Brick-and-Mortar Jewel Boxes

Some of the brightest gems I love in Los Angeles are its movie theaters. What could be a better tribute to the art of film than to house them in celestial-inspired shrines? The exterior facades are as alluring as the magic inside flickering on film. Embellished stone or color-encrypted light bulbs decorate what would otherwise be a normal building. "Going to the big picture show" isn't just "going to the movies." It's an entirely unreal experience: from the first footfalls approaching an exterior illuminated to a state of spectacular, to the moment we look over our shoulder, remembering a world outside our own. 

The Majestic Crest:

 

Since its opening in 1940, the Crest Theater has undergone many transformations, renamings, and remodels. Located close to the UCLA campus, the theater was known as UCLAN for a time, in concordance with the university's name at the time: University of California at Los Angeles. It has also been known as the Westwood Theater or the Westwood Crest. By the 1980s, the interior was redecorated in art-deco style, complete with a ceiling of stars. Before a show starts, a shooting star explodes across the mimic-night sky. 

Grauman's Egyptian:

The Egyptian Theater is the site of Hollywood's first movie premiere in 1922 for Robin Hood. Tickets for the opening were $5, a hefty price at the time. Showman Sid Grauman and real estate developer Charles E. Toberman built the theater, deciding on the Egyptian theme soon after plans for a Hispanic theme were already in development. Hieroglyphics paint the walls, and huge columns stand throughout, although in one ceiling section, Hispanic designs remain intact. Grauman built the world renown Chinese Theater five years after the Egyptian opened. 

The Million Dollar Theater:

Quite possibly L.A.'s oldest theater, built in 1918, is the Million Dollar Theater. It was designed by Albert C. Martin, a prominent architect at the time, and was developed by Grauman before the Egyptian was built. Carved into its stone facade are figures of bison heads and long horn skulls, in traditional Spanish Churrigueresque style. Located in Downtown, it stands across from the Bradbury building, another historic architectural landmark. When it opened, it housed 2,345 seats, one of the largest theaters in the world at the time. After refurbishing in 2008, the theater reopened and now plays shows on a special basis. 

The El Capitan Theatre:

The El Capitan originally housed live performances, instead of films. It opened in 1926 with Charlot's Revue, starring Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence, and Beatrice Lillie. Also developed by Toberman and Grauman, the theater was built across the street from Grauman's Chinese and a few blocks away from the Egyptian. In keeping with the ongoing cultural theme, the El Capitan was designed with Spanish Colonial influences. The world premiere of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was held at the El Capitan in 1941. From 1941 to 1991 it was known by the name of the "Hollywood Paramount." It is now operated by Walt Disney Pictures.

-- Jennifer Pellerito

Photo Credit: Jennifer Pellerito

Genius Loci: My L.A.

Many American cities have famed, distinctive skylines – think of New York, Seattle or Chicago and you’ll probably also think of the collection of buildings that make the city iconic. I haven’t found this to be as true for L.A., probably because this earthquake-prone city isn’t known for its skyscrapers – there is no Empire State Building, no Space Needle, no Sears Tower.

Instead of specific buildings, L.A. is recognizable for – among many things – its vastness. The city goes on and on. Whether seen from Griffith Park or from LMU’s own Bluff (as above), the stretch of lights – to me – is a reminder that there is so much more to explore in Los Angeles. It’s a city I’ve seen, for the most part, from a distance. The one part of the city I’ve really set my zoom lens on is its world of movies.

One visual that shouts, “You’re back in L.A.!” are billboards, especially billboards for movies. In Pierce County, Wash., where I grew up, there are laws significantly limiting where there can be billboards. They are a rare site there, in stark contrast to the mass of advertising around Los Angeles.

Movie theaters are my L.A. There are so many to choose from – multiplexes to small indie theaters, to historic revival ones. A marquee announcing the presence of a favorite filmmaker is Los Angeles to me.

Red carpets, dozens of camera flashes going off at once, a loud crowd of reporters packed into a small space: movie premieres are another part of my L.A., something I’ve gotten to see from the perspective of a journalist on the press line. Here is a look at the fans flanking “The Hunger Games” premiere and a behind-the-scenes peek at the Oscars red carpet, taken from the press route through Hollywood and Highland Center.

