After seeing Jeff Lange’s pictorial on the outside of the El Capitan, I was reminded how much I wanted to visit the theater and what better time than the Christmas holidays? This was my first trip to the grand old movie palace and I thought I’d share a few thoughts and photos of the trip.
It’s two days after Christmas and I’m at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. The El Capitan is a just a few blocks from historic Hollywood and Vine and across the street from Mann’s Chinese, one of the world’s most well known theaters. I spent my first 6 or 7 years living pretty close to here. On Friday nights in the early 60’s, my mom and grandmother and I would window shop on Hollywood Blvd for fun.
I remember spending time in front of The Hollywood Magic Shop marveling at all the junk on the walls behind the counter. The store is still there with more cool junk on the walls than in the 60’s. I was in Hollywood when I heard the news that Walt Disney had died. The news came from a radio at the International Newsstand on the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Cahuenga. I was seven years old and the news made me sad. No more Uncle Walt hosting “The Wonderful World of Color.”
I don’t have any specific memories of “El Capitan” which was called the Paramount in the 60’s. My strongest memory of a theater was “The Cave,” a strip joint down Hollywood Blvd. that still does business. I remember “The Cave” because the place had a false plaster front that looked like the rocky entrance to a real cave. At my age, that was the coolest looking place on the Boulevard.
Today I’m here to see “The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe.” Okay, that’s not entirely true. I’m actually here to see the El Capitan interior. I would have sat through any film playing here; it was just a happy accident that it was a film I hadn’t seen yet.
While I don’t consider myself a true movie buff, (You’re not going to see me at a Clara Bow retrospective or a foreign film festival at the local art house) I am interested in cinema history. I came to the El Capitan to experience a movie in a movie palace. I came to sit in a Hollywood theater and pretend I was watching a film in an era when movie theaters were much of the show with exotic interiors, expensive furnishings, and at least two fancy curtains that raised before every film; an era when approximately 50% of the US population went to see a cliffhanger, an animated cartoon, and a double feature every week for two bits American. I came to soak up a little Hollywood history.
1926 was a busy year for developer Charles E. Toberman. The Texas native had moved to Southern California in 1907 and made millions in Hollywood real estate. He is considered by those who know this kind of stuff to be the most influential developer in Tinseltown’s history. He was something of a visionary who saw Hollywood as an entertainment district as far back as the 20’s. Among his Hollywood developments Toberman built the Egyptian Theater, the original Max Factor Building and helped acquire the land for the Hollywood Bowl.
In 1926 he was busy with an architectural hat trick building the now historic Roosevelt Hotel, Graumans Chinese Theater and the El Capitan. Why would a millionaire build two theaters just across the street from each other? Because Grauman’s was built as a movie house and El Capitan was built for legitimate theater. They were built to compliment each other, not compete.
Thousands of theaters sprung up in the US in the prosperous 20’s, each one trying to outdo the last. Theater designers were always looking for unusual and exotic architecture to use as themes. Mixing both period and geographic styles inside and out left us with buildings both weird and wonderful. For his landmark theater, Sid Grauman chose a Chinese motif while, El Capitan’s architect G. Albert Lansburgh, chose a Spanish style exterior and an East Indian interior. I don’t know anything about East Indian architecture but I do know that the intricately carved ceiling in the auditorium is beautiful. Unfortunately, beautiful interiors don’t pay the rent and only 15 years after it opened, El Capitan was beginning to struggle.
By the 1940’s, entertainment tastes had changed. Song and dance troupes, plays and vaudeville acts had fallen out of favor and movies were king. In 1942 Orson Welles had just finished “Citizen Kane” and he was having trouble finding a theater to play it in. The thinly veiled fictional biography about real life newspaper mogul Randolph Hearst had made Hearst mad. Really mad. Hearst wielded his considerable power and influence and the film became too hot for Hollywood. As a last resort, Wells went to the owners of the El Capitan who agreed to premiere the film, the first film to ever be shown there. The success of the premiere prompted the owners to remodel and reopen as the “Paramount,” showing first run movies.
By the 1980’s, the Paramount had been passed from owner to owner. The old theater had been rode hard and put away wet. In its heyday, Hollywood had at least 20 or 25 theaters that rivaled the grandeur of El Capitan, all with exotic exteriors and hand crafted interiors, many with colorful neon marquees. By the 80’s, neglect and good old American greed left these outstanding buildings to be bulldozed or gutted and refitted and the landmark architecture of the 1920’s theater began to disappear
Sadly, these old architectural landmarks aren’t just being destroyed in Hollywood, it’s a nationwide phenomenon. Theaters are in the heart of old downtown’s, usually prime real estate. To “redevelop” these areas, movie palaces become Starbucks and Subway’s with nothing more than cheap posters of silent film stars left to mark the spot. In the 80’s The Paramount/El Capitan was one more old theater waiting to be gutted until Mickey Mouse stepped in.
