Hollywood's Cinerama Dome Shuttered in Arclight's Mass Closure
The Cinerama Dome Theater in Los Angeles, California on May 24, 2021. (Maxim Elramsisy | The Corsair)
Arclight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters announced their nationwide closure of theaters on April 12, leaving Southern California to lose approximately 300 movie screens. Included in the mass closure was Hollywood's prized Cinerama Dome.
Steven DeVorkin, a lifelong Angeleno and former Corsair editor from 1974, cites the construction of the Cinerama Dome as a pivotal part of his lifetime.
"I watched them build [the Dome] when I was 9 years old in ‘63...On the worksite, they had pictures of Alfred E. Newman up...The movie was It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, coming to this theater in 1963… They were promoting that as the big premier motion picture at the Cinerama Dome," he said.
"It was the first theater built from the ground up using a geodesic dome. We were looking forward to the 1964 World’s Fair," DeVorkin said. "This was the future. This was the burgeoning future that we’d been all promised and here it was going up in Hollywood."
From an architectural standpoint, the Cinerama Dome is one of the last remaining film domes of its kind in the world. The design was created by renowned architect Welton Becket, who also produced the blueprint for the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Its rare geodesic structure, formed with cement, combined with the use of three projectors and a curved 90-foot screen, gave viewers a unique cinematic experience. The theater and marquee were declared as historic-cultural monuments in 1998 by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning.
“I would hope that someone takes it over... and turns it into a place for film preservation and exploration... [showcasing] presentational movies, which is sort of counterintuitive to this day and age of streaming," said Devorkin. "Hopefully after this pandemic, there is still a place for people to meet and talk and be in the group experience in which movies have been.”
Los Angeles film-lovers have taken to social media sites to outpour their mourning for the Dome. Users are sharing stories of their favorite viewings and expressing their passion for the theater's preservation.
Ben Steinberg, an avid patron of the Cinerama Dome, created a petition and donation page to revive its operation.
“Before the pandemic, I would go to Arclight cinemas and specifically the Cinerama Dome, probably like twice a week. It was basically a ritual or routine for me... So when I saw that they announced that they were going to close forever I knew there would have to be some way we could save the Dome,” said Steinberg.
The petition calls on well-known studios like Amazon, Walt Disney Studios, Apple, and Netflix to step in and save the theater's legacy. As of May 24, it amassed over 25,000 signatures.
This is not the first time the Dome faced critical changes. In 1998, the Dome's architectural design was threatened; Arclight made plans to tear down it's plaza, box offices, and marquee to create a restaurant and add stadium-style seating. Advocacy groups banded together to preserve its original structure, as seen today, with some added screen and acoustic upgrades.
In the last year, restaurants and concert venues struggled to keep the lights on without business from their dedicated patrons. Movie theaters, even well known chains, are no exception. Angelenos are hopeful that their collective voices can once again change the tides for the Cinerama Dome, preserving a piece of Hollywood history, and reviving its legacy for years to come.
