Tower Theater under construction.
Date created: June 17, 1927
Courtesy of The UCLA Library Special Collections
In this project, we interrogate audiences’ experience of movie palaces during the 1920s and 1930s. We divided our project into five pages: home, blueprints, 3D modeling, bibliography, and about, using multiple technology skills and digital platforms to present our findings. Our primary sources are various, including blueprints, images, and newspaper articles. All of the blueprints are from the UCLA Library Special Collections – S. Charles Lee Papers, 1919–1962, which possesses rich collections of Lee archives. For newspaper articles, we focused on acclaimed newspaper, Los Angeles Times, which has published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. Our images are from various sources. Photos of Tower Theatre were from the UCLA Library Special Collections, Historic Theatre Photography, and Apple Tower Theatre. The sources of Los Angeles Theatre’s photos include the UCLA Library Special Collections, Historic Theatre Photography, USC Digital Library, and California State Library’s Mott Studio collections. In 1931, Mott Studio was commissioned to take a series of photos of Los Angeles Theatre before its gala opening.
By synthesizing primary sources we collected, we reconstructed audiences’ experience through annotating S. Charles Lee’s blueprints and building a 3D model of Tower Theatre. We used Genially to annotate Lee’s blueprints of Tower Theatre and Los Angeles Theatre, producing interactive images to display our archival materials. We not only marked important spaces in theaters for which Lee planed, but also bridged the blueprints, images, and newspaper articles to demonstrate how Lee’s ideas were embodied and how the public perceived his movie palaces. For Tower Theatre, we only found blueprints of its main and mezzanine floors. In order to make up the lack of the basement floor, we additionally annotated a plan of Tower Theatre’s longitudinal section to showcase the layout of the theatre. Compared to Tower Theatre, we had more luck on hunting Los Angeles Theatre’s blueprints, including the basement, auditorium, mezzanine, balcony floors and its longitudinal section. These five blueprints eventually perfectly exhibit the grandeur of Los Angeles Theatre.
As for 3D modeling, we selected the auditorium of Tower Theatre and the basement of Los Angeles Theatre as our subjects considering the applicability. We first collected, compared, and reorganized various blueprints, and then we used Vectorworks to build models. However, there may be gaps in the measurements and location details provided by these papers, and portions of the models must be based on alternate resources, conjecture, and guesswork. This 3D modeling, albeit incomplete, aims to offer website readers a chance to simultaneously experience space and learn from archives.
Yun-Pu Yang
PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include East Asian Theater (particularly Taiwan and China), gender and sexuality, Sinophone Studies, and Digital Humanities. She is writing her dissertation “The Eroticism of Peking Opera Male Impersonators over the twentieth Century” and working towards the Graduate Certificate on Digital Humanities.
Brandon Keith
Graduate Student in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department at
UCLA studying Egyptology. His interests include Third Intermediate Period and New Kingdom Egyptian history, ancient language, digital humanities, and education.
Special Thanks
Professor Anthony Caldwell
Professor Wendy Kurtz
Mr. Simon V. Elliott and UCLA Special Library Collections
Mr. Mike Hume and Historic Theatre Photography
USC Digital Library
California State Library
Apple Tower Theatre
