Los Angeles has an inferiority complex when it comes to film appreciation—anyone will tell you that. The hang-up is exacerbated by comparisons with New York, where repertory cinemas abound and there seems to be a Bresson retrospective in constant rotation. We undoubtedly lack a festival culture; the city has reportedly only ever screened a full Cannes lineup once, in 1974. The best film critics all live in New York; really, the entire critical infrastructure is there. It can be a real quest to find new releases from outside the United States in this “AMC-dominated multiplex environment,” as programmer K.J. Relth-Miller put it to me when we spoke in October.
A strange bifurcation tends to arise in these conversations: LA produces, New York consumes. LA creates; New York appraises, judges, critiques. That sense was only heightened, during the spring and summer of 2023, by the simultaneous strikes of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA. The country has learned of the nitty-gritty contract details of both unions: the way they use digital technology and artificial intelligence; the checks for pennies they receive, according to some impossibly complicated set of formulae; their regulations around culturally responsive hair and makeup. These details are no more glamorous than those of any other labor dispute; the difference is that the difficult and often dull work that actors do appears before us onscreen completely transfigured. More than ever before, people who do not already live here have come to understand the work that produces this alchemy. And no matter that AFTRA was once based in New York or that there have been pickets there, too, or that just as many new American releases are filmed in Georgia. In the cultural imaginary, LA is the “dream factory,” as film historian Thom Andersen called it in his experimental 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself—the place where these myths are spun, where labor transforms into enchantment.
“Los Angeles is not ‘Hollywood,’ and those who confuse the two should be banned from visiting,” Rachel Kushner writes in a recent installment of her Harper’s column. She’s right, of course—only a small percentage of the city’s residents work in the movie business—but the borders between the two aren’t exactly secure. In walking distance from my apartment are indelible places of filmmaking history as well as sites instantly recognizable from the movies: the Mack Sennett studios, now, unsentimentally, a storage space sporting a little plaque; Echo Park Lake, where Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes snaps blackmail photos from a rowboat in Chinatown (1974); Bob’s Market, as seen, under a different name, in the Fast & Furious franchise (2001–). (In the column in question, Kushner details the hostile takeover of her neighborhood, which is just adjacent to mine, in order to shoot one of the Fast sequels.) The Paradise Motel, featured ever so briefly in Los Angeles Plays Itself, looks utterly ordinary during the day, but I have never failed to see it as a louche hideout when I glide past it at night. Onscreen, the city’s particularity can dissolve, letting it serve as a stand-in for anywhere in the world, a universal movie backdrop—or it can concretize, casting LA in its own image.
But LA is more than a city of soundstages and backlots, a living set, a home to everyone from marquee stars to best boys and PAs. At the end of the day, the dream factory workers clock out, and they go to the movies like anyone else.
LA THEATERS: wackier, weirder, and gaudier than their counterparts in New York. The most famous of them gesture at exotic peoples and empires of yore: the Mayan, the Egyptian, the Chinese, El Capitan. They are rarely just a dark room offering a transportive experience. Without fail, they constitute a spectacle in their own right.
Sid Grauman, the original theater impresario, always conceived of his movie palaces as part of a continuum with the rest of the filmmaking process. His first venture in LA was the Million Dollar Theater, a lavish two-thousand-seater downtown. Today, it’s the perfect setting for a Saturday afternoon screening of 1960’s La Dolce Vita. Downtown was once the locus of moviegoing in LA, before the center of gravity shifted northwest to Hollywood, in large part thanks to Grauman himself, who later built the Egyptian and the Chinese. He came up with the idea of the premiere—for which the Chinese Theatre is now famous; even I have been to one there—and the red-carpet interview.
“I remember going to [the Egyptian] when I was eighteen, nineteen, and it was like, This is Hollywood,” Ryan Coleman tells me. Coleman is a film critic who grew up in Glendora. When he went to see Leave Her to Heaven (1945) there, more recently, people gasped at the first glimpse of Gene Tierney’s face onscreen. Her legendary beauty was somehow enhanced by the projectionist’s use of nitrate film stock, which “radiates this luminescent, golden light,” Coleman says. (He called it an “all-time LA moviegoing experience”). There has always been a frisson of danger in nitrate, which can substitute for gunpowder in a pinch; its extreme flammability provides the main source of tension and plot-driving conflict in the quintessential movie-about-movies, 1988’s Cinema Paradiso. The Egyptian is one of just five theaters in the country that is set up to handle it. Nitrate is the reason, Coleman tells me, that something like 70 percent of all American movies from the 1920s are lost forever.
LA is more than a city of soundstages and backlots, a living set, a home to everyone from marquee stars to best boys and PAs. At the end of the day, the dream factory workers clock out, and they go to the movies like anyone else.
