Majestic Crest Theatre
- Architects
- Arthur W. Hawes Joseph Musil
- Year
- 1940
- Style
- Art Deco
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
- Collection
- l.a. deco
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Now the Nimoy Theater, this Westwood venue was built as the UCLAN, a 500-seat live-performance house designed by Arthur W. Hawes with Joseph Musil in an austere Moderne style for financier Frances Seymour Fonda, wife of Henry Fonda and mother of Jane and Peter. It opened in 1941, switched to an exclusive newsreel cinema during World War II, and afterward screened foreign films under the names UCLAN, Crest, and Metro Theatre. UCLA acquired and renovated the building in 2018, reopening it in September 2023 renamed for Leonard Nimoy.
the building
From newsreels to Kubrick. After its wartime run as an exclusive newsreel house, the theater reopened with foreign films, and later, as the Crest, screened Dr. Strangelove, Rosemary's Baby, Goodbye, Columbus, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
the style
Hawes gave the original 500-seat house an austere Art Deco/Streamline Moderne treatment, the clean, machine-age look then favored for theaters going up around Westwood Village.
More on Art Decosignificance
Individually designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, the theater was extensively renovated by UCLA and reopened in September 2023 as the Nimoy Theater.
nearby
- Bratskeller - Egyptian Theater (Ralphs Grocery Store)
- Janss Investment Company Building
- Wilshire Federal Building
- Regency Village Theatre
- UCLA MacDonald Medical Research Laboratory
- Strathmore Apartments