L.A.’s Grand Old Broadway Theaters

The above photo was taken on the day in 1974 when the Follies Theatre on Main Street was trashed for another parking lot.

You can’t stop progress of this sort, but you can certainly try. That was the point of having this year’s convention of the League of Historic American Theatres in downtown Los Angeles.

Broadway--our Broadway--has so many historic movie houses that it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. These range from the Cameo, built as a nickelodeon in 1910, to the Los Angeles, definitely not built as a nickelodeon in 1931.

Some of these theaters are doing well enough with action films and Spanish-language movies to keep going: the State, the Orpheum, the Million-Dollar. (The latter also has Spanish-language variety shows.)

Others aren’t doing so well. The Tower has closed, and God knows what will happen to its delicious lobby, a scaled-down version of the one at the Paris Opera. The Globe has become a shopping arcade. It’s feared that the Los Angeles will be the next to go.

Nobody’s mad at Metropolitan Theatres, which runs most of these houses and has not run them into the ground. Metropolitan’s president, Bruce Corwin, was at the league’s conference, as concerned about the future as anybody. “They’re great theaters,” he said. “But what are we going to put in them?”

That’s the question. Hillsman Wright, president of the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation, which hosted the convention, wants Broadway to become a legitimate-theater district, like New York’s Broadway. Some of the theaters ran vaudeville shows as well as movies in the old days, and Wright would like to see them brought back as performing arts centers.

Larry Wilker told the delegates--about 175 people attended--that this idea had worked out nicely in Cleveland, where three old vaudeville houses were linked together in a nonprofit venture known as the Playhouse Square project.

Architect Daniel Coffey told them what the restoration of the grand old Chicago Theatre had meant to business in the North Loop. And we also heard about cities where theaters were put back in mint condition but couldn’t find enough product to fill their stages.

That’s an obvious concern in Los Angeles. When the Shuberts can’t find anything to put in their theater in Century City between “Cats” and “Les Miserables,” when the Nederlanders can’t keep the Pantages consistently lit in Hollywood, it is obvious that touring Broadway shows aren’t the answer.

The alternative would be locally produced shows. But our major producing groups already have their own houses: the Taper, the Los Angeles Theatre Center (four spaces there), the Pasadena Playhouse and so on.

So what do you do? Perhaps you start by acknowledging that not all of Broadway’s endangered theaters can be saved and that not all of them are, in fact, endangered.

One delegate said that he wasn’t as depressed as he thought he would be to see what “they” had done to the Globe (built in 1913 as the Morosco). I shared that feeling. If the orchestra level is now a maze of little stands selling Fruit ‘o the Loom underwear, it is at least buzzing with shoppers, part of the wonderful blare that is Broadway (before dark).

The crime here was pouring concrete over the stage and orchestra, rather than installing a slab floor that could be taken up if a new owner wanted to put the Globe back into use as a theater. (The balcony is still there.) Builders who find new uses for old theaters ought to be encouraged to preserve their lineaments, maybe by some kind of tax abatement program.

Why? Because nothing is forever. If we could reclaim all those miles of light track that got ripped up when the Red Cars were replaced by buses, we’d be congratulating ourselves today. Suppose that it’s discovered in 20 years--I should say, suppose it’s confirmed--that watching TV causes brain damage? We will need all the theaters we can get.

Until then, it’s probably inevitable that some Broadway theaters will be mothballed. Others are too precious for that. The Los Angeles, for example. One of the convention’s panels was held there. The house looked a little large, and the backstage space a little small, for stage shows. But it is a movie house for the gods, even in its present dusty state.

Imagine restoring it to mint condition and making a tourist attraction out of it, a living museum for the moviegoing experience as it used to be. (Claire W. Engle, a delegate from Hawaii, came up with the idea.)

“MOVIES WERE MOVIES” is what it’s called in the tourist brochure. A bus picks up the tourists at their hotels and takes them downtown to the Los Angeles. Proceeding up the grand staircase--and is it ever--they get a box of free buttered popcorn, and a uniformed usher (with flashlight) finds them their seats just before the lights go down.

The program changes every week; each one highlights a different movie year. This week the newsreel, the cartoon, the selected short subject and the feature (“Star-Spangled Rhythm”) all come from 1942. The prints are sparkling, and Paramount has provided a lobby display of some of the gowns used in the picture.

After the show, we take a tour of the theater, including its amazing downstairs ball room. Then the bus back to the hotel. It was fun. It was safe. It was a trip to the past that the children could enjoy.

Above all, it was Hollywood--a reminder of the awe factor (in Hillsman Wright’s phrase) that the movies used to have. If people get a kick out of seeing how movies are made, won’t they get a kick out of seeing how they used to be shown? It’s easy to imagine Universal Studios building an imitation movie palace as part of its tour. Why not use the real thing?

As thrilling as the Los Angeles is, a theater person is more intrigued by two small houses where the convention also held sessions, the Palace and the Belasco. These were built specifically for live performance and could easily convert to it.

Built in 1911 as the Orpheum, the Palace has been poking along with films for 50 years. Turn the lights up and you find a comfortable and surprisingly fresh interior, with light Beaux Arts touches. The auditorium suggests a seashell. The stage has depth and height. Capacity is about 1,200, but it feels much smaller than that. Without question the spoken word would carry here.

Built in 1926, the Belasco, on Hill Street, has been used as a church since the 1950s. But it was built as a legitimate theater: Fredric March played here in “The Royal Family.” The marquee is gone, but the inside is as intimate as a small New York house--the Booth, say. Seating capacity: 1,000. No need for mikes and binoculars here.

Both houses could accommodate any holdover hit that the Mark Taper Forum or the Los Angeles Theatre Center could send them. They would be perfect for small one-set musicals, like the Pasadena Playhouse’s current Harry Chapin show. Suddenly it’s clear that the Doolittle isn’t the only 1,000-seat house in town. And that’s what Los Angeles needs just now--decent, human-sized theaters, not mausoleums.

Would people come downtown? They’re coming down to the clubs, and to the Los Angeles Theatre Center. But security is an issue, and so is cheap parking. If the city is trying to make downtown livelier, it ought to be able to help with both.

No one at the convention spoke for the Spanish community, without which Broadway would be dead. The Palace would be an ideal venue for Spanish-language plays, as well as films. Perhaps Carmen Zapata’s Bilingual Foundation of the Arts should take a look at it.

The Shuberts and the Nederlanders have looked over the Belasco and decided it doesn’t fit their plans. Happily, it has been bought by a local developer, Michael M. Bolour, who has started to put it back in shape, while figuring out what to do with it. “I love this theater,” he said. “But it’s got to provide some income.”

There was some talk at the convention that all an old theater needs to come back is the right show--a “Phantom of the Opera” or a “Les Miserables.” The trick, of course, is to find a permanent constituency for your theater. But it’s true that a theater can’t be saved until people know it’s there, and that the best way to do that is to put something in it, if only a convention panel.

The achievement of groups like the League of Historic American Theatres and the Los Angeles Conservancy is to remind us how rich we are in theaters, if we can find uses for them. Anyone with ideas on the subject should write to LAHTF at P.O. Box 65013, Los Angeles 90065. Anyone who wants to see the theaters close up can take the conservancy’s regular Saturday morning tours. Information at 623-TOUR.