That's a photo of the Pacific Cinerama Dome up on Sunset Boulevard, as it looked in '63 when it was housing its debut attraction, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The place is currently undergoing extensive remodeling and will soon reopen as part of some sort of shopping mall. God knows L.A. could use more malls. There are parts of this town where you can go an entire block without encountering a Victoria's Secret, a Gap, a Foot Locker and/or a Mrs. Fields' Cookies shop.
But at least the Cinerama Dome will exist. As I think back to movie theaters I patronized in the sixties and seventies, I recall a lot of buildings that are no longer there…or if they are, they're no longer movie houses. Out on Sepulveda, just north of LAX, there are two that have long since been converted to office buildings. I can't drive out to the airport without noticing the Loyola and the Paradise. The Paradise is a special memory. One of the first movies I ever saw in a theater — Jerry Lewis's Don't Give Up the Ship — I saw there. And I was also there for one of its closing attractions, which was the animated Disney version of Robin Hood.
A lot of other such palaces are gone — like the Picwood, which once sat near the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Westwood. It and the adjoining bowling alley were there for fifty-some-odd years but my personal history spanned Hey There, It's Yogi Bear (1964) and Fame (1980). There's a block-long shopping mall there now, with a Tony Roma's rib joint at the approximate location of the Picwood.
About a mile northwest, at the corner of Olympic and Bundy, there's a huge Cadillac dealership, erected on land which once comprised the Olympic Drive-In. There, around age seven, I saw (with my parents) a double-feature of the old Fleischer Brothers' animated Gulliver's Travels, paired with the then-recent cowboy comedy, Once Upon A Horse. The latter was an unsuccessful attempt to sell the new comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin as the new Martin and Lewis. In fact, it was so unsuccessful that — eleven years later, when they made their next feature, The Maltese Bippy — they publicized it as their first movie. The Maltese Bippy, by the way, had its world premiere at the Picwood.
Many other movie theaters of my youth are gone, and a few others — like the Fairfax — have been carved up into multiplex cinemas. I am not suggesting they should have been preserved just because they were a part of my childhood. I just think it's interesting what these old buildings mean to us. I have a great memory but I'll bet that even if I didn't, I could still remember that I first saw 101 Dalmatians at the Meralta in Culver City, first saw Doctor No at the Aero in Santa Monica, and first saw Robin and the Seven Hoods at the Fox Wilshire in Beverly Hills. The theaters are no longer there but the memories never get replaced by California Pizza Kitchens.