West Coast Theatre

If anyone has any stories about going to/ working at this threatre in its adult days, I would love to hear them. I am chronicling the histories of adult theatres in the US. Please contact me at Thanks!

This page
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Contains this then-and-now mashup
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Thanks for redoing the introduction. This is a photo circa 1959 that is currently being advertised on eBay:
http://tinyurl.com/oggh6k

Here is a 1958 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/klkhtn

Actually, now that I look at it again, the second mystery photo probably says wATER instead of theATER. But what would the Santa Ana Theatre have been? It looks like 1910s, which would make it too old to have been Clune’s Santa Ana/Yost.

Here is part of a November 1998 article in the Orange County Register:

Contractor Pete Montanez was sitting in a pew one Sunday morning when a surge of inspiration came over him. It happened as the pastor was preaching about Christian Tabernacle’s terrible problem. The congregation had bought the 1923 Fox West Coast Theater on Main Street, once the grandest movie palace in Orange County, but had run out of money to transform it into a church. I will fix it, Montanez thought.

The restoration of the National Register of Historic Places landmark was a giant task. The walls had holes and the carpets were disintegrating. There were rats, smashed lights and basement dressing rooms choked with decades of clutter. Long expanses of graceful gold leaf lay under coats of dirt. The 50-foot-high ceiling needed paint. The intricate Spanish Colonial Revival facade had faded so much that it was hard to identify the original colors.

But Montanez, 47, who lost his forearm in an accident 26 years ago, felt moved by the spirit of God to restore the theater, and there was no turning back. Years before, his parents helped build a church in Cuauhtemoc, Mexico. It seemed like his destiny. He and his family had been living in Fontana; he was only visiting Santa Ana, his former home, that day he went to the church service. In December 1996, he moved his wife and four children back to Santa Ana, and into the home of his sister, suspended his normal work as a general contractor and set about fixing the theater.

Montanez started in the basement of the theater on a restoration journey that occasionally took him back in time. Removing layers of paint, he found doodles from long ago. Under the stage, someone had stashed soda bottles that were so old he didn’t recognize the brand names. In the balcony, he found a row of square windows that had been covered up. He put in panes of glass and watched the morning light stream in. He borrowed scaffolding from a friend to work on the ceiling. He installed decorative trim around plain doorways. He noticed empty spaces atop the pillars on the facade, and fabricated big gold globes to sit on them.

Some of the tasks were more mundane. He installed plumbing in the bathrooms. He did electrical work. At first, Ariel Meza, the assistant pastor, got nervous watching Montanez climb up and down the scaffolding, because of his disability. Montanez lost his right forearm in a gasket-making machine in Anaheim in 1972. He says he was depressed for seven years, but finally snapped out of it and went into the homebuilding business.

Montanez finished his work on the theater Oct. 30, and on Halloween, the new church was rededicated in an all-day ceremony and lunch. Its gold leaf shone. Its pews stood on a rich royal-blue carpet. Meza said Montanez saved the church $200,000. Still, the project was an expensive one. The church paid $750,000 for the building in 1991, Meza said, and put about $500,000 into it. Christian Tabernacle, an evangelical Hispanic church, used to be on Susan Street but moved because it needed a bigger building. Meza said the church has about 600 members.

Montanez crossed Main Street this week to admire his handiwork on the facade from a better vantage point. He looked up at it and said he felt he could go back to breadwinning now, satisfied with the way things turned out.

Here is a 1983 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/dyjpkr

The exterior of this theater appears in the opening credits of SOLE SURVIVOR (1983), a low-budget horror/sci-fi movie that was released on DVD in 2008.

This photo is circa late 1940s:
http://tinyurl.com/3ap5b5

Why isn’t this place listed with all of the other Fox listings?

This is a mixture of pictures of Our Pastor & Church Choir inside of the Theater (currently use as our church sactuary) All the gold triming is…original..untouched.
All the lighting has been fixed in the exterior.

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Thank you Ken so much for the pictures!!! They are very special to us.