Editor’s Note
Words by James Kaelan
Image by Spencer Lowell
The silent film star Mary Pickford, on a vacation to Europe in 1925, visited the Gothic Catedral de Segovia. Born to a Methodist Englishman and a Catholic Irishwoman, Pickford was baptized under both denominations and practiced neither. But wandering through the naves in Segovia, she felt inculcated by the spiritual grandeur of the church. When she returned to California, she engaged the architect C. Howard Crane to recreate it for her.
The United Artists Theater opened in 1927 at 929 S. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles. But by the 1930s—as talkies displaced silent films and the center of the Los Angeles film industry migrated north to Hollywood—it had fallen into disuse as a movie house. When the Ace Hotel acquired the property in the early ’10s, like many of the other historic film palaces on Broadway, it had been operated as a church for decades. In a windowless office in the penthouse of the adjacent building, the previous owner, minister Gene Scott, allegedly kept the world’slargest collection of bibles.
It isn’t coincidental that, between the distinct eras when it screened films, preachers held the lease on the theater. At the center of the domed ceiling is an enormous ovoid recess, tiled with glowing mirrors, that, when hit with blue light, lends the space a sacred air. Whether you’re listening to a sermon or waiting for a film to start, staring up from the orchestra pit is to gaze at an interpretation of the heavens. We’re still making up the rules for this magazine as we go along. But we’ve solidified a few principles. Amongst them is that the cover subject will always be a
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new filmmaker who’s brought a radical vision to the screen. We selected Ryan Coogler for Winter/Spring because he made a traditionally unmarketable film that found an enormous and vociferous audience—reminding us that what sells is what the purveyors choose to sell. For Summer/Fall, we’ve inaugurated Ana Lily Amirpour because she disregarded the advice of everyone who told her to sanitize her vision. Instead of embarking on a safe project, she made a black-and white genre mash-up, and shot it in Farsi. The success and attention she’s enjoying now is a product of that boldness. Beginning with this second issue, we’re proud to partner with the Ace Hotel Downtown LA—in whose rooms the magazine is now available—because they espouse the same ethos we hope this magazine embodies. When Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin founded United Artists in 1919, they appropriated the creative control that had been the purview of the accountants and executives, and bestowed it upon the artists. And though it was only briefly their Vatican, the United Artists Theater was built to consecrate the films pioneered by their actors, writers, and directors. Under Ace ownership, it will again be a bastion for independent cinema. That excites the shit out of us.