A search on 233 N. Vermont at Terraserver fetches a recent aerial view of the area, and there are no buildings that resemble a theater (at least from directly above) there today. The shadow of that pitched roof on the front of the building would surely show in an aerial view. I think that this theatre must have been demolished.
Yes. The card with the reference to the wedding apparently had a misspelling of the name. It is Chotiner, rather than Chotner. All the other cards with references to the Chotiner family at the site are spelled correctly.
I think that the Music Box had become the Pix Theatre by the 1950s, and was showing movies. I think it most likely that the last two seasons of the Lux program were broadcast from the KNX studios on Sunset Boulevard.
I have a vague memory of some mention of a CBS Playhouse being located in the Sunset Boulevard facility. It was somewhere in the History of KNX section of the station’s web site. I think it was a caption to one of the pictures there (reached by a small link near the top of that page.) There is also one good photograph of the Vine Street Theater there, and another which I think is of the Music Box, but the captions of both refer to them as the CBS Playhouse.
A search on “Calhoun” and “Alice” (one name in each of the first two search boxes) at the L.A. Public Library’s California Index fetches 11 scanned index cards (I’m presuming that the actual items these cards reference are available at the library itself, probably the central library downtown) with references to her. According to one, she is indeed silent film star Alice Beatrice Calhoun (1904-1966), and another card refers to an article in the Hollywood Citizen of January 5th, 1927, announcing her marriage to M.C. Chotner, who I know was himself the owner of several theatres in the Los Angeles area. Many of them are listed here at Cinema Treasures, but I can’t remember their names offhand.
Stonewood Center is at the northeast corner of Firestone and Lakewood, about a half mile east of Downey’s old downtown. It was an open air shopping center when it was built in 1958, and became an enclosed mall when it was expanded in 1990. My Google search turned up a Lynn’s Hallmark Card and Party Shop for the address 136 Stonewood, though George Redfox says there is a fabric shop in the theatre’s old location. There is a JoAnn’s Fabrics at the center, in a building with an outside entrance, not on the mall proper, but I can’t find an exact address for it. I remember the theatre being in such a peripheral building, so that must be it. I think that addresses may have been shuffled in the expansion.
I’ve been having the same problem with it. I think that the collection has only recently been added to the college web site, and they probably don’t have the kinks worked out yet.
The Hidalgo/Miramar is probably the theatre designed by Clifford Balch, the plans for which were announced in the July 2, 1937 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. Balch designed a large number of theaters in the Spanish Colonial/Mission Revival styles in that era.
I don’t believe that The Casino Capistrano was ever a movie theater. It was a multi-purpose community building, built by the developers as an inducement to attract residential property buyers. I know that it was used as a ballroom for many years. Even in the early picture of it on this page of the San Clemente web site, it is topped by a sign reading “DANCE.” There is no marquee visible on the building.
My grandfather had a vacation house in an area about midway between Capistrano and San Clemente, and from my visits to the town in the 1950s, I know that it had only this one theatre.
I have a copy of the Los Angeles Times theatre listings from February of 1973, and at that time the Showcase was apparently still a single screen house, as no second screen is listed. I remember Stonewood Mall itself having been built in the 1950s. I think the theatre dates from the same time.
Thanks, Ken. I went to a few movies at the Music Box in the 1960s, when it was called the Pix Theatre. Then, I had no idea that it had had such a long and varied career.
I also remember passing by the Huntington Hartford, and having no idea what was under that modern facade. Until recently, I was under the impression that it had actually been built from the ground up by Hartford in the 1950s.
Do you happen to know the years during which the Lux Radio Theater was broadcast from the old Music Box (now Henry Fonda) Theater on Hollywood Boulevard? I know that the show started in New York City, then moved to Hollywood, where it was broadcast both from the CBS Playhouse and the Music Box, but I don’t know which theater was used first, or for how long each was used.
You can find some pictures of some of Hunt’s other buildings, particularly his work at Occidental College, online in the Robert Winter Collection, which is maintained by Occidental. Their campus, located in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles, is worth a visit, too.
