You’re here, and it’s a party but you feel like you’re stepping into a cathedral, and the crowded bar glows like an altar. L.A. worships everything. L.A. definitely worships itself. L.A. especially worships big spaces and big dreams and big ideas. This is the allure of the silver screen.
You’re not standing inside a cathedral. You’re inside a historic cinema on Broadway in downtown—the Los Angeles Theater—a big velvety, gilded “movie palace” where grandiosity was normalised thanks to Charlie Chaplin’s wallet, ego and his own big dreams and big ideas. He helped build the Los Angeles Theater in 1931 to showcase the premiere of his film “City Lights,” a masterpiece you studied in college back when moving to California was a fantasy. And now you’re lucky to be inside Chaplin’s vision and this gorgeous, gorgeous cinema because no one has yet bulldozed this particular house of worship and replaced it with luxury condos. It’s old and still standing—ageing as we all hope to age—by staying relevant and being seen.
Cities aren’t rigid spaces of concrete and glass but fluid, bioluminescent vortexes of ideas, dreams, and desires. Walking downtown L.A. and its cinema district is more like swimming than walking. Cinemas are L.A.’s vertebrae, the backbone of some great whale, as much a part of the L.A. landscape as serpentine beaches and crisscrossing highway overpasses. You glide through your city, this cinema, someone’s vision. You walk into this party and feel L.A.’s hot breath on your neck welcoming you.
Years later, as you and L.A. become one, you find your favourites. But this takes time. You learn the city’s history by learning about its cinemas, and how some began as venues for vaudeville before flim took over, like the Orpheum, another beloved downtown cinema that you will go to several times in your new L.A. life. The Orpheum was built in 1926, the year Queen Elizabeth II was born, and it sits a few blocks away from the Los Angeles Theater where you stand now.
In your new L.A. life, you’ll attend live storytelling at The United Theater also on Broadway, downtown, and you will wonder how streaming movies from your sofa will ever be enough after sitting somewhere so luxurious. The building that now houses the United Theater was built in 1927, and in 1989, became an actual house of worship when it was leased to televangelist Gene Scott who used the location to broadcast religious services. This feels appropriate. Buildings live many lives, and so have you. This feels very L.A., this type of reincarnation, reinvention, where televangelists, who are naturally theatrical folks, preach in cinemas.
The smaller neighbourhood vintage cinemas matter, too. There’s the single-screen Vista Theater in Los Feliz built in 1923, which also began as a vaudeville playhouse, and where you saw Black Panther in 2018. Director Quentin Tarantino has since bought the Vista because more Hollywood directors are becoming cinema preservationists—a different kind of visionary than Chaplin, but still in the tradition of what men with money do: they build wonderful things, knock them down, or rescue them. Watch the skyline to see their choices.
The L.A. skyline and its cinemas are a reaction to Thomas Edison, another visionary who used mob tactics to protect his patents because his lab back in New Jersey invented the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope. The entertainment capital is a fuck you to the East Coast. And, New Jersey is a small state with a big complex, wedged between New York and Philadelphia, and the mob still has a presence there. You would overhear them at your favourite diner in Fort Lee because mobsters like pancakes, too. East Coast filmmakers felt stifled by Edison and fled west. You can relate. You felt stifled after 14 years in New Jersey and fled to L.A. It’s a beaten path because it works, and here you are at this party, a bit underdressed.
Each cinema you visit in the years after your big move, after this party, is a time capsule. Each cinema’s shared magic in the dark. You love this about L.A. The neon marquees here are flashy valentines begging for your attention.
The marquees went dark during the pandemic. Chaplin’s cinema went dark. The Cinerama Dome and the Arclight chain, including the one in your neighbourhood, shut their doors, and this hurt a city so dependent on cinema-goers to keep the economy chugging along. Thankfully, several reopened, and people with money are rescuing historic cinemas, as Tarantino did.
Earlier this year, a group of directors including Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Guillermo del Toro bought the Fox Westwood Village Theater, which debuted the same year at the Los Angeles Theater and looks like a church with its white spire.
