The latest season of Bosch, which kept me thoroughly entertained during this quarantine, featured countless new-to-me restaurants that I am itching to stalk! I can only hope they are still in business when this craziness ends. Fortunately, I did spot one locale that I previously stalked but have yet to blog about – The Theatre at Ace Hotel, a gorgeous and historic venue that began life as the famed United Artists Theatre. I visited the auditorium via the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Broadway Historic Theatre and Commercial District Walking Tour (another enterprise I hope is still in operation when businesses are allowed to reopen) back on June 20th, 2015 and was thoroughly awed! I am thrilled to finally be able to dedicate a post to the place.
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The venue was initially built in 1927 as the flagship theatre for United Artists, the independent film studio established by Hollywood legends Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith.
The Spanish Gothic-style auditorium is situated on the bottom 3 levels of a 14-story building designed by Walker & Eisen.
Inspired by a recent vacation, Pickford and Fairbanks sought to include European elements in the design of the theatre itself and enlisted C. Howard Crane to realize their vision.
The finished product is nothing short of stunning, with gilded mirrors, elaborately carved plasterwork, and murals galore!
They truly just don’t build ’em like this anymore!
The detailing is absolutely remarkable!
I mean!
The auditorium itself is the real showpiece, though!
Its focal point is a circular mirrored and crystal dome that reflects light and color in an absolutely dazzling way.
Green lighting gels were in use when I visited, which cast the entire space in an emerald glow to magnificent effect.
It felt like I had wandered into the Land of Oz!
The Great Depression hit the venue hard. In the years following, it closed several times and went through several ownership changes before ceasing theatre operations entirely in 1989.
The following year, the site was leased to the Los Angeles University Cathedral church. The group occupied the theatre for the following two decades and even wound up purchasing the building that housed it at some point.
University Cathedral put the building on the market in 2010 and it sold to hotel developer Greenfield Partners the next year. The Ace Hotel was quickly tapped to manage the site and a restoration soon got underway.
The 189-room Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles opened to the public on January 6th, 2014. The former United Artists space became a special events/live performance venue known as The Theatre at Ace Hotel.
It’s also, of course, a filming location.
In the Season 6 episode of Bosch aptly titled “The Ace Hotel,” Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver) tracks FBI Agent Maxwell (Carter MacIntyre), a murder suspect, to the Ace Hotel . . .
. . . and winds up chasing him through the theatre.
Bosch is hardly the first production to feature the space, though it hasn’t wound up onscreen nearly as much as I would have thought.
The United Artist’s lit and unlit marquee is visible a couple of times in the 1950 noir classic The Asphalt Jungle.
Benny Goodman (Steve Allen) plays there in the 1956 biopic The Benny Goodman Story.
The venue portrays a New York theatre in 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success.
Mr. T (Robert Hooks) breaks into the venue and then into one of the offices upstairs in the 1972 crime flick Trouble Man.
Ashe Corven (Vincent Perez) scales the building in 1996’s The Crow: City of Angels, though most of what we see is a model, per the Historic L.A. Theatres in Movies blog.
Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott) also auditions for a performing arts school spot at the theatre in the 2015 horror film Insidious: Chapter 3.
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Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Stalk It: The Theatre at Ace Hotel, from “The Ace Hotel” episode of Bosch, is located at 929 South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. You can visit the venue’s official website here and the hotel’s here.