The Patterson is no longer closed. It re-opened on May 16th, 2003, as an arts center and theater operated by Creative Alliance
Their web site describes the facility as providing two galleries, a 250 seat flexible theater, a classroom, media lab, offices, and live/work studios for artists. The address is now given as 3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore MD 21224, and the telephone number as 410-276-1651. Their e-mail address is
The web site’s brief history of the theater says that there was an earlier Patterson Theater built at the same location in 1910, which was demolished in 1929. The current building was opened in September, 1930, twinned in 1975, and closed in 1995. When opened in 1929, the Patterson was operated by the Grand Theater Company, an affiliate of Durkee Enterprises. The history page also mentions the marquee and the art deco sign, lighted by “a plethora of bulbs,” but it appears to be referring to the blade sign only. At least that feature was able to be saved and restored.
I have run across mentions of S. Charles Lee having remodeled a “Studio Theater” on Vine Street in 1936, but thought they were mistaken, because there was a Studio Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. This clears up the mystery.
I’ve never seen a picture of Mr. Woodley (Frank Erwin Woodley was his full name, I believe, and he was born in 1865, so he would have been the right age to be balding), but I can easily imagine any exhibitor of the day jumping at the chance to be in a movie. Think of the talk it would generate among the theatre’s patrons, and their friends and acquaintances, and the consequent increase in business!
It’s undoubtedly difficult to spot specific locations of the city in old movies, not only because of the way the movie scenes were shot out of sequence, but because so many places in Los Angeles looked so much like so many other places in Los Angeles. So much of the city was built over such a short time that all the buildings ended up being in designed in the same few styles.
Maybe someday you’ll run across an identified interior photograph of that theatre in “Career” and recognize it.
The only old pictures I’ve seen of the Vine Street Theater (all exterior shots, unfortunately) are those few in the L.A. Public Library photo database. (Click on the “Photo Collection” link, use the search terms “Theater Vine Street” and choose the search type “Subject Headings” from the menu. That brings up nine pictures. Some are of the building while under construction, some after completion.
I also know that the first alteration to the Vine Street Theater came as early as 1936, when S. Charles Lee designed a new marquee, and new heating and ventilating systems were installed. Lee sometimes did sketches of buildings to which he made alterations. If he made any of the Vine STreet, then they would probably be in the collection of his drawings and papers which, I believe, is held by UCLA. Since he made a major change only to the outside of this theater, though, he might not have bothered to make any interior sketches.
When Huntington Hartford bought the place in the 1950s, the remodeling he ordered was so complete that almost nothing remained of the original theatre but the outer walls. There are probably photographs of the old interior somewhere in the world- in old magazines and such, perhaps- but I have no idea where to find them.
The place also went by the name Mirror Theater for a while, but I don’t know if that was before or after it was the Huntington Hartford Theater. If it was earlier, then pictures of it from before the rebuilding might be sought out by that name as well as by the original name.
I remember when the book store moved from it’s original location on the northwest corner of Garfield and Main into the building that had once been half of Montgomery Ward’s Department Store. (The other half of Ward’s had been in the building with the small art deco tower on it, one door to the west, which later was renovated and occupied by Prober’s Shoes.) They had the biggest selection of paperbacks in the San Gabriel Valley after they moved to the new location. The place was huge.
The book store opened in its original location about 1964 or 1965, and was owned by the people who had formerly operated the Bungalow News on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. The store had been busier when it was at the corner of Garfield, even though the new location was bigger. I think they made a mistake by moving it. That mid-block location at the east end of town wasn’t as visible. They probably weren’t helped by the opening of a Waldenbooks on the Mervyn’s center in the early 1980s, either.
The Garfield didn’t have a balcony. You must be thinking of the Monterey Theatre, on Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park, which had a section of stadium seating in the back half of the auditorium. It was the only theatre in the area that had that arrangement, and none of the theatres in Alhambra ever had a balcony of any sort.
