Nothing Gold Can Stay
It's stupid to cry over a building. I keep telling myself that. I am sad about a building that I did not live in, a building that has not been -- and because of its status as a Historical Landmark, will probably not be -- destroyed, and a building that will probably be sold very soon to a corporate oligarch who uses it for quasi-similar purposes. But the Arclight Hollywood was the only place I truly loved in Los Angeles, and my heart breaks for its sudden and undignified fade out.
I moved here at the end of August 2013, and I saw my first movie at the Arclight two weeks later (it was the only theatre in the city playing SHORT TERM 12, a movie I adore to this day). My love and admiration for the Arclight has been perhaps the only constant of my life in the city. Even over the course of the past year, as the pandemic ripped away the ability to sit in the velvet blue comfort of an Arclight seat, I thought constantly about the eventual continuation of the routine I had built up over half a decade. How good it would feel to walk to Sunset/Vine, to select my seat for whatever movie was playing, to use the secret glitch I had found in the Arclight system years before to order a Large Popcorn for $1.50 without losing any of the membership points I had been earning for years, to sit amidst the respectful anticipation of a movie-loving audience eager to be blown away, and then, after a short and semi-awkward speech by a staff member introducing every single screening, for a few hours, to be taken away by something truly special.
By virtue of being a theatre that cared obsessively about the quality of the movie-watching experience, Arclight made bad movies less bad, and for those rare moments when you watched something truly spectacular, it allowed you to completely immerse yourself.
I didn’t patronize the Arclight always. In times where I couldn’t justify paying $17 for a movie, I would go to matinees at the Los Feliz 3 or the Vista and pay a fraction of that cost. And like any cinephile in LA, I also adored the charm and grit of The New Beverly Cinema’s double-features and inventive programming. I even checked out the Downtown Alamo a few times, but found myself massively underwhelmed and a little put-off by the way they seemed to emphasize food and chicness over the actual watching of a movie. But for films that I was determined to see in the most ideal setting possible, I was pretty much Arclight or Bust -- not out of any sense of film-elitism (though again, I’m very aware of how this all sounds), but because I knew that the Arclight moving-watching experience would deliver, and it always did.
I can’t pretend like my adoration is entirely rational, nor can I pretend like the Arclight was some ideal Valhalla for the theatrical experience. Take away the blue velvet, and the colossal lobby, and the history of the Cinerama Dome, and what you have is ultimately just a really well-run theatre. But it felt like my theatre. It felt like my Los Angeles. Not to mention that, across our entire country, well-run theatres are few and far between (and high-quality multiplexes are basically nonexistent). Ultimately, a lot of my love for the Arclight Hollywood, like any deep feeling, is constructed out of a framework of memories. And I have a staggering breadth of memories to choose from.
I remember the yearly pilgrimages I would make to the Dome to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY whenever they screened it. The advance screening of KURT COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK I took my then-girlfriend to, smiling the whole time, and then declaring to her for the first time that I loved her. The way I felt after watching MOONLIGHT only weeks after an election that laid bare the frayed circuitry of systems that neo-liberalism had unsuccessfully attempted to hide. The screening of MOTHER! where the theatre burst into boos at the end credits and me and my friend turned to each other and quietly admitted “I really loved that movie”. Where I openly sobbed watching CALL ME BY YOUR NAME on a night where I thought really hard about dying, then woke up the next morning to an Annie Award nomination and a selection to the Oscar Shortlist. An opening day screening of ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD where a clearly-already-tipsy Quentin Tarantino gave an in-person introduction. And I’m sure a hundred or more other capital-M Memories that lodged themselves firmly into my psyche, never to be torn asunder. I remember the movies that took my breath away, that introduced me to voices and perspectives and techniques I had never before seen, that made me ecstatic to be a filmmaker, and happy to be alive.
I’m sure I’ll be back at that complex to see many other films one day whenever some corporate monolith decides to turn the entire block into their personal For Your Consideration complex. But the future will never match the memories. And watching as Netflix and Amazon and Disney and Warner Brothers and Pepsi and Nike and Phillip Morris Co. and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company all begin to consolidate their massive empires and grudging disdains for the weak profit-margins of traditional film distribution fills me with inescapable dread about the future of moviegoing.
"The only constant in life is change," you tell me, and I say "Yes, I know, no shit," but still it hurts to see the way things are changing and worry that the good changes might not fully overcome the bad in the end. That even minor (and trust me I understand how truly minor this is, on any sort of macro level) shifts in the way the wind blows can eventually create a tornado. This is not gentrification in the way most LA developments seem to be. The space was already gentrified -- it was a movie theatre multiplex in the center of Hollywood for god’s sakes. The Cinerama Dome itself long predates the 15 other screens that Arclight surrounded it with in 2002. The truth is, this might all be premature doomsaying, and it may've happened even if a pandemic didn't upend the entirety of the already-teetering balance between theatrical and streaming. But it still sucks, and I am still sad, and I think I'm still going to be sad about this building for a long while.
After the credits rolled on SHORT TERM 12 in September 2013, I walked back to Hollywood/Vine in the cool blue dusk. I went down the stairs, and I used my new TAP card to usher me thru the turnstiles and into the train. I played with my movie ticket and looked at my reflection in the train window as we sped thru the subterranean darkness. I would do this probably a hundred times or more over the next 6.5 years, and even as I walked back from what would be my (unbeknownst to me at the time) final trip to the Arclight, a screening of FIRST COW on March 8, 2020, I thought of the same thing I did after my first visit: "God, I can't wait until I can see a movie of my own there.”
Maybe I still will, but it won't be at the Arclight. And though it is just a chain, and though that complex is, at the end of the day, just a building, it is a building that meant the world to me, and now it is gone, and I am sad.