Los Angeles Visionaries Association

Today the Cameo theater at 528 South Broadway celebrates its 100 birthday.

As an electronics store.

It orginally opened on October 10, 1910 and was the first building in Los Angeles built as a movie theater.

The Cameo ran movies from 1910 until December 3, 1991 and has been used as an electronics store ever since.  When I toured the theater last year the screen and the speaker behind it were still there, which is very uncommon. 

Just makes me sad every time I pass it.

Visionary (and proprietor of indie lending library Libros Schmibros) David Kipen recently moderated an impromptu summit on L.A.'s endangered libraries and the community-building power of books between celebrity elder-blogger Barbara "Cutie" Cooper of The OGs and her Councilman, José Huizar. Check out the video at the link below:

http://the-ogs.com/councilman

One of L.A.'s amazing living treasures is Bob Baker, who discovered his purpose in life that the age of 7 (he is now 86) by entertaining kids young and old through the art and magic of marionettes.   It was not until I was in my 40's that I saw any of his shows that he presents at his little theater near the border of downtown and Echo Park.  (actually I may have when I was younger but my memory may be fading)  Now only does he produce these amazing shows but makes all the puppets himself.

His group will be giving a free performance at the Levitt Pavilion in Pasadena tomorrow at 7PM and will probably give a performance at the Levitt Pavilion in MacArthur Park as well (but I don't have that date yet).

So please come and see the amazing marionettes!!!

The fabulous Robbie Cress over at the Dear Old Hollywood blog revisits the actual locations featured in the Judy Garland version of "A Star is Born. "

What a treat to look upon '50s era Los Angeles with new eyes, treating the background landscape as the main attraction.

Did you know that the Jack in the Box at Cahuenga and Sunset was once a big deal drive-in with car hops and everything, called Roberts Drive-In? It's where Norman Maine finally tracks down Esther Blodgett.

Kinda weird and cool that the drive-in was replaced by a drive-tru, but sad that Jack in the Box was too inflexible to reference its predecessor in design or ornamentation.

Quentin Tarantino has been called many things in Los Angeles. But the moniker "home town hero" may fit best.  On February, 19, 2010, the Hollywood Reporter shared the news that  Tarantino had provided financial aid to the New Beverly revival theater, and L.A. landmark, when it was in danger of closing.    New Beverly's owners had a right of first refusal/negotiation option to buy the building themselves but had difficulty raising the cash. When its landlord announced that it had found a willing buyer for the building, Tarantino, who had been semi-quietly paying the theater's $5,000 rent since 2007,  stepped in and purchased the building outright.

Like many native Angelenos, Tarantino had spent formative years at the New Beverly, absorbing classics and hard to find flicks. It's nice to know that those trips to the New Beverly instilled an appreciation for old theaters. Perhaps he's saved the L.A. theater in recompense for blowing one up in "Inglourious Basterds." 

To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson, L.A. tends to always “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.’” Not as in fights & feuds, but as in flashpoints & geneses. Was reminded of this with all the Olympics coverage of snow-boarding, a sport clearly spun from So-Cal skateboarding, itself an adaptation of California-popularized surfing—each one an under-the-radar activity that later wowed the world. This week I also watched the just-out DVD of The T.A.M.I Show, the 1964 Santa Monica Civic concert (Chuck Berry, Rolling Stones, James Brown, Supremes, etc.), whose frontispiece has Jan & Dean skateboarding from Hollywood to the Civic. Stop-frame and squint and you’ve got vanished history at hand. Last night it was The Real Beach Boy, a sad and touching BBC documentary on Dennis Wilson. In Hawthorne, bandmate David Marks walks the camera past a plaque commemorating the group (another auspicious startup), then gestures to the two-story berm and onramp behind it: “This wall of dirt here was where the Wilsons’ house was… and mine was right over there, where that dirt is.” Now I’m wondering if the dozen under-construction, city-block-size apartment complexes changing the face of H’wood and the Wilshire Corridor will turn into the tenements of 2040, warrens for poor, newly arrived Angelenos, thence to be ’dozed and carted off in time for another cycle to start. If you love the town, catch it while you can.

Gene Sculatti’s occasional column about Cali-bashing, ‘They Hate L.A.,’ appears at www.sofein.com .