The Garfield Theatre, less than a mile north of the Monterey, at the corner of Garfield and Valley in Alhambra, had the rest rooms upstairs, on either side of the projection room, and there were small anterooms adjacent to them that had glazed windows overlooking the auditorium. The one adjacent to the Women’s rest room was probably used as a crying room, and might have had seating- I don’t know, since I never went up there. The one next to the men’s room had no seats, though, but you would often find guys using it as a smoking room, since smoking wasn’t allowed in the auditorium itself.
I attended the Whittwood only once, in the mid-1980s. The theatre did indeed have a stadium-type seating section at the back of the auditorium. This was a feature it shared in common with only a few theatres in the Los Angles area, among which were the 1917 Rialto on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, the 1924 Monterey in Monterey Park, and the more recent Loyola in the Westchester district of Los Angeles, and Crest in Long Beach.
I used to go to the Monterey frequently in the 1950s, and always liked sitting in the stadium section, though nobody called it that in those days. Everybody, including the theatre manager and staff, referred to it as the balcony, even though it wasn’t a proper balcony at all. The Whittwood was a much nicer theatre than the Monterey, though. In any case, both of them are gone now, along with the Crest, and the Loyola has been converted to offices, and the Rialto sits dark and empty, its lobby used for retail shops. These theatres were ahead of their time, and now they all but forgotten by most of the world.
It might be of interest to some that the architect of this theatre, William H. Wheeler, was also the architect of the very theatrical 5500 seat Angelus Temple, built in 1923 in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, for the notorious radio Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. There were few who understood show business as well as did Sister Aimee. She chose her architect well.
Southwest Builder and Contractor, June 4th, 1920, says that Walter P. Williams had the contract for the construction of a theatre building on Grand Avenue, Escondido, to seat 625 persons, and that work would commence at once. The owner of the theater was named as A. H. Nelson.
Southwest Builder and Contractor of April 23rd, 1937, announced that Clifford Balch had prepared the plans for a theatre at Escondido. The name of the theatre was not given in my source, but the timing was right for it to be the Ritz.
The earlier publication, Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer, issue of September 18th, 1909, mentions a theatre (again, no name given) that was to be erected at 5th and B Streets, Escondido, for a Mr. John Johnston, Jr. Apparently, the Johnston family was in the theatre business in Escondido for a long time.
The web site Silent Era lists a Jewel Theatre, with 700 seats, at 3829 Whittier Boulevard, operating in 1925. The source cited is Film Daily’s Film Year Book for 1926, page 485, with additional information provided by Lars Hedlind. Perhaps the discrepancy in address is the result of a remodeling which moved the entrance, or a street renumbering? Or perhaps the original theatre was destroyed, and replaced by this building in the 1930s?
The Hill Street Theatre opened on March 20th, 1922. It was built by the Orpheum Circuit as one of their “Junior Circuit” houses, which featured continuous Vaudeville shows of five acts, with only one headliner, alternating with movies, all day long. (The regular Orpheum Circuit theatres were two-show a day houses, strictly for Vaudeville, with more acts, more headliners, more elaborate staging and costumes and, of course, higher ticket prices.)
It was re-opened as the RKO Theatre on September 11th, 1929, but popular usage of the earlier name led the RKO circuit to begin advertising it as the RKO Hillstreet Theatre.
In its later years, it was operated simply as the Hillstreet Theatre by Metropolitan Theatres, which occasionally used the big stage for live music shows, but mostly ran movies. As downtown movie going declined in the late 1950s, the Hillstreet suffered more, and earlier, than did the somewhat smaller theatres on busier Broadway. I attended movies there several times from 1961-1963, and even on Friday and Saturday evenings, the sparse audiences, sometimes no more than a few dozen patrons, were lost in the cavernous auditorium. The closing of the Hillstreet was announced in a Los Angeles Times article of April 29th, 1963. It was demolished not long after.
