"There was only one Cinerama, and to appreciate its impact, the intoxicating visual and aural pleasures that it provided for midcentury moviegoers, you had to be there." – Foster Hirsch¹

In 2009, Ed Ruscha told the arts magazine frieze about his childhood trips to the movies in Oklahoma. “Most of the films I saw at that time were black and white,” he recalled. “I’ve got a vivid memory of what they looked like on a big screen and the silvery feeling that I got from them.” It was this glittery aura, the promise of staggering scope and scale, that underpinned Ruscha’s disinterest in television, explaining, “I’d rather read a book, see something else or go for a drive along the street.”² Television has historically allowed for, even demanded, liveness, but going to the movie theater puts you in the living world; television is live but always-there, film is pre-recorded, but you have to go to participate.

Mid-century experimental cinema, from Bruce Conner to Maya Deren, is preoccupied with classical cinema–distorting it, fracturing it, exposing its artificiality. To that end, in his essay “Ed Ruscha’s Moving Pictures,” Matthew Reynolds considers Every Building on the Sunset Strip as one of the artist’s most cinematic projects. He opens: “Ed Ruscha uses the language of film when he talks about making art in Los Angeles… because in L.A., everything seems so ‘cinematic.’”³ It is not just the film strip shape and scope of the work that accomplishes this, but the project’s “foregrounding of materiality and the conscious rejection of narrative… [that] are, of course, among the defining features of experimental cinema.”⁴

Ruscha’s city street photography, the Sunset Boulevard corpus in particular, comprises a movie of sorts, one literally produced on film stock. It’s an experimental movie too, the dreams and fantasies that these marquees evoke punctuating what is otherwise a documentary aesthetic. The “dreams” to which I am referring, of course, belong to the particular magic of the Hollywood Dream Factory. After all, we are in Los Angeles.

And the imaginative, escapist experience of movie-going is signaled by the boulevard’s marquees. They live alongside the signs for dry cleaners or watch repair shops, all three promising service and return on investment. Such an analogy, when it comes to the movies, is both comforting (we all need somewhere to run) and obscene (what are we running from?). In a 1972 television documentary, Dick Cavett intones how “Hollywood, the dream factory, at its worst it was spendthrift, crass and vulgar, but at its best it offered a rich, romantic, compelling world of illusion.”⁵ In the marquees frozen on Ruscha’s film, we see both what Hollywood produces in perpetuity and what it offered audiences at any particular moment: what films were being produced, which genres favored, which stars’ names demanded space on the marquee.

Across location and year, his marquee photos reveal viewers’ aspirations, their fears, and their ideals, many of which the entertainment industry invented in the first place. (What are movie marquees if not dream journals, doodled mostly by studio executives, dreaming about what “regular people” dream about?)

Building on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Anne Friedberg writes of the “tension between the material reality of built space and the dematerialized imaginary that the cinema has always provided.”⁶ Perhaps that is what is so disorienting and compelling about these marquees–that abiding, “meta” tension. The marquee is a “material reality,” a plastic or ceramic placard with letters that move, but it also signals or stands in for the “dematerialized imaginary [of cinema].” But just as cinema lives in our memories, our collective preoccupations, it is also a fixture of the urban landscape, recording change over time. Ed Ruscha’s repeated photographs of Sunset Boulevard make this particularly clear. Close examinations of a few of the marquees he captured illustrate the range of options for cinephiles in a city that, when it sleeps, dreams about the movies.

In short, marquees tell us a lot more than what is, or was, playing. They lay out the imaginations of historical audiences alongside the realities of movie-going at the time; they tap into the histories of Los Angeles (a place where you can live) and Hollywood (a factory made of money and dreams).

The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of

The movie marquee is a fossil, a frozen moment in time, not unlike the image itself. It dates the image both literally and subconsciously. One of my favorite family photographs shows my mom, aunt, grandparents, and some unnamed cousins standing on the Atlantic City boardwalk underneath a marquee advertising Psycho. For a brief moment, the story of Norman Bates lives in the same visual field as my Italian-Catholic family. But these narratives are always living alongside each other, like neighboring buildings on a city block. If they didn’t, if these demented thrillers didn’t resonate with the pleasant stories we tell ourselves about boys and their mothers, Hitchcock wouldn’t have much of a legacy to uphold.

