Indian Hills Theatre: The Story of Omaha’s Lost Cinerama Palace
If you grew up in Omaha before the turn of the millennium, there’s a good chance the Indian Hills Theatre at 8601 West Dodge Road is where you saw your first genuinely big movie. For nearly 40 years, that circular building held one of the largest curved movie screens in the entire country.
And when a wrecking ball finally took it down in August 2001, Hollywood stars had written letters to stop it, a national preservation organization had backed the fight, and CBS News had covered the story. None of it was enough.
Here’s the full history of the Indian Hills Theatre: what it was, why it mattered, and what replaced it.
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Built for a Format That Barely Existed
The Indian Hills Theatre opened on December 21, 1962, in what was then a brand-new residential development on Omaha’s west side. The Indian Hills neighborhood had itself been built on a former golf course by Swanson Enterprises, the family behind the Swanson TV dinner. The theater was operated by the Cooper Foundation of Lincoln and designed by Denver architect Richard L. Crowther, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Crowther wasn’t designing a generic movie house. He was engineering a purpose-built machine for three-strip Cinerama, a widescreen projection format that used three synchronized projectors to wrap a single image across a deeply curved screen. Only a handful of theaters in the entire country were ever purpose-built for the format. Indian Hills had the largest Cinerama screen in the United States: roughly 105 to 110 feet wide, 35 feet tall, curving 146 degrees around the audience.
The auditorium itself was circular. The exterior was wrapped in black brick at the base and burnt-orange panels above, a color scheme that carried through into the interior. It was the first enclosed movie theater constructed in Omaha since the Center Theater in 1946, and nothing in the city looked remotely like it.
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What It Was Like to Go There
Going to the Indian Hills in its early years was nothing like the multiplex experience most Omahans know today. You called ahead to reserve a seat. A doorman opened the lobby door when you arrived. An usher in a tuxedo walked you to your seat with a flashlight. Concessions inside the auditorium weren’t permitted — no popcorn, no fountain drinks, just an orange drink and imported candy available in the lobby.
Then the lights dropped, the curtain pulled back, and the screen took over the room.
The theater opened with “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” and “In Search of the Castaways,” showing exclusively in true three-projector Cinerama through 1964. Its last Cinerama presentation was “How the West Was Won,” after which the theater transitioned to standard first-run films projected in 70mm and 35mm.
The building kept growing as Omaha expanded westward. A second screen, the 300-seat Cameo Theater, was added in 1977. Two more 200-seat auditoriums followed in 1987. By the end, the site housed four screens and roughly 1,550 total seats, all sharing that original circular lobby.
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The Film That Defined the Place
The Indian Hills Theatre’s defining cultural moment came in the summer of 1968. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” ran there in true 70mm Cinerama for 17 consecutive weeks beginning June 19, part of a national roadshow that included Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. For an entire generation of Omahans, that run was the experience that made the Indian Hills feel like something beyond just a movie theater.
Omaha filmmaker Jim Fields, who went on to document the theater’s preservation fight, put it plainly in an interview with Omaha Magazine: “Going to the Indian Hills in the mid-’60s to ’70s made a big impact on me. Reserved seats, ultra-wide screen, souvenir programs. When I saw ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in 70mm, it was the first time I had seen a film as opposed to a movie. I saw it over and over. It’s my favorite.”
“Jaws,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” and the other big-format releases of those decades all came through Indian Hills at a time when seeing a film at full scale — really at full scale — required a screen like this one.
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Ownership Changes and a Closing That Caught People Off Guard
Over the decades, the Indian Hills passed through several owners: Commonwealth Theaters, United Artists, First International Theatres, and eventually Carmike Cinemas. It was Carmike’s bankruptcy filing in 2000 that ended things. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, Carmike was permitted to cancel its lease on Indian Hills alongside several other locations it deemed underperforming.
The theater closed on September 28, 2000, just months before a planned renovation that would have updated the seats, drapery, and sound systems. At the time of its closing, the Indian Hills was believed to be one of only four theaters remaining in the United States still capable of screening true Cinerama.
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The Preservation Fight That Made National News
Preservation-minded buyers spent the fall and winter of 2000 trying to work out a deal to reopen and restore the theater. By April 2001, Nebraska Methodist Health System, which operated a hospital campus nearby on West Dodge, had made an offer to purchase the property. Two months later, Methodist announced its plan: demolish the theater and use the land as a parking lot. The cited renovation costs were north of $1 million.
What followed turned a local zoning dispute into a national story.
The Indian Hills Theater Preservation Society formed almost immediately. The National Trust for Historic Preservation announced it was backing the effort. And because Cinerama commands a devoted following among some of the most prominent figures in film history, letters opposing demolition arrived from Kirk Douglas, Janet Leigh, Patricia Neal, Charlton Heston, Ray Bradbury, film critic Leonard Maltin, and director Robert Wise. CBS News ran the story nationally.
On July 2, 2001, 115 people gathered at a public rally to push for the theater’s survival. Two weeks later, demolition crews began taking down the three smaller auditoriums regardless. Omaha’s Landmarks Heritage Preservation Commission voted to grant the building historic-landmark status, but landmark designation couldn’t reverse a demolition already in progress. The main Cinerama auditorium, the circular core of the building, came down on August 20, 2001.
Some of the theater’s contents were saved. A portion went to Larry Karstens, part of an investment group that had attempted to lease the building before the end. Other pieces were donated to local arts organizations, including the Rose Blumkin Performing Arts Center.
The preservation fight itself became a documentary. Omaha filmmaker Jim Fields directed a film originally titled “Saving the Indian Hills.” He later expanded the project to include preservation battles in Boston, Chicago, and Salt Lake City, re-releasing the documentary in 2006 under the title “Preserve Me a Seat.”
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What Stands There Today
For roughly 15 years after the demolition, the site was exactly what Methodist had described: a parking lot adjacent to the hospital campus.
That changed in 2017, when Methodist sold the 12-acre property. Children’s Hospital & Medical Center purchased approximately seven acres for its own expansion. NP Dodge Co. purchased the remaining five acres, including the precise footprint where the Indian Hills once stood, and redeveloped 8601 West Dodge Road into a roughly 60,000-square-foot office and retail building. Office space occupies the upper floors; a ground-floor pad site was built out for a restaurant. Current tenants include a Methodist physicians’ clinic and an NP Dodge real estate office.
There’s no marker at the address. No plaque. Nothing at street level to signal that this particular block of West Dodge Road was once home to the largest Cinerama screen in the country.
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Why People Still Talk About It
The Indian Hills lives on almost entirely in memory — in postcards, in Durham Museum photographs, in the firsthand accounts of people who can still describe which movie they saw there and exactly where they sat. For nearly four decades, Omaha had one of the best movie screens in the country. The building was unusual enough, and the fight to save it prominent enough, that film historians outside Nebraska still know the name.
If you have a memory of a film you saw at the Indian Hills, the usher who walked you to your seat, the moment the lights dropped before “2001,” or the opening weekend crowd for whatever blockbuster brought you through those doors. That’s exactly the kind of story worth sharing.
For more Omaha history and local stories, check out some other stories from Hurrdat ONE. Think we missed something about the Indian Hills? Let us know.
