Los Angeles Theatre
615 S. Broadway,
Los Angeles,
CA
90014
615 S. Broadway,
Los Angeles,
CA
90014
71 people
favorited this theater
Showing 101 - 125 of 295 comments
This is an interesting editorial from the opening of the Los Angeles:
(Feb. 2, 1931) LA Times
PREVIEW PANDEMONIUM
It is a moot question whether some better regulations will not have to be adopted to meet the occasions when premiere pictures are programmed and popular movie stars are on parade. In the case of the first showing of the Charlie Chaplin picture at the opening of the Los Angeles Theater the whole traffic on the chief downtown thoroughfares for a mile on either side of the theater was at a complete standstill for more than two hours, store windows were broken, clothes were torn, windshields in cars were smashed and many women fainted in the milling multitudes gathered to make a movie holiday.
Los Angeles is too large a city and the freedom of the streets is too vital for such conditions to be countenanced as recurrent accompaniments of every new high-powered picture production. In the capital of filmdom such scenes are bound to occur when the kings and queens of the screen are advertised to be on parade, unless the police authorities take the same precautions for handling the crowds as is done in other large cities in similar circumstances. Apparently a the opening of the Los Angeles Theater the authorities left everything to chance.
There is no reason why a premiere parade should be allowed to degenerate into a preview pandemonium. The people who assemble for a glimpse of their favorite actors and actresses are in the main a cheerful, good-natured, happy-go-lucky, if somewhat boisterous, crowd of sightseers. It would be a pity if such demonstrations had to be discontinued for lack of preparedness on the part of the officials hired to attend to these civic duties. Premiere parades are a distinctive feature of Los Angeles life and under proper control a good advertisement of thhe city no less than for the motion-picture industry.
At the opening of the Los Angeles Theater they were not under proper control. Police, motion-picture people and citizens in general cannot afford to permit a repetition of these bear-garden festivities.
The occasion for the super-excitement on Broadway was, of course, an unusual one. The Los Angeles Theater is the very last word in what constitutes a modern playhouse, in appointments, conveniences and equipments. The Chaplin picture was in a way epochal and its inception had drawn the attention of the whole film world. That the people of Los Angeles should assemble in extraordinary numbers to show their pride and delight at this double event was a thing to be expected.
LOL….nothing else required.
It would be nice if you’d spend more time posting interesting things that relate to theaters instead of this incessant complaining, kvetching, moaning and groaning from the Citizens Auxiliary Police. I wish you would take Ken on Judge Judy so I could see her scream at you. YOU HAVE NO DAMAGES! Let the people who took the precious photos go after the vile thieves. I think I’ll start referring to you as Jay Santos.
Oh well. I’ve tried to steer clear of this topic as this site is not the place for lectures on fair use and copyright law. Essentially, fair use relies on a four part test, but the primary focus is on the nature of the use (non-profit v. commercial), the ratio of the excerpted work as opposed to the work as a whole, and the potential impact of the use upon the commercial value of the work. This is a very brief and condensed view of a complex topic.
If I was to be sued, which is a laughable assertion, the owner of the work would have the burden of proof to show that the use of the work caused some dimunition in commercial value. This is a difficult burden and the reason why there is such a variance in the case law regarding fair use.
With all due respect to Mr. Memory, the person who complains the most should not be the person who knows the least. That’s why I haven’t responded to the prompts for sources and so on. I do this strictly for fun. If it’s going to be burdensome, I will go back to online poker. I work about a hundred hours a week and this is a good way to relax between assignments. Since this is all off topic, I am tabling any further discussion on my part. Mr. Memory is free to “report me” or to pursue whatever he considers his legal remedies. I know a little bit about the law and I think I will survive whatever legal assaults that may be headed in my direction. I apoogize to the site owners for taking up space with this tangential discussion.
Ken McIntyre
Are you planning to report him to someone? Maybe you should contact Photobucket. While you’re at it you can contact the LA Times every time I quote from an article from the past. It’s nothing personally against you, but ken mc posting photos or having them in his Photobucket account seems highly innocuous when there is a deluge of internet media theft occurring right now that actually hurts people and destroys businesses. In my opinion, its similar to giving the jaywalker a ticket as an army of drunk drivers pass by freely.
Lost Memory…..if it IS a copyrighted photo ken might be comfortable with taking the very low chance that he will get sued. If anyone other than you cared about posting one photo from a book where no one is making a profit (for educational and illustrative one time use), they would most likely just ask him to remove the link…cease and desist. Yes, he could just state the source and say that if you go buy this book and look on page so and so you can see a photo of the ceiling of the theater, if the book is still even in print, but ultimately its the individual’s choice. It’s not your choice…..unless you’re some type of Copyright Keystone Cop. I deal with photo copyright all day long at work and this issue is small potatoes.
Here is some detail from the lobby ceiling, circa mid 1970s. Sorry about the white spots, but most of the detail is visible regardless:
http://tinyurl.com/2epn4b
When I was very young (the 1930’s and ‘40’s) I remember that spittoons were commonly found in banks and other public places. They were also very close to the ground. Apparently persons who chewed tobacco at that time were not only much more numerous and accepted in polite society than they are today but were also quite accurate in their aim! I would bet that the mysterious cannisters were in fact spittoons.
Does any one know if the Los Angeles Theatre has a historical record keeper? Maybe then we will know what the cylinders were used for.
