STYLE : ARCHITECTURE : Hooray for Hollywood!

Hollywood. In the past, the city was synonymous with glamour and glitz, riches and romance. And things may be that way again. True visionaries are going to great lengths to restore famous residences, refurbish landmark buildings and even open museums devoted to Tinseltown. Here, a few projects that are cause for applause.

The restoration of the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard offers a generation raised on multiplex theaters a chance to step back in time and view a genuine movie palace. After two painstaking years, Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and Pacific Theatres have returned the El Capitan to its original grandeur--and then some.

Built in 1926, the El Capitan was a playhouse with an ornate East Indian interior by architect G. Albert Lansburgh (he designed the Wiltern) and a spectacular Spanish colonial exterior by Morgan, Walls and Clements. In 1942, however, it fell, like a Disney heroine, under a languorous spell: Converted to a movie theater, it was “modernized” with corrugated plaster walls and ceilings, and its cast-stone canopy replaced by a nondescript marquee.

Awakened this year and declared a city landmark, the theater is again a sight to behold, thanks to 30 subcontractors and 200 artists coordinated by Fields & Devereaux. Inside, architectural designer Joseph J. Musil created four tiers of fringed curtains--40 feet tall, 175 feet wide and hung with giant tassels. The center panel, painted velvet, features dancers against a skyline and is reminiscent of “every Hollywood musical you’ve ever seen,” Musil says.

Martin Weil and Ronald Reed, who oversaw restoration of the plaster, lavished more than 80 different colors on the interior. Reed recalls the first time he saw it: “It was black. A previous fire had left debris and muck a quarter-inch thick.” But cleaning revealed the rich coffered ceiling of bronze-tone rosettes and stylized leaves.

Elsewhere, old photographs aided the reconstruction of opera boxes, which had been sheared off. More than three dozen plaster molds were made to repair numerous holes (from the 1940s suspended ceiling) in the gilded ceiling over the ticket foyer and the stenciled ceiling in the lobby. And original color schemes were gleaned, Sherlock Holmes-style, through microscopic inspection.

The El Capitan is a real showstopper--as well as a preservation story with a happy ending.