Above: The rehabilitated interior of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, which originally opened in Los Angeles in 1922.
When Parisians flocked to the corner of Boulevard des Capucines and rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin on November 24, 1927, for the opening of what was billed as their city’s most spectacular new movie theater, the Vaudeville Paramount Palace, they discovered that its Belle Époque facade housed a sumptuous Art Deco interior. Gold paint glistened on the ceiling of the 1,920-seat auditorium as the Paramount Orchestra played the overture to Wagner’s 1867 The Master-Singers of Nuremberg in a prelude to the movie, the Oscar-nominated documentary Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness.
Like so many once-glamorous early-20th-century movie theaters, the Vaudeville Paramount Palace faded during the television age. But the building (or most of it) survived, and it reopened this summer as the seven-screen Pathé Palace after five years of restoration and reconstruction led by Renzo Piano, the acclaimed Italian architect of Centre Pompidou in Paris. He and Pathé, one of Europe’s biggest film companies, strove to retain the charm of the original interior while reinventing it as a luxury lair. As well as watching films, visitors can see plays and concerts, quaff wines from the famous Parisian restaurant Le Taillevent, and down cocktails in a bar designed by Jacques Grange, grandee of French interiors whose clients have included Sofia Coppola and the late Yves Saint Laurent.
The Pathé Palace’s Art Deco–style bar was decorated by Jacques Grange.
Not that the Pathé Palace is alone. After decades of decline, when first television and then streaming stole their audience, historic cinemas are now being lovingly restored across the globe, in the hope of transforming them into places we will yearn to visit again.
One of the earliest cinemas, the Orpheum in Haverhill, Massachusetts, opened in 1907 after a hasty conversion from a burlesque theater by a local scrap metal dealer, Louis B. Mayer (later, the second M in MGM). But the first example of truly ambitious cinema design was Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. The boxing promoter Sid Grauman spent $800,000 on constructing a movie palace emblazoned with faux-Egyptian hieroglyphics, friezes, and columns.
One of seven new movie theaters within the Pathé Palace complex.
The Egyptian opened in 1922 with the world’s first movie premiere—and first red carpet—for Robin Hood, starring, written, and produced by the dashing Douglas Fairbanks. The delighted Grauman lavished $2 million on his next major investment, the nearby Chinese Theatre, which, as the name suggests, was a spectacle of chinoiserie. After opening in 1927 with Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings, it scored another coup by inviting movie stars to leave their handprints and footprints on the concrete sidewalk, which is now adjacent to the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Among Grauman’s admirers was Oscar Deutsch, the enterprising son of a British industrialist. Convinced that there was an appetite for equally flamboyant cinemas in Britain, he commissioned the architect Harry Weedon to build them across the country, inspired by the Art Deco curves of ocean liners and airplanes. Deutsch opened 258 cinemas, all named Odeon (allegedly an acronym of “Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation”), between 1934 and his death in 1941.
The Odeon Leicester Square in London, designed by Harry Weedon in the Art Deco style in 1937.
Dynamic though he and Grauman were, architectural purists tend to prefer the subtle rationalism of the Cinéac chain, designed in the 1940s and ’50s by the Russian-born architect Adrienne Górska and her French husband, Pierre de Montaut. Most Cinéacs were in France and Belgium, but one of the finest was Le Palmarium, which debuted in 1951 in the Tunisian capital, Tunis. Equally chic were the Jagat, Neelam, and KC, designed by the Indian architect -Aditya Prakash, as part of the epic project led by Le Corbusier in the 1950s and early ’60s to build a model modern city, Chandigarh, in northern India. Prakash executed all three cinemas in Le Corbusier’s utilitarian style in Chandigarh’s cultural hub, Sector 17.
A glass atrium at the Pathé Palace cinema complex in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano.
Sadly, the Neelam Theatre is the sole survivor of the three. Most of the Cinéacs have disappeared too, as have many of Deutsch’s Odeons. But in recent years, movie palaces have staged a renaissance. A perversity of the digital age is that our immersion in screens has made us crave human contact, kindling a surge of enthusiasm for public speaking and other forms of live performance, crafts such as carpentry, weaving, and ceramics, and imaginatively restored cinemas.
This is why Netflix spent $70 million transforming the Egyptian into an opulent screening venue, and why the Neelam is being renovated in the redevelopment of Sector 17. A similar spirit prompted Quentin Tarantino to renovate two vintage cinemas in Los Angeles, the New Beverly in Fairfax and the Vista in Los Feliz, and has fueled the success of the Metrograph repertory cinema in New York City.
The Neelam Theatre, a modernist cinema designed by Aditya Prakash in Chandigarh, India, dates back to the 1950s.
As for Paris, the excitement over Piano’s opulent Pathé Palace will be followed by the reopening of La Pagode on rue de Babylone in 2025. A Japanese pagoda that was shipped to Paris from Tokyo in 1895, the theater functioned as an indie cinema from 1931 until its closure in 2015 and is now another neglected gem poised for revival. It is unlikely to be the last, as the zest for reinventing historic cinemas shows no signs of stopping, though nor does our love of staying at home to binge movies on Netflix.
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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