Re-reading my recent columns on Walt Disney’s Hollywood Homes, Hollywood Studios, and Hollywood Hangouts, I realized I had left out a couple of important locations where Walt walked: The movie theaters that showed his films.
Walt loved going to the movies, not only for inspiration and enjoyment, but because he was interested in the audience’s reactions so he primarily found a seat in the back of the theater so that he could observe.
“[Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks] spent their spare time [in Kansas City, Missouri] haunting movie theaters…They studied any available movie—live-action or animation—that they could afford to see. Their schools were the theaters of Kansas City,” stated the book The Hand Behind the Mouse by Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy.
“The first time I remember Walt ever seeing one of his cartoon shorts in a theater was just before we were married [in 1925],” recalled Walt’s wife Lillian in an interview from McCall’s magazine February 1953. “My sister and I were visiting a friend that night, so Walt decided to go to the movies. A cartoon short by a competitor was advertised outside, but suddenly, as he sat in the darkened theater, his own picture came on.”
“Walt was so excited he rushed down to the manager's office,” she continued. “The manager, misunderstanding, began to apologize for not showing the advertised film. Walt hurried over to my sister's house to break his exciting news, but we weren't home yet. Then he tried to find Roy, but he was out, too. Finally he went home alone. Every time we pass a theater where one of his films is advertised on the marquee I can't help but think of that night.”
Besides the personal enjoyment Walt got from going to see movies, he often previewed his cartoon shorts at local movie theaters.
His Alice Comedy, the black and white silent cartoon “Alice’s Balloon Race,” was sneak previewed at the Bard’s Glen Theater on Colorado Street in Glendale on December 11, 1925, to judge the audience’s reaction. It officially was released to the general public on February 15, 1926.
Here are four other movie theaters that had prominent connections to Walt. Two of them are gone but two are still in existence and still showing films.
Alex Theater, 216 North Brand Boulevard, Glendale, California
This movie theater opened in 1925 as the Alexander Theatre, which it was called until 1939. In 1940, the newly designed exterior had Alex on the marquee as the new official name. The theater was named after Alexander Langley, the son of C.L. Langley, owner of the West Coast chain that included the Raymond Theater in Pasadena (see below).
From the 1920s through the 1950s, it was used as a sneak preview house for major Hollywood films, as well as its regular schedule of films. Singer-actor Bing Crosby nervously paced the lobby carpet during a preview screening of Going My Way in 1944 as he worried whether the movie-going public would accept him as a movie priest.
A teenager named Marion Morrison worked at a nearby soda fountain and his pal Bob McCaskey ushered at the Alex, where he let in the future John Wayne for free, in exchange for Morrison's “on-the-house” sodas.
In particular, Walt Disney, in the 1930s, often previewed his animated shorts at the theater that was just a few miles away from his Hyperion studio to judge audience reaction to his work.
He and his animators would sit in the back of the theater and then go out to the lobby or outside the theater for Walt to give his evaluation. It was sometimes an anxiety-inducing experience as Walt would concentrate on what needed to be improved.
In their highly recommended (and sadly difficult to obtain) book Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series, authors Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman were able to document that Disney had preview screenings at the Alex Theatre at least as early as 1931 with the Silly Symphonies series, including “Egyptian Melodies” and “The Clock Store.”
Disney Legend and veteran animator Ward Kimball stated, “We always previewed our pictures in Glendale at the Alexander, and they let us know when they'd run ‘The Wise Little Hen’ or ‘Orphans' Benefit’ and we'd all go out. We had passes and we would sit in the audience and listen, and Walt would walk outside and have an impromptu discussion.”
Clarence Nash, the performer who supplied the voice of Donald Duck remembered that preview showing of “Orphans’ Benefit.” He told an interviewer, “We drove over to the Alexander Theatre, here in Glendale, for the preview. I was more nervous about that picture than I was about ‘The Wise Little Hen.’ I was with a group of Disney people, and my wife was with me, too. I got a big kick out of it and completely forgot that I had anything to do with it.”
Animation director Jack Kinney confirmed that the location was used for previewing the animated shorts in his book, Walt Disney and Other Assorted Characters, where he wrote, “When a picture was finished, it was usually previewed at the Alexander Theatre in Glendale to get audience reaction. After the show, the boys and girls would gather in the lobby and discuss the various scenes with Walt.”
Walt’s final animated short directorial effort The Golden Touch (1935) was previewed at the Alexander Theater. The audience reaction was so weak that Walt didn’t hold a discussion session afterward.
