theater manager. I spent every night in the theater. They didn’t have a babysitter. I watched the flick. Six different movies a week,” he recalls.
    But Lippert didn’t want to work for anyone else, according to Lippert Jr., so, in 1936, he decided to try a marketing ploy he had learned from other theater owners.

Dish Nights and Book Nights

    To attract patrons to the movies at the height of the Great Depression between 1936 and 1940, Lippert held “dish nights” and, later, “book nights” at theaters across the country, moving his family to Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. People flocked to dish night one night a week at their local theater so they could get the 52 dishes in a set. “As long as I gave a cup or a saucer away each week, I got them coming back for a year to complete their set,” Lippert told reporter Larry Cahn.
  Book night came next. He
gave away “wonder” books, which were the Encyclopedia Britannica. There were 52 volumes in a set, so movie patrons got one per week, according to Lippert Jr. “These were a big thing during the Depression. He was a super salesman, my dad was,” says Lippert Jr.
   Always business-savvy, Lippert, at 33, built and opened the Grand Theater in Richmond in 1942, which allowed him to provide movie entertainment to shipyard builders and military personnel during World War II. It was Lippert’s first theater and marked the beginning of his theater chain. He continued to build and open more theaters, including the first drive-in in Northern California in Fresno in 1945. By the end of the decade, Lippert owned or operated nearly 60 theaters in California and Nevada.

Block-Booking

   During World War II, Lippert owned The Times Theater on Webster Street and the Rio Theater on Park Street. “He had one on each end of the Island. They were nothing but converted stores,” says Lippert Jr. But like all independent theater owners, Lippert had trouble getting movies to show. They faced stiff competition in bidding for films from the major studios that wanted to distribute films exclusively to their own theater chains or to independents
in bulk, a practice called “block-booking,” which often required theaters to buy several mediocre pictures for every desirable one.
    In 1942, the Society of Independent Mot-ion Picture Producers attacked the Holly-wood studio system with lawsuits against block-booking. The government also took up the matter as an antitrust case. So Lippert decided he would make his own low-budget films to provide movies for his own theaters. He opened production offices in San Francisco.
    Lippert’s first film in 1945 was a 60-minute western, Wildfire, which cost $34,000 to make but returned $350,000. Lippert had entered the movie production business with a hit.
    In 1948, the independent movie owners and producers got the victory they’d been seeking against the major studios. In a landmark case, the United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court abolished block-booking by requiring all films to be sold on an individual basis. The ruling also made the studios divest themselves of their theater chains. “That opened the gates for the independents. He went on his own after that,” says Lippert Jr.
    Lippert brought a sharp eye for the bottom line to independent film production. Some called him cheap. He kept costs down and production schedules on deadline. He wouldn’t have had it any other way, and, as an independent, he also couldn’t afford to. Lippert’s Highway 13 was made in 58 hours. He once shot three Westerns at the same time in 12 days, using the same sets and different clothes for the same actors. Lippert also shot his outdoor adventures on his own property near the Rogue River in Oregon.
    With his focus shifting to movie production in Hollywood, Lippert moved to Southern California in 1948 and turned over the daily management of the theaters to others. Lippert spent the next 17 years in Hollywood making movies. His films were not masterpieces but were a way to make a buck and get films in theaters quickly. He made genre films, including Westerns, cop thrillers and science fiction. They were low-budget affairs with catchy titles like The Baron of Arizona, Desire in the Dust, G.I. Jane and Detour to Danger.
    Lippert answered the critics of his films’ quality one time thus: “I’m not in this for personal glory; I’m giving the public and the exhibitors the films they want for purely commercial reasons.”

The King of the Bs

    Until about 1960, movie theater programs were “double bills.” There was a feature film and then a B film, which was more cheaply made but not necessarily shorter. Every studio had a B unit, including Fox, where Lippert worked for a decade. He became known as the “King of the Bs” in Hollywood.
    As a producer, Lippert found the script and hired the director and film editor. “He broke in more directors than anyone in Hollywood, because he paid them no money,” says his son. Some famous directors who got their start with Lippert include Elmo Williams, Sam Fuller, James Clavell, Howard Koch and Terence Young.
    Sam Fuller was a frustrated staff writer at Warner Bros. who couldn’t get his scripts produced when Lippert approached him to write some low-budget Westerns. Fuller offered to work for union scale in order to write and direct his own material. Lippert agreed, and in 1949 Fuller made I Shot Jesse James, introducing his distinctive, close-up intensive cinematic style. Fuller really got noticed with The Steel Helmet.
    Shot in 11 days for less than $100,000, The Steel Helmet was the first drama made about the Korean War. Equally important, it grossed an astounding $6 million—a particularly impressive effort for an independent feature that didn’t come out of any of the major studios.
    In 1950, director Kurt Neumann convinced Lippert to let him write, direct and produce the low-budget Rocketship X.M., about a failed flight to the moon. It is considered by some to be a ground-breaking science fiction film, because it was the first American movie to depict space travel seriously and, along with Destination Moon, led the way for the sci-fi movie explosion of the 1950s.

