I remember the first time I went to the Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard.
I didn’t get out much as a teen. My middle school years were marked by a strong focus on grades and, for high school, I went to a boarding school on the edge of Los Angeles County.
Most weekends, a few teachers would offer to drive vans of students into downtown Claremont or Upland to go to the multiplex near an In-n-Out. Your options were limited to what showtimes fit into the driving and dorm check-in schedules that night. It was still the closest thing we had to being out on the town as kids — without risking suspension — and we did feel the thrill of running to grab a post-movie burger before teachers showed up to shuttle us back to school.
I was, I admit, a tad bit sheltered.
When I was back home in the Inland Empire one summer after graduation, and the invite from a friend came to go see an old movie … at midnight ... in L.A., it was an immediate “Yes!”
I expected to get a surefire “no” from my parents when I asked permission to go into the city with my musical theater pals, but after many assurances of “they’ll drop me back off I promise!,” three of my friends and I piled in a car and headed to a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Nuart Theater.
I watched movies with my parents all the time growing up, but we weren’t big on actually going to movie theaters. Always a little too expensive, a little too uncomfortable, and the showtimes were never quite right. And with the rise of video on demand in the 2000s? It just got easier to throw things on at home and save the theaters for a special occasion.
Going to the Nuart that first time was a transformative experience for me. Packed into a screening room with other theater nerds, we watched the film as a shadow cast in full garb performed “Rocky Horror” live on stage in sync with the movie. Tim Curry never looked so good.
After joining in with the audience singing and dancing, throwing rice and roaring with laughter, I made it back home at 4 a.m., desperately rubbing off my cheeks the red-lipstick Vs that marked me as a first-timer at a “Rocky Horror” midnight screening (the V, in case you are wondering, is for virgin). I was elated. It was so thrilling to be at this old theater that had so much history, and having this collective experience with all these other film fans. Save for my three friends, we were all strangers. Still, there was a connection.
I was about to leave L.A. for four years to go to college but I knew the city and its theaters would have me back.
HIM: Ethan Hawke is my favorite actor.
ME: I actually haven’t seen him in much!
It’s March 2020, and I’ve been living in L.A. post-college and the COVID pandemic is about to go into full swing. I’m trying to keep a conversation alive over text with a boy I met on March 4, as my graduate program in arts journalism “moves online for just two weeks.”
Our second date has been canceled. Doors around the city have closed. But we stay in contact.
He tells me I’d probably really like the film Before Sunrise. So, as I settle into quarantine life, with two hours to kill and nowhere to go, I spend the $3 on a rental. I was curious — what is so special about Ethan Hawke in this movie? What can I learn about this guy I just met through his love of this?
And it struck a chord. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about two artsy twenty-somethings who meet serendipitously, wander a city on an hours-long sprawling date, and are parted without a guarantee they’ll ever meet again.
HIM: You watched it?
ME: Of course! You said it was your favorite.
We watch the sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, together on FaceTime — propping our phones up and hitting play at the same time so we can watch each other watch the movie. That is how our relationship evolved — each of us sharing a movie we love with the other. Eventually we quarantined together so we could actually watch the movies, side-by-side, in person.
Two years later, summer of 2022, we leave our apartment and drive to the Academy Museum — there’s a screening of Before Sunrise on film in the Geffen Theater. We hadn’t technically seen that one together. Certainly not with an audience.
The screening was full. Scanning the crowd during particularly romantic moments, you could spot couples; heads leaning into each other, hands touching. There’s obvious dust, scratches and grain on the film print and it made me think: people must have fallen in love in front of this specific film reel countless times.
“I know so many people that have met their husband, wife, partner here, you know, friendships just because they came to the New Beverly,” says Jules McClean, the programmer for another one of L.A.'s great independent theaters, The New Beverly Cinema. “I think you get something emotionally and even though you might not know the 200 people you're sitting with, you just had a collective experience.”
Whether you are solo or watching with friends, these theaters are kind of sacred spaces — to laugh, to cry, to just feel something.
In 2020, sitting in my boyfriend’s apartment after the requisite quarantine period, watching our umpteenth weekend-at-home-double-feature, I wondered if I’d ever get to go back to my neighborhood theater, the Los Feliz 3 (just a block away!). Or get to see a film at the New Beverly, or the Vista, or Vidiots — spaces that hadn’t been on my radar when I was growing up in the Inland Empire.
How thrilling that they’ve all opened back up — some with brand new remodels — and that we can again sit among strangers and people we love, and have an experience together in the dark in front of the big screen, whether we’re revisiting an old favorite or discovering something new.
There’s so many of these places to discover in L.A. — and any of these theaters could provide a life-changing experience for any of us.
Join How to LA as we visit these theaters, and learn about their histories and how they continue to add to the fabric that help make up arts and culture L.A.
