Cultivating Creativity at the Wiltern Theater

The Wiltern Theater is a mood piece--intensely vertical, angled to the street, its terra-cotta facade as green as an algae-covered pier.

Opulent, mysterious, it is filled with chandeliers and hidden rooms and crowned by a great plaster sunburst on the ceiling above the main stage.

The pastel glow of the ornate interior makes entering the Wiltern “seem like going into an enchanted grotto,” recalled Catherine Mulholland, who often walked to the theater in the 1930s, when it was one of Los Angeles’ grand movie palaces. “I just felt like we were going into some wonderful, mystic cavern.”

The Wiltern is urban and on some days sullen, the sort of building you’d notice on rainy afternoons in New York. Named for a street corner--Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue--the Art-Deco masterpiece has survived earthquakes, the burning of Koreatown during the 1992 riots, and the attempts of one prior owner to tear it down--a campaign that inspired picketing in the streets.

Movies gave way long ago to concerts and live stage: styles and personalities ranging from Johnny Mathis to Bruce Springsteen, Andrew Dice Clay to Jerry Seinfeld, Marcel Marceau to Mikhail Baryshnikov. Muhammad Ali’s 50th birthday celebration was filmed at the Wiltern. The same 2,200-seat theater has featured the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Video Awards, “Porgy and Bess,” Mummenschanz and the Boys Choir of Harlem.

A 12-story tower rises above the theater and gives the Wiltern complex its imposing profile. The tower is a haven for creative artists. Tenants include four architectural firms, two Hollywood set-design companies, several screenwriters and television writers, and an outfit that assembles sound stages.

“Every last one of them said, ‘I need to get into the Wiltern,’” said property manager Leisanne Ontario. “They just draw to this building; it’s amazing. People in the building consider it their muse.”

The Cinema Makeup School has occupied an airy space on the third floor for three years.

Purple-haired instructor Lee Joyner, a man with experience in “Godzilla,” “The Arrival” and other film projects, teaches “creature effects,” an eight-week course in which students learn how to fashion “Star Trek”-style masks and engineer monsters controlled by cables and inflatable bladders.

“One of the best things about Wiltern,” he said, “is the theatrical element. As opposed to being in some square, concrete building, we come into this beautiful theater that’s a Hollywood icon. It really helps open the mind to the creative juices, helps the students get into the mind-set of being Hollywood makeup artists. They love coming here.”

Joyner’s students devote four weeks to their outlandish masks, chiseling out the molds, whipping up foam latex in an electric mixer. When the creatures are finished, students like to wander the building or venture down to the street.

“Every once in a while you find Klingons in the coffee shop,” said screenwriter Robert Ramsey, who shares a tiny fourth-floor suite with his writing partner, Matthew Stone.

They took the office two years ago, and did the script for “Big Trouble,” a Tim Allen farce recently in theaters about a nuclear bomb stashed in a suitcase. The writers are now at work on a black comedy about the mob.

Being in Koreatown, in a neighborhood busy with street life, inspires them, Stone said. They like the action, the fact that they can walk to lunch and encounter crowds on the sidewalk.

“It feels like another city sometimes,” Stone said. “We’ve always loved the Wiltern building. You don’t have to have the air-conditioner on. You can just open the windows and get fresh air and hear the traffic.”

Their suite has a view of the Hollywood sign and buildings west along Wilshire as far as Century City. The W and I of the theater’s big vertical “Wiltern” sign hang just outside their window, filling the room with red and blue neon when they’re working late.

“It’s great,” Stone said. “We feel like we’re detectives in a Raymond Chandler story.”

Chandler was just beginning to write his hard-boiled detective fiction about the time the Wiltern opened, in 1931. The land had been part of a sheep ranch owned by Germain Pellissier, whose name now graces the office tower. Pellissier’s grandson, Henry de Roulet, negotiated with Warner Bros. to build a flagship for the nationwide theater chain that would rank among the finest anywhere.

Architects G. Albert Landsburgh and Stiles O. Clements devised an Art Deco design incorporating recessed windows into a visual upward thrust capped by a square secondary tower.

The interior, with its oval rotunda and Anthony Heinsbergen murals, includes a second-floor conference room with a marble bathroom and tiny kitchen concealed behind walnut panels.

The Wiltern became recognized as “a virtual catalog of the trends which ultimately comprised the Art Deco movement,” according to a written history. “Visitors encounter rooms in French Moderne, German Bauhaus, Cubistic, Streamline Moderne and classical American skyscraper motifs. Skillfully integrated in a sequence of spaces, they constitute a three-dimensional record of a brief but important moment in architectural history.”

An anchor for a stretch of Wilshire that already included the Art Deco Bullocks Wilshire store and the Ambassador Hotel, the Wiltern influenced the city’s Deco period.

Its grandeur, however, could never save it from hardship. Only a year after its spectacular opening, the theater closed temporarily for lack of revenue. Revived in the mid-1930s, it continued to languish as commerce and night life gravitated east to downtown and west to the beaches.

The Franklin Life Insurance Co. bought the Wiltern in the 1950s, and tried to raze it in 1979. Angry over the loss of the Art Deco Richfield Building downtown and a number of other structures, preservationists turned the theater into a cause celebre.

“The Los Angeles Conservancy ... said: ‘We need to do whatever we can to stop the demolition of L.A. landmarks,’” recalled Wayne Ratkovich. “Until the Wiltern came along, either the battle hadn’t been fought or, to the extent it had been fought, it had been lost.”

Ratkovich, a developer, saved the Wiltern from the wrecking ball--and lost millions for it. At the urging of then-Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro, he bought the Wiltern in 1981 and invested heavily in restoration, only to be hit by a fiscal triple whammy: the riots, which destroyed much of Koreatown; the Northridge earthquake, which caused damage throughout the Wiltern; and a Metro Rail construction project that tore up much of Wilshire.

“A calamity,” is how Ratkovich describes those events. “It was impossible to recover.”

He sold the Wiltern a few years ago to the Hertz Investment Group, a partnership that also owns the Oviatt Building downtown and other historic properties. Although the theater is dark some nights and lease rates are far below buildings in Century City, the Wiltern has but a single vacancy and is enjoying a bit of a revival, manager Ontario said.

“We love our space,” said Thomas Mann, associate director of the American Institute of Architects, which occupies the eighth floor after leaving the more expensive Pacific Design Center.

“I’m a thousand times happier here. The space is obviously designed by architects. It keeps the creative juices and the thoughts flowing.”