Coordinates: 620 Lincoln Boulevard

As it stands, 2010

THE FOX DISCOUNT DEPARTMENT  Store is quite a fancy name for what, in essence, is an indoor flea market. Technically, yes, it is a store, with different vendors establishing the departments, selling discount merchandise, so the name isn't entirely deceptive. But then there's that towering Fox sign, coupled with the peaked street-facing awning that suggests a former glory as a palace of cinematic dreams and memory.

In my early teens I found myself running with an older crowd. As our junior and senior high school orchestras were combined many of us seventh and eighth graders found ourselves sharing music stands with tenth and eleventh graders who were more than happy to bring us unto their world, and we were more than happy to follow. How could I resist? They had access to cars and could drive, and to be a fourteen-year-old tagging along on weeknight and weekend adventures beyond the easy bicycling confines of Culver City was like winning the lottery.

Many of those excursions led to 620 Lincoln Boulevard where I would pony up a dollar and fifty cents to see a double bill at what was the Fox Venice Theatre. In the days before cable and video-on-demand, before DVDs, before VCRs even, the only way to see an old movie was either by chance on TV or in second-run theatres like the Fox Venice where films were programmed into interesting combinations on a calendar. The bills changed daily and it wasn't unusual for the theatre to sell out its 900 seats on any given weeknight. Despite the glut of content all over the web today from streaming sights like Netflix I still occasionally discover films that I saw at the Fox Venice that as yet never made it to video or DVD.

1980 calendar. Every cool kid had one on his wall.

Back then, seeing the Fox Venice calendar in a rack at a music store, a bookstore, or better yet on the walls of a friend's bedroom, lent a cache of cultural cool to those establishments. There was an ad hoc, free-spirited, clinging hippie vibe in those silk-screened calendars, a beautiful chaos in those paste-up graphics that bespoke a love of the movies. The audiences were no less eclectic, consisting of college-age adults and cinephiles, nostalgic older adults banking the fires of their memories while feeding off the energies of a younger generation, and younger kids like myself who felt we were getting a peek into a non-conformist counter culture. Today the experience might derisively be viewed as a sort of hipster scene, but it was a scene outside the mainstream unironically beholden to the cast-offs of Hollywood's memory, a church dedicated to the art form removed from its commercial trappings.

Fading glory, 1968

It's difficult to look at this bland, blue-gray building and think this was the place where I encountered many firsts. It was where I saw my first R and X-rated movies – if the soft-core satire Flesh Gordon really counts as a true X-rated movie anymore. Watching a midnight show of the Jamaican gangster-biopic hybrid The Harder They Fall became a crash course in the burgeoning Rastafarian subculture, back in a day when theatres still had smoking sections and wouldn't think of insisting on only tobacco. Not that I smoked, not that the theatre could enforce their own policies, not that anyone cared that the auditorium glowed with the blue haze of marijuana illuminated by the light on the screen. This was where I saw David Bowie as The Man Who Fell to Earth, where Tod Browning introduced me to Freaks, where I saw Rocky Horror with the creators of audience participation... all before I was old enough to drive. The Fox Venice was where I saw my first foreign films and realized there were stories, real stories, that movies could tell, with ambiguous and not always happy endings.

These experiences were formative and not in the least minor. Prior to the Fox Venice I had a vague sense of wanting to work in movies, but it left me with a life-long questioning of what it meant to tell stories that were true. There was also a reverence that could be felt sitting in that mid-century modern auditorium, this idea that, as a young teen, I was accepted into an adult audience. No one asked me what I was doing there or thought it weird or made me feel as thought I couldn't appreciate what transpired on the screen.

Somewhere in the dark of the Fox Venice, amid the hormonal confusion and narrative dissonance, I lost my childhood innocence. There is a hazy image I have of an alien-looking band of musicians crowded on stage playing an odd arrangement of “Minnie the Moocher” as sung by the devil, the band wearing turbans like bath towels embedded with mechanical eyeballs surveying the audience. Anecdotal evidence over the years suggests this was an early gig from a group called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, later to cute their name down to the last two words, featuring a young Danny Elfman as the devil. But there I was, hearing Cab Calloway's words coming out the rubbery, exaggerated mouth of red-painted crooner inside a shrine dedicated to holding on to the orphans of cinema, and I felt both enthralled and at home. Any true map of the places I have lived in my life wold have to include the address 620 Lincoln.

