Shalom, buballa! Who can forget the “Star” Theater’s 49 cents days, and the ebullience of the recorded message when you’d call in. Saw It Came From Outer Space in 3D here, as well as less memorable pictures such as Butterflies Are Free. Great theater; sorry to hear it’s immolated.
It was great! I miss this theater! Loads of senior citizens used to come in from Fairfax to this cozy theater, mixing with the west LA potheads about as well as oil mixes with water. One time, me and a pot-smoking friend found out that there was a free matinee screening for seniors of Around the World in 80 Days and we showed up—we were polite and all, but we still got hocked to CHina by the elders (“This is for senior citizens!” one told us.) In another drug-related movie watching incident, I ate some pink hearts and saw a Woody Allen marathon and just about died laughing. (Fortunately, so was the rest of the audience.) I also went on a rather important first date there to see the Mitchum version of Farewell My Lovely. I miss the Lido…
Tiny, but significant. Smile and The Fortune isn’t a bad double bill…I saw The Man With The Golden Gun here, and wished I hadn’t—but it wasn’t the theater’s fault.
Last Detail is the one I remember the most, seeing there. I forgot about the clock, “Belfast Water” wasn’t it? We loved this little hole in the wall; the programming seemed to be a bit more ambitious than some of the surrounding theaters, like the Culver and the Meralta (and we can see from the photo of the Meralta what a second to third run theater it was…)
Sorry to hear it’s been plexed…A beauty—the neighborhood is still full of screenwriters, and with the theater’s proximity to Chatterton’s Bookstore (which is probably also gone) it was quite a meeting spot for writers.
I’m sure the area under the marquee is still hosting all sorts of impassioned conversations on film. I saw my first foreign film there: Malle’s Le Souffle au Coeur—drawn by the newspaper ad picture of the beautiful Lea Massari. My 13 year old self couldn’t resist her, even if I sure was baffled by the film’s references to Dien Bien Phu and Miles Davis. It was the only time I ever went to the Las Feliz, but as the correspondent above comments, it was as French as 1970s LA got (except for that French language bookstore on Westwood Boulevard).
I worked here with my first girlfriend right around 1976-7, when Chuck Yelsky was the manager (nice guy). I was just out of high school. Changed the letters on the marquee, went up into the catwalks to relamp when the theater got rented out for the High Holidays, you name it. This beautiful old palace, then known as the Pacific Beverly Hills, was being booked with the worst movies ever! But such was the movie business is those days immediately before the rise of Spielberg and Lucas—
Countless adventures were had there, and there was plenty of room to run around the utterly empty auditorium what with films like Scalawag, the soft-core porn movie Maitress, Terry Gilliams’s Jabberwocky, and The Missouri Breaks playing. The time I can remember it most crowded was for the premiere of that memorable film Fun With Dick and Jane. Cranky executives from the home office came in and really made our life miserable for a few hours.
However, the real fun began when we ran an exclusive engagement of The Passover Plot. Remember that one? Zalman King (later the soft-core tzar behind Red Shoes Diaries, et cet) in the role of Jesus Christ; this—I believe—Golan and Globus production suggested that the Crucifixion was a trick. Local fundementalists—LA’s got ‘em by the thousands—phoned in bomb threats, and we on the staff drew extra hours to protect the otherwise empty theater from suspicious characters. Since the theater still had a stage, and since there were an average of three people a night paying to see this movie, and since the movie was a true lox, one time I rode my bicycle across the stage in mid film on a bet. Got a nice hand; no complaints.
One of the reasons I left LA is because they were tearing down buildings like this, and I’m sorry to hear it’s gone.
This was my neighborhood movie theater when I was a kid—James Bond revivals, Billy Jack, Gone With the Wind…I was really happy to see its rooftop marquee a-blazing in the new version of The Singing Detective.
As Mr. Melnick notes, this neighborhood has been pretty rough and tumble over the years, but now Highland Park has a reputation as an artist’s ghetto, and everyone knows that artists are the yuppie shock troops, so perhaps the really beautiful old houses around here will start being rennovated…and maybe this great old theater with it.
Saw a bad spy movie here The Salzberg Connection; but even though that was a rather hot date, the real highlight was seeing all four Beatles movies in a mini-marathon when they were released together c. 1972.
Blofeld
commented about
Vidiotson
Nov 12, 2003 at 2:16 pm
Saw Zebra in the Kitchen here with my grandfather. If I ever make a million, I’ll buy it.