A 1973 image that Ruscha took of the Oriental Theater at 7425 Sunset Boulevard captures another double bill of cinematic output, Maggie Smith’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, a romantic comedy-drama, alongside Goldie Hawn’s Dollars, a heist co-starring Warren Beatty. Together, these films showcase Hollywood’s range of aesthetic and narrative formulas in this moment: Love and Pain a twinkly, slapstick-turned-melodrama (as the title promises), filmed through the cheesecloth haze of romance; and Dollars a peppy heist movie, by Roger Ebert’s estimation “a slick and breakneck caper movie that runs like a well-oiled thrill.”⁷ The latter pairs Goldie Hawn as a good-natured prostitute and Warren Beatty reprises his role as a bank robber. In the former, Maggie Smith acts as the priggish British love interest for Timothy Bottom’s naive leading man. In both, European adventures abound, underscoring what it means to be American (energetic, sexy, and/or earnest).

The Madonna-whore complex is in full swing: are you a Goldie Hawn or are you a Maggie Smith? More subtly, but also there, is: are you a Warren Beatty or a Timothy Bottoms? The marquee offers up these genres, and their attendant gender ideologies, as options on a menu for pedestrians and viewer-consumers who might cruise by in their vehicles, or be lured in from off the sidewalk. By the time of Ruscha’s 1985 drive, a new building was under construction there; his 1995 photograph reveals the flagship location of Guitar Center now occupying the site.

Another “masculinity as genre” marquee, decidedly heightened, comes with Ruscha’s 1973 image of the Century Theater, located on another storied Los Angeles boulevard, Hollywood (5115 Hollywood Boulevard). United Artists’ Theater of Blood is an exploitation comedy about an actor (Vincent Price) who murders critics, while the sober Soylent Green, now the stuff of spoofs, was near parody on arrival. Critic Gene Siskel called the film “a silly detective yarn, full of juvenile Hollywood images,” adding, “You may never stop laughing.”⁸ (These words would be enough to warrant a gorey demise in Theater of Blood.) The resonance of these titles – the goofy comedy mask, alongside Heston’s self-serious drama mask – is too good to be a coincidence. In the dream factory, it feels, frankly, scripted.

Together, these titles ask: to whom do movies belong? The critics? The audiences, now or decades into the dystopian future? Or the landscape, where they live as letters on a marquee, floating the possibility of playing hooky and seeing a well-priced matinee? Surely, Vincent Price’s excessive mugging, his anti-Method performance style, is camp. Hester’s hypermasculinity ends up reading as camp too, but perhaps the marquee itself is a kind of camp, particularly in its presence in the montage of street life. The marquee is restricted in its verbiage while its theatrical tightness is, to borrow Susan Sontag’s framing, “too much.” As she writes in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world.”⁹ And what sign on the streets of Sunset Boulevard is more pro-aesthetic, more anti-practical, than the marquee’s beckoning to skip work, shirk responsibilities, and go to the movies?

The marquees on Sunset Boulevard and its neighbors fit easily, if not neatly, into Ruscha’s image-heavy body of work, cousins to the other, more literal, street signage in these photographs. “Open for lunch,” they say; “Do Not Block Intersection”; “Slow”; “Warning.” Street signage tells people what to do with their bodies or their vehicles, as billboards sell passersby vodka and car radios. The movie marquee tells the body what to do – presumably, buy a ticket, come watch – but it has an even more intimate directive, selling them on what, Hollywood’s God willing, they already want.

Linda Williams defines “body genres” – melodrama, horror, and pornography – as movies that make the viewer weep, scream, and, well.¹⁰ Just so, the marquee, with its brevity and literal flatness, its campy “detachment” (Sontag, again), cannot decouple from the human body, from the bodies that move around and by it, nor from the bodies promised on the sign.

The Cinema Theater, located half a mile south of Sunset Boulevard, at 1122 North Western Avenue, was serendipitously captured on a brief side street detour during Ruscha’s 1973 drive along Sunset. The Cinema’s marquee advertises “It Happened in Hollywood.” This is not, however, the 1937 film that gave birth to numerous remakes with the name “A Star is Born”; it is, instead, a 1973 porno about a woman trying to make it in Hollywood. These films of the same name – one about a woman whose fame ascends as her lover’s star wanes, the other of a scrappier performer who will do whatever it takes to get on camera – live, side by side, in our dream inventory.