Opening Night.

What had opened in 1951 as a part of the Fox West Coast Theatre Corporation's exhibition chain, a deco-infused first-run house showing traditional Hollywood fare, had by 1968 found itself on the ropes. Whether because of dropping attendance in the age of television or the fact that the theatre didn't posses the majesty (or prime location) of it's sister theatres in Westwood and on Wilshire, the building's decline as a theatre was protracted but inevitable. Gaining a second wind as a revival theatre in the 1970s then as an Art house in the early 1980s, the Fox Venice couldn't hold on in an era where most palaces (or barns, as large older theatres were called by that time) were carved into multiplexes or simply leveled for their land. The final blow came in 1988 when building renovations uncovered asbestos, a common fire-proofing material that was commonly used in public buildings since been known to cause cancerous mesothelioma, that forced the auditorium to be shut down and gutted. That the basic shell of the Fox Venice theatre still stands is more a testament to the fact that the surrounding neighborhood hasn't seen much in the way of modern development and, sadly, not some grand notion that the building is worth anything beyond the memories it triggers.

It would be fitting to end with a memory of the last film I ever saw at the Fox Venice, but I just don't know what it was. It would had to have been in late July or early August of 1980, and the fact that I don't remember it as strongly as other outings that summer after I graduated from high school – final group excursions to Stan's Donuts and Falaful King in Westwood, last “hangs” with friends at Foster's Freeze on Washington Blvd. and sunsets at Dockweiler Beach in Playa Del Rey, a last stroll of the Fox Hills Mall and a group field trip to Magic Mountain in Valencia – leads me to believe that the last movie I ever saw at the Fox Venice was a solo outing. And as I did when I moved away to college, I never said goodbye to friends and family thinking I would never see them again, I never thought to say a final farewell to the Fox Venice I knew and loved.

-- David Elzey 

photo credits, from top to bottom:
Los Angeles Movie Palaces, photo credit: Bill Counter
the author's private collection
Cinema Treasures 
USC Digital Library, Herald Examiner Collection, photo credit: Donald Irwin Sandusky


additional reference material:
Virtual Venice, "Tale of the Fox," from the Free Venice Beachhead, June 1978

City of Sunlight: L.A. Through the Prism

SOMEHOW, I ended up with the film Cyrus, staring John C. Reilly, in my Netflix queue. It was suggested for one reason or another -- one that I'm still not quite clear about. It's a romantic comedy with a tilt, I guess you could say.  Once I began watching it, however, I found myself more interested in not what was going on plot wise, but what was going on in the background --  literally.  The backdrop of the film is Los Angeles.

The architecture, the slope of the hills, the quality of sunlight: Much of it looked as if it was shot in Northeast L.A. -- Silver Lake, Echo Park -- or was meant to be translated as such.  The houses the characters inhabited were California Bungalows or modest stucco domiciles surrounded by vibrant  tangles of bougainvillaea and agave. It was Paradise enclosed and protected by a picket fence or a brief retaining wall. For each character, that plot of land was the postage stamp of Los Angeles' promise -- despite the mayhem exploding in their personal lives. 

This on-screen glimpse, through a filmmaker's eye made me think about how enchanting this Los Angeles looked through the camera and about other films that have chosen to focus as well that quiet natural beauty -- that Arcadia, we've been talking about --  rather than the forced Hollywood plastic glam Los Angeles often seems to be defined by.

Have any of you seen Steve Martin's Shop Girl? I remember watching this film and also making an mental note that Steve Martin really does see the beauty of Los Angeles alongside the complicated lives we work through. Light too plays an important part, as well as the architecture (and the defining characteristics of neighborhoods) that help to delineate  communities and sketch characters.

So, I thought I'd put together a brief list of films that show off Los Angeles' nuanced beauty -- the light, the flora, the sense of personal space and the freedom that comes with that.




Here's the trailer for Cyrus:

This film, Quincinera, also set in Echo Park, feels very much like a walk through the city during a very particular time in L.A. -- the early to mid 90s as the neighborhood began to gentrify.

Check out the Lincoln Lawyer for views of Highland Park and georgeous Echo Park sunset-to-twilight. 

What are some of your favorites? Images of L.A. on film that stick with you?

