Loyola Theater
8610 S. Sepulveda Boulevard,
Los Angeles,
CA
90045
8610 S. Sepulveda Boulevard,
Los Angeles,
CA
90045
16 people
favorited this theater
The Loyola Theater was opened on October 3, 1946. Located in the Westchester district of Los Angeles, close to LAX airport. Before the theater’s conversion to a medical office building, the front of the Loyola Theatre featured a beautiful swan that rose about sixty feet above the theater’s marquee. The auditorium was similiar to the Fox Crest Theater in North Long Beach, CA (now razed) and featured an early form of stadium-style seating.
Contributed by
William Gabel
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Recent comments (view all 81 comments)
I’ve posted ads on here myself. Some ads are helpful. An ad might give us an address for a theater. It could also help to find a timeline for a particular theater. On the other hand, this site is mostly about movie theater buildings and not movies per se. I don’t see any reason to flood this site with movie ads just for the sake of posting something. Should we post every ad published for every theater listed on this site? Some people complain that many of these threads are way too long as it is now. I do agree that not all ads work and too much of something can be a bad thing.
I was lucky enough to have my first movie-going experiences in the Loyola; in fact, until I was an adolescent, I assumed all movie theaters were Art Deco palaces with red velvet curtains and swirly designs (which to me looked like giant duck heads) on the walls. My brothers and I loved the free movies, especially the inevitable moment(s) when some kid would sneak in the back door, temporarily flooding the screen with light, at which point the kids in the audience would shout, in unison, “SHUT THE DOOR!”
Cool looking theatre.
I only went to this theatre once, when it was a Mann theatre. And it was to see One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Where’s Poppa? with a friend and his mom and dad. It was cool. Had a walk up balcony.
I also remember driving by and seeing a mural painted on the back of it advertising Dog Day Afternoon with the caption indicating it was playing at Exclusively at the National Westwood. That was during the Fall of 1975.
Here is a February 2010 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/y92jg82
I was looking at CinemaTour’s photos of the Crest in Fresno, and was immediately struck by how much both it and the Fox Inglwood look like the Loyola. Were they all built by the same architect? The Loyola had a whole lot more color, peacock-like above the swirly golden things along the wall and painted like a nighttime sky above, and I think the light fixtures were different, but look through the interior photos of the Crest and you’ll get a really good idea what the inside of the Loyola looked like, including the lobby.
http://www.cinematour.com/tour/us/12948.html
-DB: Carl G. Moeller, who collaborated on the Inglewood Fox with architect S. Charles Lee, and who also worked on the Crest in Fresno, was almost certainly part of the design team for the Loyola, though Clarence Smale is the architect of record.
Moeller was the Fox circuit’s chief designer during the period when these theaters were built and, though he is listed on the Pacific Coast Architectural Database as an interior designer, he apparently also had a major influence on the exterior appearances of the many theater projects he worked on.
DB, the Crest in Fresno, the Crest in Sacramento and the Fox Inglewood are more or less triplets.
I spent so many hours in this theatre when I was a kid! I loved the grandness of it all, the steps down into the lounge, the loge (which, BTW, was where smoking was allowed), the big velvet curtains. We would go to Sav-On across the street (next to the See’s Candy store) where you could buy three 5¢ candy bars for a dime, then we’d go to the movie. I remember the theatre full of screaming kids at the Wednesday summer matinees sponsored by Marina Federal Savings. We would stand outside the bank and ask adults to pick us up a couple of tickets. I remember our whole family sitting in the loge for “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and occasionally kids would knock on the exit doors from outside to get let in for free. The theatre sold advance tickets for “Help!” and my brother got two for a Christmas present. The Fox Inglewood also had a loge, as a I recall. I attended a few of the revival programs before the theatre shut down. It kills me to know the inside is entirely gutted. It was a great place to go to the movies! (And personally, I like seeing the ads, it reminds me of what I saw there!)
from 1951 to about 1960, this was my second favorite theater. Paradise was the first.