No Happy Ending to the 61-Year Story of Whittier Theatre

In a few days, the Whittier Theatre will be rubble.

The small shopping plaza that fronts the theater complex is half-demolished already. The theater itself is practically gutted, with the chairs ripped out and the interior ceiling removed.

It’s difficult to argue with the city manager and some residents, who have called the building an eyesore, a shadow of what was once the town’s glittering movie house.

But others look past the carnage of wrecking balls, earthquakes, vandalism, economics and time. Their vision is colored by ghosts, the specters of their youths.

For Whittier natives older than 35, the theater is the movie house of their childhood, adolescence and maturity, the main entertainment attraction before television, “cineplexes” and videocassette recorders.

“I took my wife there on our first real date,” says Bob Henderson, 50, who now sits on the Whittier City Council. “She was wearing a gingham dress of some sort. I was probably wearing jeans. We’ve been married 30 years now, going together since the eighth grade.”

Regina Phelan’s recollections reach further back. The retired physical education instructor was 10 years old when the theater opened on July 31, 1929. “I remember when they brought in the searchlights for the grand opening, probably two or three,” Phelan says. “We heard that there were movie stars there, and it was a grand affair.”

The opening night featured three vaudeville acts, including the “Personality Girls” and a juggler whom the local paper described as “far above average.”

The celebrities included actor Monte Blue, who starred in the opening feature, “From Headquarters.” Blue assured the mayor and more than 1,000 spectators that great advances had been made in sound-picture technology in just the previous six months.

Still, the theater owners had prepared for all contingencies. They constructed an organ loft so that silent movies could run to live music. And their movie house, which had cost $160,000 in those pre-Depression days, included a full-sized stage with an orchestra pit in front, a drop loft above and five dressing rooms below. The theater’s 79-foot tower dominated the rural countryside at the time.

The theater was one of several hundred of its era designed to mentally transport audience members to a world beyond their own. The walls were crafted to suggest the outside patio of a hacienda, replete with balconies, tile roof overhangs, art-stone window grilles, arched doors, pillars, towers, turrets and chimneys. Dim orange lamps cast this mythic panorama in the silhouette of a perpetual sunset. Bulbs embedded in the planetarium-style curved ceiling represented stars--in recognizable constellations--that were periodically veiled by the lighting effects of a cloud machine.

“It was the greatest thing that ever existed,” Phelan recalls herself thinking as she and her siblings tromped past orchards and barnyards filled with chickens during the mile walk to the theater from their father’s ranch. Developers built the theater outside city limits, at the corner of Whittier Boulevard and Hadley Street, to bypass Whittier’s blue laws, which forbade showing movies on Sunday.

In the days before Disneyland and television, “the idea was to get you out of your humdrum life to a place of magic. That’s what they were doing,” says Phil Wintner, a director of the Whittier Historical Society.

The crafted escapism of atmospheric theaters such as the Whittier represented a reasonably economic innovation in theater construction of that time. The prevailing architecture for first-class houses involved more-costly materials and workmanship than at the Whittier, and it imitated grand, old stage theaters and symphony halls or incorporated Art Deco styling, says John Miller, vice president of the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation.

By contrast, an atmospheric theater could be likened to a three-dimensional, plaster-and-wire movie set.

Miller says John Eberson erected the first atmospheric theater in the early 1920s in Houston. Southern California architect David Bushnell fashioned the Whittier movie house, known in its early years as the McNees Theatre because it was built on land belonging to that family.

Atmospheric theaters achieved particular popularity in bad weather states, Miller says, because the fake, starlit sky simulated clear, temperate conditions that were rare most of the year. Miller estimates that, at most, a couple of dozen such theaters remain, with the Arlington in Santa Barbara being the survivor that most closely resembles the Whittier. Miller says a person can also see an example of the atmospheric effect at the Blue Bayou restaurant at Disneyland.

In the early 1930s, Sam Yorty--later to become mayor of Los Angeles--operated the theater’s projection machines and shined the spotlight on the vaudeville performers.

The theater was still in its heyday in 1945 when Charlie Marlatt, then 26 and just out of the armed forces, headed west from Rochester, N.Y., to visit California. He took a job at the Whittier Theatre for $65 a week and stayed, actually living in an apartment above the theater until 1952.

