Paris Theatre
6262 Hollywood Boulevard,
Los Angeles,
CA
90028
6262 Hollywood Boulevard,
Los Angeles,
CA
90028
7 people
favorited this theater
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The Tele-View Tele-News Theatre launched as a 350-seat theatre which emulated the New York City Translux newsreel theaters. The concept included no ushers or ticket takers replaced with a turnstile. It launched November 9, 1938. After switching to all-westerns as the Hitching Post in 1941 to 1949, it completed its run as the Paris Theatre beginning in 1949. The Paris closed likely at the midpoint of a 30-year lease on July 31, 1953 with the 3-D film, “Love for Sale.”
The Hitching Post theatre reopened as the Paris with “Passport to Pimlico” on November 3rd, 1949. Another grand opening ad posted.
This reopened as Hitching Post on January 24th, 1941. Grand opening ad posted.
I understand from the film documentary The Haunted World of Edward D Wood Jr (US 1995) that the 1953 film Glen or Glenda ( now a cult film) was premiered here.
does anyone remember what it looked like inside colour scheme type of lighting curtain in front of screen even screen size and what the lobby looked like Since it opened as a newsreel theatre i suspect it would have followed the norm of a long narrow converted store with a minimal soundsystem and low intensity projector lamps
Dick Jones, who starred on “The Range Rider” and later “Buffalo Bill Jr.” was a kid actor who appeared in a ton of westerns with all the big stars. He told me that on Saturday, his mother would drop him off at the Hitching Post where he would spend the day watching cowboy movies. Sometimes he would spot himself in the movie. Was also the voice of Pinocchio in the Disney classic.
Many thanks for your prompt responses! From the exterior, it looked like a movie palace from the 20s, but it just goes to show that we shouldn’t assume.
Rafaelstorm, the Palace was always a live venue and TV studio, never a movie theater.
You are talking about the Palace theater. Back in the 60s the Beatles played there and ABC tv used the theater for their hit variety show “The Hollywood Palace”. Now the Avalon nightclub.
Here’s a question for the very knowledgable members here. On Vine, between Hollywood and Yucca, is a club now named the Avalon Hollywood. It was used in the 1984 movie “Against All Odds” as either the real or fictional club called The Palace. From the exterior, it’s obvious that this building was once one of the grand old movie palaces; can anybody here identify it?
The following article appeared in the February 13, 2011 issue of the Los Angeles Times.
“Where Westerns Were in the Saddle"
By Steve Harvey
With its daily menu of westerns, the Hitching Post Theater in 1940s Hollywood gave posses of kids some early lessons about law and order â€" and not just on the screen.
“Check Your Guns at the Box Office,” a sign commanded the youngsters, who usually showed up in costume.
Management was serious about cap-gun control.
“They could check to see if your holsters were empty,” said Hollywood historian and Hitching Post habitue Bruce Torrence.
Still, some young desperadoes managed to smuggle their shooting irons into the seating area, as became evident.
“During chase scenes or gunfights on the screen, they would fire off the cap pistols to the tune of yells, whoops and cheers,” said Westell Rhodes, another patron.
As a transplanted New Yorker, Rhodes said, “I had never seen anything like this.”
The Hitching Post, he recalled, “showed a western double feature, cartoons and a serial chapter every day. The exterior had a western theme. The ticket-seller was dressed in cowboy garb.”
Rhodes, in his early teens, quickly shed his New York ways.
“I felt right at home walking down Beachwood Drive dressed in authentic western style with the boots, striped gambler riding pants and cowboy hat,” he said. “Nobody gave me a second glance as I walked about two miles to the Hitching Post.”
It was before Hollywood became obsessed with making one-size-fits-all movies, and genre theaters were plentiful.
Some offered only foreign language films, some silent movies, some newsreels, others sophisticated, art-house attractions. (Soft porn emporiums wouldn’t arrive until the 1960s, followed by, well … you know.)
And then there was the Hitching Post with its sagebrush sagas. Smaller studios in the neighborhood of Gower Street and Santa Monica Boulevard (nicknamed Gower Gulch) were churning out low-budget, B movies. The stars were such luminaries as Roy Rogers (“King of the Cowboys”), Bob Steele (“Two Fisted Hero of the West”) and Gene Autry (“America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy”). One stallion, Rex the Wonder Horse, even got top billing in his own movies.
The Hitching Post opened in 1941 at 6262 Hollywood Blvd., now a plaza outside the Hollywood/Vine Metro Red Line station.
Times columnist Lee Shippey found it ironic at the time that the theater was located near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, “the very heart of what many persons think the center of a sink of immorality.”
But, he noted, the heroes were keeping to the straight and narrow.
“They never smoke, drink, swear, gamble or make love to any but the right gal,” Shippey wrote. (“Make love” meant “chastely kiss” in the 1940s.)
The movie house was such a hit that its owner, ABC Theaters, opened other Hitching Posts in Beverly Hills (later the Beverly Canon theater), Pasadena, Long Beach and Santa Monica. One fan insists that the Santa Monica theater had an actual hitching post outside.
Cowgirls were not so much in evidence at the theaters.
Writer Lisa Mitchell had a girlfriend who said of her infatuation with Hopalong Cassidy: “I didn’t know whether to be his girlfriend or be him.”
For Mitchell, at the age of 9, the choice was easy.
