ARCHITECTURE : Mann’s Chinese Theater: Illusion at Its Best

The first time I came to Los Angeles, I took the bus from the downtown train station directly to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, now Mann’s Chinese Theater. Every day, thousands of people make the same sort of pilgrimage, flying from Tokyo, Paris or Peoria and finding their way to this imposing temple and its famous footprints. It is the quintessential Los Angeles icon, the mother of all movie palaces, the mecca of motion pictures.

Look closely, though, because it’s a pretty weird building. How did a structure made of barely disguised concrete and festooned with an odd mixture of swags, beams and dragons become our idea of Hollywood glamour?

You might say that the building, which was designed by the firm Meyer & Holler in 1927, is a piece of bad architecture. Nothing quite fits, nothing quite matches, and nothing quite makes sense. The theater is supposed to be Chinese, or so its name tells us, and certainly there is a pagoda-like copper roof over the entrance, supported by concrete posts and beams painted a Chinese-lacquer red.

But what about the green copper obelisks over the main front on Hollywood Boulevard, the grotto-like swags molded out of concrete and the vaguely Greek friezes? What about the fact that the whole thing is just a front tacked onto a giant concrete box?

Mann’s is about as Chinese as a frozen lo mein dinner. For master showman Sid Grauman, the idea was not to make a correct building, but to create the image of an exotic escape into the faraway lands that only movies could offer. The theater succeeds because it combines the grandeur of a kind of imperial Shangri-La with the sense that when you enter, the city disappears.

It also succeeds because it makes sense in terms of its spaces. In between matching fronts, you enter into an elliptical courtyard where a covered walkway leads you into a lofty space whose verticality and curved walls remove you, without separating you, from the life of the city. There, you are prepared for the grandeur of the movie theater, where marble columns soar up to misty vistas seemingly held up by giant beams and guarded by strange ogres, dragons and saronged sages.

These great spaces and Grauman’s sense of showmanship made the theater the greatest place for premieres in the world. Today, it is still a terrific movie theater, but signs mask the facade, a ticket booth blocks the walkway, souvenir stands fill the main space, and loudspeaker announcements for star tours promise glamour elsewhere.

Even worse is in store; developer Melvyn Simon has planned a massive, two-block wide, U-shaped shopping mall that will completely encompass the theater.

Designed by shopping mall whiz John Jerde, the incomplete designs for this behemoth are frightening. Grand entrances will mimic and detract from the original opening, while a curved shopping street will make the theater into a relic sitting in the middle of something like the Westside Pavilion. All we will have left of this temple of illusion will be our memories--merchandised and sold on site. Mann’s is still a symbol of Hollywood, only now it represents the selling of long-faded dreams.