Many of these theaters were repurposed in some way during the second half of the twentieth century. Sometimes it seems like half the cinemas in LA, including two of the city’s current repertory darlings—Quentin Tarantino owns them both now—enjoyed stints as pornographic theaters in the 1970s, when smut was still a furtive, collective experience. (Today, only one endures: the Tiki, in East Hollywood.) The Million Dollar Theater, meanwhile, began showing Spanish-language movies and continued doing so into the new millennium; a guy I know who grew up in Boyle Heights tells me that his father used to take him and his sisters there for $1 screenings. Still others resisted change: The Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax remained faithful to its name until its owner was horribly murdered during a screening in 1997 in a botched contract killing—the hit was put out by his much younger lover. (There seem to be no regulations governing the disclosure of prior violent death on theater premises; I saw many screenings at this one’s latest incarnation before I learned about the murder.) These days, it’s called Brain Dead Studios, after the streetwear brand that owns it; though once you know this history, the macabre double entendre tends to linger.
THEY ARE ALWAYS CLOSING: because of Covid, because the owner is unmasked as a dedicated sex pest, because nobody is going to the movies anymore. The loss of Hollywood’s ArcLight theater was keenly felt during the pandemic; its golf-ball Cinerama Dome elicits an outpouring of nostalgia from everyone I speak to about it. (It’s due to reopen in 2025.) I am sorry to report I never got there, a fact that some readers might decide disqualifies me from writing this article. Lucia Arce Ahrensdorf, a screenwriter who works in global film distribution, tells me she loved it for how it treated the screening of low-budget indie films like some grand event. On his podcast, Bret Easton Ellis talks frequently about going to see movies at the ArcLight, which he has called the best theater in Los Angeles and the perfect place for a Tuesday matinée. Unlike most of LA’s residents, whoever sets the zoning code seems to be constitutionally unsentimental about the city’s past, so movie theaters have been converted into bars, swap meets, and condos. Of the 406 theaters listed on the site Cinema Treasures—these are just within city limits; there are plenty more in Santa Monica and Glendale and the many other municipalities within LA County—340 are shuttered, and 198 of those have been demolished.
But lately they have been opening too. “Since 2020, 2021, we’ve seen a huge, a massive resurgence of interest in going to the movies in this city,” Relth-Miller, who currently programs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, tells me. “And, yes, that applies to new releases, but I think what we’re really seeing audiences show up for is repertory programming.”
The thing to understand about LA’s moviegoing culture is that it is essentially fragmented and scattered across a vast sprawling terrain, like the city itself. But despite it all, there are more options for independent and foreign cinema than ever before. “We’ve gotten to the point where every night of the week there’s something incredible worth seeing,” Micah Gottlieb, a film archivist and the creator of the Mezzanine programming series, tells me.
There’s Vidiots, a film space and video rental store that dates to the 1980s and just reopened in Highland Park’s historic Eagle Theatre (which, in between its original and present incarnations showing pictures, passed a roughly two-decade interregnum as a church). here’s Brain Dead, which sets its film schedule according to loose monthly themes—human resources, shock of the new, personality crisis—and always provides colloquial, freewheeling movie descriptions. (“GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE: ‘love how hard Godard went in his late period. Constant disruption and a real to and fro at all times. Also, he put his doggo in the flick, can’t go wrong with that star turn.’”) They love genre movies and camp; this year, they screened Showgirls (1995) on Valentine’s Day, one of the most fun movie outings I’ve had in ages. There’s Tarantino’s New Beverly, which Ahrensdorf refers to as having “sometimes psychotic vibes,” though not without some fondness. I’ll put it this way: I went to see L’Avventura (1960) there with a couple of female friends, and you know that famous shot of Monica Vitti standing against the wall in the plaza as men gawk and leer at her from every direction? That was kind of how we felt waiting in the popcorn line. But it has great programming—“always on film,” the marquee proclaims—and the sound is piped into the restrooms, a boon for those of us who like to stay hydrated and a possible solution to the recent imbroglio between the Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) studios and the theaters that had apparently opted to illegally insert an intermission into the film. “I think that it’s still a place where a particular experience of moviegoing is preserved that you really can’t find in 99 percent of the world,” Gottlieb says. During the pandemic, Tarantino also bought the Vista, right across the street from the former location of D. W. Griffith’s Babylon set, and it finally reopened in November, complete with 70mm projection, a new sound system and cafe, and whispers of a possible future 16mm micro-cinema next door.
The new venue 2220 Arts + Archives, housed in the former Bootleg Theater in Historic Filipinotown, hosts a rotating film series in addition to readings and other events. Gottlieb’s Mezzanine focuses on harder-to-find revival fare; Jordan Cronk, who runs Acropolis, brings in new international movies that haven’t found a distributor. Gottlieb tells me he’s tried to connect Mezzanine’s offerings to a wider, or at least different, audience by bringing in writers to discuss them: Kushner screened Robert Frank’s elusive 1972 Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues there in 2022, and Emily Wells, who just published amemoir about her days as a dancer, recently introduced Frederick Wiseman’s Ballet from 1995. Gottlieb has also tried to cultivate a more social atmosphere, making sure the bar is open before and after screenings.