Lords of Dogtown: "Poetic License"

JUST A QUICK riff on Caroline's post about Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Not too long after the documentary about the Westside skate tribes made its rounds, a feature film based on their story premiered on the big screen in 2005. The film,  Lords of Dogtown, is the dramatized retelling of the story of skaters Jay Adams, Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva. 

Jay, Stacy and Tony -- the "Hollywood Version" in  Lords of Dogtown

Directed by Stacy Peralta, (who was part of the scene and also prominently featured in the doc) Lords of Dogtown explores the same ground yet via a different prism.  It's a clarifying compliment to watch the two side by side. While 2001's Z-Boys was frank, edgy and gloriously frayed at the edges in a realistic way,  the Lords of Dogtown is all mood,  evoking a re-enacted of-the-moment "sense of place." It speaks to some elements we have been discussing in class -- voice, point of view and how memories of places and scenes now gone -- unfold differently in various hands.

Jay Adams, for one, pretty much thought the film was in a way, Dogtown Lite.That, however, he suggests, was largely the problem with the Hollywood version of gritty subcultures:

 "Movies about surfing and skateboarding have always turned out to be pretty bad. Usually they're pretty corny. The only one that I ever really liked was “Big Wednesday.” Movies like “Thrashin” made me want to hide. I think “Lords of Dogtown” was kind of like “Blue Crush” but for little boys instead of girls. “Blue Crush” was a little girl movie. I thought they did a good job on it. I thought the same for ours. I mean, it was PG-13. How real can it be?

First of all, Stacy Peralta never hung out with us. He was a Z boy, but he wasn't a Dogtowner. I have to give Stacy a lot of credit. Think of how hard it would be to write a movie about yourself and not come across as being big-headed. Stacy was a really great skateboarder. He did good in contests and was smart as far as making money is concerned. Some of the things in the movie were true, but a lot were made up just to make the story better."

Adams has photographed and written extensively about the scene himself.  You might want to check this out too. 


Here's a couple of windows in on that moment in L.A via Stacy Peralta's POV.:

Lords of Dogtown: The Trailer: 

 Pool Skating: Let's turn "the dream" inside out . . .

-- L.G.

Coordinates: Unearthing Vanished L.A.

SURFING THE internet a couple weeks back, I happened upon a website selling handmade trinkets -- mostly charms for bracelets, unusual earrings or cufflinks. They were conversation pieces; items that  commemorated buildings, streetcars, supermarkets, bakeries and beer-brands that hailed from New Orleans,  Louisiana  yet were physically no longer in existence. The webmaster had titled the page  -- "Ain't There No More" -- and I could hear that sentence delivered rapid-fire in one of my friend's or relative's idiosyncratic Louisiana Creole accents.

I have to say though, I thought, immediately, that the other L.A. -- our Los Angeles -- could have not occupied just a page, but an entire other city dedicated to what isn't here any longer.

Often, you'll hear Angelenos dolling out directions by referencing markers that were once in its place. It's a strange way to live in the present.  Our memories are cluttered with such locations. Some addresses have had multiple identities and lives within one building -- like a brick-and-mortar nesting doll;  others sites continue to be razed entirely and built up over and over again and so often, Angelenos really have to force  the recollection, because even the landmarks nearby have been "updated," "renovated," "retrofitted."

We live in a place filled with the promise of new beginnings and the impatient expectation of them. We want Los Angeles to be "the fix," the geographical solution to our problems. That's a lot to heap on a city's shoulders.

Above, you'll see a charming building, one that when I look at it conjures F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories or the beautiful black-and-white movies I would stay up at night to bathe in the blue glow of   on the old Channel 11-KTTV (decades before it was known as Fox). This was once the old  Hollywood Hotel and it stood  at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, which many of you know now looks - sigh -- like this below. 

As if we needed another mall, really.

In the next few weeks under the tag  "Coordinates" you'll be reading  posts from a couple of guest bloggers weighing in on various spots on L.A.'s vast grid  --   former empty lots, college hangouts, late-night watering holes,  down-at-the-heels  hotels  -- now turned into McMansions or coffee chains or any number of   mixed-use playgrounds.  What sort of memories and histories do these re-imagined spots hold or trigger? What old boundary lines did they once draw? What community did they once host?   

The above images come from the wonderful Facebook page, Vintage Los Angeles. Check it out for a mind-blowing compare and contrast of then-and-now L.A.