NYC-based, young adult author Melissa de la Cruz, a California native, made a quick trip to Los Angeles last week. Coincidently (or not), Warner Brothers just bought a pitch by RJ Cutler to direct the movie adaptation of her book, Au Pair.  Drew Barrymore's Flower Films will be producing.

de la Cruz visited a small Catholic girl's school, the Ramona Convent Secondary School, in Alhambra. Usually, Southern Californian youth benefit from the area's proximity to the pop culture industry.  This time,  it sounds like Hollywood benefited from one school girl's persistence

it took Esther Leung, 17, a senior at Ramona and a big fan of the "Blue Blood" series, nearly two years to nail down a date when the De La Cruz could visit the school.

It was 1954. I was a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art assisting Frank Stauffacher, a filmmaker and critic, who ran a series of programs at the Museum highlighting the creative achievements of Hollywood directors. This was clearly an avant-garde recognition of Hollywood directors as auteurs. Among those whom Frank selected were: George Stevens, Vincent Minnelli, Rouben Mamoulian and Fred Zinnemann. Each director was invited to come to San Francisco to show selections from his films, comment on them and answer questions from the audience. Why would Hollywood giants come to San Francisco for nothing but a free plane ticket? Through his Art in Cinema series at the Museum, Frank had developed a very sophisticated film audience. Art in Cinema presented a melange of avant-garde, classics and documentaries. There was nothing else like it anywhere in the country at that time. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had its Film Library collection which managed to place films on a par with paintings and sculpture. There were regular showings in the Museum’s basement theater and duplicate prints of some films were lent to film societies around the country. The focus of MOMA at that time (1950s) was to acquaint American audiences with the history of modern art from the beginning of the twentieth century. In doing that, the Museum presented modern art in a context broader than painting, sculpture and printmaking. Architecture, graphic design and films were among its expanded scope. Thus, D.W. Griffith and Claude Renoir fell within its purvey, but Hollywood was off limits.

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Having been given the responsibility of contacting Rouben Mamoulian as a possible speaker for the Art in Cinema directors’ series, I went from San Francisco to Los Angeles and was invited to meet him at his home. Mamoulian was a highly successful film and theater director. Typical of many directors of his era, he was a cosmopolitan European. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, of Armenian descent, he was the son of a bank president; he spent part of his childhood in Paris and later studied at the Moscow Art Theatre. He arrived in America in 1923, later making a name for himself as the director of lavish Broadway productions including George Gershwin’s operatic version of Porgy and Bess as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma. Migrating between Hollywood and Broadway, he developed a reputation for lavish film productions rich in color, costumes, decor and music -- among them Blood and Sand (1941) with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth.

We met in his grandiose living room, which could have been the set of one of his films. When we concluded our negotiations with his agreeing to come to San Francisco, conversation shifted to more mundane topics. His wife was present throughout our discussions. At this point, Mamoulian was in his late fifties; she appeared to be in her forties with an untortured body and bleached blonde hair. She and I seemed to hit it off. We shared a passion for things Italian, discussing food, wine and coffee. I told her of an Italian domestic espresso machine that I had just purchased from Thomas Cara in San Francisco’s North Beach. He was a pioneer introducing Italian espresso machines to this country. As our discussion and shared nostalgia for real Italian espresso became more passionate, I offered to send her one of Thomas Cara’s Italian domestic espresso machines. (Incidentally, I still have mine and use it.)

Can I prove that Mrs. Mamoulilian’s espresso machine was the first to land in Hollywood? I doubt it, but I can assume that if there had been others available in the circles in which the Mamoulians traveled, she would have known about it. These simple cast aluminum contraptions were placed directly over the burner with chambers filled with coffee and water and heated to the point at which espresso gushed out of the coffee chamber into the waiting pot sitting below. Espresso makers have become more elaborate and complicated in recent years, when I was in Rome a few months ago, I saw variations of this espresso maker in housewares stores.

As a final note, a brief history of espresso coffee makers is in order. In 1901, Luigi Bezzera patented the world’s first espresso machine, a gigantic steam powered device that served as the prototype for commercial espresso makers for generations. In 1947, the espresso revolution began with the Gaggia Crema Caffee machine which made espresso a generally affordable commodity.

I wonder if the Mamoulian’s heirs treasure their 1950s vintage espresso maker the way that I do mine.

For more information about the history of Italian domestic and commercial espresso makers, check out these links:

• Homespresso, 1900-1970 Immagini della Collezione

• An Espresso Century, an exhibition 30 of the most important commercial espresso coffee makers that has been traveling internationally since 2000.