Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls | Regency Village Theatre — Opening Night in Westwood

On 8 November 1995 the film premiered at the Fox Theatre in Westwood Village, the tall white Spanish-Mission box with the 170-foot tower at Broxton and Weyburn. Two days later it opened wide and took $37.8 million across three days to finish first in the country — on a picture where Jim Carrey's fee alone had been ten million.

The theatre had been doing this since 14 August 1931. Percy Parke Lewis designed it for Fox West Coast Theatres with about 1,400 seats, a number that grew to 1,535 after a 1951 remodel, and for most of a century it was where studios sent films to be seen first: a block from UCLA, searchlights raking the tower, the village streets closed off. Los Angeles made it a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1988. Mann ran it, then Regency from 2010, which fitted Dolby Atmos in 2014 and made it the first THX Ultimate Cinema in 2019.

It went dark on 25 July 2024. An investor group led by Jason Reitman, with Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan and J.J. Abrams among the backers, is spending some $25 million to bring it back under American Cinematheque programming, with reopening planned for 2027.

So for now the pilgrimage is to the sidewalk, which is enough. The tower still carries its vertical sign above the village rooftops and you can pick it out four blocks down Broxton. Stand under it and the November night is easy to reconstruct: a queue around the block, waiting to watch a comedy about a stolen white bat in a fifteen-hundred-seat movie palace.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.