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Bison heads, longhorn steer skulls, girls on ledges with stringed instruments, legs over the sidewalk. Joseph Mora put all of it on a picture house at Broadway and Third, opened 1 February 1918. A stained-glass window used to fill the scalloped arch over the entrance; it is plaster now.
Sid Grauman's name went on the building; the idea was Homer Laughlin's, who hired Grauman and his father to run the theatre. The balcony spans 110 feet on what the Los Angeles Conservancy calls the first reinforced concrete girder in the world, permitted only after 1.5 million pounds of sandbags failed to break it.
Frank Fouce leased the hall in 1950 for Mexican vaudeville and Spanish-language film, and the bills after that ran to Dolores del Rio and Lucho Gatica. A tiled portrait of Cantinflas, left in the wall behind the candy counter after a scene from El Patrullero 777, was still there when the Los Angeles Times looked in 1999.
The offices are apartments now. The hall goes out for premieres, weddings and shoots, no visiting hours published; two 35mm Simplex projectors still stand in the booth.
Blade Runner worked across the street, in the Bradbury Building, and let this one play itself. Its marquee burns in street shots, carrying the real 1981 bill: Mamá Solita, about a boy crossing the Rio Grande after his father. The film's 2019 downtown, shot in 1981, Spanish-language programme legible over the door.