While known most casually as the Cool Mom of awards ceremonies – here, you and your friends can drink as much champagne as you want but make sure you do it under my roof, in front of my cameras – the Hollywood Foreign Press Association accomplishes much more every year than pulling off Oscar season’s liveliest, sloppiest party. At their annual Grants Banquet last week, the HFPA awarded over two million dollars worth of grants to non-profit arts organizations, higher education fellowships, professional trainings, and other film-centric or adjacent projects and spaces.
To Angelino cinephiles, film history buffs, and fans of landmark cultural sites, one additional grant announcement might spark some interest: a $500,000 grant to renovate and restore the legendary movie palace, the Egyptian Theater. Home to reams of Golden Age Hollywood lore and, contemporarily, the encyclopedic repertory organization American Cinematheque – the recipients of the grant, and masterminds of the theater’s first major renovation in 1996 – the Egyptian has held a special place in the past, present, and future of Hollywood film culture since its construction in 1922 by film exhibition (and cultural appropriation) impresario Sid Grauman. While Grauman’s Chinese Theater would go on to secure higher iconography in the pantheon of movie palaces and cemented handprints, the Egyptian arguably influenced the practices of the Hollywood hype machine more integrally and with more longevity; after all, it hosted the first ever movie premiere in history, for Allan Dwan's Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks.
Which is all to say, where we see movies matters. Whether it’s a packed AMC with the comfiest seats and strongest air conditioning, a local independent theater with roots in the community, or a trusted repertory house with a taste-expanding slate, the environment in which we watch has the capacity to add a special new flavor to your filmgoing experience.
Do you have a favorite theater around where you live that makes you feel warm and fuzzy when the lights dim? Personally, The Neon in Dayton, Ohio makes me as bubbly inside as one of their homemade Italian sodas.