The historic 100-year-old Highland Theatre in Highland Park closed its doors late last month. Many Angelenos are mourning the loss, but still holding out hope for a reopening.
This three-screen theater was one of very few movie theaters in northeast L.A., on a street that’s been gentrifying for years. Tickets used to be $10 or less, and you could regularly catch a movie for only $6 on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
It was also a cultural hub for movie lovers and filmmakers, and for the last 10 years was the home of the Highland Park Independent Film Festival.
Why it closed
Talk about the theater closing goes all the way back to 2022 with a story in The Eastsider LA about a pending sale. The 99-year lease was about to be up last February, but it stayed open.
The theater was reportedly bought by Cyrus Etemad, who also owns Highland Park Bowl and other real estate along the Figueroa Corridor in Highland Park. Etemad let the theater’s operator, Dan Akarakian, stay rent free for another year, and that year is up.
But still the news of the closure caught employees and the neighborhood by surprise.
Denise Hernandez, who works at her father’s restaurant, Antigua Bread, remembers the many times she’d eat at the restaurant before catching a movie with her little brother. “It’s a core memory for us … And I didn’t even know it was leaving,” she says.
The Highland Theatre’s history
The Highland Theatre is a proper movie palace with more than 1,400 seats (that’s bigger than the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood). It opened in 1925 and was designed by the same architect who did the Vista in Los Feliz and the Rialto in South Pasadena.
The area used to be a booming theater district, but as historian and film professor Ross Melnick explains, “Today the theater is all that’s left of this once booming suburban theater district. By the 1950s, demographic shifts, the rise of television and other factors began impacting local theaters.”
Highland Park’s Franklin Theatre closed in 1952, the Park Theatre closed in 1963, and the Highland itself struggled into the mid 1970s.
Like many theaters at the time, in the 70s, a new owner started screening adult films as a way to stay afloat and bring in more money, but that caused protests. According to Melnick, picketers, including local nuns, carried signs reading, “Decent movies for decent people. Shame, shame, what a disgrace. Get this filth out of our face.” and the Highland Theatre did close for almost a year.
In 1975, the Akarakian family bought the theater, and a few years later they changed the space from a single screen movie palace to a triplex. To do that, they closed off a vintage balcony space and reduced the capacity to about 500 seats.
In 2022, Etemad bought the theater and according to the L.A. Times, he said his priority is to preserve the venue, and is currently looking at cinema and live music uses.
And the community is hoping that that’s the case.
Not just a movie theater
Local filmmaker and actress Marita De La Torre, featured in the 2024 Sundance film Ponyboi, is one of the founders of the Highland Park Independent Film Festival, which has been running for the last 10 years out of the Highland Theatre.
De La Torre was immediately drawn to the theater. “Give me a grand dame of a theater and I’m there,” she says. The Highland Theatre has been so beloved by the festival organizers that several team members are working on a documentary about its history.
HPIFF’s tagline is “Film For the People,” and their festival’s mission is to bring mentorship to local schools, give independent filmmakers a platform for their…
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