And below, check out the trailer for the film "Hollywood Hotel" in its black and white glory.

-- L.G.

"Anchor's Aweigh"--Exposing the Boosters

YELLOWS, REDS, blues and oranges lit up against the neon pink sunset.  Street carts selling fruits, handmade dolls, trinkets, skirts, hats lined the cobblestone streets as the scent of tamales wafted through the air.  Dark-haired men wearing sombreros and women wearing big flowing skirts are playing instruments and waiting for the occasional passerby to buy an item from their cart. Gene Kelly, followed by Frank Sinatra, dressed in a blue Navy uniform, walks up to one of these carts and to ask the vendor a question.  Although it may seem like these two famous actors from the 40’s are taking a vacation in Mexico, they are actually just outside of the MGM Studios lot in, none other than, Los Angeles. 

LA was founded upon this false identity forged by its founding boosters. I never realized how prevalent it was until I watched a one of the classics from its time that replicated all these ideals that the boosters promoted. “Anchors Aweigh,” a 1945 movie starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly tells the story of two sailors that are on leave in Hollywood, Los Angeles.  The scenes switch between what was then, the MGM studio lot and this little two that was previously described.  This is what the boosters promoted, the mending together of the dreams of fame and the promise of warm weather, in a beautiful town surrounded by Hispanic influence.

At the end of the film, we meet Frank Sinatra’s love match and the illusion of the boosters is broken through.  She is a beautiful blonde from Brooklyn, New York, who, like many, came to Los Angeles because her “nose and the rest of her body were blue.” The allure of the LA weather and the utopian world was the true pull on her to come to the “magical land.” However, as she finds herself working in a Mexican restaurant as a waitress, a true oxymoron of the utopian ideal and truth behind its mask, tells Sinatra’s character, “My nose isn’t blue anymore, but the rest of me is.”  It is still interesting to me that even in a lighthearted film of that time, filmmakers can find the cracks behind the façade.

Like it did for many, Los Angeles  told the false tale that built them up to break them down.

-- Elise Fornaca

Photo: Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, top; bottom Kelly dances with Sharon McManus

Image via imageshack.us

LA's Ghosts of the Past

“WE CAME, we saw, we kicked ass!” said Bill Murray’s character Dr. Peter Venkman in the 1984 Ghotstbusters thriller as they leaped into the Ghostbusters car with their freshly captured ghost. This random threesome of paranormal doctors paired up to create the “largest paranormal removal company in America,” while capturing audiences everywhere.  These men and their ghosts remain icons today.  The men, the car and the song are rhetorical masterpieces of the 1980’s film industry.  But what is the car without the actors, the songs, the ghosts and the magic that encompasses the giant flat screens of the theatres? Alone, the car is just that, an ordinary car.

The appeal came from the red streaks along the side and the ghost containers and trackers that lined the top.  But the real icon was in the red circle with a ghost inside and a red streak slashed through, slapped in the middle of the diver’s side door that symbolized the end to paranormals and for ghosts to BEWARE.  It zipped through the streets of “New York City” capturing all of the ghosts in sight.  It’s new home, however, is within the white lined rectangle of the third parking spot outside of the Judy Garland building on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City. The Ghostbusters Mobile is no longer any use for the three paranormal hunters. What used to transport ghosts captured in giant vacuums by three nerdy scientists is no more. Outside of the movies, it is stripped of its magic. Its “ass-kicking” abilities have been reduced to nothing more than an old white car from the 80’s. It was the means to which those brave men captured not just ghosts, but audiences everywhere, and yet, its only friend now is the black Green Hornet Cadillac and the occasional fan walking past on a tour from the lot, who stops to take a picture on their iPhone. 

Seeing the car is like seeing a faded outline of a woman who used to captivate men and women from the big screen or an ordinary man, who we used to watch scale buildings, dodge bullets and get the girl.  The movies will build you up, but once the lights in the theatre are turned back on and shine on the cracks within the surface as the glitter in the air fades away; it breaks you down to nothing more that tin metal in the shape of a car.

Denise Hamilton said, “LA makes promises it can’t keep.” This lonely Ghostbusters car is just one of Hollywood’s many victims.  It has become the outcome of Hollywood’s forgotten dreams and the realities of the movies, without the magic.

-- Elise Fornaca
 -- image via jalopnik.com