Once Grand, Cinemas Now Focus on Function

There was a time when movie theaters were splendid palaces, grand fantasias conjuring visions of ancient Egypt or China or Aztec Mexico or Moorish Granada.

Architect S. Charles Lee, in the 1931 Los Angeles Theater on Broadway, created a dream version of the Palace of Versailles, complete with a tiered lobby fountain dripping strings of crystal mock water into a mosaic basin guarded by white marble sea serpents. The ornate darkness of the 2,000-seat auditorium resounded with the throb of a giant Wurlitzer, which in veteran organist Gaylord Carter’s phrase, “perfumed the air with music.”

But that was then; this is now.

And now cinema architecture tends towards the utilitarian, as if watching a movie in an auditorium offers no more sense of occasion than viewing a cassette on a home videocassette recorder.

Now we have multiplexes, clusters of small auditoriums, such as the recently opened AMC Santa Monica Seven on the Third Street Promenade.

A prosaic box, finished in the fashionable Post-Modern mini-mall colors of peach and bluish-green teal, the Santa Monica Seven divides its total 2,500 audience capacity among seven cinemas ranging in size from 200 to 465 seats.

Designed by Hemet-based architects Salts Troutman Kaneshiro Inc., the Santa Monica Seven’s main aim is, says partner Kevin Troutman, “to be compatible with the traditional aesthetic of the pedestrian mall’s Neo-Classical and Art Deco architecture.”

To achieve this compatibility, Troutman chose to design a facade that is almost anonymous. A wide, recessed archway housing the ticket booth is the Seven’s one gesture toward grandness, in a plain stucco promenade frontage.

A narrow, soft drink bar with outdoor tables, titled Critic’s Corner Cafe, occupies the intersection with Arizona Avenue.

Santa Monica Seven’s stripped simplicity continues in the lobbies of the three-story multiplex.

The theater lobbies are little more than corridors lined with the inevitable counters, serving the the appetites of a legion of munching popcornoids.

On the Arizona Street facade, a tall window lets light into the space occupied by a series of escalators to carry patrons up to the second floor or down into the basement-level cinemas.

The auditoriums seem spacious for their modest sizes. Comfortable seats, fitted with AMC’s trademark built-in cup holders, are upholstered to match the aisle carpets. Completing the simple scenario are plain peach walls, black-painted ceilings and red concrete floors designed for the easy cleaning of spilled popcorn and soft drink slop.

The luxuries of advanced technologies mitigate some of the architectural bareness of the multiplex auditoriums.

The ample cinema screens are curved vertically and horizontally to “provide enhanced image clarity, a brighter picture and even illumination,” said AMC regional director Sam Giordano. The visual quality is backed by a High Impact Theatre System that provides crisp sound.

“The design intends to generate a lively, fresh and light atmosphere in which the experience of watching the movie is paramount,” Troutman explained. “AMC operates within tight building budgets in an architectural formula that is carefully considered.”

The AMC architectural formula has proven successful in several local multiplexes, including Burbank’s AMC 10 and Century City’s Century 14.

In Burbank, AMC followed the inspiration of the local Golden Mall by creating a giant box that looks like a suburban shopping plaza filled with small cinemas. Clad in rough, gray, concrete block, capped with red-metal edging and isolated in a sea of parking Tarmac, the AMC 10 is a bare bones building as minimal as its surroundings.

The Century 14 complex is, for AMC, an upscale design. Here the lobbies are more spacious, the finishes a trifle glitzier, the shopping mall ambience muted to match the sensibilities of a supposedly more sophisticated Westside clientele.

The relative design sophistication of AMC’s Century 14 is matched by the Universal City complex of its major rival, the Toronto-based Cineplex Odeon. With 5,940 seats in 18 auditoriums, Cineplex Odeon’s Universal City aimed “to bring majesty back into the viewing of movies,” said then chairman Garth Drabinsky when the multiplex was opened in 1987. “If the setting in which you actually see a film turns out to be a let-down,” Drabinsky added, “the whole complicated enterprise has failed.”

Recognizing that the grandeur of the lobby plays a main role in creating a sense of cinematic majesty, Drabinsky lavished marble floors and grand curving stairways in a double-height volume flanked by an illuminated garden. The ubiquitous concession counters, whose pungent popcorn odors grab you immediately upon entry to the AMC multiplexes, are discreetly relegated to the side areas close to the auditoriums.

Kansas City-based American Multi-Cinema Entertainment Inc., which claims to have invented the multiple-cinema concept in its hometown back in 1963, operates close to 1,500 screens in 270 sites nationwide. Cineplex Odeon, AMC’s main multiplex competitor, runs an even larger number of outlets in the U.S. and Canada.

Cineplex Odeon first revolutionized Toronto’s theater-going experience in the late 1970s by converting the ground floor of an office building into a series of matchbox-sized auditoriums showing small-scale movies, many of them foreign art films whose potential audiences were as limited as the size of the Cineplex screens.

Like the Beverly Center multiplex, Cineplex Odeon’s first major Los Angeles multiple cinema complex, the Toronto auditoriums were crude little chambers with uncomfortable seats and fuzzy projection no better than that of a home projection TV.

But Cineplex Odeon proved capable of better things.

In its conversion of two 1930s L.A. movie houses, the Fairfax on Beverly Boulevard and the Showcase--previously the Gordon Theater--on La Brea Avenue, Drabinsky’s in-house architects honored the Art Deco flavor of the decor while renovating the spaces and updating the technologies.

The Broadway, a new Cineplex Odeon two blocks south of the Santa Monica Seven on the Third Street Promenade, continues this conscientious pattern.

Designed by Toronto architect David K. Mesbur in collaboration with Santa Monica-based Solberg & Lowe Architects, the Broadway’s Art Deco frontage is skillfully integrated into the new Janss Court mixed-use office and condominium complex that surrounds it. The sleek 1930s style, which seems so apt for movie-going, still pervades the lobby and auditoriums.

The Broadway and the Santa Monica Seven will soon be joined by another multiplex on the Third Street Promenade.

Mann Theater’s Criterion, a 1,500-seat six-cinema complex designed by Jeff Cooper Architects in the renovated shell of a 1920s shop and office building, is under construction across the Promenade from AMC’s Seven.

When the Criterion opens later this year, the Promenade will offer the public about 5,000 new cinema seats.

Given this great expansion of cinema space, it seems a pity to many designers that the architecture of the new multiplexes is usually so commonplace and uninspired.

It may never again happen that multitudes of patrons will wander downtown on Broadway admiring the glories of the Million Dollar, Los Angeles, Palace, Orpheum, United Artists, Tower, Cameo or Roxie, or parade on Hollywood Boulevard as they did in the 1920s and ‘30s.

But the lack of a distinctive design style in most new multiplexes does not mean that fine or fantastic architecture is no longer possible in modern movie houses.

San Francisco’s 1984 Galaxy Theater, designed by Kaplan McLaughlin and Diaz, is a glittering neon-outlined, Post-Modern Art Deco glass cube-and-tower that flashes enticement to passing traffic on busy Van Ness Avenue.

Eschewing fake nostalgia, crudity or condescension, the Galaxy demonstrates that cinema design can still create an urbane and glamorous mise en scene even in this more modest movie era.