Topic: Oddities
Not Hollywood: More of Encinitas on a Quiet Afternoon
More of that sad little movie theater in downtown Encinitas, the La Paloma Theatre, a Spanish Mission thing built in the twenties. As mentioned in the previous post, it opened with the film The Cohens And Kellys in Paris - February 11, 1928, and the rumor is that Mary Pickford rode her bicycle all the way to the La Paloma from Fairbanks Ranch for the opening. And she wasn't even in the film. It seats four or five hundred, and still has the Kilgen Wonder Organ from the days of the silent films and the opening vaudeville stage act. The stage is still in use. Jerry Garcia played here. So did Eddie Vedder. They show offbeat films, and, of course, show The Rocky Picture Horror Show every Friday night.
Frankly, it looks like something from a Hitchcock film, where Jimmy Stewart goes slowly mad and the well-lit everyday suddenly looks dangerous and menacing, and Grace Kelly or some other ice-blond looks simultaneously worried and flawless, and Stewart’s nightmares are designed by Salvador Dali - like in Spellbound, where there was a major point of contention between Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick. Selznick had Hitchcock under contract, and directed him to make a movie based upon Selznick's experiences in psychoanalysis. Selznick even hired his therapist as the technical advisor. She and Hitchcock clashed frequently, and Hitchcock brought in artist Salvador Dali “to conceive certain scenes of mental delusion,” which Selznick hated. Miklós Rózsa added the score with the spooky theremin, long before the Beach Boys used the thing.
This theater gives you that Dali nightmare feeling.
The lobby.
Posted by Alan
at 9:25 PM PDT
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Updated: Sunday, 4 June 2006 1:12 PM PDT
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Updated: Sunday, 4 June 2006 1:12 PM PDT