The Highland Theater’s marquee turns up in the new John C. Reilly movie Cyrus.
Shalom, buballa! Who can forget the “Star” Theater’s 49 cents days, and the ebullience of the recorded message when you’d call in. Saw It Came From Outer Space in 3D here, as well as less memorable pictures such as Butterflies Are Free. Great theater; sorry to hear it’s immolated.
It was great! I miss this theater! Loads of senior citizens used to come in from Fairfax to this cozy theater, mixing with the west LA potheads about as well as oil mixes with water. One time, me and a pot-smoking friend found out that there was a free matinee screening for seniors of Around the World in 80 Days and we showed up—we were polite and all, but we still got hocked to CHina by the elders (“This is for senior citizens!” one told us.) In another drug-related movie watching incident, I ate some pink hearts and saw a Woody Allen marathon and just about died laughing. (Fortunately, so was the rest of the audience.) I also went on a rather important first date there to see the Mitchum version of Farewell My Lovely. I miss the Lido…
Tiny, but significant. Smile and The Fortune isn’t a bad double bill…I saw The Man With The Golden Gun here, and wished I hadn’t—but it wasn’t the theater’s fault.
Last Detail is the one I remember the most, seeing there. I forgot about the clock, “Belfast Water” wasn’t it? We loved this little hole in the wall; the programming seemed to be a bit more ambitious than some of the surrounding theaters, like the Culver and the Meralta (and we can see from the photo of the Meralta what a second to third run theater it was…)
Sorry to hear it’s been plexed…A beauty—the neighborhood is still full of screenwriters, and with the theater’s proximity to Chatterton’s Bookstore (which is probably also gone) it was quite a meeting spot for writers.
I’m sure the area under the marquee is still hosting all sorts of impassioned conversations on film. I saw my first foreign film there: Malle’s Le Souffle au Coeur—drawn by the newspaper ad picture of the beautiful Lea Massari. My 13 year old self couldn’t resist her, even if I sure was baffled by the film’s references to Dien Bien Phu and Miles Davis. It was the only time I ever went to the Las Feliz, but as the correspondent above comments, it was as French as 1970s LA got (except for that French language bookstore on Westwood Boulevard).
I worked here with my first girlfriend right around 1976-7, when Chuck Yelsky was the manager (nice guy). I was just out of high school. Changed the letters on the marquee, went up into the catwalks to relamp when the theater got rented out for the High Holidays, you name it. This beautiful old palace, then known as the Pacific Beverly Hills, was being booked with the worst movies ever! But such was the movie business is those days immediately before the rise of Spielberg and Lucas—
Countless adventures were had there, and there was plenty of room to run around the utterly empty auditorium what with films like Scalawag, the soft-core porn movie Maitress, Terry Gilliams’s Jabberwocky, and The Missouri Breaks playing. The time I can remember it most crowded was for the premiere of that memorable film Fun With Dick and Jane. Cranky executives from the home office came in and really made our life miserable for a few hours.
However, the real fun began when we ran an exclusive engagement of The Passover Plot. Remember that one? Zalman King (later the soft-core tzar behind Red Shoes Diaries, et cet) in the role of Jesus Christ; this—I believe—Golan and Globus production suggested that the Crucifixion was a trick. Local fundementalists—LA’s got ‘em by the thousands—phoned in bomb threats, and we on the staff drew extra hours to protect the otherwise empty theater from suspicious characters. Since the theater still had a stage, and since there were an average of three people a night paying to see this movie, and since the movie was a true lox, one time I rode my bicycle across the stage in mid film on a bet. Got a nice hand; no complaints.
One of the reasons I left LA is because they were tearing down buildings like this, and I’m sorry to hear it’s gone.
This was my neighborhood movie theater when I was a kid—James Bond revivals, Billy Jack, Gone With the Wind…I was really happy to see its rooftop marquee a-blazing in the new version of The Singing Detective.
As Mr. Melnick notes, this neighborhood has been pretty rough and tumble over the years, but now Highland Park has a reputation as an artist’s ghetto, and everyone knows that artists are the yuppie shock troops, so perhaps the really beautiful old houses around here will start being rennovated…and maybe this great old theater with it.
Saw a bad spy movie here The Salzberg Connection; but even though that was a rather hot date, the real highlight was seeing all four Beatles movies in a mini-marathon when they were released together c. 1972.
Saw Zebra in the Kitchen here with my grandfather. If I ever make a million, I’ll buy it.