Enter Hammer Films

    In 1951, the always-enterprising Lippert took advantage of the British government’s Eady Plan, a subsidy that taxed theater seats in order to reimburse producers for making a film in England, and established a relationship with England’s Hammer Films. Lippert co-produced and distributed the studio’s films in the United States and also lent American actors to Hammer so it could capitalize on marquee names for its films.
    It was a great arrangement for both companies as it allowed Lippert to lower his costs of production and enabled Hammer to develop its North American market and cast U.S. stars. Lippert also taught Hammer some cost-saving tricks, such as reusing the same sets for different films.
    In 1955, Lippert released Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment, released as The Creeping Unknown in the United States. The success of the film led in part to Hammer’s decision to move into horror films, the genre for which it became famous.
    Lippert was a businessman, first and foremost, even when it came to his own son, who worked in the industry and for his father as a producer, stuntman and film editor from 1951 to 1956. “He was a son of a bitch to work for. I had to quit working for him,” says Lippert Jr. “I had to leave. I didn’t make any money working for him.”
    Eventually Lippert’s focus on making a buck began to hurt his reputation in the industry. In the early 1950s, the Screen Actors Guild, openly critical of the sale of Hollywood films to television, threatened to ban their performers from making for any producer who sold a post-1948 movie to television. They carried out the boycott when Lippert challenged the guild and sold many of his early films to television.
    But Lippert didn’t stop there. He also wouldn’t share residual money from the TV rights to his films with any actors, directors, producers or writers, according to Maury Dexter, a producer who worked with Lippert from 1956 to 1964. Lippert became persona non grata in Hollywood by 1954 and he couldn’t make union films anymore.

The 20th Century Fox Years

    As a result, Lippert dissolved his own production company in 1955 and accepted a 10-year, multimillion-dollar picture deal with 20th Century Fox. Lippert Jr. says his father was able to get a deal with Fox that gave him full autonomy within the studio. “He was an independent guy, but he could deliver the product,” says Lippert Jr.
    But there was a downside to the deal. To keep his name out of the theaters and union member’s minds, Lippert’s name never appeared on one of the 121 B films he made for Fox, including his most famous film, The Fly. He became the anonymous producer. Even 1959’s A Dog of Flanders, Lippert’s favorite of his films, which won a Venice Film Festival award, didn’t bear his name. But it probably didn’t matter to Lippert the businessman.
    At Fox, Lippert made 121 full-length features between 1955 and 1964. Fading stars worked for Lippert at Fox, including Barbara Stanwyck and Lon Chaney Jr. Up-and-coming actors such as Charles Bronson, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood all got major breaks in Lippert’s Fox films.
    Lippert’s deal with Fox called for a series of low-budget B films. To distinguish these low-budget films from higher-class color CinemaScope productions, Fox coined the name “RegalScope” after Lippert’s production company, Regal Films. Lippert later changed the name to Associated Producers, still keeping his name off the films.
    Lippert’s most famous film, The Fly, cost approximately $350,000 to make and went on to gross more than $3 million. The story originated from a 1957 short story in Playboy Magazine. Lippert hired novice James Clavell to write his first script for the 1958 film, which co-starred Vincent Price. The film’s depiction of a brilliant but tragic scientist, who accidentally transforms himself into a fly/human hybrid, complete with a fly’s head, horrified and captivated audiences.
    Lippert Jr. remembers an aspiring actor in the mid-1950s named Jack Nicholson coming to his father’s office at Fox for an appointment. “He was just a young guy,” he recalls, adding that Lippert sometimes gave the struggling actor money for food.

Long Hours, Hard Work

    Lippert Jr. saw his father infrequently after he stopped working for Lippert in 1956. But Lippert didn’t see much of his wife, either, because he was always traveling.
    “He was always on the go. He was a workaholic. I only knew him to take one vacation in his life. You do 10 pictures a year for a company—that is a lot of film. Of course, he lived in his office. But he loved it. He enjoyed it,” says Lippert Jr.
    Maury Dexter, now 77, joined Lippert’s production company as an assistant in 1956, just after Lippert had signed with Fox. Dexter says, for the first three years, the deal called for 20 pictures a year, each with a budget of $125,000. On the average, the films had 10- to 12-day shooting schedules.
    Dexter remembers Lippert as straightforward and businesslike. “He was tough but fair. He knew what he wanted to do, and had the power to do it,” says Dexter. He says Lippert’s approach to movie-making built whole films around catchy titles. “Bob being an old exhibitor, he believed that the titles were what lured people into the theater. Bob was a marketer,” says Dexter. “Bob would often come up with the titles, and the scripts were written around them. He came in one morning and said, ‘What do you think of House of the Damned?” Lippert’s titles still catch the eye today, including Man Bait, G.I. Jane, Alligator People, Seven Women from Hell and 20,000 Eyes.