In her essay on sex work in Los Angeles, “The Open Secret of Sex Work on Sunset Boulevard,” AnneMarie Kooistra writes of how “Ruscha’s photographs help us recall the forgotten by revealing both traces and the presence of absence.” Unsurprisingly, movie marquees feature in her discussion, with screenings of The Maids and Ride Hard, Ride Wild (1985) at The Sunset (1508 North Western Avenue, near 5453 Sunset Boulevard), which proclaims loudly on that same signage: “This is a Pussycat Theater.” These examples represent more than a trace, perhaps, to a pedestrian passing by. But in the historical record, these explicit mentions constitute a visual blip at best.

A Tale of Two Theaters

Finally, we find a tale of two theaters: the Vista (4473 Sunset Boulevard) and the Cinerama (6360 Sunset Boulevard). The histories of these spaces are quite different, the Vista with its old-world Vaudevillian origins and foray into softcore pornography and gay-focused programming in the 1970s; the Cinerama, opened in 1963, with its role as an industry hotspot known for its splashy premieres and technological innovations.

To look at these two theaters together is to foreground the range of theatrical institutions in the city and to review how they operate. Not all movie houses are created equal, nor is there a singular movie-going experience. But, even so, the Vista and the Cinerama are both historical landmarks that show up in mainstream commercial films, from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, each indexing the unique precarities that Los Angeles theaters have faced throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As film historian Ross Melnick explained to me in a conversation last year, Los Angeles is a city where much of the movie-going is local.¹¹ To go far afield in Los Angeles is to face impossible traffic and the perils of parking. To that end, the Vista’s changing facade bears witness to shifting demographics, locally and nationally: the “open all night long” Girls Girls Girls adult programming of the ‘70s gives way to a Silverado/Teen Wolf ‘80s generational divide. (Again, the options emerge: are you a grizzled cowboy, or are you a part-time teen monster? Are you a baby boomer, most likely, or a Gen Xer?)

The 2007 marquee zooms out to offer an additional layer of commentary on all the marquees that followed: an image of Ocean’s Thirteen, the third in a franchise that is, in turn, a reboot of the Rat Pack’s Ocean’s Eleven movie from 1960. Some dreams are recurring, and these self-consciously stylish heist movies are as much about making money at the box office as they are about stealing money from whichever casino needs robbing. And robbers, like the movie business, are endlessly adaptable, changing plans from moment to moment so that the cash transfer goes smoothly.

Theaters track not just change, but also decline. The Cinerama, opened in 1963, long boasted a modern glass storefront still visible on Ruscha’s 2007 visit, though the theater’s entrance was moved from the flashy Sunset doorway to one opening out to the parking lot on Ivar Avenue. “Upscale, [with] flexible vernacular furniture,” is how Melnick described the landmark to me, with a dome that had been dressed up as Shrek or the Pink Panther in conjunction with those films’ premieres.

The marquees track what constituted “big” entertainment in their moments: thriller The Day of the Jackal in 1973; adventure-comedy Back to the Future in 1985; inspirational period piece Apollo 13 in 1997; bleak torture porn Hostel in 2007. It is tempting to see this arc as moving from paranoid to hopeful to masochistic, a dream journal with a downward trajectory that maps onto lagging box office revenues and cinema’s place in society. It might not be: the top-grossing film of 2007 was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End; and, for every Hostel, there’s a Ratatouille (which came out the same year). Ruscha’s marquees are literal and figurative snapshots of what Los Angelenos were thinking about, what was being projected into their eyeballs, but it can never be the whole story.

Both the Cinerama and the Vista closed with the 2020 COVID pandemic. The former’s reopening keeps getting pushed back – from 2024 to 2025 – while a remodeled Vista reopened under Quentin Tarantino’s ownership in fall of 2023. In those renovating months prior to the Vista’s grand reopening (screening True Romance, from a Tarantino script), the marquee read “To be continued….”

This sentiment, a nod to the kind of serialized storytelling on which Hollywood relies, speaks just as intimately to the dynamic histories and geographies that Ruscha tracked, auteur-style, in revisiting Sunset Boulevard repeatedly over five decades. The cinematic world Ruscha has created with his photographs belongs to no one genre. And while the images eventually stop, the ending is left open, to say the least. But, together, these photographed marquees speak to cinema’s centrality to the day-to-day lives of Los Angelenos and Americans more broadly. They are ordinary portals, taking people away from their regular routines for two hours at a time. Even the glimpse or promise of a movie they offer gives viewers now, just as it gave viewers then, the embodied memory of being here-but-not-here, that “silvery feeling” just as Ruscha described it.

Notes