Walt Disney, often previewed his animated shorts at the Alex Theatre that was just a few miles away from his Hyperion studio to judge audience reaction to his work.
In 1992, The Glendale Redevelopment Agency purchased the Alex Theatre to serve as the centerpiece of Glendale’s revitalized Brand Boulevard and embarked on a $6.5 million rehabilitation of the facility.
It is home to resident companies such as the Alex Film Society, Glendale Pops, Glendale Youth Orchestra, Los Angeles Ballet, and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and hosts a variety of music, dance, theatre, comedy, film, and special events each season.
The Alex Theatre was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
Pasadena Crown Theater, 129 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, California
The Raymond Theater opened in 1921 as a vaudeville and movie theater. In 1948 it was renamed the Crown Theater and became the premier theater in the city from 1948 to 1974 and was said to rival Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
Like the Alex, this was a theater where Walt would preview some of his animated shorts to get the reaction from the audience.
Walt Disney’s first True-Life Adventures documentary short Seal Island (1948) did not appeal to RKO-Radio Pictures who distributed Disney films to movie theaters at the time and they balked at releasing it. They felt audiences would not sit still for a nature film.
Walt asked a friend who ran Pasadena’s Crown Theater to show the film for one week in December of 1948, so that this nature film would qualify for consideration for an Academy Award nomination.
Though it was 27-minutes long (much longer than the usual short subject), Seal Island won that year’s Best Documentary Oscar. The very next day, Walt took that Academy Award to his brother Roy Disney’s office and said: “Here, Roy. Take this over to RKO and bang them over the head with it.”
In 2004, despite a lengthy four-year lauded battle by The Friends of the Raymond Theater to prevent it from being demolished, developer Gene Buchanan, who owned the property, drove a bulldozer through the side-wall of the theatre and demolished anything possible to make sure the theatre could not be saved.
Today, what remains of the existing building is a mixture of apartments and retail use.
Carthay Circle Theater, 6316 San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles, California
The Carthay Circle Theater was a movie palace designed in a “Spanish Mission Revival” style by architect Dwight Gibbs. The 1,500 seat theater opened in 1926 in the mid-Wilshire district. It had a circular auditorium and the interior was adorned with forty foot tall murals of historical events.
The famous façade of the Carthay Circle theater lives on at the Disney theme parks on both coasts.
Along with Grauman's Chinese Theater, the Carthay Circle hosted more big West Coast movie premieres than any other Hollywood theater. “Gone With the Wind” had its Hollywood premiere there in 1939.
In 1929, Walt decided to produce a new animated series, the Silly Symphonies, and the first installment was “Skeleton Dance.” However, Walt's distributor didn't want to release the cartoon, but wanted more Mickey Mouse cartoons instead.
Walt found a salesman he knew at a local pool hall, gave him a copy of the cartoon and convinced him to contact Fred Miller, the owner of the Carthay Circle Theater. Miller liked the cartoon and booked it into his theater in August 1929, where it was a huge hit and gave Walt plenty of positive reviews to convince his distributor to book the film in other theaters.
It was this success that convinced Miller to take a chance on the first feature length animated cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It premiered with much hoopla at his Carthay Circle Theater in December 1937 with the nearby street median decked out as the Dwarfs’ cottage and mine.
The film had already been booked, sight unseen, as the Christmas attraction at Radio City Music Hall in New York but Walt wanted a Hollywood premiere for his peers to help demonstrate that his work in animation was comparable to their work done in live action films.
The Carthay Circle Theater was only one of only a handful of theaters to be fitted with the full Fantasound equipment for the premiere of Fantasia in 1940. Twelve of the 14 theaters showing the film were legitimate stage theaters and not movie theaters.
The theater was demolished in 1969 and, today, two low-rise office buildings and a city park (called Carthay Circle Park at the corner of San Vicente and Crescent Heights just south of the Miracle Mile, roughly between Wilshire and Olympic and between La Cienega and Fairfax) occupy its former site.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Gone With the Wind had their Hollywood premieres at the Carthay Circle in the 1930s.
A number of factors caused the theater’s demolition, including earthquake damage, losing money in the age of multiplex theaters and the fact that developers wanted to build a huge office tower.