The Hillstreet was not the most beautiful of downtown theatres, but I miss it as much as any of them, as it is the first theatre other than my neighborhood house of which I have any clear memory, dating from the late 1940s- early 1950s, when we went to an occasional matinee there. I can still see the shiny aluminum railings of the stairway to the balcony (where we never sat, which made it all the more desirable), and the five big oval reveals in the orchestra floor ceiling under the balcony, each lined with lights concealed in its coved edges and under a pendant fixture in the center of each reveal, so that each was a big, oval doughnut-shape of soft light. At the age of five, I thought it was about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I’m glad that I had the chance to refresh my memory by seeing it again, a dozen years later, before this theatre was taken away forever.
In 1926, when the Orpheum Circuit moved to its new theatre further down Broadway, this Orpheum was given the name Broadway Palace, which was displayed on the marquee and used in advertisements for the theatre. The name didn’t become simply the Palace Theatre until sometime later. The inclusion of the street name in the theatre’s name may have been to distinguish it from an earlier Palace Theatre which had been located nearby on Seventh Street, and which had closed only a few years before.
It’s interesting that the Optic was owned by Woodley. There was a Woodley’s Theater on Broadway at that time, on the site where the fourth Orpheum was later built. This Woodley’s was later renamed the Victory, and then was purchased by Mack Sennett in 1920, remodeled and expanded and renamed the Mission. So there’s another connection between Sennett and Woodley.
I wonder if the Woodley’s/Victory on Broadway could have been the more ornate second theatre you mentioned? Does “A Movie Star” include any scenes of that theatre’s surroundings, so that its location might be identifiable as the middle of the 800 block of Broadway? Hamburger’s Department Store (later the May Company) was just up the block across the street, and the Garrick Theater on the southeast corner of 8th was only a few doors up from Woodley’s. The Majestic would have been across the street and south a bit, and Tally’s original Broadway probably almost directly across the street. Broadway also makes that bend at Olympic Boulevard, so a scene looking south might have revealed that, though I’m not sure in what year Broadway was cut through that block.
A search on 233 N. Vermont at Terraserver fetches a recent aerial view of the area, and there are no buildings that resemble a theater (at least from directly above) there today. The shadow of that pitched roof on the front of the building would surely show in an aerial view. I think that this theatre must have been demolished.
Yes. The card with the reference to the wedding apparently had a misspelling of the name. It is Chotiner, rather than Chotner. All the other cards with references to the Chotiner family at the site are spelled correctly.
Christian:
I think that the Music Box had become the Pix Theatre by the 1950s, and was showing movies. I think it most likely that the last two seasons of the Lux program were broadcast from the KNX studios on Sunset Boulevard.
I have a vague memory of some mention of a CBS Playhouse being located in the Sunset Boulevard facility. It was somewhere in the History of KNX section of the station’s web site. I think it was a caption to one of the pictures there (reached by a small link near the top of that page.) There is also one good photograph of the Vine Street Theater there, and another which I think is of the Music Box, but the captions of both refer to them as the CBS Playhouse.
Sue:
A search on “Calhoun” and “Alice” (one name in each of the first two search boxes) at the L.A. Public Library’s California Index fetches 11 scanned index cards (I’m presuming that the actual items these cards reference are available at the library itself, probably the central library downtown) with references to her. According to one, she is indeed silent film star Alice Beatrice Calhoun (1904-1966), and another card refers to an article in the Hollywood Citizen of January 5th, 1927, announcing her marriage to M.C. Chotner, who I know was himself the owner of several theatres in the Los Angeles area. Many of them are listed here at Cinema Treasures, but I can’t remember their names offhand.
Stonewood Center is at the northeast corner of Firestone and Lakewood, about a half mile east of Downey’s old downtown. It was an open air shopping center when it was built in 1958, and became an enclosed mall when it was expanded in 1990. My Google search turned up a Lynn’s Hallmark Card and Party Shop for the address 136 Stonewood, though George Redfox says there is a fabric shop in the theatre’s old location. There is a JoAnn’s Fabrics at the center, in a building with an outside entrance, not on the mall proper, but I can’t find an exact address for it. I remember the theatre being in such a peripheral building, so that must be it. I think that addresses may have been shuffled in the expansion.
