Historic Hollywood

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Left: Capitol Records started at Sunset
and Vine Street, moving two blocks
north in 1956 to this, the world’s first
circular office building. Resembling a
stack of forty-five-rpm records with a
stylus on top, Capitol and famed
architects Welton Beckett & Associates
have always denied that was the basis
for the design. The three recording
studios continue to be state-of-the-art
and have been used by the Beach
Boys, Frank Sinatra (the first to
record there on February 28, 1956,
before the building officially opened),
Dean Martin, Nat “King” Cole,
Natalie Cole, Grand Funk Railroad,
Ella Fitzgerald, Bonnie Raitt, and
many more as the studio continues
into the twenty-first century.
Right: The El Capitan Theater
reopened in May 1991 as a flagship
theater for the Walt Disney Company.
Almost $7 million went into its
restoration, after the original plans to
remodel the theater and create two
separate auditoriums were blocked.
The theater’s restoration garnered
worldwide praise and within a year it
was the highest grossing single movie
theater in the country. The theater
went under further improvements in
1998 restoring the backstage area
into a state-of-the-art theater and
adding the powerful 1928 Fox San
Francisco 4-manual 38-rank
Wurlitzer pipe organ. Disney
premieres at the theater have included
concerts by Sting, Wynonna Judd, and
Phil Collins.
theater was halted, leaving it in a state of
disrepair. A meeting was held with the
preservation groups and others concerned about
the theater’s fate, and all but one decided, at the
developer’s urging, to support a partial
nomination-some walls and spaces that were
uncovered would be historic and preserved, and
the rest would somehow not be historic and that
eighty percent would be remodeled.
Local theater historian Hillsman Wright
somehow convinced Pacific Theaters to allow him
to be lowered behind the 1942 false wall to see if
any of the original theater existed. Hillsman used
his mountain climbing gear to boldly go where no
man had gone before, and with a flashlight
estimated that at least eighty percent of the hidden
interior was still intact. When presented with the
information, the anti-designation forces ignored
it, still claiming it did not exist (“pay no attention
to that theater behind the plaster curtain”).
Meanwhile, three thousand miles away,
Disney had opened the Disney-MGM Studio
theme park in Orlando to record crowds. A
highlight of the new park was its recreation of
many of Hollywood’s fabled landmarks for its
shopping and dining areas. So while Disney
showed the value of Hollywood’s architectural
history when recreating it, they were at the same
time determined to demolish the one original
historic structure that they controlled. The
media (Los Angeles Times, Daily Variety, the
Hollywood Independent) used this angle, and
supported the efforts to restore the El Capitan.
In the middle of the landmark hearing
process, the main proponent of the nomination,
Robert W. Nudelman talked with the
surprisingly available Richard Cook, head of
Disney’s Buena Vista Distribution arm, the
division of the company responsible for the
project. Cook was asked about restoring the
theater and why they would not do it. His
response was that no one had asked them to.
Offering to put together a package of materials
on how other theaters had been successfully
restored, Nudelman, along with Hillsman
Wright, John Clifford, and Jill Dolan submitted
examples to Cook. Even after the city got its way
at the landmark hearing, Cook continued the
42 ✦ HISTORIC HOLLYWOOD