One of Santa Monica's Last Movie Theaters Shuts Down

After ninety years of flickering films entertaining moviegoers in Santa Monica, The Santa Monica Daily Press reports that one of the city’s last movie theaters closed this week. Most recently it was a multiplex run by AMC , but the building’s history dates back to 1934 when it opened as the Elmiro theater. Built in the midst of the Great Depression, when people thought of movies as a cheap way to escape the burdens of real life (some of us still do), the Elmiro was designed with an enthusiastic amalgam of jazzy styles dancing around the promenade.

The Santa Monica Conservancy describes it as a “three-dimensional Art Deco design, combining both Art Deco (zig-zag -phase) and Streamline Moderne.” Of course, a massive neon sign crowned the confection spelling out E-L-M-I-R-O in bright neon, which likely flashed through the night.

The theater survived Third Street turning into a pedestrian mall in the 1960s. Operations were taken over by Loews and General Cinemas in the 1970s and it later became a Spanish-language house run by Metropolitan Theaters. Historian Bill Counter posts an exhaustive history here . At the end of its first life in 1987, developers sliced off the façade and demolished everything behind it to build a multistory mixed use project that would include…a movie theater!

The restored façade boasted the new Broadway Cinemas which debuted around the same time as the newly remade Santa Monica Promenade, which became famous for street performers, dinosaur topiary, and an active street life. Backers keep trying to bring back shoppers , but the street has suffered in recent years with multiple vacancies, crime, and an absence of crowds.

The rebuilt Elmiro may have lacked architectural pizazz beyond the front doors, but it kept moviegoing alive as part of the bustling district. Cineplex Odeon took over operations, and later AMC, and blockbusters came and went until this week when the house went dark. The town where Robert Redford, Sean Penn, Anjelica Huston and countless show people were born and live today, there are three places to gather and see movies. There were once more than two dozen movie theaters in the city by the sea. Today, only the Aero , Laemmle , and AMC 7 remain.