I’ve been having the same problem with it. I think that the collection has only recently been added to the college web site, and they probably don’t have the kinks worked out yet.
The Hidalgo/Miramar is probably the theatre designed by Clifford Balch, the plans for which were announced in the July 2, 1937 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. Balch designed a large number of theaters in the Spanish Colonial/Mission Revival styles in that era.
I don’t believe that The Casino Capistrano was ever a movie theater. It was a multi-purpose community building, built by the developers as an inducement to attract residential property buyers. I know that it was used as a ballroom for many years. Even in the early picture of it on this page of the San Clemente web site, it is topped by a sign reading “DANCE.” There is no marquee visible on the building.
My grandfather had a vacation house in an area about midway between Capistrano and San Clemente, and from my visits to the town in the 1950s, I know that it had only this one theatre.
I have a copy of the Los Angeles Times theatre listings from February of 1973, and at that time the Showcase was apparently still a single screen house, as no second screen is listed. I remember Stonewood Mall itself having been built in the 1950s. I think the theatre dates from the same time.
Thanks, Ken. I went to a few movies at the Music Box in the 1960s, when it was called the Pix Theatre. Then, I had no idea that it had had such a long and varied career.
I also remember passing by the Huntington Hartford, and having no idea what was under that modern facade. Until recently, I was under the impression that it had actually been built from the ground up by Hartford in the 1950s.
Ken:
Do you happen to know the years during which the Lux Radio Theater was broadcast from the old Music Box (now Henry Fonda) Theater on Hollywood Boulevard? I know that the show started in New York City, then moved to Hollywood, where it was broadcast both from the CBS Playhouse and the Music Box, but I don’t know which theater was used first, or for how long each was used.
You can find some pictures of some of Hunt’s other buildings, particularly his work at Occidental College, online in the Robert Winter Collection, which is maintained by Occidental. Their campus, located in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles, is worth a visit, too.
The Patterson is no longer closed. It re-opened on May 16th, 2003, as an arts center and theater operated by Creative Alliance
Their web site describes the facility as providing two galleries, a 250 seat flexible theater, a classroom, media lab, offices, and live/work studios for artists. The address is now given as 3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore MD 21224, and the telephone number as 410-276-1651. Their e-mail address is
The web site’s brief history of the theater says that there was an earlier Patterson Theater built at the same location in 1910, which was demolished in 1929. The current building was opened in September, 1930, twinned in 1975, and closed in 1995. When opened in 1929, the Patterson was operated by the Grand Theater Company, an affiliate of Durkee Enterprises. The history page also mentions the marquee and the art deco sign, lighted by “a plethora of bulbs,” but it appears to be referring to the blade sign only. At least that feature was able to be saved and restored.
I have run across mentions of S. Charles Lee having remodeled a “Studio Theater” on Vine Street in 1936, but thought they were mistaken, because there was a Studio Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. This clears up the mystery.
I’ve never seen a picture of Mr. Woodley (Frank Erwin Woodley was his full name, I believe, and he was born in 1865, so he would have been the right age to be balding), but I can easily imagine any exhibitor of the day jumping at the chance to be in a movie. Think of the talk it would generate among the theatre’s patrons, and their friends and acquaintances, and the consequent increase in business!
It’s undoubtedly difficult to spot specific locations of the city in old movies, not only because of the way the movie scenes were shot out of sequence, but because so many places in Los Angeles looked so much like so many other places in Los Angeles. So much of the city was built over such a short time that all the buildings ended up being in designed in the same few styles.
Maybe someday you’ll run across an identified interior photograph of that theatre in “Career” and recognize it.
Christian:
The only old pictures I’ve seen of the Vine Street Theater (all exterior shots, unfortunately) are those few in the L.A. Public Library photo database. (Click on the “Photo Collection” link, use the search terms “Theater Vine Street” and choose the search type “Subject Headings” from the menu. That brings up nine pictures. Some are of the building while under construction, some after completion.
