Hodgetts & Fung to design downtown theater

Hodgetts & Fung Design and Architecture -- the Los Angeles firm responsible for the restoration of Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater as well as the new Hollywood Bowl -- has been selected to renovate a historic downtown movie palace into an Asian American theater and cultural center that architect Craig Hodgetts hopes will have the “compressed, surprising quality that you find in a very dense Asian city.”

ImaginAsian Entertainment -- a multimedia entertainment company that promotes Asian Pacific American culture to broader audiences and launched the 24-hour ImaginAsian TV network in Los Angeles in October -- has partnered with Costa Mesa-based developer Cinema Properties Group to launch the estimated $2-million renovation. Renovation of the 1920s property, at 251 S. Main St., is expected to be completed this summer.

Although the design is not complete, the center will include a 300-seat theater with a balcony and the ImaginAsian Cafe. Among the center’s offerings will be small karaoke rooms that can accommodate up to 10 people for patrons to use before or after attending a movie or other event.

“It will be a full center,” said Michael Hong, chief executive of ImaginAsian. “Its primary role will be as a movie theater, but it could also be used for live performances, cultural events that are ethnic-specific or just mainstream events and stand-up comedy.

“It will be modeled after the centers they have in Asia, more of a destination than just a theater,” Hong said. “They’ve got Internet cafes, massage places, all sorts of things they incorporate into the center.

“One of the most important things is the ImaginAsian Cafe, which will specialize in Asian snacks -- we’ll have samosas and egg rolls, as well as Asian box candies that you wouldn’t find in a Loews theater.”

Hong added that the theater screen might be used for group viewing of televised events of specific interest to Asian American communities.

“A good event would be the cricket matches between India and Pakistan -- television on a huge screen, that would be a huge draw,” he said. “It’s crazy -- they’re on all night, over three or five days, depending on the tournament. Another good idea would be World Cup soccer. We’re only limited by our imagination.”

The downtown structure, out of use for many years, has been home to several historic movie theaters including the Arrow, the Aztec and most recently the Linda Lea, a Japanese-language movie house.

“The theater itself has been there since prewar days, and it has a real checkered history,” Hodgetts said. “It was for a little while a Japanese burlesque house -- I’m pretty sure that’s not apocryphal. It really must have been quite a street scene. There was an open-air balcony where performers would wave to the passersby.”

The theater reopened in the late 1940s as the Linda Lea, which screened Japanese films. Hodgetts said that the existing orange and white plexiglass Linda Lea sign, from the late 1940s, will be taken down but saved and incorporated into the interior design.

Sue Ann Kirst, spokeswoman for Cinema Properties Group (her husband, James Kirst, is president), said that the developers purchased the building to take advantage of the burgeoning development of downtown L.A. and brought in ImaginAsian Entertainment, which created similar Asian American entertainment complexes in New York, because of the theater’s location near Little Tokyo and Chinatown.

“We happened upon the Linda Lea theater downtown several years ago when we were looking at another project,” Sue Ann Kirst said. “We said, ‘What a wonderful jewel, what a shame if it became a parking lot.’ Plus with all the new development and condos downtown, it seemed that there was a need for entertainment in the area, something a little different, with all the different cultures downtown.”

She added that Cinema Properties makes a practice of taking on properties that would seem to have little future.

“That’s what we’re trying to do in downtown Los Angeles,” she said.