Visiting the Great Movie Palaces of Los Angeles

Inside the Los Angeles, built in 1931.

(Berger/Conser Photography, from the book The Last Remaining Seats: Movie Palaces of Tinseltown, www.bergerconser.com)

Downtown Los Angeles is a great place to find cut-rate stereos, haggle over “designer” sunglasses, or pick up a belt with a platinum handgun for a buckle. But once it was home to a string of lavish movie palaces that rivaled New York’s Great White Way in terms of elegance and star power. The likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford trod the red carpets, and Judy Garland and Jack Benny played live vaudeville acts to delighted fans. A group called the Los Angeles Conservancy has been vigorously preserving these buildings and leading weekend tours that offer unique opportunities to get inside lost L.A.

“My job is really to tell you a good story, and these theaters tell a story about the evolution of popular entertainment in the first third of the twentieth century,” said the guide the day I went, Randy Henderson. Armed with a giant flashlight and an overflowing satchel, he led us to 11 theaters all within six blocks of one another. He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of both movie and municipal history, and he filled three hours with entertaining tales of pre-World War II Los Angeles.

In 1910 moving pictures jostled elbows with vaudeville acts in modest theaters, but as it became clear that the new medium was here to stay, powerful show business bosses in New York and Los Angeles decided to build sumptuous movie palaces based on the Paris Opera. These were places where the middle class could indulge in fantasies of wealth and enjoy an atmosphere that the upper-class would have found suitable.

The theaters were to be total entertainment packages: a trip to France, a stroll though a museum, and a chance to see your favorite star, all rolled into one. The idea was to “sell tickets to theaters, not movies,” said one owner. The facades were rich with ornament, and inside hung tapestry, paintings, and chandeliers. Statues of wilting maidens with drapery discreetly sliding off their lithe frames lounged against pillars, and uniformed ushers escorted the guests to their seats.

Randy starts his tour at Sid Grauman’s 1918 Million Dollar Theater, at Broadway and Fourth Street. After the movie business moved to Hollywood and the downtown theaters began to lose business, the Million Dollar survived by playing Spanish language films. A dingy lobby put in during the 1950s belies the magnificent auditorium behind it covered with decorations carved in dark wood. Whimsical figures from an English fairy tale writhe over the balcony’s elaborate organ screen, while a carved skeleton with an Egyptian headdress looks down on the audience from a perch at the center of the proscenium. The theater’s exterior is encrusted with cement curlicues, woolly buffalo heads, and longhorn steers’ skulls, all in a Spanish baroque style complete with niches that hold not saints but fantastic figures representing facets of the entertainment industry.

Were it not for my cinephile guide, I would have strolled right by the two oldest remaining theaters on Broadway, clustered together between 5th and 6th Streets: Clune’s Broadway, renamed the Cameo, and Pantages, now the Arcade. They were both built in 1910, when the movie palace movement was just beginning, so they are more modest showplaces with less than a thousand seats apiece. Today their lobbies are retail spaces, and bemused workers let Randy take us into the auditoriums, which are used for storage.

My eyes needed a moment to adjust in the dim back room the Cameo, but gradually the gilded leaves of the proscenium floated into view around the gaping eye of an empty stage. We peered through the shadows at a low-slung balcony festooned with golden vines sweeping over piles of cardboard boxes.

Cater-corner to these now lackluster buildings is the Los Angeles, a magnificent French baroque structure modeled on the palace at Versailles. It was built for just over $1 million in 1931. America was in the throes of the Depression, but that didn’t stop the Los Angeles’s owner, H. L. Gumbiner, from making sure his patrons viewed films in comfort and style. The tour doesn’t allow you inside that theater, but Randy’s description of the plush interior was evocative nonetheless.

The high point was the 1926 Orpheum, which has recently undergone a $3 million renovation and plays host to special events including movie premieres. Its vaulting lobby is overhung with jeweled chandeliers, and limpid nude maidens attend the staircases leading to a second level where people once looked out through draped windows and watched the crowds arrive.

Entering the auditorium, with its scalloped ceiling, I was greeted by music from a 1928 Wurlitzer organ capable of making 14,000 sounds, including a persuasive imitation of a Model T horn, twittering birds, and a train whistle, used to enliven silent movies. The Orpheum is the only one of these theaters that has held on to its organ. Over the sweeping balcony hang the original chandeliers, one repaired with bakelite panels after it fell one night in the 1930s (thankfully when the theater was empty).

As television took entertainment into the home and the suburbs drained downtowns of their traffic, these theaters were gradually torn down or adapted to be used as jewelry stores, discos, and even churches. But some, like the Los Angeles, Orpheum, and Million Dollar, retained their original glory as locations for special events, filming, and the occasional premiere. “These spaces are still being used,” Randy said, shrugging off our clamoring questions about whether they could be “saved.”

But with luxury in today’s movie theaters meaning a cup holder and 20 minutes of commercials, it is easy to wax nostalgic for the old days when a night at the pictures was a glamorous affair and movie theaters were, as one architect put it, “shrines to democracy where the wealthy rub elbows with the poor.”

The Los Angeles Conservancy’s walking tours cost $10 for non-members. For information visit www.laconservancy.org or call 213-623-CITY.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.