I also know that the first alteration to the Vine Street Theater came as early as 1936, when S. Charles Lee designed a new marquee, and new heating and ventilating systems were installed. Lee sometimes did sketches of buildings to which he made alterations. If he made any of the Vine STreet, then they would probably be in the collection of his drawings and papers which, I believe, is held by UCLA. Since he made a major change only to the outside of this theater, though, he might not have bothered to make any interior sketches.
When Huntington Hartford bought the place in the 1950s, the remodeling he ordered was so complete that almost nothing remained of the original theatre but the outer walls. There are probably photographs of the old interior somewhere in the world- in old magazines and such, perhaps- but I have no idea where to find them.
The place also went by the name Mirror Theater for a while, but I don’t know if that was before or after it was the Huntington Hartford Theater. If it was earlier, then pictures of it from before the rebuilding might be sought out by that name as well as by the original name.
I remember when the book store moved from it’s original location on the northwest corner of Garfield and Main into the building that had once been half of Montgomery Ward’s Department Store. (The other half of Ward’s had been in the building with the small art deco tower on it, one door to the west, which later was renovated and occupied by Prober’s Shoes.) They had the biggest selection of paperbacks in the San Gabriel Valley after they moved to the new location. The place was huge.
The book store opened in its original location about 1964 or 1965, and was owned by the people who had formerly operated the Bungalow News on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. The store had been busier when it was at the corner of Garfield, even though the new location was bigger. I think they made a mistake by moving it. That mid-block location at the east end of town wasn’t as visible. They probably weren’t helped by the opening of a Waldenbooks on the Mervyn’s center in the early 1980s, either.
The Garfield didn’t have a balcony. You must be thinking of the Monterey Theatre, on Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park, which had a section of stadium seating in the back half of the auditorium. It was the only theatre in the area that had that arrangement, and none of the theatres in Alhambra ever had a balcony of any sort.
The Garfield Theatre, less than a mile north of the Monterey, at the corner of Garfield and Valley in Alhambra, had the rest rooms upstairs, on either side of the projection room, and there were small anterooms adjacent to them that had glazed windows overlooking the auditorium. The one adjacent to the Women’s rest room was probably used as a crying room, and might have had seating- I don’t know, since I never went up there. The one next to the men’s room had no seats, though, but you would often find guys using it as a smoking room, since smoking wasn’t allowed in the auditorium itself.
I attended the Whittwood only once, in the mid-1980s. The theatre did indeed have a stadium-type seating section at the back of the auditorium. This was a feature it shared in common with only a few theatres in the Los Angles area, among which were the 1917 Rialto on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, the 1924 Monterey in Monterey Park, and the more recent Loyola in the Westchester district of Los Angeles, and Crest in Long Beach.
I used to go to the Monterey frequently in the 1950s, and always liked sitting in the stadium section, though nobody called it that in those days. Everybody, including the theatre manager and staff, referred to it as the balcony, even though it wasn’t a proper balcony at all. The Whittwood was a much nicer theatre than the Monterey, though. In any case, both of them are gone now, along with the Crest, and the Loyola has been converted to offices, and the Rialto sits dark and empty, its lobby used for retail shops. These theatres were ahead of their time, and now they all but forgotten by most of the world.
It might be of interest to some that the architect of this theatre, William H. Wheeler, was also the architect of the very theatrical 5500 seat Angelus Temple, built in 1923 in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, for the notorious radio Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. There were few who understood show business as well as did Sister Aimee. She chose her architect well.
Southwest Builder and Contractor, June 4th, 1920, says that Walter P. Williams had the contract for the construction of a theatre building on Grand Avenue, Escondido, to seat 625 persons, and that work would commence at once. The owner of the theater was named as A. H. Nelson.
