Regency Village Theatre
- Architect
- Percy Parke Lewis
- Year
- 1930
- Style
- Mission Revival
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
The Regency Village Theatre is a 1930 movie palace in Westwood, designed by architect Percy Parke Lewis in the Mission Revival style for Fox West Coast Theatres, part of a wave of cinema construction the chain built across Southern California. It opened August 14, 1931, with roughly 1,400 seats, and sits across the street from the Fox Bruin Theatre inside Westwood Village, the Mediterranean-style commercial district the Janss brothers planned around UCLA. It's since hosted many Hollywood premieres and carries individual Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status.
the building
The 1951 Skouras remodel. A postwar update by the Skouras theater chain added plaster gold swirls to the stage-area side walls, new carpet, upgraded exits, and California Gold Rush-themed artwork in the lobby, pushing capacity up to about 1,535 seats.
the style
Lewis designed the theater in the Spanish Mission idiom that also defines Westwood Village's storefronts, tying the movie palace's tower and facade to the surrounding 1920s development rather than treating it as a freestanding spectacle.
More on Mission Revivalsignificance
Individually listed as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, the theater has changed hands from Fox West Coast to National General Theatres to Mann Theatres (1973) while continuing to operate as one of Westwood's landmark movie houses.
nearby
- Janss Investment Company Building
- Bratskeller - Egyptian Theater (Ralphs Grocery Store)
- Strathmore Apartments
- Sheats Apartments
- UCLA MacDonald Medical Research Laboratory
- Majestic Crest Theatre