Also if you compare the shot of the urinals from the link above(the black and white picture) to the shot of the urinals ( the one on the offical page) here`s the kicker, thay are not their thay were removed . Thank you for you time :)
I continue to ponder the purpose of those metal canisters and how they could possibly relate to men’s grooming and toiletry needs of the era. The more I consider uses like spittoon or ashtray, the more skeptical I am of those guesses. The objects just seem too close to the ground, and their openings too small, for such prosaic functions without making a big mess! Rather, I’m convinced that they represented some kind of engineering marvel in the same way that other features of the Los Angeles Theater were groundbreaking and unique.
I recall that one of the first articles I encountered concerning Broadway’s theater district was in Westways magazine (the publication of the Auto Club of Southern California (AAA)) in the early 1970s. (While my childhood memories had included shopping downtown and eating at Clifton’s Cafeteria with family, we never went to a movie there; a lifelong fascination with movie palaces was thus awakened largely by this single article and its accompanying photographs and vivid descriptions of faded elegance.)
That Westways piece mentioned the exotic and avant garde elements of the Los Angeles Theater, including the individual marble rooms in the ladies' restroom, the human hair wigs on the curtain, the periscope device in the downstairs lounge and the lighted strips in the aisle floors. I remember, too, the description of the shoeshine stand in the men’s room â€"– and I’m quite certain that there was a mention of some other feature regarded as quite unusual back in the day. But wrack my memory as I do, I just cannot seem to recall what it was — yet I am pretty sure that those metal canisters are the evidence of it.
Unfortunately, I lost my copy of this article many years (and many moves) ago, and the online archive of Westways doesn’t go back nearly that far. What, oh what, could be the possible function of those cylinders? They aren’t in the ladies' room, so it could only have been useful to men. I believe they must concern something that was a custom of the times, now vanished and therefore not on our radar at all — but what?
Has any one found out what the metal cylinders are and what thay were used for? Thank you for your time.
I don’t think there is a book on the Los Angeles Theatre, out of all the books on the market. The S. Charles Lee book has a small amount of info but no real book. Fox West Coast Theatres programs you could buy that had pictures and alittle history on the house. But that’s it.
Does anyone know of a book on the “Los Angeles Theater?”
I am aware that the theater appears in numerous theater books, but would like to see a dedicated book on that theater alone.
I am aware the THS did an annual on the Los Angeles Theater. Unfortunately, it is out of stock. Maybe they will offer it again.
Trainmaster
The Spring 2008 issue of “Cottages & Bungalows” has a short article on the Los Angeles Theatre. It also has two vintage black & white photos, one of the auditorium and one of the exterior at the time of opening. The exterior shot, while excellent, is the commonly published view. It also has a very nice recent color photo of the beautiful main lobby. And the rest of the magazine is pretty good, too. The main point of the article is that the Broadway Theatre district in LA is poised for revival, and the LA Theatre is at the center of that.
Odd. Wonder if they stored the urinal cakes in there? LOL.
The mysterious metal cylinders were located in the “hall of urinals,” too:
View link
In regard to the cylindrical objects in the mens room, I don’t recall them being there in the 1960s. I suppose they might have been spittoons, or maybe places to discard cigar or cigarette butts (I believe such devices were called silent butlers), but their tops were pretty close to the floor for either of those functions. It’s an interesting mystery.
Could thay be some kind of ashtray?
That is what thay look like to me.
This photo (from the California State Library collection) is of the men’s lavatory:
View link
Does anybody know what those cylindrical objects are on the floor along the wall? Spittoons, perhaps?
It says I have to log in to see the page.
I’ve finally posted some of the photos I took during last summer’s Los Angeles Conservancy sponsored screening of “Roman Holiday” at the Los Angeles Theatre.
View link
I have a vague memory of having read in a magazine or newspaper article forty or so years ago that the two extra aisles in the Los Angeles Theatre were converted for seating during the boom years of WWII, when many downtown theatres remained open 24 hours and still had full houses for may performances. I know that some movie theatres had their orchestra pits covered over to provide more room for seats during that time.
This photo shows that the aisles were about wide enough for two additional seats per row. I would suspect that, to minimize the cost of the change, the existing seats would have been left in place and the new seats would have simply been bolted into the rows (probably after the removal of the decorative end-pieces on the seats adjacent to the aisles), adding only one additional armrest between them, but I don’t know for sure. Of the 150 or so images of the theatre in the 9 folders in the state library collection (search “Los Angeles Theatre”), all are from the period before the change.
As for the prism device in the basement lounge, I know it wasn’t working in the early 1960s, when I went to the theatre frequently. The restaurant was gone by that time, too, but I remember the aisle-side lighting strips still glowing. They were blue.
Does the Los Angeles presently have 2,200 seats, or was that the number with which it opened?
My question relates to the original seating plan, in which individual blocks of seats were no more than five or six across. There were more aisles then! (I haven’t been inside since the early 1980s, but even at that time one could see where these original aisle doors had been sealed off from the lobby.)
Does anyone know when these “extra” aisles were filled in, and how the overall seating capacity was affected by that change? Were new seats merely added in the former aisle spaces, or were entire rows replaced?
I’ve always wondered about this — and some other chronological details concerning the Los Angeles, too, such as when the downstairs restaurant closed, when the prism device for displaying the movie in the downstairs lounge was removed, and when the neon strips in the aisle floors that once guided patrons to their seats stopped functioning.
All i have to say is GREAT!!!
It is a wonderful theatre it is hard to grasp that it has only 2200 seats it looks like a 4000 or more seat palace.
Great just great.!!!
You can see the downstairs lounge with all that wood paneling in the current Kia commercial for President’s Day (Millard Fillmore). It is currently running in the New York market.