Southwest Builder and Contractor of April 23rd, 1937, announced that Clifford Balch had prepared the plans for a theatre at Escondido. The name of the theatre was not given in my source, but the timing was right for it to be the Ritz.
The earlier publication, Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer, issue of September 18th, 1909, mentions a theatre (again, no name given) that was to be erected at 5th and B Streets, Escondido, for a Mr. John Johnston, Jr. Apparently, the Johnston family was in the theatre business in Escondido for a long time.
The web site Silent Era lists a Jewel Theatre, with 700 seats, at 3829 Whittier Boulevard, operating in 1925. The source cited is Film Daily’s Film Year Book for 1926, page 485, with additional information provided by Lars Hedlind. Perhaps the discrepancy in address is the result of a remodeling which moved the entrance, or a street renumbering? Or perhaps the original theatre was destroyed, and replaced by this building in the 1930s?
The Hill Street Theatre opened on March 20th, 1922. It was built by the Orpheum Circuit as one of their “Junior Circuit” houses, which featured continuous Vaudeville shows of five acts, with only one headliner, alternating with movies, all day long. (The regular Orpheum Circuit theatres were two-show a day houses, strictly for Vaudeville, with more acts, more headliners, more elaborate staging and costumes and, of course, higher ticket prices.)
It was re-opened as the RKO Theatre on September 11th, 1929, but popular usage of the earlier name led the RKO circuit to begin advertising it as the RKO Hillstreet Theatre.
In its later years, it was operated simply as the Hillstreet Theatre by Metropolitan Theatres, which occasionally used the big stage for live music shows, but mostly ran movies. As downtown movie going declined in the late 1950s, the Hillstreet suffered more, and earlier, than did the somewhat smaller theatres on busier Broadway. I attended movies there several times from 1961-1963, and even on Friday and Saturday evenings, the sparse audiences, sometimes no more than a few dozen patrons, were lost in the cavernous auditorium. The closing of the Hillstreet was announced in a Los Angeles Times article of April 29th, 1963. It was demolished not long after.
The Hillstreet was not the most beautiful of downtown theatres, but I miss it as much as any of them, as it is the first theatre other than my neighborhood house of which I have any clear memory, dating from the late 1940s- early 1950s, when we went to an occasional matinee there. I can still see the shiny aluminum railings of the stairway to the balcony (where we never sat, which made it all the more desirable), and the five big oval reveals in the orchestra floor ceiling under the balcony, each lined with lights concealed in its coved edges and under a pendant fixture in the center of each reveal, so that each was a big, oval doughnut-shape of soft light. At the age of five, I thought it was about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I’m glad that I had the chance to refresh my memory by seeing it again, a dozen years later, before this theatre was taken away forever.
In 1926, when the Orpheum Circuit moved to its new theatre further down Broadway, this Orpheum was given the name Broadway Palace, which was displayed on the marquee and used in advertisements for the theatre. The name didn’t become simply the Palace Theatre until sometime later. The inclusion of the street name in the theatre’s name may have been to distinguish it from an earlier Palace Theatre which had been located nearby on Seventh Street, and which had closed only a few years before.
It’s interesting that the Optic was owned by Woodley. There was a Woodley’s Theater on Broadway at that time, on the site where the fourth Orpheum was later built. This Woodley’s was later renamed the Victory, and then was purchased by Mack Sennett in 1920, remodeled and expanded and renamed the Mission. So there’s another connection between Sennett and Woodley.
I wonder if the Woodley’s/Victory on Broadway could have been the more ornate second theatre you mentioned? Does “A Movie Star” include any scenes of that theatre’s surroundings, so that its location might be identifiable as the middle of the 800 block of Broadway? Hamburger’s Department Store (later the May Company) was just up the block across the street, and the Garrick Theater on the southeast corner of 8th was only a few doors up from Woodley’s. The Majestic would have been across the street and south a bit, and Tally’s original Broadway probably almost directly across the street. Broadway also makes that bend at Olympic Boulevard, so a scene looking south might have revealed that, though I’m not sure in what year Broadway was cut through that block.