A New Home for Directors
The charge to the architects, one of the speakers said, was that if you started at the Pacific Ocean and headed east on Sunset, the first really drop-dead building you come to should be the new headquarters of the Directors Guild of America.
The 9,000-member guild formally dedicated its new home Saturday morning with speeches and the cutting of a red ribbon. It seems possible that the guild got even more than it asked for. You probably couldn’t find a comparably drop-dead building if you started at the east end of Sunset in downtown Los Angeles and drove west to the guild’s tower.
(You could get an argument on other streets, but we’re talking Sunset Boulevard.)
Architectural critics will have their own say, but to a passing layman it is a startlingly untraditional structure, generally cylindrical but with glassy planes interrupting the curvatures, like the high, wide and handsome columned main entrance.
At six stories, it rises above its neighbors, which include a car-wash, a drug store, a financial institution and the guild’s former HQ across Hayworth Street. (Councilman Joel Wachs, who formerly represented Hollywood, and Councilman Michael Woo, who represents it now, both worked hard for necessary variances and both were on the dais Saturday morning. Woo noted that the building has positive symbolic value for a Hollywood that is trying to tone up its image.)
The new building, with its sweeping curves, its mauve granite, its rose-tinted glass and its bronze accents would actually stand out in a forest of skyscrapers. It is an instant landmark, with Deneys Purcell the principal architect for the firm of Rochlin Baran and Balbona.
The last of the guild’s founding fathers, Rouben Mamoulian, died a few months ago, too soon to see what he and his colleagues had wrought. But as the guild’s current president, Franklin Schaffner, and other speakers noted, the new structure is in part a memorial to him and to the other pioneers, including Frank Capra, who is the oldest surviving former president of the guild.
On a December night in 1935, King Vidor had invited Mamoulian and other directors, including Howard Hawks and William Wellman, to his house to discuss the threats to their work. There was talk of industrywide salary cuts, and of direct-or-be-fired limits Paramount and possibly other studios seemed about to impose on a film maker’s right to decline unsuitable assignments.
Vidor and his guests were better paid and had more clout than run-of-the-mill directors, but they knew that they, too, were ultimately order-takers, even when the orders seemed fatuous if not suicidal. The actors and writers had organized and now, at Vidor’s urging, the directors did, too.
The new building contains two floors of handsome guild offices plus rental spaces. But its functional heart is its three screening facilities: an intimate 50-seat video theater, a 150-seat film theater and a majestic 600-seat main auditorium with a state-of-the-art sound system capable of raising the dead. The theaters were designed by Jeff Cooper.
Indeed, the features of the new building likely to be appreciated most by the industry at large are the fairly steep pitch of the theaters, which affords a view of the screen unobstructed by high-rise hairdos, and uniquely ample spacing between the rows, offering knee-room that is scarce in nearly all theaters.
“We could have put 100 more seats in here,” said actor-director Sheldon Leonard, who chaired the guild’s building committee for the five years the headquarters was in process. “But we figured let’s do it right.”
Although directors presumably represent the art component in the art vs. commerce duality of motion pictures, the guild leadership showed a keen financial prescience, buying the site at Hayworth and Sunset several years ago for slightly more than $300,000, a modest enough sum then, a bargain now. The building’s cost, exclusive of the three floors of subterranean parking, was $13 million.
(Times change. The guild’s previous HQ immediately west on Sunset, dates from 1954. It contained only the guild offices and one theater, but it cost less than $250,000, land included.)
Gazing around the huge, high-ceilinged lobby, one of the directors said, “If the industry ever fails, this would make a great casino. We could start the new Las Vegas.” The lobby is designed to accommodate the receptions that frequently follow the screenings of high-profile films.
An early use of the facility will in fact be an American Cinematheque festival in June, pending the completion of the Cinematheque’s own headquarters in Hollywood, which is probably three years away.
“Directors always want more takes, until they get it right,” Sheldon Leonard said. “It’s a little hard to do when it’s a building. But here we are, and it’s a print.”
