TCL CHINESE THEATRE

Description

Essentials about the TCL Chinese Theatre in brief

Los Angeles is the city of movie-making. Anyone visiting LA should therefore also include a visit to the cinema on their agenda. Definitely one of the best locations to watch a movie is the TCL Chinese Theatre. Opened as early as 1927, the cinema in the style of a Chinese pagoda is one of the most famous movie palaces in the city. The TCL Chinese Theatre is located directly on Hollywood Boulevard, next to the famous Hollywood and Highland Center shopping and entertainment complex. The cinema is also world famous because of the more than 200 hand and shoe prints of movie stars immortalized in cement slabs in the entrance area of the cinema.

The history and architecture of the TCL Chinese Theatre

The TCL Chinese Theatre was built by the entrepreneur Sid Grauman, who had already built one of the first movie palaces in Los Angeles in 1918 with the Million Dollar Theatre. In 1922, he built Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, a large-scale movie theater designed like an Egyptian palace, in Hollywood, which had previously only been home to several film studios. With this cinema built on Hollywood Boulevard, movie theaters moved from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood suburb.

In 1926, Grauman decided to build another movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard just a few blocks from the Egyptian Theatre. The building was designed in the style of a Chinese pagoda by architect Raymond M. Kennedy. The Chinese Theatre was built using many original parts from China. The portal of the building is dominated by two red columns 27 meters high. Above them are iron masks depicting mythological dogs. Above them adjoins the curved bronze roof. Between the columns hangs a Chinese dragon carved from stone.

In front of the portal is a walled forecourt, which served as a reception area during many movie premieres. The interior had room for 2,200 spectators on one floor. Since the cinema was planned before the breakthrough of sound film, a modern Wurlitzer cinema organ was installed. However, the cinema also provided space for an orchestra and a show stage, where an elaborate entertainment program with music and dance framed the film screenings in the early years of the Chinese Theatre.

Incidentally, from 1944 to 1946, the Chinese Theater was the venue for the Academy Awards. In 1968, the cinema was listed as a historic monument. In the 1980s, two smaller movie theaters were built next to the main building. However, these annexes were closed and demolished at the end of the 1990s. In their place, the Kodak Theatre (now the Dolby Theatre) was built, which has been the venue for the Academy Awards since 2002. In 2013, the Chinese electronics company TCL secured the naming rights to the cinema, so that it has since been officially called the TCL Chinese Theatre.

The hand and shoe prints in the atrium

Even though the TCL Chinese Theatre is still used today both as a premiere cinema and for normal film screenings, most visitors come here because of the hand and shoe prints in the cement floor of the forecourt. Legend has it that actress Norma Talmadge got her high heels stuck in the damp cement floor during a visit to the cinema, which was still under construction, whereupon Grauman had the idea of immortalizing such prints as “autographs” of the stars at the Chinese Theatre. On the other hand, it is documented that the construction worker Jean Klossner left his handprint and monogram behind when he had finished designing the forecourt.

On April 30, 1927, the first prints to be made were those of actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who were partners with Grauman in the construction of the theater, in a formal ceremony. Over the next 70 years, some 200 more stars were added. Some of the Hollywood greats immortalized themselves in special ways: Marilyn Monroe’s prints of her high-heeled pumps can be seen, of course; Johne Wayne stepped into the wet concrete with his cowboy boots; R2-D2 from Star Wars left the wheel prints of his three legs; and country singer and Western star Gene Autry immortalized the hoof prints of his horse. Charlie Chaplin’s hand and footprints, by the way, were removed in 1928, allegedly because of his proximity to communism. The concrete slab with his prints has been lost to this day.