L.A.’s Tower Theatre
In the early 1920s, the motion picture industry had been experimenting with ways to bring sound into the moviegoing experience. They devised a way to record actors’ voices during production and chemically add the sound track onto the film being run through the projector. For the first time, people could hear the actors speak, move and sing in time with the action on the screen. The talkies were born.
Vintage Photos (above): 1905 photo published in v.93-94 (Apr.-Sept. 1928) of Architect & Engineer from the San Francisco Public Library Collection.
The first talkies were short films, and few theatres at the time had the requisite equipment to show these films. It was, however, that film studios would begin to make feature-length talkies, and that theatres across the country would be engineered to show these films to their audiences.
Caption: Tower Theatre lobby, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Wendell Benedetti/lahtf
On October 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered in New York’s Warner Theatre, becoming the first feature-length “talking” picture. But the night before, on October 5, a sneak preview of the film was held at the Tower in Los Angeles, a newly constructed theatre on Broadway that had just opened that July. The Tower was the first movie theatre in Los Angeles to be wired for sound, and the sneak preview of The Jazz Singer—held one night before its official premiere in New York—makes the Tower the first movie theatre in the world to have publicly shown a feature-length talking picture.
Caption: Tower Theatre auditorium, Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Wendell Benedetti/lahtf
In 1982, the venerable Los Angeles Theatre was facing demolition, when business leader Ezat Delijani decided to purchase the building with the intention of preserving it for its beauty and historical value. Delijani and his family later purchased three more theatres on Broadway—the Palace Theatre, the Tower Theatre and the State Theatre—and formed the Broadway Theatre Group, with the goal of restoring these theatres as part of a larger initiative to revive Downtown Los Angeles as a thriving center of city life.
Caption: Tower Theatre medallions, Los Angeles, CA. Photos by Wendell Benedetti/lahtf
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