The Bay of Yesterday

Sixty Years Ago, the Community’s Only Movie Palace Opened

by Michael Aushenker

Once upon a time, Pacific Palisades had a movie palace. Palisadian Sam Lagana still has vivid memories of frequenting the Bay Theatre’and with good reason”as a teen, he worked there during its final days in 1978, before it became Norris Hardware.   Lagana still has some mementos given to him on that fateful night 30 years ago. They include posters of ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ and ‘Freaky Friday”’among the last films to play there.   Today, Lagana, 46, is associate vice chancellor of Pepperdine University, but as a 15-year-old Palisades High School student he worked for the Bay as an usher, working his way up to assistant manager.   ’My job was to lock the doors at the end of the evening,’ he said.   Growing up in Pacific Palisades, Lagana remembers the Bay’s evolution from community focal point to community footnote. The Bay opened in July of 1949 as ‘a gorgeous Art Deco single-screen theater,’ Lagana said, ‘but when we got it, it was $1.50 for adults and 99 cents for kids.’   As a youngster, Lagana saw myriad films there: ”Heaven Can Wait,’ all the Disney films, ‘Smokey and the Bandit.’ They were there for three weeks. There was usually a double header in each theater. It was fun.   ’I’d ride my bike to the theater,’ Lagana continued. ‘Everybody was there on the weekends. The parents would drop the kids off.’   ’It was a nice looking theatre,’ agreed Ann Thompson, 82, who has lived near Will Rogers Park since the Bay’s heyday. She recalls taking her son and daughter to see movies. ‘Birthday parties took place there, and the Hot Dog Show was right across the street.’   Lagana was among those kids frequenting the popular frankfurter joint, ‘while parents went to a Mexican restaurant called The Hacienda,’ he said.   ’Originally, the Bay was one large theater,’ Lagana continued. ‘By the time I worked there, it was a twin. The California Cinema Corporation bought it and they split it [in the mid-1970s]. I was a kid when that sort of happened. Their goal was to have films for mature audiences on one screen and a family screen.’   Lagana, who worked under manager Dennis Addy, made many friends at the Bay, including Erin O’Neill and Johnny and Ash Adams. ‘Guys that I went to school and church with worked at the Bay,’ Lagana said. ‘I see them once in a while, they still live in town.’   One of those PaliHi students landed in the Palisadian-Post in dramatic fashion.   ’Bob Bigelow’s claim to fame was that he lived in Santa Monica Canyon,’ Lagana said. ‘One day, he was driving in his brown Camaro when the whole hillside between Temescal and Chautauqua landed on top of his car. It delivered him all the way down to the sand. The Post got a picture of it.’   Lagana and his Bay cronies once engaged in some good ol’-fashioned boosterism.   ’This local guy, Channing Clarkson, who grew up in the Huntington Palisades, he had a small role in a film [1978’s ‘Coach’ starring Cathy Lee Crosby and Keenan Wynn]. I remember we put up ‘Channing Clarkson starring in’ [above the title of the film], like he was the star.’   Other hi-jinks included swinging on the cables of the original screen’s curtains, which remained hidden behind the twin screens when the theater split its facilities.   ’You could ride the mechanism up, it was beautiful,’ he said. ‘The old stage was gorgeous. If you go upstairs in the hardware store, the stairwell is still there and you can almost tell where the balcony and the projection room still is.’   Long before Lagana was born, the Bay Theatre was a prominent part of the Palisades’ cultural life. Designed in an Art Moderne style by famed architect S. Charles Lee (the man behind the Los Angeles, Tower, and Bruin Theatres), the Bay opened in July 1949, and seated 1,100 people (including 80 loge seats on the mezzanine level). The independent movie house’s projection booth was decked out with Simplex E-7 35 millimeter projector heads, SH1000 Soundheads, and Peerless MagNarc lamps. The proscenium was located behind the screen, which was flanked by massive curtains.   At the inaugural Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce meeting on March 29, 1949, J. U. Chaffin, the Bay Theatre’s manager, served as vice-president of the Board of Directors under president Arthur Loomis.   Hollywood’s swimming screen siren Esther Williams ripped tickets at the theater’s 1949 grand opening.   ’Leland Ford, Sr., the ex-U.S. congressman who lived in town, owned the whole block where the Catholic Church and Ralphs is now,’ recalled local historian Randy Young, who has warm memories of the Bay as de facto community hub; a ‘Norman Rockwell-meets-Hollywood’ experience that virtually every young Palisadian growing up in that era.   ’It’s where all the kids would congregate,’ said Young, recalling that stars such as Duncan ‘Cisco Kid’ Renaldo and Leo ‘Pancho’ Carrillo came to plug their 1950s TV series. ‘At age 5, I’m sitting in the theater, and the Cisco Kid pulls out his big shiny gun and shoots it off. The place was packed with kids and it scared the heck out of us.’   According to Young, after the mid-1960s, the Bay began to decline. Originally a first-run theatre, the Bay was twinned and turned into a second-run venue that ran four films at a time following a first run in Westwood.   ’When it closed [in Fall 1978], it was the end of the era,’ Young said. ‘It was a turning point when the town became something else, from a Norman Rockwell existence to a real estate listing.’   Based in the Palisades since 1925, the owners of Norris Hardware overhauled the Bay complex in 1979 and they have been serving Palisadians ever since. Visit Norris today, and you can make out the bones of the old theater. By the shelf liners is where the ticket booth person once collected admission. Over by the greeting cards is where the snack bar used to stand. Where the Bay’s entrance existed, you can now find Corning ware. Upstairs, the restroom area now contains Norris’s seasonal back stock, and a private office used by the store’s owners once housed the projection booth, while along the staircase wall, a dumbwaiter once circulated the film reels dropped off and picked up by the movie companies. On the Sunset Boulevard pavement out front, you can still see the remnants of the entrance terrazzo.   Ultimately, some longtime locals wish that a cinema spot such as the Bay still existed in town.   ’It was so handy,’ Ann Thompson said. ‘Now we have to drive down to Santa Monica to go to the movies.’   ’As a parent now raising my family in town,’ Lagana said, ‘it’s too bad, not only for me, but for my kids. They don’t have the opportunity to have the Bay Theatre to go to. It was a great social place to see people in the community.’