Salvage and Restoration
See that wonderful old building? It's a Taco Bell Cantina.
It came up in 1917 on Hollywood Boulevard, the facade in the Churrigueresque style, and it once was the Pickwick Book Shop. Marlene Dietrich shopped there. That no one decided to demolish it entirely or simply obscure the facade to make it more palatable to prospective buyers is the lowest bar on the cultural preservation ladder, but one I'm glad it cleared. Of course I would prefer that it still be a bookstore because I always want there to be more bookstores, but I have eaten an acceptable chicken quesadilla there.
Across the street is a true conservation project, The Egyptian Theater. It's been around almost as long as the building that is now a Taco Bell Cantina, and it's gone through plenty of physical changes during even the short 27 years I've lived in Los Angeles. But it's still up and running after over a century, and has been the home of the American Cinematheque since 1998. Now Netflix owns it and they share it with the Cinematheque. As long as it sticks around, as long as I get to keep walking in and watching a movie, I'll be as content with this arrangement as any other non-corporate, non-powerful person can be.
To park close to the Egyptian often means using a parking structure on Cherokee Avenue that sits between the still-standing Canterbury apartments and the building that houses World of Wonder, the latter featuring a basement that used to be The Masque. You get to walk past it and feel good about how WoW left all the old punk graffiti on the basement walls, though you can't see that from the sidewalk. Content yourself with imagining that, somewhere inside and downstairs, Darby Crash kicked Belinda Carlisle out of the Germs before throwing up in a corner.
We go to the Egyptian to see Queen Kelly. It's a silent film from 1929.
Several years ago I was at a screening of Sunset Boulevard at the Laemmle Royal. There was a Q&A with now-97-year-old co-star Nancy Olson, the last living cast member. What I learned afterward from Alonso Duralde, my own personal human encyclopedia, is that Sunset Boulevard's film within a film, briefly projected in one scene by Gloria Swanson's involuntarily retired silent-star character Norma Desmond, is Queen Kelly.
This is something we do with and for each other. We watch a lot of movies together and, if it's an example of classic Hollywood filmmaking, he's there to deliver information I missed before, like Queen Kelly's dueling endings or its connection to the Kennedy family. If we've just emerged from some obscurity, I'll harass him with details about Denis Lavant that he never asked for and then talk his ear off about my ideas regarding films from various decades being "in conversation" with each other. And here's another thing about Jia Zhangke and here's another other thing about some band you never heard of or cared about and and and. I realize I said we do this with and for each other. I'm pretty sure I do it at him.
Queen Kelly stars Swanson and was directed by Erich von Stroheim. Its production was a maelstrom of creative differences and competing contracts, and it never opened in the United States. Gloria Swanson's preferred ending, shot after Erich von Stroheim was fired, involves her character killing herself. It opened in a couple European and South American countries, arriving on TV decades later. In Sunset Boulevard, von Stroheim plays Desmond's ex-husband-ex-director-turned-butler. The insertion of a piece of real-life film nobody in the United States saw, one that fell to a sort of ruin, created by the people you see on screen, makes everything that much more haunted.
Then came a 1985 restoration and its current 2025 4K restoration, which uses still photos, short pieces of footage, storyboard illustrations, and expository intertitles to finish the film as the script intended. Because it's screening at the Cinematheque, it's introduced by Gloria Swanson's granddaughter. We enjoy it very much. It's one thing to watch an old silent movie on YouTube or TCM. It's another to be confronted with the past on a huge screen in a building that actually showed silent films because there were no other kind. You don't have to imagine what it was like. You're right there, and you've turned off your phone for the experience.
When it's over, we walk back out to the sidewalk. To the left is the Scientology building with its gorgeous vertical sign. I was once lightly scolded by a friend for loving it, but if tourists can go admire ancient Catholic churches when Christianity has spent a couple thousand years ruining the planet, then I can enjoy this freaky religion's neon come-on. Maybe someday it'll be a Chick-fil-A.
