One final, private screening with Art Theater owner Howard Linn

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

For a man whose life has been spent showing some of our most intelligent films—The Conversation, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Little Thief, Less Than Zero—the Art Theater’s owner Howard Linn doesn’t talk much about the movies he’s seen. But then Linn, who dryly admits he can remember when gas was 23 cents a gallon, is not your empresario, your ebullient man of the theater.

He wears neither cape nor wingtips, nor even a scarf or cap to keep him warm in the winter wind. The native New Yorker comes to work like the rest of us—in a Hyundai, wearing thin slacks, an argyle V-neck sweater and running shoes. His handkerchief is neatly tucked away in his left hip pocket, and he refers to it frequently while we talk. It’s cold.

“What happenened to Southern California?” Linn asks, referring to the cold weather—but he could just as easily be referring to the disappearance of cheap gasoline, or of an era when our streets were still dotted with Roaring Twenties movie houses like this one.

Howard Linn has owned the Art Theater for 35 years, nearly half his lifetime. When he bought the single-screen Art Deco movie house with four partners in February 1973, it was just a place for him to roll film: a temporary camp on his retreat from Cal State Long Beach, where he’d screened movies until the theater there closed. The plan was to push onward like Sherman or Laemmle, becoming one day the owner of an art house theater chain—an empresario in his own right. That never happened.

“I was small,” he says over coffee at the Park Pantry, where we go to get change for the Art Theater’s tiny, tiled ticket booth. “Didn’t get smaller, but I didn’t get bigger.”

Thirty-five years ago, Linn estimates, there were eight single-screen movie houses in Southern California like the 1925 Art Theater. By 1978, he says—just five years after buying the Art—they had all been demolished: The land beneath them had become just too valuable. Then technology began wooing away his audience with Beta, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray; and after a disastrous stint leasing the Art to another operator in the late ’80s, Linn settled in for the long haul.

“When I got it, it was about 10 years into the rejuvenation of the art theater in the United States. So I decided I would just concentrate on [art films]. And so I gave up the idea of owning a chain of theaters,” Linn says. “I was offered a theater in Huntington Beach. I was offered a number of theaters and I turned them down. Maybe it’s because I like to keep control close.”

Now, he’s finally relinquishing that control. On March 5, Linn, who is 80—and his wife Florence, who still does the bookkeeping and sometimes makes the popcorn, and his son Steve who is the general manager—will close the portholed doors to Long Beach’s last independent movie theater for the last time.

“You’ve got to know when to stop,” Linn says. “There’s people who end up with what they’re doing burying them.” That’s why Linn is stopping—in hopes of taking his second vacation in 35 years. But the Art will go on. After entertaining three other offers, Linn has finally sold the theater to urban developer Jan van Dijs, who believes his plan for the theater could change the way we look at Fourth Street’s vintage district.

Van Dijs is perhaps best-known in Long Beach for having purchased and redeveloped the historic Ebell Club from a withering women’s club to a thriving mix of 11 residential lofts and a wedding hall—then selling it to the Club’s wedding planner. Van Dijs paid $850,000 for the Art Theater, Linn says.

The developer is a 17-year Long Beach resident who plans to spend approximately three months restoring the 1925 Art Theater to the 1930s splendor it attained following a Long Beach Earthquake-mandated remodel—while simultaneously adapting it to a long life as a modern theater. That means larger, cleaner bathrooms and reducing the theater’s seating capacity from 499 to around 400, to accommodate the new bathrooms as well as a new snack bar. It means bringing in digital sound; rebuilding the stage in front, and framing the screen above it with a proscenium arch—the giant eyebrow that’s a must-have for any mini-movie palace.

And it means turning the two little storefronts that flank the entrance back into working stores: Van Dijs is in talks with Portfolio Coffeehouse owner Kerstin Kansteiner to open a so-called “Portfolio Annex” in the kiosk on the left. Another Fourth Street fixture, Linn’s eldest son Steve, who’s spent six days a week at the Art for about the last 10 years, has been asked to stay on as general manager. And that’s about it.

When the Art re-emerges (they plan a soft opening in June and a grand opening in August), you’ll still be able to see the same obscurely wonderful non-commercial fare which has made it famous for a generation.

“We’re doing this in the hope that the community will support it,” says Van Dijs. “I think that they will. But you have to believe.”

