Masterpiece Theater

It opened 15 days before JFK’s assassination with the premiere of the prophetically titled “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” It seats 959--not the biggest theater in Los Angeles--but its 86-by-32-foot curved screen, designed for the stillborn three-projector Cinerama process, was made for big movies. Big movies disturbing but beautiful to watch--”Apocalypse Now” and “Barry Lyndon” and “The Wild Bunch”-- but, especially, big science fiction movies: “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” and “2001,” because walking into the geodesic isolation of the Cinerama Dome is like journeying into a lunar landscape.

Now documents recently filed with the city point to an uncertain future for one of Hollywood’s highest-profile landmarks. The Cinerama’s owner, Pacific Theatres, has quietly asked the City of Los Angeles planning department to approve zoning for a proposed “Cinerama Dome Retail/Entertainment Center.” The 275,000-square-foot project would attach a multiplex, microbrewery, health club, food court, parking garage, retail shops and offices to the south side of the theater. Neil Haltrecht, vice president of real estate for Pacific Theatres, says the company is “exploring possibilities” and won’t discuss plans that are “in preliminary stages,” though he says the dome itself will not be razed.

Preservationists remain concerned. “We don’t want them to alter it, to poke holes or engulf it,” says Chris Nichols of the L.A. Conservancy. “They’re developers, they like to build.”

Pacific commissioned L.A.’s Welton Becket and Associates--architects of the Music Center and Capitol Records building--to design the theater, but it was essentially “Bucky Fuller’s design,” says Pierre Cabrol, a retired architect with the firm, who interned for the legendary father of the geodesic dome in the 1950s. Using Buckminster Fuller’s invention, Cabrol gracefully and safely interlocked 316 concrete hexagons into the world’s only concrete geodesic dome (most are aluminum or glass). The building created a sensation when it was completed--”The Only Theatre of Its Kind in the World,” Pacific trumpeted on a 1963 promotional postcard.

The architect of what is arguably L.A.’s most idiosyncratic movie palace is wary of the proposed expansion. The Cinerama Dome, Cabrol says, “is a form e finita--a form that’s complete. If you add something, it will look odd.” In an age when faceless multiplexes reign, he adds, “it gives you back that sense of important place. You are not stuck in a little box to see your film. You are somewhere.”