(500) Days of Summer|Million Dollar Theatre — where the movies taught Tom the wrong lesson

Tom's problem is stated in the first minute of the film: he grew up on sad British pop music and a total misreading of The Graduate. The misreading gets its own scene. He and Summer sit in the dark watching Benjamin Braddock chase a bus, and Tom leaves convinced it is a love story, which is not what the ending of that film is doing at all.

The dark room is Sid Grauman's first Los Angeles picture palace. The Million Dollar Theatre opened at 307 South Broadway in 1918, two thousand-odd seats behind a facade that has to be seen to be believed: William Lee Woollett piled longhorn skulls, bison, winged figures and Churrigueresque foam twelve storeys up the front of an office block, as if a cathedral had been rebuilt by someone who had only heard cathedrals described. It ran vaudeville, then Spanish-language cinema for decades, then Pentecostal services.

It is not a working cinema today. The auditorium opens for concerts, film events and private hires, so check listings before you plan around it — but the facade is public, permanent and free, and Broadway's whole surviving theatre row runs south from it. Stand across the street where the sidewalk widens and look up rather than at the marquee.

The joke of the location is architectural. Tom learns his worst romantic lesson inside the most theatrical building on the block — a place designed from the ground up to make you believe the thing on the screen.

Location photo: Wikimedia Commons, free licence.