American Cinematheque, a programming series that has been around for some time, screens most often these days at the Los Feliz 3. It’s not my ideal viewing experience: The theater is wider than it is long, putting you uncomfortably near to the screen, fine for philistines who like to sit so close their eyes blur and not so great for those of us who prefer a dignified remove. But the lineup is always terrific, and the theater brings in writers, directors, and actors for discussions following screenings. Some recent viewings: Jean Eustache’s Mes Petites Amoureuses and Joseph Sargent’s Taking of Pelham One Two Three (both 1974), Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuervos (1976), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021). American Cinematheque also puts on movies at the Aero in Santa Monica, which has been showing good movies on 70mm for ages—Gottlieb says he used to go there with his dad. Also as of November, the AC is screening once more at the Egyptian, which had been closed for renovation after being purchased by Netflix, in a real throwback to the pre-Paramount antitrust era. This seems to have been basically an award season gambit, and while watching The Irishman there back in 2019 was a treat, it’s harder to summon the same enthusiasm for most of Netflix’s offerings. Luckily, the Cinematheque is screening there on weekends.
Meanwhile, everyone I talk to seems to be surprised that the Academy Museum, which opened during the pandemic, isn’t just showing Oscar winners. (They do that, too, on Sundays, but it’s more 1940’s Double Indemnity than 2018’s Green Book.) The museum also runs a limited series that looks beyond the institution. Relth-Miller described it as “a bit more international, a bit more experimental.” For example, they’ve paired Agnès Varda’s Lions Love and Lies (1969) with Penelope Spheeris’s Hats off to Hollywood (1972). Another series, Branch Selects, highlights behind-the-scenes movie work: costume design in Taxi Driver (1976), visual effects in Apollo 13 (1995). Renzo Piano Studio Workshop designed the museum’s flagship theater to recall a spaceship lifting off from Earth, invoking the transportive experience that movies can offer. “Building a movie theater in LA is a serious business,” Luigi Priano, a partner at the studio, tells me. “You’re not building it [just] anywhere.” The architects wanted to design “the perfect machine for watching a movie,” he says, echoing Le Corbusier’s famous formulation. For the most part, the building gestures forward, not past, though its theaters’ sumptuous red velvet interiors are a callback to the old movie palaces. Priano, perhaps catering to his American audience, says that if he could screen any two movies in the theaters, he would choose 2017’s Dunkirk for the big one; apparently Christopher Nolan was the person who urged Priano and others to outfit the theater for nitrate. And for the small one? 1998’s The Big Lebowski. (“I can’t stop watching The Big Lebowski,” he admits.)
Relth-Miller sees it as the Academy’s job to complement the programming of independent theaters around the city. “We’re just one piece of the puzzle,” she says. One thing that stands out about the Academy Museum is its sheer scale: The flagship theater has one of the biggest screens in town and can fit an audience of 966. It’s also apparently one of the safest places in the city to be during an earthquake. The fact that its screenings are just as well-attended as those of the much smaller repertories should suggest that some optimism is in order: When my boyfriend saw the three-hour-long Taiwanese family drama Yi Yi (2000) in late October, nearly every seat in the house was full.
LOS ANGELES IS A DRIVING CITY, and people will always fidget to get back to their cars at the end of a screening. But there is promise in the haze of cigarette smoke that amasses outside 2220 after a screening, and a real pleasure in catching something at LF3 and then traipsing down the sidewalk to Figaro to talk it over afterward—or in leaving Brain Dead and heading to Canter’s after for a late-night matzo ball soup and a Manhattan. And LA is, after all, an industry town, so you might, as Relth-Miller did, go to a Preston Sturges double feature and glimpse an ascot-clad Peter Bogdanovich, doubled over laughing at The Lady Eve (1941). You might go to see Short Cuts (1993) and find Andie MacDowell sitting in front of you or catch a new indie film at Brain Dead and spot Timothée Chalamet. You might attend a bootleg screening of Chinatown under a bridge in Chinatown. You might go take in a Cinespia offering at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, yards from the eternal resting place of one of its stars.
Whether you work in the business or not, going to the movies here means grappling with the whole process of filmmaking, from the decades of negotiation that can go into getting a project greenlit to the difficulties of getting into the union to the absurd technical detail required to frame a single shot. Sure, on some level, you can never forget that what you’re viewing is something other than pure fantasy how could you, when someone who’s in the picture might be taking it in three rows ahead; when the theater you’re sitting in is owned by the guy who made the thing? But I don’t think that being awake to the labor involved precludes indulging in the reverie that movies promise. The very best ones take the labor and imagination of scores of people—their pasts, their expertise, the sum of all the films they’ve seen and all the wild visions their minds can conjure—and alchemize them into a spectacle that somehow slips the bonds of that earthly work. You know what this feels like, because you also know what it feels like to watch a movie that feels like it was birthed in a conference room or even one that has all the right ingredients and just doesn’t quite work. Its individual elements protrude: a stilted performance, dialogue made of tin, jittery editing. But the best movies feel inevitable. They seem to speak themselves into being, fully formed.
And there is possibly something even more wondrous about the fact that we know, sitting there in the theater, that all of this happens right here. We’ve heard the stories; we recognize the streets, the landscapes, the people. Yet that alchemy, that flash of the ineffable: It still occurs. Something transforms. It would make anyone a believer.