Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 3, 2012

Los Angeles’s first major filmgoing mecca was downtown, with theaters like the Million Dollar and the Rialto lining South Broadway starting in the 1910s. Then in the 1920s the center shifted west to the movie palaces of Hollywood Boulevard, like the Egyptian, the El Capitan and Grauman’s Chinese. By the early ‘30s, Beverly Hills was coming into focus as an outpost for the movie biz on the western edge of LA, with opulent theaters like the Warner Beverly Hills, the Beverly and (Beverly Hills-adjacent) Carthay Circle earning headlines and high-profile film premieres. 

Of all these early Beverly Hills movie showplaces, only the Fox Wilshire survives. Now known as the Saban Theatre, the venue hosts a regular schedule of lease events and religious services. It’s a different operation from the days when you could glimpse Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart at the premiere of How to Marry a Millionaire. But the theater’s current stewards have taken fine care of the place, and extended its life as a center for entertainment and arts, just as it was intended.

Opened in 1930, the Fox Wilshire was part of the Fox West Coast Theatres circuit, which controlled dozens of theaters up and down California, and hundreds more throughout the country – more than 500 at its peak.

From the beginning, the Fox Wilshire was envisioned as more than your average neighborhood theatre. Its thoroughly modern architecture and interior design, its state-of-the-art lighting, acoustics and projection equipment, and its 2,500-person seating capacity (the third-largest in LA) all set this place apart.

Customer service was a big focus here in the early days, too. There were fresh cut flowers brought in every night, and a small, auxiliary pipe organ in the lobby to entertain theatergoers before the show started. Management even hired ushers who looked like famous movie stars. All of these amenities kept butts in seats at the Fox Wilshire, even as the Fox West Coast Theaters chain endured budget cuts, bankruptcy and theater closures during the Great Depression. 

As just the second purpose-built movie theater in Beverly Hills (or third if you count the Carthay Circle Theatre, just east of the LA/Beverly Hills border), the Fox Wilshire was also important for identity-building. Ever since Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford moved to town in 1919, A-listers from both sides of the camera have built their mansions in Beverly Hills. The Fox Wilshire gave the local elite a theater as glamorous as they were, and strengthened the city’s image as an entertainment center independent of Downtown and Hollywood. 

The Fox Wilshire’s peerless design and technological features also symbolized the proud independence of Beverly Hills, whose citizens had voted down a proposal to annex the city to Los Angeles just a few years earlier. As Edward J. Kelsey writes in the theater’s National Register application, “It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this theater and building in bringing in other development and cementing the reputation of the city of Beverly Hills as a separate community, even as it was surrounded by the growing city of Los Angeles.” 

If you need any more evidence that this theater is important to Beverly Hills, just walk into the new LA Metro D Line subway stop at Wilshire and La Cienega, just a block west of the Saban. The station walls are covered with a gorgeous selection of blueprints and architectural renderings of the Fox Wilshire, all recontextualized and layered into collages by artist Todd Gray. 

The Fox Wilshire was designed by S. Charles Lee, perhaps THE pre-eminent movie theater designer in California in the 1930s and ‘40s. While he’d go on to design hundreds of theaters in his long career, this was just his second, after the Tower Theatre in downtown LA (now the fanciest Apple Store you’ll ever see). Lee wasn’t yet 30 years old when he accepted the commission for the Fox Wilshire, but the results show that he innately understood, even at the beginning of his career, how dramatic arrangements of space and interior design could be used to enhance the theatergoing experience. The year after the Fox Wilshire opened, Lee completed the Los Angeles Theatre, arguably the most stunning theater interior in the city. That’s a hell of a hot streak for one architect right out of the gate.

This was also Lee’s first art deco theater. Introduced to the world at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, art deco in its many permutations would soon become de rigueur for theaters, post offices, banks and gas stations. In the late ‘20s though, it was cutting edge and less common, reserved mostly for high-end department stores (e.g. Bullocks Wilshire and the Oviatt Building) and office towers by pedigreed architects. There wasn’t even a name for it – “art deco” wasn’t introduced as a classification until much later on. 

