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The Los Angeles Theater - Movie Palace - Located at 615 S. Broadway, the Los Angeles opened in 1931 for the premiere of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. It had a seating capacity just short of 2,000. The theater was designed by S. Charles Lee and S. Tilden Norton in the French Baroque style, and was modeled on San Francisco's Fox Theater. The Los Angeles included the latest technological features when it opened, including an electric monitor of available seats, blue neon floor lights, a restaurant, a children's playroom, soundproof crying rooms, smoking room with built-in cigarette lighters, a walnut-paneled lounge with a secondary screen on which a periscope-like system of prisms relayed the film. The ladies' powder room was lined with mirrors and vanities, and the toilet stalls were each done in a different kind of marble and each toilet bowl of a different pastel shade. In 1988, the Los Angeles Times called it "a movie house for the gods, even in its present dusty state." Columnist Jack Smith wrote that the Los Angeles Theater was "palatial beyond the dreams of a prince" with a lobby that suggested "nothing less than the glory of Versailles." The music video "Spiderwebs" by No Doubt was filmed almost entirely in the palatial lobby of the Los Angeles Theater. Aerosmith's video for "Jaded " was filmed in the Lobby, Auditorium, Ballroom/Lounge, Landing on the way to the Ballroom and the Mezzanine Hallway. |
The Los Angeles Theater - Movie PalaceLocated at 615 S. Broadway | MapPhotograph: V.E. Stapf Jr., 2010 |