However, the façade of the theater lives on both in a small gift shop that opened in 1994 on Sunset Boulevard at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Florida and in a building on Buena Vista Street that opened in 2012 at Disney California Adventure. Neither replica is the same size nor interior floorplan of the original theater.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, 6925 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, California
The theater opened in May 1927 after 18 months of construction at a cost of more than $2 million dollars. The theater was the dream of entrepreneur Sid Grauman who was responsible for other movie palaces including The Egyptian theater just down the street.
The theater was meant to resemble a huge red Chinese pagoda.
According to the theater’s official website, “Authorization had to be obtained from the U.S. government to import temple bells, pagodas, stone Heaven Dogs and other artifacts from China. Poet and film director Moon Quon came from China, and under his supervision Chinese artisans created many pieces of statuary in the work area that eventually became the Forecourt of the Stars. Most of these pieces still decorate the ornate interior of the theatre today.”
Sid Grauman sold his share to William Fox’s Fox Theatres chain in 1929, but remained as the theater’s managing director until his death in 1950. On March 24, 1949, Sid Grauman received a special Oscar that was given to him because he was a “master showman who raised the standard of exhibition of motion pictures.”
Walt was friendly with Grauman and had him caricatured in the Mickey Mouse cartoon short, “Mickey’s Gala Premiere” (1933). Two years later, the first Silly Symphony in color got its premiere at Grauman’s on July 18,1932&
Bob Thomas wrote in his terrific book Walt Disney: An American Original: “After the first few scenes had been completed (on the Silly Symphony 'Flowers and Trees' released in 1932), Walt showed them to a friend, Rob Wagner, publisher of a literary magazine in Beverly Hills. Wagner was so impressed that he invited Sid Grauman, impresario of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to see the film.
“The film lasted only a minute, but Grauman said he wanted ‘Flowers and Trees’ to open with his next attraction, [MGM’s] ‘Strange Interlude,’ starring Norma Shearer and Clark Gable. Walt worked his animators overtime to finish ahead of schedule, and Technicolor sped the processing.
“When ‘Flowers and Trees’ appeared at the Chinese, in July 1932, it created the sensation that Walt had hoped for. No longer was the Silly Symphony the neglected half of the Disney product. ‘Flowers and Trees’ got as many bookings as the hottest Mickey Mouse cartoon. Walt decreed that all future Symphonies would be in color.”
In 1973 the theater was purchased by Ted Mann, owner of the Mann Theatres chain, and from then until 2001 it was known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
Of course, the theater is perhaps best known for its forecourt with its imprints of hands, feet and signatures of movie stars in concrete.
In 1984, a costumed Donald Duck, along with help from his long time “voice” Clarence ”Ducky” Nash, imprinted a square in the forecourt on May 21, 1984 as part of Donald’s 50th birthday celebration. It was the 150th ceremony. Neither Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney were ever afforded that honor.
Donald Duck's footprints are just one of the many that can be found in the Forecourt of the Stars at the Chinese Theater, but you won't find Walt's or Mickey's there.
Through the years the original Chinese Theatre has not only shown movies, but it has had its image used in many films. Singin’ in the Rain, Blazing Saddles, and Disney’s The Rocketeer are among those in which it has appeared.
The theater was declared a historic-cultural landmark in 1968, is still used frequently for red carpet premieres, and draws nearly $4 million visitors a year.
For the opening of the Disney MGM Studios in Florida in 1989, the Disney Imagineers constructed an exact replica of the famous theater at the end of Hollywood Boulevard. They used the original 1927 Meyer and Holler blueprints for reference and the façade was built to full scale, rather than the forced perspective often used in such huge structures at Disney theme parks.
Disney did not have permission to use the names of either Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or Mann’s Chinese Theatre (as it was called in 1989) so the building is just called The Chinese Theatre. The Disney version was built to resemble how the theater looked in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The building is 96 feet tall.
The pagoda roof alone stands 45-feet tall and weighs 22 tons and was built separately and then hoisted into place by a crane. In the Florida version the ticket booth that was in front of the entrance was moved to the left to provide a better view for the guests and to facilitate the guest flow.
The Jungle Book had its premiere at the Chinese Theatre in 1967.
The two display areas in the front of the Great Movie Ride attraction features photos and memorabilia of two Disney red carpet movie premieres that happened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre: Mary Poppins (1964) and The Jungle Book (1967). However, with the new sponsorship of the attraction by TCM, those displays are slated for removal. Walt Disney and his wife attended the Mary Poppins premiere on August 27, 1964. The Jungle Book premiered October 18, 1967, less than a year after Walt's death.