When Marlatt began managing the 982-seat theater, he says, a regular ticket cost 60 cents for adults, 14 cents for children.

There was a uniformed usher for each of the four aisles. “Red coats and red slacks, with stripes down the sides,” Henderson recalls. “They came around and made sure the audience behaved themselves. In those days you came out for your refreshments. You didn’t take them into the theater.”

In 1946, Marlatt asked a doorman named Walt whether he knew any nice girls. A few nights later, Walt invited his sister-in-law, Shirley, to the movies. And that’s when Marlatt first glimpsed his future spouse. “I met my wife right in the lobby of the Whittier Theatre,” he says, chuckling.

Marlatt now works the counter for Whittier Drug at the corner of Hadley Street and Comstock Avenue, where he still chats with former moviegoers and one-time employees. That drugstore, originally an anchor store in the theater’s plaza, moved out in the 1970s. Another longtime tenant, Betty Matthews Dress Shop, ended its 30-year stay in 1969. They were followed by a succession of marginally successful discount and budget stores.

For years, Whittier’s steady growth masked the impact that television made on movie-going. Drive-in theaters, and then multiple-theater complexes with smaller seating capacities, also siphoned away customers. After the heirs of longtime owner Hugh Bruen sold the property to Pacific Theaters, the new management tried a variety of strategies to resuscitate business: double bills at bargain rates; first-run Spanish-language films; $1 movies.

“The people running the theater tried everything to get people to come,” says John Hanson, a retired Sears manager who has lived in the neighborhood since 1950. “People didn’t go to neighborhood theaters anymore.

“They got down to one usher and one teller,” Hanson says. “He was furnished with a brown coat and he wore his own slacks.”

Hanson says the theater became a neighborhood blight. He says he never thought much of the style to begin with. “It’s all ersatz,” he says. “It’s a mixture of everything.”

Pacific Theaters had already closed and sold the run-down complex to Doerkin Properties Inc. when the Oct. 1, 1987, earthquake damaged the property further. Taking advantage of emergency demolition ordinances thereafter, wrecking crews knocked down walls for about five hours before local preservation advocates obtained a court order stopping them.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that because the building is a local historic landmark the city had to supply an environmental impact report and compel the developer to abide by its conditions before the property could be leveled. In March, the court accepted the city’s report, clearing the legal path for the demolition of the fenced-off, vandalized theater.

On May 11, the public had one last chance to take a look around the theater before Doerkin Properties knocks it down to build a multimillion-dollar shopping complex. The developer was required to allow interested parties to scan the complex for artifacts and must sell these odds and ends for no more than the removal cost.

Danni McCue, Anthony Santana and a handful of others needed flashlights that day as they poked through the musty darkness.

In the projection room, strips of film curled along a floor that was blanketed by thousands of punched ticket stubs. There was also a rusty metal file cabinet, a beer can and a kicked-in space heater. Some of the debris was recent, such as a mattress and khaki jacket left in Marlatt’s former apartment by an uninvited boarder.

Without the seats and ceiling, the theater itself resembled a warehouse with an orchestra pit and a stage. On the side walls remained much of the hacienda-style detailing, nearly invisible in the gloom. Santana commented that the building is more solid than some other old theaters that have been saved.

At length, McCue and Santana stumbled upon a find--a long-forgotten scenic curtain prepared by “Martin Studios of Hollywood.” The intact, painted curtain depicted a generic Moorish city, Hollywood-style. In the corner was an ad for a local car and tractor repair shop that none of the visitors could recall.

As they left, longtime Whittier resident Lilyan Neal peeked tentatively into the black interior. “I didn’t know they’d gone this far,” she said, looking into the empty hull of the theater, her voice raspy with emotion.

“I wish there’d been another way.”

NEXT STEP

Friday is the deadline for preservationists and collectors who expressed interest in rescuing specified theater artifacts. By Friday, interested parties must deliver to the developer’s attorney checks for the removal cost of items they want. Only specified and paid-for artifacts will be saved before the general demolition, which is expected to proceed in the next week or two.