In 1989 Disney was looking for a west coast theater to restore for premieres when they found the Paramount. The restoration team played with ways to get the tired old theater to turn a profit including one plan to turn the balcony into a second theater! As they pondered the theater’s fate, it was discovered that above the plaster ceiling which had been installed in 1942, much of the original arched and hand crafted ceiling was intact.
The discovery inspired Disney to attempt a full restoration of the theater to its pre-movie days, a bold and expensive move.
The El Capitan is an eleven hundred seat theater, with half of those seats in the balcony. Stepping inside, the auditorium seems cavernous. The carved and rounded ceiling is nearly six stories tall and what you see today is about 90% original. There were once two opera boxes on the side which are now used for props and such to decorate the theater.
The stage houses a 40 foot tall screen hidden behind curtains bathed in yellow and red lights. As the stage is currently dressed to look like Narnia’s winter, the blue of the props set against the curtain is striking.
By current performing arts center standards, the scale of the place is small, almost intimate, but the grandeur is unmistakable. This place was designed to look lush. From The stenciled ceiling in the foyer to the dark wood and red highlights in the barrel ceiling upstairs, it’s very much the same theater Hollywood would have seen when they came for a performance before “talkies” and “Steamboat Willie.” While the sound and lights are state of the art, the theater is definitely from a bygone era. It’s not hard to imagine Hollywood’s finest arriving for a show or maybe even a young cartoonist and his cronies taking in a vaudeville matinee, looking for gags for their next cartoon. It is hard to imagine that this beautiful theater could have easily ended up another fast food joint.
My holiday pre-show at the El Capitan was a concert by house organist Rob Richards. Richards has played the organ here since 1999 and was named 2005 ‘Organist of the Year’ by the American Theatre Organ Society. He played a mixture of Disney standards and holiday tunes on a twenty five hundred pipe organ known as the “Mighty Wurlitzer” and it’s one of the main reasons I came.
Now you may be thinking I’m one of those guys who sits at home listening to turn of the century recordings on a hand cranked record player, and that’s really not the case. I can’t tell the difference between a pipe organ and a midi player, but the “Mighty Wurlitzer” is not just any organ, this one is a movie palace aristocrat, an organ with a pedigree,
The Wurlitzer was originally installed in the Fox Theater San Francisco which opened in 1929. At the opening, the Fox was the west coast’s most stunning movie palace. The nearly 5000 seat theater was nicknamed “The Last Word,” it had $3000 Grecian urns decorating the front stairway (1920’s dollars, kiddies), a nurse’s office and a playroom where parents could leave the kids while watching a film.
Not too surprisingly, The Wurlitzer was one of the largest organs of it’s time and a monster to play. For my matinee, Richards took it easy but this is an organ with huge range and big lungs and was once part of the show in one of the world’s most decadent movie houses. Hearing this organ in a giant theater like the ones my grandmother used to wax nostalgic about was a geeky thrill.
Richards finished his concert, the house lights turned off and the previews began, all of them Disney movies which just so happen to be the next 3 or 4 films that will play in this theater reminding me that this experience is the property of Disney. But the El Capitan still had one little magical surprise.
After the credits and just before the movie, to remind us that Narnia itself is locked in a 100 year old winter, Disney decided to let it snow. Snow machines like the ones on Disneyland’s main street gave the theater a light powdering. Blue lights illuminated the soap flakes as they cascaded from above and the ooh’s and aah’s from kids and out of towners filled the air.
It was the kind of stunt El Capitan would have tried in its heyday. As Orson Welles shakes his snowglobe and whispers “Rosebud,” hired hands in overalls, standing on catwalks, throw handfuls of soapflakes, not just on the stage but on the audience where men in tuxedoes and women in gowns would ooh and aah and happily shake snowy white flakes out of their hair.
I didn’t realize it, but I came here with really high expectations. I expected this theater to be a landmark, a museum and a state of the art theater and it actually lives up to all three. I wanted to be reminded that a mythical Hollywood was not completely myth and I wanted to feel a bygone era with state of the art effects. I came to experience a movie palace and El Capitan didn’t disappoint. It’s old school craftsmanship and new century technology, a fabulous 1920’s posh theater restored to its early glory. For under 15 bucks American, anyone can have a 3 hour tour into a bygone era of Tinseltown glitz with the addition of surround sound and it doesn’t get more Hollywood than that. Now if they can just get the front of the place to look like a rocky cave entrance …
Ward is a guest writer for Jim Hill Media who wants nothing more than to live in a blimp that circles Disneyland day and night.