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Pacific’s announcement that it’s shutting down its theaters, including Arclight & the Cinerama Dome, has hit Angelenos hard. But don’t write the Dome’s obit just yet: The midcentury modern masterpiece has been saved (at least) once before, and that was because folks got loud.
In October 1997, when I was a writer at the LA Times Magazine, I learned that Pacific had quietly filed plans with the city for a giant new retail-entertainment center to be built around the Cinerama Dome.
I talked to @ChrisNicholsLA—savior of, among other landmarks, the Downey McDonald’s—who was as concerned as I was.
The Cinerama Dome was always my favorite theater in LA—how could it not be? Those 316 interlocking hexagons felt like the world’s coziest concrete cocoon. That 86-by-32-foot curved screen. The curtains! I saw Back to the Future there on its opening night.
I spent an afternoon drinking tea with the Cinerama Dome’s lead designer, France-born Pierre Cabrol, who worked for the legendary LA firm Welton Becket and learned how to build geodesic domes when he’d interned with Buckminster Fuller.
Cabrol put it best in describing his greatest creation: “It gives you back that sense of important place. You are not stuck in a little box to see your film. You are somewhere.”
A couple weeks after my story was published ( https://lat.ms/3uMJHcO ), I went to a meeting for the LA Conservancy’s Modern Committee. A guy who’d never attended before piped up and said he’d read my story, and wanted to do something about saving the Dome.
The grassroots Friends of the Cinerama Dome was born as Pacific revealed its plans for the theater: tear down the Dome’s plaza and box office, make the lobby into a restaurant, and gut the innards for stadium seating.
And that signature marquee of cockeyed red-and-blue letters, which has been a beacon on Sunset Boulevard since 1963? That was going to go, too.
The @LAConservancy got involved, and partnered w/Friends of the Dome to convince Pacific to institute a much more sensitive plan that would not destroy the Dome but enhance it: a new screen, upgraded projection capabilities, and enhanced acoustics.
The entertainment center surrounding it would be the Arclight complex, and when it opened in 2002, the Dome was not just preserved, it was showcased. The Conservancy called it a “major victory.”
Every time I’ve walked through the doors of the Cinerama Dome since, I’ve thought of Pierre Cabrol’s words: You are somewhere.
Back then, to get your voice heard as an individual, you had to pick up the phone and actually call someone. Now you can pick up the phone and reach a gigantic audience in seconds. It’s a lot easier to get real loud real quick.
And this isn’t just about the Dome. Like my friend and former colleague @marymacTV, I’ll be missing my local Arclight in Pasadena (almost) as much as the Dome. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-04-12/mourning-the-arclight-closuer-after-covid-lockdowns
Movies—making them, watching them, debating them, awarding them—are part of L.A.’s DNA. So yes, support any place that works to ensure those movies are seen on a big screen, with a big audience, like @vidiots and @newbeverly and @am_cinematheque.
But also, get loud—like THX loud—about this. Sign a petition (they’re floating around), follow the @LAConservancy for updates, or form your own group.
The power of print, as I learned with the Cinerama Dome, is real. As is the power of grassroots movements. Look around you—those movements are changing the world every day. Whatever your cause, invest in it. You never know what the outcome may be.
