"On Hollywood Boulevard, just past the man with the albino python wrapped around his neck, lies the TCL Chinese Theatre. Four years ago, the iconic landmark received a multimillion dollar makeover to revive its faded beauty, not unlike some of the aging actors who’ve placed their hands and feet in the theater’s cement courtyard.
But Thursday , the majestic movie theater will mark 90 years as the Grand Dame of Hollywood Boulevard, playing host to 20,000 visitors a day from around the globe.
“It’s just like it looks on TV,” marveled Jay and Nazira Momin, who were visiting from Atlanta.
These days it hosts more than 40 movie premieres a year, and it screens the blockbusters moviegoers can’t wait to see each weekend.
“Some of the most amazing movies opened here or played here,” said Levi Tinker, the theater’s general manager. “?‘Star Wars,’ ‘Avatar,’ ‘Titanic,’ ‘Mary Poppins,’ ‘The Jungle Book’ — the list goes on and on.”
On Wednesday — a day before the theater’s birthday — Harrison Ford stopped by to watch his friend Ridley Scott, who directed him in the 1982 blockbuster “Blade Runner,” press his hands into wet cement. The filmmaker will be immortalized on the walk in front of the Chinese, along with the likes of Groucho Marx, Betty Grable and George Burns, who left an imprint of his famous cigar.
“I won’t be able to sleep for a week!” Scott quipped, as he strolled the red carpet before the ceremony and a screening of his new sci-fi thriller, “Alien: Covenant.”
“I came here in 1960 as a student,” said the English-born director. “I lived in a little boarding house down the street for a week. I used to walk up and down here.”
Scott noted how much the somewhat-seedy neighborhood has changed.
“Hollywood Boulevard then was perfumed, clean and very pretty in those days,” he recalled. “It’s getting better now, but it did take a downturn. It’s climbing out of that right now. And it should.”
Built during the silent- film era, the movie house opened in 1927 as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, named after its founder, Sid Grauman. It became Mann’s Chinese Theatre in 1973, reverted back to its original name in 2001, then took on the moniker TCL Chinese Theatre after naming rights were purchased by the Chinese electronics firm, TCL Corp. in 2013.
Outside the theater Wednesday, tourists were excited to get a glimpse of the landmark and a few real-life movie stars.
“It’s incredible. I saw Harrison Ford just now,” said 14-year-old Eileen Befeler of Costa Rica as her father smiled.
She added that the movie palace was everything she imagined.
Words like that are no doubt music to the ears of Alwyn Hight Kushner, president and chief operating officer of Chinese Theatres LLC, a group of industry insiders who bought the theater in 2011. Among the investors: her father, Donald Kushner, best known as the producer of the 1982 movie, “Tron.”
“The theater hadn’t been updated in a long time,” Kushner said. “Attendance had fallen off because of other theaters that had new, exciting updates that had drawn our audience away from this movie palace. It really needed a fresh take on life. There was so much potential and opportunity. It just was kind of sitting there.”
Now, Kushner, 35, reports that the TCL Chinese is the largest IMAX theater in the world.
“We have great respect for everything that came before, but at the same time, you have to implement change,” she said. “You have to do things that are new and exciting and different and take a fresh approach to bring a hipness and a relevance to something this iconic.”
She said she thinks founder Sid Grauman would appreciate the transformation.
“When we came on board, we asked ourselves, “What would Sid do? What would Sid do if he were alive today?” Kushner recalled. “I think Sid would be very proud.”" (
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