Based on early descriptions in the newspapers, Lee’s design seems to have gone through adjustments as the construction phase approached. The Los Angeles Times described the theater in May 1929 as “modified Spanish architecture,” which the final building certainly wasn’t. By the following year writers were simply calling it “modern.”

But without a doubt the Fox Wilshire is an art deco building, through and through. The office section’s vertical emphasis, with tall fluted piers, chamfered corners and floral decorations of cast concrete are all straight out of the deco playbook (still being written at the time). The massing and ornamentation here have little in common with the European revival styles that were so popular for commercial architecture of the early 1900s. Instead we get monumental shapes and hyper-stylized decorations that reinterpret ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, updated for the automobile age. 

I love how Lee continued the art deco detailing around to the parts of the building that most theatergoers would never see – like the diamond-shaped indentation on both the parapet, and the archways above the load-in doors. 

Though the original entrance to the Fox Wilshire is arguably more sedate than it would become in the ‘40s, Lee stayed true to his adage “The show starts on the sidewalk,” with a marquee and zigzag-shaped transom windows that carry through the deco designs that we see elsewhere in the theater. 

The theater’s present-day interior is a riot of textures and patterns. Every column in the awe-inspiring rotunda is covered in fluting or a bas relief diamond pattern, and topped with a fancy capital; the lacy wrought-iron railings that line the dual staircases merge with multiple bands of plaster decorations into an ornamental layer cake between the two floors. Look up, and you’ll see the original glass and metal chandelier, modified in the ‘40s to add some extra metal pizzazz. Surrounding it on the ceiling is a dense thicket of black and silver lines, looking like a page from an adult coloring book just waiting to be completed.

The auditorium portion of the theater (which some sources attribute to Fox executive Harold B. Franklin) contains the most impressive proscenium that I’ve ever seen. The entire thing is surrounded by an elaborate plaster basketweave pattern, with a sunburst plopped at the top center, and abstracted tree patterns flanking the stage, next to the grilles that once hid the chambers for the pipe organ. On the right side, floating high above the floor, is a backlit false window of green and white leaded glass, arranged in geometric patterns. Original wall sconces light your way down the side aisles on the bottom floor, separated by wall segments of red velvet.

As lavishly decorated as the interior is today, back when it opened, the Fox Wilshire’s insides were even more over the top. That dizzying black and silver coloring book pattern on the ceiling of the rotunda? It used to cover nearly every wall in the rotunda, waiting areas, aisles and balconies – a choice that predated the op-art movement by 30 years.

The carpeting used to be coral pink, and a giant black and silver curtain with stylized frond patterns once hung over the stage, rigged in sections so that they could perfectly frame the screen at any aspect ratio. Sadly that curtain burned in a stage fire in 1932.

In addition to the theater, the Fox Wilshire included two storefronts on the Wilshire Boulevard side and another on the corner. 1930 photos show a pharmacy/lunch counter combo called Chrisney Drugs in the corner position; the Wilshire-fronting stores hosted a beauty salon in the late ‘30s, and from the ‘40s through the ‘60s, Cinderella Sample Shoes. In more recent years the corner was a succession of bistros and burger joints, but now it appears empty, and the other two storefronts have been converted into a VIP room for the Saban. 

Above the theater are seven stories of office space. Most are accessed via a simple entrance on Hamilton Drive, aside from the second floor over the building’s eastern wing (above the two Wilshire-fronting storefronts), which has its own entrance. That part is occupied by the Dolly Saken School of the Arts, an afterschool program run by the Saban’s current owner, Temple of the Arts. Jutting up from the top of the building is a rectangular box, which conceals mechanical equipment in a decorative tomb. Originally there was signage that spelled out “F-O-X” in giant neon letters, rotating above the box. 

There was once a chic penthouse apartment on the top floor, where Fox West Coast Theaters executive Howard J. Sheehan (and later movie producer Jack Schwarz) laid his head. The space was all art deco luxury, with diamond-shaped wood panels, hyper-modern furniture, what appears to be a black marble-faced fireplace, and a stepped ziggurat shape that carries through the entire place – from the doorways to the built-ins to the coved ceilings. Most of this decoration was removed years back, and now the top floor is remodeled office space. 

