Added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 21, 1999

It was total serendipity that led me to a daytime look-see inside the historic Warner Grand Theatre in downtown San Pedro. I was driving down 6th Street, on my way to shoot a video at the post office a few blocks away (see visit #179), when I noticed the doors of the Warner Grand were open. I popped my head in, noticed property manager Lee Sweet giving a tour to a rental client, asked if I could look around myself, and got a surprise self-guided walkabout without any other patrons around to obscure the views. And to think, I hadn’t even planned on driving by that day. “If you’re nearby, go there.” My new maxim.

Turns out that I saw the Warner Grand just in time. After two years of delays, the venerable theater closed its doors in early January 2024 for a series of renovations, seismic retrofitting and restoration of its interior. It’s set to be closed for two years. So while San Pedro patiently waits to get its theater back, it’s a good time to take stock of what a special building they’ve got.

Background

The late 1920s and early ‘30s was a brief golden age for the neighborhood movie theater. The Pacific Electric red car lines enabled the growth of new suburbs, further from LA’s commercial center downtown, which meant more demand for nearby entertainment. And 15 years on from the first Hollywood picture The Squaw Man (see visit #174 for more about its creation), movies were no longer the province of the lower classes. Cinema had become a legitimate form of art and entertainment, and tons of theaters were built in the ‘20s to cater to the booming moviegoing audience. In fact there were about a dozen movie theaters (or theaters that were often used for movies) that preceded the Warner Grand in downtown San Pedro alone.

The Warner Grand opened as the Warner Bros. Theatre in 1931, at a time when Warner Bros. was rapidly expanding its theater operations on the west coast. During this era of Hollywood history, the major studios controlled both the production and exhibition of film – so they would build theaters exclusively to screen their own pictures. Warner Bros. opened a Hollywood theater in 1928, and soon took over the Forum on Pico (now a Korean Presbyterian church). In 1929 they acquired two playhouses from the Pantages chain, including the flagship Pantages theater at 7th & Hill (now known as the Downtown Jewelry Exchange) plus another in Fresno. 

Warner Bros. also built three new theaters as part of a concerted effort to bring their films to untapped parts of the city. Within a six-month span from fall 1930 through spring 1931, Warner Bros. opened movie houses in Huntington Park, Beverly Hills and San Pedro. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, the Los Angeles Harbor in San Pedro expanded considerably in the early 1930s. Studio scouts found a huge potential audience of longshoremen, shipbuilders, fishermen and cannery workers employed at the San Pedro docks and Terminal Island. 

Of those three Warner Bros. theaters from the 1930s, only the Warner Grand has survived intact. The Beverly Hills location was demolished in 1989, and the Huntington Park one was turned into a Blink Fitness in 2018, after two decades of disuse.

The Outside

The architect of all three 1930s Warner Bros. theaters was B. Marcus Priteca, one of the country’s most prolific theater designers. Priteca had been the go-to architect for the Pantages chain since 1912, crafting opulent vaudeville/movie houses up and down the west coast in a variety of styles, from beaux arts to Byzantine. When Warner Bros. bought out several of the Pantages theaters, they brought on Priteca as their chief architect. 

Like the other two Warner Bros. theaters he designed, Priteca did up the San Pedro playhouse in a variation on art deco, the style du jour of the early ‘30s. It’s got an imposing ziggurat of a facade, boxy but embellished with fluted pilasters, a crested parapet atop the marquee tower,  and floral panels pressed into the concrete plaster above the second-floor windows. The one-story retail segment to the east, currently home to Sacred Grounds cafe, is decorated with zig-zags above the windows, and black and white chevron patterns, rendered in tile below the windows on 6th Street.

Of course a historic theater would be naked without its marquee, and Priteca turned in a beauty for the San Pedro theater. Its multi-color floral trim is enhanced with neon chevron patterns, and the old “Warner Bros.” (now “Warner Grand”) lettering and corner WB (now WG) logos are emblazoned in neon, too. Just in case you missed the main marquee, a vertical blade advertised “Warner Bros.” in big white neon lettering, crowned by a yellow sunburst. 

The outdoor ticketing vestibule is wild here – checkerboard terrazzo floors, marble lining the walls and wrapping the bottom of the ticket booth, a coffered metal ceiling covered in rosettes and plant-shaped lights. I’d be inclined to loiter in the vestibule for a while, if it weren’t for those 12 mahogany doors just begging to be opened. 

