Two matters before we plunge into the second part of our tale of the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. One is this link to Part One just in case you didn't read it or need a brief refresher.
Secondly, a reader of this site wrote to ask if the man who built the theater, Yegishe Harout, was of Arabic extraction and if he named the theater in honor of someone named Ravi, spelling it backwards. Pretty much all I know about Mr. Harout is contained in this paragraph that I found online…
A stage actor in Armenia during the 1920s, Harout toured Russia, the Balkans, France, England, Belgium, Egypt and finally the U.S., ending up in Hollywood. He built the Ivar Theatre and Har-Omar Restaurant, located on Ivar Street and Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, that he managed for twenty-seven years. Once a week, Harout would present a half hour of Armenian and Middle Eastern classical and Folk music on a local radio station.
So I'll take a wild stab and guess that he named his theater The Ivar because it was on Ivar Street. Exhaustive research (i.e., a little Googling) shows that Ivar Street was named Ivar Street many years earlier in recognition of a Danish immigrant named Ivar Weid who owned much real estate in the area.
I also found out that Mr. Harout died in 1974. The cause of death is not given but you may suspect it had something to do with what happened to his beloved theater.
What happened to it was that around 1972, it became a porn-and-stripper place. I believe the last legit theatrical production there was Godspell, which had transferred from a successful run at the Mark Taper Forum, one of the more upscale theaters in town. Not long after that, the Ivar, for what I suppose were financial reasons, went over to the dark side.
This was a trend in Los Angeles theaters in the early seventies. Currently, a lot of prestigious shows play, usually for one night, at a theater on La Cienega Boulevard called the Largo at the Coronet. Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman and other name comedians play there regularly…and back in the sixties and before, it was just plain The Coronet…a movie theater that played classic motion pictures. Buster Keaton famously showed up there one night in the late fifties and bought a ticket to see The General, a film masterpiece he made in 1926.
But for a few years in the seventies, the place showed porno movies and in-between the films, women would come out onto its stage and remove their garments to music. Fortunately, the theater got better. By the close of that decade, it was back to clothed presentations. I went to some very good plays there and even worked on one. Backstage, I came across an old advertising sign from its burlesque days.
Much the same thing happened on about the same timetable with the Beverly Cinema on Beverly Boulevard. In the sixties, my friend Steve Hopkins and I were obsessed with silent movies. You could find us most weekends at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax but one week, we went to the Beverly Cinema to take in a double-bill of Mr. Chaplin's masterpiece, The Gold Rush (1925) and Jacques Tati's more recent Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953).
That was the kind of thing they showed in the sixties. Then for a while in the early seventies, the Beverly was given over to porn-and-strippers. Then it went back to classic cinema. It is now, as you may know, a revival film palace run by Quentin Tarantino.
The Ivar did not make such a speedy recovery. It turned into a pretty sleazy place — one that seemed somehow sleazier by comparison to what was next door: The Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Los Angeles then had several newspapers and I think every one of them sent a reporter to write about the Ivar, its new format and sometimes its headliner stripper for a while…a self-described "porn princess" named René Bond.
I can't give you an exact timetable but around 1975 — that's a guess — a bunch of my friends and I, instead of playing poker one night and talking about comic books, made a field trip to the Ivar. I'm saying '75 because that was the year the Barbra Streisand movie Funny Lady came out. Ms. Bond began her act by coming out in an evening gown with satin on her shoulder and kind of half-lip-syncing Barbra's recording of "How Lucky Can You Get?" from that film.
It was very bizarre. Not sexy. Bizarre.
I shall attempt to describe the whole experience and count how many times I feel the ideal word choice is some form of the word, "sleaze." It was applicable to everything — the sleazy signs outside (that's 1), the sleazy box office (2), my sleazy change (3), the sleazy lobby(4), the sleazy seats (5), every single one of the other sleazy patrons (6), the sleazy men's room — especially that sleazy men's room (7 and 8)…and of course, René's sleazy performance (9) even before she had removed a single garment.
I suspect my pals and I looked like we were auditioning to play the audience watching the opening number of Springtime for Hitler. Some of the other patrons looked like they weren't there for the onstage presentation. They looked like they just wanted to spend some time in a building with a roof on it. There was even one guy who was sound asleep as René/Barbra belted out, "How Lucky Can You Get?"