Sheehan Apartments, 1929-1930 (S. Charles Lee Papers / UCLA Library)

From the get-go, the film industry embraced the Fox Wilshire as a first-class place for premieres. It hosted the premiere of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers on opening night, September 19, 1930. In the ‘50s, classics like The African Queen, How to Marry a Millionaire, 12 Angry Men and Sleeping Beauty made their debuts there. Even after the searchlights had shut off, the Fox Wilshire got the most popular first-run films in exclusive weeks-long runs, before they moved to the neighborhood theaters elsewhere in Los Angeles. 

As times and tastes changed, the theater underwent a number of changes too. A new box office was festooned in scrolls and swirls in the 1940s, a trademark of the Skouras brothers, who owned the National Theatres chain that had taken over Fox West Coast during the Great Depression. Then in 1959, a major renovation brought in new projectors, a 28’ x 60’ curved screen and new audio equipment to accommodate widescreen pictures and stereophonic sound. 200 seats were removed, and the slope of the seating area was reduced considerably to ensure that patrons on both floors had better sight lines. The marquee and entryway were revamped as well: out with the deco zigzags, in with plate glass doors, display cases for upcoming movies, and a carpet that extended all the way to the sidewalk. You can see some pictures of this era at the Los Angeles Theatres blog’s comprehensive page about the Fox Wilshire.

Post-renovation, the Fox Wilshire became a favorite for special 70mm “roadshow” engagements of popular new releases like Exodus and The Sound of Music, the latter of which ended up playing for an insane 94-week run. Reissues were popular here too – for example the “MGM’s Fabulous Three” series, which screened Gone With the Wind, Dr. Zhivago and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm for three weeks in October of 1971. 

The last time this theater showed movies regularly was in 1978, by which point it was part of the Mann Theatres empire. The following year a realtor named Thomas Stagen bought the land and the building, initially with the intention of demolishing it and prepping it for redevelopment. But as it turned out, that plan would have cost about six to seven times what it would take to renovate the existing theater, and any new structure would be subject to much stricter parking requirements. 

Stagen plunked down about $2 million and hired architect Richard McCann to oversee a renovation (he also worked on restoring the Pasadena Playhouse and Philharmonic Auditorium downtown). They installed a new floor in the shape of a parabolic curve, and raised the stage seven inches. They also pushed the back wall of the auditorium forward, which sacrificed 500 seats, but allowed for a new bar and lounge space at the back of the lobby. It’s still intact today.

With Fox out of the picture and the broadcaster RKO now on board as an investor, the theater was renamed the Wilshire Theatre. By the end of 1980 it was presenting stage plays, and by the following year the Nederlander Organization had taken out a 34-year lease to bring stage plays, musicals and live shows to the venue. By the dawn of the 1990s, the Nederlanders owned the building outright. 

The current phase of this historic theatre began in 2005, when a Jewish congregation called Temple of the Arts purchased the theater from the Nederlanders after holding services there for over a decade. Spiritually-speaking, they seems like a great match for a historic theater – in their own words, the Temple of the Arts offers “a unique, contemporary approach to Judaism through music, dance, drama, and film.” 

The Temple began yet another round of restoration and renovation work, expedited by a $5 million donation in 2009 from media mogul Haim Saban – hence the latest name of the theater. There was new carpet installed, reupholstered seating, a fresh paint job in the proscenium. The current marquee by master signmaker Fernando Duarte, with its glorious art deco center pylon, was added during this era. Duarte also redesigned the outside entryway, reintroducing the terrazzo floor design and other deco elements that had been removed over the years. 

Most recently, Temple of the Arts brought in restoration specialists EverGreene in 2023 to replaster, glaze and refinish the inner entryway and rotunda. Their Creative Director Alan Carroll brought the black and silver coloring book motif to the dome at the top of the rotunda, a callback to the pattern that once covered most of the interior walls. While EverGreene’s touch was light, its impact was profound: all the finishes now shine like new, and the jumble of different textures fit together into a coherent whole. 

When Temple of the Arts isn’t holding worship services at the Saban, they lease it out for concerts, comedy shows, charity galas, Jewish cultural events and the occasional film screening, all booked by the veteran promoters at Sterling Venue Ventures. 