Speaking of important films, Linn must surely know by now what his last movie at the Art will be? Time is short. Nope. “I’ve got my short list,” he says. It includes the The Savages, with Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the Israeli film The Band’s Visit, about an Egyptian band lost on its way to play the opening of an Arab art center. (As always, their posters ring the entrance, alongside advertisements for The Kite Runner, The Orphanage, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth.)

And what about Linn’s first movie, the first film he screened at the Art after getting the keys back when Nixon still prowled the White House—running the fireplace and the air conditioning at the same time? Something with Marlene Dietrich perhaps? Publicity photos of her are framed in the lobby, alongside lobby cards for Dracula, Frankenstein, Gone With the Wind, Fantastic Voyage and others.

Nope. Not Marlene Dietrich—well, probably not. Linn has shown so many movies to so many people—peaking at 26 films a month some time in the first 10 years—that he can’t remember his first one at the Art.

“There were too many,” he says.

Howard Linn does recall a golden night not long after he came to California in 1956, to work at Boeing. It was the night when he first made money—good money—screening a movie. (He doesn’t remember the movie, either.) The location: a school auditorium somewhere in West Los Angeles. And—action! Enter Linn, an organizer of the Los Angeles Film Society.

“I put an ad in the paper,” he says. “And the night of the show, I had a couple hundred people show up, and I thought that was pretty remarkable. That was the beginning.” He swiftly duplicated his success at auditoriums in Beverly Hills and Inglewood—and when he moved to Long Beach from the San Fernando Valley in 1962, the pattern was set.

He organized the Long Beach Film Society and showed films in a theater at CSULB. When they closed the theater for a three-month renovation that would actually last three years, Linn was primed. The Art Theater became available, and he bought it—with four partners, including three CSULB faculty members. (Later, he bought them out, one by one.) Times were about to be tough—recession, oil embargo—but with a slate of significant films behind it (including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation) the Art began to build a loyal following.

“Some of the best films ever made were made in the ’70s,” says Linn, whose favorite American film is Where’s Poppa, director Carl Reiner’s 1970 black comedy. (He also admires Jack Nicholson.) “You couldn’t get enough people to see them when they were in a theater. But a month or so later, you could bring [them] back.”

That’s how he did it, and perhaps because its owner had so recently been associated with a university, the Art became an early hit with college students.

“For some reason the majority of people coming to the Art in the late ’70s and early ’80s were college students—not just from Cal State, from all over,” Linn says. They didn’t come for the decor—a smallish lobby with a ’70s-vintage cork bulletin board and wood paneling, and a water fountain named “The Watergate”—so much as for the films Linn chose.

“I just agonized over what films I would show. Still do,” he says. But as the 1960s Christie Electric Corp. projectors whirred out award-winning performance after performance, it sometimes all seemed worth it.

“I remember this one occurrence in the ’70s. I’m sorry to say we didn’t have air conditioning—we had fans,” Linn says. “One Sunday, it was so hot we propped the doors open at both ends and we went ahead and showed the movie. And nobody left. They just sat there and sweated.”

Jan van Dijs wonders how Howard Linn will be able to give all this up.

“I think letting go of this theater is a very difficult thing for him. He’s got this emotional attachment to this building and to the art of what he does,” the developer says. “He understands the art of making film. That passion is the only thing that has kept this building alive. They were able to survive strictly on the quality of their programming.”

Van Dijs thinks about survival a lot—his own. He and his wife, who does interior design for their eponymous company, have a lot riding on the Art Theater’s rebirth. Van Dijs estimates the renovation will cost more than $1 million. That’s expensive for a first-run art house theater—even if it is unique.

“It’s a little scary. You have to look at it and say ‘On paper, it’s a terrible idea.’ You have theaters closing every week,” he says, “and then the fiscal history of this theater is not so good and you’re going to dump a fortune into it.”

Yet the developer—who makes his offices in a character-driven 1920s brick building which once housed a neighborhood market—would be the first to admit he’s been seduced by the building’s charms.

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

The Art Theater makes believers out of its ticketholders with its films, and with the textbook Art Deco styling of its exterior, which remains largely original despite a 1969 fire that claimed the roof and much of the projection booth.

“There’s really very little or nothing original in the interior of the theater,” says Van Dijs—who invested a considerable sum in finding that out. He funded a voluminous, encyclopedic report on the theater’s condition and possibilities, which he presented last year to the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission. (Not surprisingly, the Commission signed off on his plans for the project.)

