Artist:
Joseph Mora
Title:
Grauman's Million Dollar Theatre
Year:
1917
Adress:
307 S. Broadway
www.publicartinla.com:
A Wild West theme, perhaps expressing the interest in the region by the artist Joseph Mora is represented by additional architectural sculpture along Third Street. Skulls of long horn cattle, bison heads, six shooters, playing cards, and two ladies sensually draping their legs over a ledge, one stroking a guitar and the other strumming a lyre, can be seen on the ornate Churrigueresque border fabricated by Gladding, McBean around the Third Street entrance.
www.aperitifandart.com:
William Lee Woolett felt a theater's design should tell a story. Woolett had two collaborators, Joseph Mora and Albert C. Martin. As most architects of the time, they drew upon centuries-old architectural design processes of European public architecture. They understood artists' imaginations. The Grauman's were vaudeville entertainers and businessmen. Their imaginations as conveyed through the theatres they erected were immersive wonderlands, temples for both stage and cinema. There seem to have been two dueling, incongruent narratives being conveyed by the dazzling decorative design of the interior and exterior. Yet, the structure was built with resourcefulness in mind. In a time of war when steel was in shortage Woollett designed with great imagination innovative structural engineering. For 1918 it was a state-of-art theatrical experience.
While the interior of the Million Dollar Theater was inspired by an English fairytale, the exterior was by Indians of the American West. The Million Dollar Theater’s awe-inspiring Churrigueresque façade was bejeweled with sculpted American Indian grotesques by artist Joseph Jacinto Mora. The artist studied the rituals and customs of American Navajo and Hopi Indians, and there is no doubt that this work was a personal passion. One can find high-relief stone carvings of bison heads, eagles and allegorical figures representing as architectural elements, not unlike those on Greco-Roman temples from antiquity. On the side of the building, longhorn skulls were embedded in the neo-Spanish style architecture. The architectural style is Spanish Baroque Revival and the architects had seen it at the 1915-17 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.
Movie-goers from the suburbs of Los Angeles would be greeted for their pilgrimage with awe-inspiring Spanish Colonial Revival style architecture by Joseph Mora and the sumptuous Woolett interior murals. In the auditorium of reds and greens, white-gloved ushers and 2,345 seats cascaded toward the proscenium arch of the stage. Angelenos could watch perched at the expansive balcony. According to the LA Conservancy, the balcony spans 110 feet, and is 'supported by the world’s first reinforced concrete girder.' Music would fill the air, being piped by a 2 manual, 16 rank Wurlitzer organ. According to the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation "huge plaster organ grilles in the style of Spanish Colonial altar screens, painted to look wooden, still, flank the proscenium arch." Grauman was his famous for his prologue shows where some actors would be discovered by the major studios. It was during these productions, audiences got to see singers and dancers perform in the costumes from the movies, finding themselves part of a showstopper phantasmagoria.
www.publicartinla.com:
The Million Dollar Theater stands at the southwest corner of Fourth and Broadway as a living monument to the economic and social changes that have occurred in downtown since 1918. A marquee, extending out from the building over the sidewalk, announces that the ground floor was designed as a movie theater. Rising above the theater are twelve stories of what originally were office suites. When viewing the building from the west, you can see "Metropolitan Water District" painted in a soft brown band just below the roof line. This sign proclaims not what is here, but memorializes what was here. Instead of offices of the Metropolitan Water District, the visitor will now find apartments, and instead of a movie theater, the visitor will find an auditorium that was previously used as a church.
A Wild West theme, perhaps expressing the interest in the region by the artist Joseph Mora is represented by additional architectural sculpture along Third Street. Skulls of long horn cattle, bison heads, six shooters, playing cards, and two ladies sensually draping their legs over a ledge, one stroking a guitar and the other strumming a lyre, can be seen on the ornate Churrigueresque border fabricated by Gladding, McBean around the Third Street entrance.
www.aperitifandart.com:
William Lee Woolett felt a theater's design should tell a story. Woolett had two collaborators, Joseph Mora and Albert C. Martin. As most architects of the time, they drew upon centuries-old architectural design processes of European public architecture. They understood artists' imaginations. The Grauman's were vaudeville entertainers and businessmen. Their imaginations as conveyed through the theatres they erected were immersive wonderlands, temples for both stage and cinema. There seem to have been two dueling, incongruent narratives being conveyed by the dazzling decorative design of the interior and exterior. Yet, the structure was built with resourcefulness in mind. In a time of war when steel was in shortage Woollett designed with great imagination innovative structural engineering. For 1918 it was a state-of-art theatrical experience.
While the interior of the Million Dollar Theater was inspired by an English fairytale, the exterior was by Indians of the American West. The Million Dollar Theater’s awe-inspiring Churrigueresque façade was bejeweled with sculpted American Indian grotesques by artist Joseph Jacinto Mora. The artist studied the rituals and customs of American Navajo and Hopi Indians, and there is no doubt that this work was a personal passion. One can find high-relief stone carvings of bison heads, eagles and allegorical figures representing as architectural elements, not unlike those on Greco-Roman temples from antiquity. On the side of the building, longhorn skulls were embedded in the neo-Spanish style architecture. The architectural style is Spanish Baroque Revival and the architects had seen it at the 1915-17 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.
Movie-goers from the suburbs of Los Angeles would be greeted for their pilgrimage with awe-inspiring Spanish Colonial Revival style architecture by Joseph Mora and the sumptuous Woolett interior murals. In the auditorium of reds and greens, white-gloved ushers and 2,345 seats cascaded toward the proscenium arch of the stage. Angelenos could watch perched at the expansive balcony. According to the LA Conservancy, the balcony spans 110 feet, and is 'supported by the world’s first reinforced concrete girder.' Music would fill the air, being piped by a 2 manual, 16 rank Wurlitzer organ. According to the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation "huge plaster organ grilles in the style of Spanish Colonial altar screens, painted to look wooden, still, flank the proscenium arch." Grauman was his famous for his prologue shows where some actors would be discovered by the major studios. It was during these productions, audiences got to see singers and dancers perform in the costumes from the movies, finding themselves part of a showstopper phantasmagoria.
www.publicartinla.com:
The Million Dollar Theater stands at the southwest corner of Fourth and Broadway as a living monument to the economic and social changes that have occurred in downtown since 1918. A marquee, extending out from the building over the sidewalk, announces that the ground floor was designed as a movie theater. Rising above the theater are twelve stories of what originally were office suites. When viewing the building from the west, you can see "Metropolitan Water District" painted in a soft brown band just below the roof line. This sign proclaims not what is here, but memorializes what was here. Instead of offices of the Metropolitan Water District, the visitor will now find apartments, and instead of a movie theater, the visitor will find an auditorium that was previously used as a church.