Grand Alex Theatre in Fine Form for 75th Anniversary

Like a well-tended celebrity, Glendale’s Alex Theatre wears the years lightly.

Reborn in 1993, “the beacon on Brand Boulevard,” as the Alex has been called, looks as good at 75 as it ever did.

On Saturday, the people who resurrected the theater and turned it into a community showcase will celebrate its anniversary with a free street festival and an evening re-creation of the theater’s first show.

“We didn’t want to leave the anniversary unmarked,” says Max Howard, chairman of the Alex Regional Theatre Board. “It’s such a wonderful theater.”

A British-born Glendalian, Howard has a production company, Melwood Pictures, based at DreamWorks’ animation studio in Glendale. He says his mantra while helping plan Saturday’s and subsequent anniversary events was the dedication read when the theater, then called the Alexander, opened on Sept. 4, 1925.

Howard quotes: “The paramount object in the erection of the Alexander Theatre was to create an artistic architectural achievement wherein to present entertainment compatible to the tastes of the people of Glendale and its vicinity. Therefore, the Alexander is hereby genuinely dedicated to you--the commonwealth of Glendale--and to any who will partake of its offerings of footlight and shadow.”

The 75-year-old words are just as relevant today, Howard says.

With its glowing neon and architectural references to ancient monuments, the Alex harks back to a time when the fledgling movie industry built exotic palaces in its own honor. Designed by local architects Arthur G. Lindley and Charles R. Selkirk, it is a happy combination of Greek and Egyptian motifs. It took its name--Alexander--from the 3-year-old son of theater magnate Claude L. Langley, who commissioned it.

As Howard notes, the theater opened at a time when people still fretted that movies might turn out to be a flash in the pan. For the opening program, the owners hedged their bets and presented both the premiere of the John Ford silent film “Lightnin’ ” and eight vaudeville acts.

Beginning at 8 p.m., Saturday’s show will include clips from the Ford film and the vaudeville acts, with writer/comedian Steve Allen as master of ceremonies. Cake and champagne will be served after the show in the theater’s lobby and forecourt.

Andrea Humberger was a leader of the fight to save the Alex after it closed as a regular movie house in 1991. Chairwoman of the anniversary celebration, she is also the Alex’s historian. As she points out, the Alexander, its name until 1940, “was a big preview house, not a premiere house.”

Throughout the decades ruled by the studios, major motion pictures tended to premiere at Hollywood movie houses. If Hollywood was the place to see searchlights and limousines, Glendale was the place where studio heads worked out the kinks in their movies, testing how titles, endings and other important elements worked.

Glendale had two things that made it attractive to Darryl F. Zanuck, Jack Warner and especially Louis B. Mayer, Humberger says: It was fairly close to the studios and Glendale was perceived as a typical middle-class suburb, a handy representative sample of the studios’ target audience.

By the mid-’30s, sneak previews shown after the advertised feature were weekly events, she says. Studio executives would take their places in cushy leather seats in the rear of the orchestra section and gauge audience reaction (they also distributed feedback cards, just as they do today). Films were routinely reedited based on the response of the Glendale audience.

“Celebrities were not supposed to attend their previews but they often did,” says Humberger. Thus, Elizabeth Taylor watched the preview of “National Velvet” at the Alexander. She and her mother got there late and had to stand in the back until the film was almost over before they could sit down. The other legendary celebrity sighting, Humberger says, was Bing Crosby, worried that the public wouldn’t accept him as a priest, pacing the Alexander lobby throughout the preview of “Going My Way.”

One of the tools of the studio executive’s trade, Humberger says, was something called a fader. Mayer or one of the others would hold the little metal box in his hand and, at some point, control of the film’s sound would be switched from the projection booth to the executive’s fader, allowing him to make the sound louder or softer as he saw fit. Humberger is going to add a fader to the theater’s riveting history wall.

One of the best things about the resurrected Alex is its open-air forecourt, remodeled when noted theater architect S. Charles Lee added its glowing tower and marquee in 1940. Every fall during the Annies--animation’s answer to the Academy Awards--the forecourt is filled with people in tuxes and long dresses, many with hair the color of iMacs and an uncanny ability to imitate Porky Pig or Pinky and the Brain.

Howard is thrilled that the Alex is home to the Annies, and is often used for such industry-related purposes as meetings of the large number of people needed to make an animated feature. Disney, Warner Bros., DreamWorks and dozens of smaller studios have or have had local facilities. “Glendale is really the international home of animation,” Howard points out.

The Alex was purchased by the Glendale Redevelopment Agency in 1992, rehabilitated and reopened as a 1,460-seat performing arts center. Since then, it has expanded its traditional role as an instantly identifiable embodiment of the creativity that fuels the local economy and helps shape the culture of the globe. Home to a half-dozen cultural organizations, including the Glendale Symphony Orchestra and the Alex Film Society, it is as Ellen Ketchum, its new executive director, says, “This shining beacon that continues to glow.”

The block in front of the theater at 216 N. Brand Blvd. will be used for the free birthday bash Saturday from noon to 4 p.m., which will include entertainment and birthday cake. Evening events will start with a premiere-like pre-show at 7, followed by the anniversary show at 8.

For $7.50, you too can partake of the Alex’s offerings of footlight and shadow.

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Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.