As Van Dijs wrote in his report—citing newspaper articles that dated to the 1920s—the Art Theater opened in 1925 as the Carter Theater: a light-colored stucco building with a Spanish-tiled roof. By 1932, owners J.W. and L.W. Carter had sold it to a man named E.H. Lee. The following year, the 1933 earthquake damaged Lee’s building enough to force him to remodel it into the theater we see today. (It’s also when Lee renamed his movie house the Lee Theater.)

“The way it’s been explained to me is that the lines on the left and the right of the building symbolize waves, and the [neon] marquee is a ship knifing through the waves,” Van Dijs says of its Art Deco redesign by architects Cecil and Arthur Schilling, who also penned the city’s Lafayette Hotel and its Hancock Motors Building. “I think this was like, after the quake, we were looking to the future and this was their vision of the future.”

Let’s consider the word “marquee” for a moment. Van Dijs uses it to refer to the vertical pylon with neon letters which still spell out the theater’s name, after dark. True. But it also gets used to describe the pointy signboard where movie titles are displayed.

That marquee isn’t original, Van Dijs says; it was added over the original flat signboard in 1948, when Milton B. Arthur and the Cabart Theaters Corp. owned the Lee Theater. The following year, in keeping with tradition, Arthur changed its name to the Art Theater—one feature Van Dijs plans to preserve.

“The Art name is worth more than the building,” the developer says, smiling. In a way, however, he’s right. So much of the Art’s interior has been altered in its 82 years—its entry doors, the snack bar, the bathrooms, the lobby, the seats, the screen, the projection booth, the two tiny storefronts that flank the ticket booth—that the shell of the building is its most original asset.

Its insides will look quite different by this summer, a fact that gives Fourth Street merchants the butterflies—even if they like the idea.

“I feel great,” says Kansteiner, who is president of the Fourth Street Business Association, and a longtime fan of independent, foreign film. “Just because as a tall person [she’s 5'-10”], I can barely sit there or comfortably enjoy the movie. We’re extremely happy with the outcome.”

Kansteiner hopes a revitalized Art—plus the coming attractions of a surf shop, a Mexican restaurant and a Vietnamese noodle shop, all planned to open in coming months—will bring more visitors to the street, and help merchants march west. Now in its third decade, the Fourth Street business district has grown exponentially from its salad days in the early ’90s, when it was known chiefly for four businesses: Portfolio, the Art, the variety store Siren and the vintage clothing store Meow. Yet despite filling out its roster of vintage-iana, the district has never managed to extend itself past the Art Theater at its west end. That’s the dream—that a redone Art will someday be a kind of golden spike denoting a mid-point, rather than an end.

“It will kind of connect the street, because there’s a kind of invisible division betwen the east end and the west end,” says Kansteiner, whose coffeehouse marks the east end, at Junipero Avenue. She hopes the still-new Fourth Street Business District could someday reach at least as far west as ex-Social Distortion drummer Chris Reece’s restaurant, The Pike Bar & Grill, one block west of Cherry Avenue.

“There were some other projects that came and went in the past, but this is the first time I’ve really been excited that this could happen,” Kansteiner says. Second District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, whose field office is on Fourth Street’s retro row, is equally bullish. Once they add a few more parking spaces, the region should be set, she says.

“It’s [Van Dijs’] biggest challenge,” says Lowenthal, and so her office put the developer in touch with Long Beach Unified School District—in hopes the two parties could broker a deal to share parking at nearby Burbank Elementary School with patrons of Fourth Street.

“Having the Art Theater successful really contributes to the city,” Lowenthal says. “The Art Theater, the noodle house, the Mexican restaurant Lola’s, and Portfolio will bring a nightlife to the area that I think the stores will use as an excuse to remain later.”

Speaking of staying open late—the Art Theater, ladies and gentlemen, and Howard Linn’s last screening. It’s coming, March 5, sometime around 9 p.m. Does he really have no idea what he’ll show? What about a throwback to the early days—a Jack Nicholson flick, maybe?

“The Last Picture Show?” Linn asks puckishly as we finish our coffee—name-checking the Oscar-winning 1971 film about a Texas town on the verge of losing its only movie house.

“No,” Linn says, answering his own question. “I’m not going to do that. But I’m thinking about putting that on the marquee.”

Tags: art theater, Film, Fourth Street, howard linn, Long Beach, meow, portfolio, retro row, siren, the last picture show