Why you should experience Fox Theater in Los Angeles, California.
Fox Theater is a surviving neighborhood cinema where Hollywood's entertainment character meets early motion-picture exhibition, successive architectural reinvention and more than a century of change along Hollywood Boulevard.
Set along Hollywood Boulevard near Wilcox Avenue and just steps from the former Warner Hollywood Theatre, the building occupies the historic commercial corridor at the base of the Hollywood Hills, positioned between the dense blocks surrounding Highland Avenue and the entertainment district extending east toward Vine Street. Its narrow boulevard frontage belongs to an urban strip developed around theaters, banks, restaurants and specialty stores as Hollywood became a regional commercial center during the early twentieth century. The structure rises directly from the sidewalk within a continuous street wall, preserving the intimate relationship between cinema architecture and pedestrian commerce that once characterized this section of the boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard runs beneath the southern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains here, with the Los Angeles Basin spreading south from a district whose historic entertainment buildings remain concentrated within a remarkably compact corridor. The result is a surviving theatrical shell whose boulevard frontage, layered alterations and position within Hollywood's historic commercial core preserve the physical imprint of successive eras of screen entertainment.
What you should know about Fox Theater.
Fox Theater is best known for beginning as the Iris Theatre in 1918, when theater proprietor P. Tabor commissioned architect Frank Meline to create a purpose-built cinema at 6508 Hollywood Boulevard. The project represented the third home of an exhibition business whose ancestry reached Hollywood's Idyl Hour Theatre, opened during the early 1910s and subsequently renamed Iris after relocating along the boulevard. Meline developed the new 1918 building in a Romanesque mode with a brick facade and a single-floor auditorium accommodating hundreds of patrons, placing it among the earliest substantial motion-picture houses on Hollywood Boulevard. Its emergence coincided with Hollywood's rapid conversion from a small community into the center of American filmmaking, giving the theater a prominent position within a commercial district increasingly shaped by cinema. Architect S. Charles Lee redesigned the frontage in 1934, replacing its earlier architectural character with a streamlined Art Deco composition and neon marquee during a period when theater exteriors became elaborate advertisements for the films inside. Technical changes followed as widescreen exhibition reshaped American cinemas, with the Iris equipped during the 1950s for CinemaScope, 3-D, VistaVision and stereophonic sound. Carol Burnett worked there as an usher during the decade before her breakthrough in television and musical theater, adding an unusual connection between the neighborhood cinema and a future major performer. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was playing at the Iris when the Hollywood Walk of Fame formally debuted in 1960, and Hitchcock's star was installed on the sidewalk outside the theater. The building consequently passed through several foundational stages of Hollywood exhibition history, from early purpose-built cinema through Art Deco modernization and the widescreen technological competition of the postwar era.
Corporate and architectural changes during the late 1960s created the Fox Theater remembered by subsequent generations of Hollywood moviegoers. Fox West Coast Theatres had assumed operation of the Iris before National General Corporation undertook another extensive modernization, and the building reopened as the Hollywood Fox on December 18, 1968. The renovation introduced a new facade, expanded lobby, marble wall surfaces and revised seating, substantially altering the appearance inherited from earlier decades. Mann Theatres eventually became the final cinema operator, maintaining the house into the 1990s before earthquake damage brought theatrical exhibition to an end in 1994. The auditorium then spent years closed to the public and served for a period as storage for theater equipment. A multimillion-dollar conversion revived the building in 2009 as Playhouse Hollywood, transforming the former single-screen cinema into a nightclub and performance venue without erasing its century-old association with entertainment. Playhouse ceased operations in 2020, leaving the structure as a rare surviving building from the first generation of substantial movie houses developed along Hollywood Boulevard. Its sequence of cinema, architectural remodeling, widescreen modernization and nightlife reuse encapsulates the continual reinvention of a boulevard whose entertainment buildings repeatedly adapted to new audiences and technologies.
How to fold Fox Theater into your trip.
Fox Theater works as the anchor for a Hollywood outing connecting the district's oldest operating restaurant, a preserved barn central to the emergence of feature filmmaking and the circular recording-industry headquarters built during the postwar music boom.
Begin at Musso & Frank Grill, opened by Frank Toulet as Frank's Café at 6669 Hollywood Boulevard on September 27, 1919 before restaurateur Joseph Musso joined the enterprise and French chef Jean Rue began a 53-year tenure in its kitchen. John Mosso and Joseph Carissimi purchased the business in 1927, and the restaurant later shifted next door to 6667 Hollywood Boulevard, where descendants of Mosso remain involved more than a century after its founding. Its 1934 Back Room became closely associated with Hollywood writers, with figures including William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler among the literary community connected with the restaurant. Continue to Hollywood Heritage Museum, housed inside the barn that Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille rented in December 1913 as a production facility for the newly organized Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The 1901 structure stood at Selma Avenue and Vine Street when DeMille used it during production of The Squaw Man, released in 1914 and central to the company's establishment in Hollywood. Studio expansion eventually surrounded the barn, and preservationists later rescued and relocated the structure before Hollywood Heritage opened it as a museum devoted to early filmmaking history. Conclude at Capitol Records Building, completed in April 1956 after British music company EMI acquired Capitol Records and commissioned Welton Becket and Associates to create a consolidated West Coast headquarters. Louis Naidorf served as project designer for the 13-story circular tower, whose stacked floor plates created one of Hollywood's most recognizable postwar forms. Recording studios incorporated into the complex became associated with artists including Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, whose commercial importance to Capitol inspired the building's enduring “House That Nat Built” nickname. The progression moves from a restaurant embedded in Hollywood's literary and studio culture through a surviving structure associated with the rise of feature filmmaking and culminates in the postwar headquarters of Capitol Records, tracing the district's development across dining, cinema production and recorded music.
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