Given how many of LA’s historic theatres are demolished, vacant or adaptively reused for soul-deadening purposes (e.g. the East LA movie palace-turned-“Goth CVS”), it’s really nice to see the Saban used for so many cultural events. It’s still a haven for the performing arts, even if we can’t see a first-run movie there anymore.

Thanks to Dana Morris for giving me the grand tour of the Saban. 

Resources & Recommended Reading

+ “The African Queen” (AD, Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, December 17, 1951 – via newspapers.com)

+ Archerd, Army: “Don’t Cry For Me, Wilshire Theatre” (Variety.com, September 11, 2008)

+ “Beverly Hills History in Pictures and Prose” (beverlyhillshistoricalsociety.org)

+ “Cinderella Sample Footwear” (AD, Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1943 – via newspapers.com)

+ Counter, Bill: “Fox Wilshire/Saban Theatre: history + exterior views” (Los Angeles Theatres Blog) 

+ Counter, Bill: “Fox West Coast: History” (Los Angeles Theatres Blog)

+ Drake, Sylvie: “Stage Watch: Why the Nederlanders Are Out at Wilshire; Counting Down at the Back Alley Theatre” (Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1989 – via newspapers.com)

+ Duarte, Fernando: “Duarte Design, Alpha Architectural Sign Restore Saban Theatre Marquee” (signsofthetimes.com, September 18, 2013)

+ Faughnder, Ryan: “How I Made It: Concert venue owner Lance Sterling” (LA Times, March 16, 2014)

+ “Film Notables Crowd Premiere of ‘Millionaire’” (Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1953 – via newspapers.com) 

+ “Fox Wilshire Is Ultra Modern” (Los Angeles Evening Post-Record, August 30, 1930 – via newspapers.com)

+ Hacker, Tom: “The Modern Motif in Fantastic Mood” (Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930 – via archive.org)

+ “How to Marry a Millionaire” (AD, Los Angeles Mirror, November 3, 1953 – via newspapers.com)

+ Kaplan, Sam: “Fox – Wilshire Theater Saved” (Los Angeles Times, January 27. 1980 – via newspapers.com)

+ Kelsey, Edward J., Historic Theater Services LLC: Fox Wilshire’s NRHP nomination form (2012, nps.gov)

+ “Marilyn Monroe – The Premiere Of How To Marry A Millionaire” (VIDEO – @marilynmonroevideoarchives on YouTube)

+ “Mining the Archive: S. Charles Lee, Architect” (metro.net) 

+ “New Fox WIlshire Theater in Glamorous Opening Friday” (Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, September 18, 1930 – via newspapers.com)

+ “New Fox WIlshire Theater Opening Set for Sept. 19 (Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, August 23, 1930 – via newspapers.com)

+ “Playhouse Plans Announced” (Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1929  – via newspapers.com)

+ “Playhouse to Be Built on Wilshire” (Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1929 – via newspapers.com)

+ “Saban Theatre” (cinematreasures.org)

+ “Saban Theatre, Beverly Hills, CA” (evergreene.com)

+ Saban Theatre website (wheremusicmeetsthesoul.com) 

+ “Search Pushed for Girl Seeking Movie Career” (Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1944 – via newspapers.com)

+ “Sleeping Beauty” (AD, Los Angeles Times, January 25, 1959 – via newspapers.com)

+ Smith, Susan: “Lee’s Picture Palaces: A Part of the Show” (Los ANgeles Times, August 26, 1979 – via newspapers.com)

+ “The Sound of Music” (AD, Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1965 – via newspapers.com)

+ “‘Sound of Music’ Reserved Seats Now Being Sold” (The Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet, February 11, 1965 – newspapers.com)

+ Temple of the Arts website (www.bhtota.org)

+ Tharp, George: “Marilyn Monroe Big Hit at Premiere” (West Los Angeles Independent, November 12, 1953 – via newspapers.com)

+ “Theater Work Planned” (Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1930 – via newspapers.com)

+ “Theatre’s Beauty Excites Acclaim” (Evening Vanguard, September 26, 1930 – via newspapers.com)