Return to Alameda

    Tired of making movies, Lippert returned with his wife to the Bay Area and lived in Danville for two years before settling back in Alameda. Lippert quickly refocused on his theater business, and between 1965 and 1976, he doubled the size of his theater chain. Lippert also built some of the first multiplexes, or multiple-screen theaters, in the country, including Showcase Cinemas I & II at South Shore Center in 1968. The ever-cost-conscious Lippert could now offer two films, but had to pay only one projectionist, cashier and manager. In 1970, he bought the Island Auto Movie Drive-In.
    “He had no [other] interests at all, just the next picture, the next theater. That was his only interest—theaters,” says Lippert Jr. “He’d still be building theaters today, if he was alive.”
    In 1973, at age 64, Lippert suffered a heart attack. Actor William Holden, a good friend of Lippert Jr.’s, reached him in the South Pacific, where he was living after an early retirement, and told him the bad news. Lippert Jr. returned to the Bay Area to aid his ailing father and became general manager of theater
and concession operations for Lippert Affiliated and Transcontinental Theaters—118 theaters at the time.
    The Alameda Theatre opened in 1932 when Robert Lippert was 23 years old, but he’d never owned it. In 1973 he bought it, “realizing the dream of his lifetime,” his wife told the Alameda Times-Star after his death. Lippert spent $85,000 on alterations, including the conversion of the balcony into two additional theaters.
    Lippert had returned to where he began, managing a theater in Alameda just as he had more than 40 years earlier. “It was his theater. He used to have Saturday matinees. He never charged the kids. He personally paid—out of his own pocket—for the Saturday matinees,” says Lippert Jr. Lippert had an office in the Alameda Theatre, but it was to be his last. He died of a heart attack in November 1976.
    Lippert Jr. closed the Alameda Theatre in 1979 and tried to sell it to the city of Alameda for $1, but the city wouldn’t buy it. It became a roller rink for a few years and then a gymnastics center. “The theater was a loser, so I closed it down,” says Lippert Jr. “The city could have had that theater for nothing. I eventually sold it for a half million dollars.”
    But the Art Deco movie palace will show movies again soon. It will be the centerpiece of a new multiplex seven-screen theater that is scheduled to open in fall 2006. The city of Alameda will spend $25 million on its share of the joint project with developer MovieTECS.
    Faced with a large inheritance tax of approximately $25 million, Lippert Jr. sold off the Lippert Theaters chain after his father’s death. He kept a few theaters into the 1980s, including the Alameda Theatre and the South Shore Showcase Cinemas I & II. In the late 1980s, Lippert Jr.’s son, Robert Lippert III, managed the South Shore cinemas. The theater closed in 1998 and was demolished in 2002.
    Today, Robert Lippert’s legacy is as a movie producer, theater builder/owner and innovator.
    But however he’s remembered, Alameda can call Robert Lippert its very own movie mogul, whose nearly 60-year career in the movie industry began and ended here on this island he called home.    

Foundation Established

    After Robert Lippert Jr. sold off most of the theaters, he retired for the last time, left Alameda and moved to Pebble Beach in 1986. His mother had died in 1984, and his father had been dead a decade. But in 1990, in honor of his father, Lippert Jr. established the Robert L. Lippert Foundation, a trust set up for charitable or educational activities to benefit the citizens of the city of Alameda exclusively.
    Over the past 15 years, the Lippert Foundation has given slightly more than $600,000 to three primary charities: Alameda Boys and Girls Club, Alameda Boy Scouts Council and Alameda Meals on Wheels. Other beneficiaries of the Lippert Foundation have included Alameda Little League, which in 1998 received $12,000 to build a Little League field for its youngest players. Once completed, the league named it Lippert Field.
    Each year, the foundation also gives nine college scholarships of up to $2,000 to three students each from Alameda High School, Encinal High School and St. Joseph Notre Dame High School. The Alameda Civic Light Opera also has enjoyed the foundation’s support for its summer student internship program since 2000.
    A five-member board runs the Lippert Foundation: Jim Stonehouse, Rick McKinley, Felipe Santiago, Richard Sherratt and former Alameda mayor Bill Withrow Jr.
    In April of 2003, Lippert Jr. gave the foundation a check for $756,000 from the sale of his father’s old Island Auto Movie Drive-In off of Webster Street, which had closed after storm damage in 1991. Lippert Jr. is in the process of giving $1 million through the foundation to the Alameda Boys and Girls club so it can build a new building, which is supposed to cost between $5 million and $6 million. “They’re negotiating with the school district for some land,” he says. In 15 years, Lippert Jr. has given $1.4 million to the foundation, and, upon his death, his estate will give an additional $3 million.

LIPPERT DISPLAY

A PERMANENT DISPLAY ABOUT Robert L. Lippert may be found at
the Alameda Museum at 2324 Alameda Ave. The display contains memorabilia from his life as a young man growing up in Alameda and his career as a Hollywood movie producer. It includes pictures, posters, articles, theater programs and two original movie projectors Lippert used at the Lincoln/Bay Street and Times theaters in Alameda in the 1930s and 1940s. The museum is open Wednesdays through Sundays. Call (510) 521-1233 for more information.