In case you're not familiar with the song, you can listen to it here . Ms. Bond did the whole thing including the part where the record gets stuck and Barbra sings the last part in a rage. Weirdest lip-sync you ever saw. And then they played another inappropriate song and René took off all her clothes.
And I'm sitting there thinking, "The last time I was here, they were doing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown on that stage."
I don't think I'd have felt so uneasy if I hadn't "known" the Ivar before this. It was like finding out your old high school sweetheart was…well, dancing at the Ivar. Everything felt not only sleazy (10) but horribly wrong.
It's possible I have not conveyed how dirty and grungy and smelly and dilapidated and sleazy (11) the Ivar had become in just a few years. It looked like sometime since my prior visit, the owners had burned the place down for the insurance money, collected and then not spent a dime on restoration. It was just awful. And in that environment, neither René nor any of the other ladies who took the stage were the least bit sexy. It was just sleazy, sleazy, sleazy (12, 13, 14).
Porn movies followed the live show and one member of our group wanted to stay for them, not so much because he wanted to watch them but because they were included in the admission price and he felt cheated to not receive everything for which he'd paid. The admission price, by the way, was $3.50. But the rest of us wanted to get the hell outta there and since he hadn't driven, he was forced to leave with us.
We did stop briefly in the lobby where Ms. Bond was selling autographed photos which we didn't buy. We also all declined her offer to join her in a bar next door for a drink before the next show. I think she was doing something like ten a day and had three more to go that evening.
The way she invited us made me suspect she was selling something more than photos over there. But we spoke with her for a few minutes and she seemed very happy and proud to be doing what she was doing there so I decided not to feel too sorry for her. I have not set foot in the Ivar since that night but every so often, I've driven by it. This is how it looked a few years later…
The painting of the lady at upper right, accompanied by lettering by someone who didn't know how to spell "totally," is more or less of René Bond. It stayed on the front of the Ivar long after she'd left its stage and even long after she'd passed away, which Wikipedia tells me was in 1996. The other painted lady is probably a later headliner who was in residence for a while there.
It made me sad to see the Ivar looking so sleazy (15) but I did enjoy that beneath the likeness of Ms. Bond, they left up a quote from the prominent New York drama critic Douglas Watt — "You'd be crazy to miss it!" I suspect Mr. Watt said that about the original Broadway production of Godspell…not even the production of it that had preceded the strippers into the Ivar. And he certainly wasn't recommending the show that strippers were putting on there for many years.
That was how the Ivar was for a long time…even through news reports of one or more fires (real ones) and at least one murder on the premises. I had a few friends who went there and from their reports, the place kept trying to outsleaze itself (16). One of those friends was the fine artist Dave Stevens who made a joke about it for the cover of The Comics Journal…
The story of the Ivar finally had a happy ending — and not the kind René Bond once offered. It was closed for a long time and sold and revamped and remodeled and turned back into a place that puts on plays. These days, it looks like this…
…except that I've been told that it may have made a brief trip back in time a few years ago. When the above-mentioned Mr. Tarantino was shooting his movie Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, he re-created 1969 Hollywood by having his crew temporarily remodel a number of businesses into the way they looked back then. This is from Wikipedia…
To film at the Pussycat Theater, production designer Barbara Ling and her team covered the building's LED signage and reattached the theater's iconic logo, rebuilding the letters and neon. Ling said the lettering on every marquee in the film is historically accurate. To restore Larry Edmunds Bookshop, she reproduced the original storefront sign and tracked down period-appropriate merchandise, even recreating book covers. Her team restored the Bruin and Fox Village theaters, including their marquees, and the storefronts around them. Stan's Donuts, across the street from the Bruin, got a complete makeover.
Several people have told me that the Ivar was regressed to its "burlesk" days for a few shots but that the footage never made it into the movie. I have seen no evidence of this and it might not be so…and You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown was playing the Ivar at the time Tarantino's film takes place. If anyone knows for sure about this, let me know. I was pleased that a brief image of our local horror movie host from that period, Seymour, was seen in the film and I'm curious if an image of René Bond almost made it in…
And I'm also curious as to why if Tarantino did think of having a shot of a now-legit theater back in its sleazy (17) porn-and-stripper days, he didn't use his own place.