But first, a trip around the corner to the empty dirt lot just west of the theater. There’s a ghost sign on the top of the theater’s west wall that reads “PMP – Professional Recording Artists.” My guess is that this was painted in 1975, when a music promoter named Ron McNulty briefly sub-leased the Warner Grand under the banner of his company PMP. That deal went bust in less than a year. 

That exposed segment of brick on the west wall, on a building that’s otherwise clad in plaster and concrete, is a telltale sign that there used to be an adjoining building here. Photos on the comprehensive Los Angeles Theatres blog show that the Warner Grand’s next-door neighbor was there at least since 1931, and housed a variety of businesses over the years. It burned down in 2015 and hasn’t been rebuilt. 

The Inside

The raw interior elements of the Warner Grand were fairly standard for neighborhood movie houses of the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, with just under 1600 seats (down from early reports of 2000), a balcony, dressing rooms, a stage and orchestra pit for live performances. Though not a lot of stage performances took place in the Warner Grand’s early years. 

Priteca collaborated with the famed interior designer Anthony Heinsbergen on the inside of the Warner Grand, just as they had for many Pantages theaters before (see visit #112 for Heinsbergen’s office in the Fairfax District). The art deco elements on the facade give only a hint of the decorative grandeur on the inside. The foyer features highly stylized deco columns and archways, plus a line of pendant chandeliers that look almost Mayan in construction. On the east wall, you’ll find a curious sunken niche surrounded by cast stone arches, which used to be a drinking fountain.

Heinsbergen complemented all that ornamentation with richly-colored stencil patterns all over the beamed ceiling. Over the years, some tasteless owner made the audacious decision to paint over the ceiling designs. The foyer floor is all hexagonal tiles now, but when the Warner Grand originally opened there was carpeting with geometric zig-zags in all the public areas. 

The auditorium is more impressive still. A giant pre-Columbian starburst of cast plaster swallows up much of the ceiling, and its alien beauty is echoed in the painted proscenium, lighting fixtures and decorative organ grille to the right of the stage. Incidentally, an actual organ was never installed in the Warner Grand. If only they could find a donor…(sorry, I’ll see myself out)

Today, four chandeliers hang from the corners of the ceiling starburst. Originally there was a mammoth chandelier at the center as well. It’s gone now, removed after an earthquake according to Cinema Treasures. But I prefer the explanation given by the NRHP nomination form, that the central chandelier “is rumored to have been only installed in Warner Theaters for opening nights then moved to the next theater inauguration.”

History

So about that theater inauguration: ground was broken on June 18, 1930. Wielding the first shovel was Jack Warner, Jr., the son of one of the four actual Warner Bros., Jack L. Warner. At the groundbreaking, Jack Jr. called the future Warner Grand “the castle of your dreams.” Very poetic for a 14-year-old!

Opening night on January 20, 1931 brought out some of Warner Bros.’s contract players like Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell and Loretta Young. Civic leaders speechified, the still-14 Jack Warner, Jr. promised San Pedro “the best of entertainment,” and two sold-out showings of the new comedy Going Wild (featuring Joe E. Brown) brought the house down. 

The Warner Grand went through a number of name changes in the 1930s through the ‘50s. Most fascinating to me was a change that came as a result of the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. decision of 1948. The Supreme Court declared it illegal for a film studio to own the means of exhibition of its films, on antitrust grounds. Warner spun off its theater holdings into a separate company in 1953, called Stanley Warner Theaters; as a result, the old Warner Bros. Theatre changed its name to the Stanley Warner San Pedro Theatre in the mid-’50s.

In the following decades, the theater’s fortunes waxed and waned. Pacific Theaters owned the Stanley Warner chain in the late ‘60s, then leased the Warner Grand to Arman Akarakian for seven years. By the late ‘70s, San Pedro’s demographics were shifting, and the Warner Grand became a Spanish-language theater, rebranded as Teatro Juarez. The seats were recovered in red, beige and green vinyl in homage to the Mexican flag. 

A group led by Ray Howell, the former managing director of Mann’s Chinese, leased the theater in 1983 and changed the named to its current moniker, Warner Grand. Howell & co. started cleaning the place up, painted the foyer lobby white and gold, and started playing classic films in English, along with other programming. But they folded quickly.