You’re grateful the Los Feliz Theater survived the pandemic, too. It was also built in 1923. These old buildings are vulnerable. Icon status can only carry you so far. The Los Feliz isn’t as grand as downtown movie palaces like the Orpheum or the Los Angeles Theater, but it’s charming, and you go there as often as you can despite the one-hour drive through snarls of traffic, most recently sharing very buttery popcorn with a man who loves hats.
But wait, you’re getting ahead of yourself again.
You’re at a party, new to L.A., standing in a cinema that feels like a cathedral.
You don’t yet know what you don’t yet know other than these historic cinemas feel like attending Catholic Mass and hearing a story but without snacks. It’s still that communal experience, but instead of a priest it’s a screen, and instead of prayer it’s your own spiral of thoughts as you react to a film. The actors on the screen want to feel worshipped, and the director who either wrote the film or built or saved the cinema you’re currently snacking in the dark in also wants to feel worshipped. These experiences didn’t just happen; they were created and curated just for you. Now, sit in the dark with a bunch of people you don’t know and be collectively mesmerised.
This is the L.A. that waits for you as you stand in the lobby of the Los Angeles Theater wearing your boring black dress. You were a visitor for years and now you’ve been a resident for all of two months. This is the L.A. that waits for you down the road, the Orpheum, the United, the Vista, Los Feliz. All you know right now is that this is where your love affair with L.A. historic cinemas begins: with Chaplin’s walls vibrating as DJs spin from different rooms on different floors. You take it all in, all the glamorousness, all the imagination, all the yes, because that’s what cinemas whisper over and over and over in the dark: “Yes, it’s possible. It’s all possible.”
You feel a hand on your shoulder. You turn around and it’s Charlie Chaplin, eyeing you like someone forgot something.
“Baby,” he purrs, and you wait because it’s Charlie Fucking Chaplin and you don’t know what to say.
He wears a tuxedo. He’s attending this party, too, because he’s the king and this is his castle. His eyes scan you. He then does that thing where he pensively chews his index finger, just like in his movie that inspired him to build this landmark where you have clearly disappointed him. His gaze is intense. No wonder everyone adores him.
“I know there’s more to you than this quiet black dress.” He pauses. “What’s really in your closet?” He smiles.
You just moved here and you don’t have a good enough answer.
You feel seen. By a ghost.
He disappears into the crowd before you can say anything. He disappears into a sea of sequins, feathers, boas, glitter on pampered skin. Loud, sparkly outfits in opulent, connected rooms where your understated approach is so understated that no one except Charlie Fucking Chaplin catches it. He’s inviting you to fit in. He’s inviting you to be seen, too, like the woman you bump into in the bathroom who’s being hugged by a tight feathered costume the colour of a sunset. She knows what she’s doing; this isn’t her first rodeo. She is her own Bird of Paradise and has a wingspan so wide she can barely fit into the stall—and yet, she does. You can’t help but watch her. She doesn’t notice you at all because in a quiet black dress, you’re nothing but a shadow on a frescoed wall in this old cinema where ghosts roam. You imagine that she and Chaplin are close friends.
Feathered wings that can barely fit into a bathroom stall aren’t a costume for a special occasion but a state of being. It’s the entertainment capital, and people take dressing up seriously, like in New Orleans. People who think “yes” dress theatrically. People who think “yes” wear feathers the colour of a sunset. Los Angeles is a city that says yes. Chaplin contributed to this yes vibe because yes is possible when you show up in a desert with a shit ton of money.
You need to think more “yes.”
In the years after that party, your closet changes: white go-go boots, a gold sequin top, puffy loud coats, bell bottom jeans, an orange vintage jacket that looks like the front seat of an old Buick, which is why you like it. You now wear these garments when you go to the cinema. You want to be seen, too. This is how L.A. has changed you. Before the lights dim, before the movie begins, you look around for Charlie Fucking Chaplin, hoping he notices your outfit.