“I had a Hopalong Cassidy outfit with black pants and black shirt,” she said. “I’d wear a cowboy belt with fake jewel studs, a silver buckle and a steer head on the buckle, and a straw cowboy hat. I wore my braids up under my hat so people would think I was a boy. I loved being the girl in the all-boys club.”
Occasionally, when a movie such as “Indian Agent,” with Tim Holt, would seem to suggest an alternative costume, some moviegoers would show up as Native Americans, with feathers in their hair.
The mostly male-oriented audience did not thrill to the warbling of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
“I remember the noise and popcorn bag-throwing during the singing or love scene between the cowboy star and the banker’s daughter,” Morley Helfand wrote on the Cinema Treasures website.
The good guys had no trouble fighting off the black hats. What they couldn’t handle was the invasion of television sets in the early 1950s.
Suddenly, the little buckaroos had only to go into their living rooms to flip a switch for entertainment instead of trudging, or catching a ride, to a movie house.
One by one, the L.A.-area Hitching Posts shut down. The Hollywood prototype became the Paris Theater in November 1949.
“It’s amazing that it could stay alive that long, and in such a good locale,” Mitchell said.
When the Paris Theater opened, The Times wrote, “You’d never know the old place. Instead of the horsey atmosphere, everything is now plush and chichi, as lobby and auditorium smile with flowers, ferns and sophisticated murals.”
Flowers, ferns, murals? Chichi?
You could almost hear Rex the Wonder Horse snorting, “Neigh!”
Hi JimH
Wow that’s amazing that a theatre rented cap pistols! I never heard of that. I’m sure the kids loved it. Thanks for sharing the info.
You can see the theatre marquee as the Paris in the Movietone Newsreel footage for the Oscar Presentation at the Pantages Theatre on the DVD for “A Letter to Three Wives”.
The Paris can be seen in this 1951 photo from the USC archive:
http://tinyurl.com/466h3rh
As a seven to eight year old, I lived in Hollywood. It was perfectly safe for me to ride the street cars to the movies in downtown Hollywood. The Hitching Post was one of my favorite hangouts. For Thirty five cents, one could get a ticket and rent a cap pistol, and for another nickel, one could buy several rolls of caps to shoot at the screen. The place reeked of cap gun powder. In the late 40’s, there was a theater in Glendale that featured Saturday Adventure and Western movies, plus a couple of cartoons and serials. Our apartment building was more toward Vermont Blvd, right on Hollywood Blvd. We lived directly below the Planetarium.
Cool name,I wonder if anyone actually hitched up a horse or horses in front of this theatre.Interesting.
The October 29, 1949, issue of Boxoffice carried a brief announcement saying “Hitching Post Theatre is to be renovated and renamed Paris for ABC Theatres.” The November 12 issue of Boxoffice said the Paris had opened that week with the British import “Passport to Pimlico.”
The ABC chain’s Hitching Post Theatre in Beverly Hills had been renamed the Beverly Canon Theatre in 1947. The Santa Monica Hitching Post was to abandon its western policy by May, 1950, and be renamed the Riviera.
ABC Theatres was a local partnership, not to be confused with the later nationwide ABC chain.
This is from the LA Times on 1/20/41:
Hollywood’s only “western†theater will open Friday night when the Hitching Post, formerly the Tele-View, holds a colorful pioneer parade and premiere, in which stars of the western screen will participate. The name Tele-View will again be used in conjunction with newsreels at the News-View Theater.
The Hitching Post, located at Hollywood and Vine, has signed contracts with Republic and other western producers for their pictures. Friday night’s opening will be “Melody Ranchâ€, starring Gene Autry, Ann Miller, Jimmy Durante and Barbara Allen.
A photograph showing the Paris Theatre in 1950:
http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics50/00044962.jpg
A couple of photographs showing the Paris Theatre in 1951:
http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics21/00045003.jpg
http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics21/00045002.jpg
Re: the two undated photos of the Hitching Post. Lost Memory is correct about the Bandit Trail film shown on the first photo. That was made in 1941. So was the Don Barry picture Apache Kid. The second photo showed Outlaws of the Rockies, a 1945 picture, playing the latest Tim Holt picture Indian Agent (1948). Theaters did that back then. That’s why they were second run theaters. We kids didn’t care just so long as the hero never ran out of bullets. The Hitching Post theater also played host to Monogram cowboy stars Johnny Mack Brown, Jimmy Wakely, etc. I have a cassette tape of the Straight Arrow radio show which premiered on the stage of the Hitching Post in 1949. Howard Culver as Straight Arrow was there along with Johnny Mack Brown and Jimmy Wakely. Cottonseed Clark was the announcer and I believe Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage were also there. Too bad there were not more pictures taken of these occasions. They would be collectors' items today.
Here is an undated photo:
http://tinyurl.com/ysqbv4
Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith attend a premiere at the Pantages in 1947. The Tele-View Theater seen in the background is the Hitching Post:
http://tinyurl.com/36q22z
Here is an undated photo:
http://tinyurl.com/2fm594
With regards to that last post, the theater called Round-Up in San Francisco can be found on Cinema Treasures as the Centre, which was one of the many theaters that was on Market Street. (Sort of ironic that both the Centre & the Santa Monica location of the Hitching Post ended their lives as porn theaters.)
The Hitching Post had a spinoff in San Francisco opened in 1944
by Robert L. Lippert called! Roundup, which lasted about 4 years
runnign double feature westerns almost identical to the Hitching Post
Check it Out billy h.