The City Takes Over

After a decade of uncertainty, the City of Los Angeles finally purchased the Warner Grand in 1996 for $1.2 million, and placed it under the supervision of its Department of Cultural Affairs. Working closely with the City is the nonprofit Grand Vision Foundation, which began as a group of concerned citizens trying to revitalize the Warner Grand, and currently assists with advocacy, fundraising, marketing and restoration efforts.

One of Grand Vision’s first projects was a restoration of the marquee, which hadn’t been turned on for nearly two decades when the City took over. Locals donated the lightbulbs and paint, and ponied up the funds needed to purchase new neon. In the decades since, the upgrades have come slow and steady – repair of the outdoor vestibule ceiling, new concession stands and an HVAC system, upgraded projection and sound systems, restored lobby chandeliers, etc. 

The Warner Grand is no longer a destination for first-run movies, but under the stewardship of the City of LA and Grand Vision Foundation, it has bounced back from years of neglect as a cultural events space. It hosts community events, classic film screenings and dance performances. Top music acts like Jackson Browne, Chris Cornell and Miguel have played here. The Warner Grand has served as a success story in the ongoing revitalization of downtown San Pedro. 

There’s still much work to be done. The current restoration will add new restrooms, an elevator and a guest lounge on the mezzanine level. When the Warner Grand opens again, hopefully by early 2026, we should also be able to see those magnificent Heinsbergen stencils and paintings in the lobby, uncovered and vivified. I’m crossing my fingers that the massive asbestos fire curtain makes a comeback, too. 

Sources & Recommended Reading 

+ Belgium, Deborah: “Remake of a Classic : 1930s Movie Palace in San Pedro Is Getting a New Life” (Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1996)

+ Brandt, Timothy J. & Jay M. Oren, City of LA’s Cultural Affairs Department: Warner Grand Theatre’s NRHP nomination form  

+ Counter, Bill: “Warner Grand: history + exterior views” (losangelestheatres.blogspot.com)

+ Gnerre, Sam: “San Pedro’s Warner Grand Theatre has become more than just a revered 1930s movie palace” (South Bay Daily Breeze, July 30, 2016)

+ Grand Vision Foundation website (grandvision.org)

+ Hemmerlein, Sandi: “Photo Essay: Warner Grand, San Pedro, Open to the Public” (Avoiding Regret, August 4, 2013)

+ Hemmerlein, Sandi: “Photo Essay: Warner Grand, San Pedro, Behind Closed Doors” (Avoiding Regret, August 4, 2013)

+ Hume, Mike: “Warner Grand, San Pedro” (historictheatrephotos.com)

+ Littlejohn, Donna: “City hoping $4.5 million renovation will bring A-list acts to San Pedro’s Warner Grand Theatre” (Daily Breeze, April 6, 2019)

+ Littlejohn, Donna: “San Pedro’s Warner Grand Theatre restoration continues with historic, ornate fire curtain” (Daily Breeze, June 2, 2014)

+ Littlejohn, Donna: “Warner Grand Theatre spared in huge, adjacent commercial fire in San Pedro” (Daily Breeze, November 2, 2015)

+ Mr. Arteest: “Warner Grand (Bros.) 1931 Movie Palace” (Flickr gallery, photos taken December 14, 2008)

+ San Pedro Bay Historical Society: “Window #3: Reel San Pedro” (SanPedroBayHistoricalSociety.com)

+ “San Pedro Show House is Part of Big Chain” (San Pedro News Pilot, January 19, 1931 – via UCR’s California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ “Stars, Ushers and Jack Warner Jr.” (GrandVision.org, October 24, 2020)

+ “The Warner in San Pedro” (Motion Picture Herald, July 4, 1931 – via Internet Archive)

+ “Ultra Modern Is How Warners Describe Plans for West Coast” (Motion Picture News, April 5, 1930 – via Internet Archive)

+ “Warner Bros. Opening Dazzles San Pedrans (San Pedro News-Pilot, January 21, 1931 – via UCR’s California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ “Warner Bros. Theatre Opens Next Tuesday” (San Pedro News Pilot, January 14, 1931 – via UCR’s California Digital Newspaper Collection)

+ Warner Grand Theatre Historical Photo Gallery (Grand Vision Foundation website)

+ “Warner Grand Theatre” (Cinema Treasures)

+ “Warner Grand Theatre” (LA Conservancy)

+ “Warner Grand: Through the Years (San Pedro Today, December 31, 2020)

+ “Warner Grand to Close Jan 1 to Begin Construction” (LA City Councilmember Tim McOsker website, December 30, 2023)