The Warner Grand Theatre, a gem from the golden age of cinema
The auditorium of the Warner Grand Theatre, looking towards the mezzanine. Photo retouched by Heli and courtesy of the Grand Vision Foundation. They weren’t called picture palaces for nothing, and that’s why prosaic terms don’t quite fit when describing the insides of the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro. If today’s rolodex theaters are like weekend yachts, the Warner Grand would be a luxury liner, a land-based flagship for a vanished golden age of cinema. But hulls rust, paint peels, and decks crumble. The Warner Grand (then named the Warner Bros. Theatre) was designed in 1929 and built in 1931. It’s touted as a prime example of Art Deco, a decorative style originating in the 1920s with (per Webster’s) “geometric motifs, curvilinear forms, sharply defined outlines, (and) often bold colors.” Among the things it came to embody was a kind of hip, nonchalant, Jazz Age sensibility. On the other hand… “It’s art deco, but it’s movie-palace Art Deco,” says Liz Schindler Johnson. “I’ve heard it called exuberant; there’s Art Nouveau elements in it,and some people even call it Neo-Byzantine because the design and the proscenium of the stage is very Egyptian-looking. So it’s a combination…
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