A Flashback to Flashy Times

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 go unmarked,” said Max Howard, chairman of the Alex’s board. “It’s such a wonderful theater.”

Howard said his mantra while helping plan Saturday’s events was the dedication read when the theater, then called the Alexander, opened Sept. 4, 1925. It said, in part: “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 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 fad. 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.

Saturday’s show, beginning at 8 p.m., will include clips from the Ford film and vaudeville numbers, with Steve Allen as emcee. The street festival will run from noon to 4 p.m.

Andrea Humberger was a leader of the fight to save the Alex after it closed as a regular movie house in 1991. Also the theater’s historian, she said it “was a big preview house, not a premiere house.” If Hollywood was the place to see Klieg lights and limousines, Glendale was where studio heads worked out the kinks in their movies, testing how titles, endings and other important elements worked.

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

By the mid-1930s, sneak previews shown after the advertised feature had become weekly events, she said. 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 re-edited based on the response of the Glendale audience.

“Celebrities were not supposed to attend their previews, but they often did,” Humberger said. Thus, Elizabeth Taylor watched the preview of “National Velvet” at the Alexander. The other legendary celebrity sighting, Humberger said, 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.”

The Alex was purchased by the Glendale Redevelopment Agency in 1992, rehabbed and reopened as a 1,460-seat performing arts center.