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Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Main Menu Introduction Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Introduction, Start Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Histories Concealed Histories Concealed landing page Projecting 1943 Sense of Pachuca Broadway as Background Splash page for Broadway as Background / Background as Broadway Photo Essay: Marquee Stories Intro to photo essay: Marquee Stories Prototypes Exploring project prototypes Portfolio Ejected Spectators and Inactive Users: Locating Multimodal Historiography In Repurposed Media Spaces

This is Million Dollar

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Video Gallery: Marquee Stories Veronica Paredes
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Photo Essay: Marquee Stories
Oral histories with cinema audience members...consistently tell us that the local rhythms of motion picture circulation and the qualities of the experience of cinema attendance were place-specific and shaped by the continuities of life in the family, the workplace, the neighbourhood and community.
— Richard Maltby, "New Cinema Histories"
In his introductory essay to Explorations in New Cinema History, Richard Maltby identifies critical ways that distinguish new cinema history from reception studies. Crucially, the former recognizes the social and spatial in experiences of cinemagoing, rather than limiting analysis of the engagement audiences experience with cultural texts by focusing on interpretation or decoding. Much of the literature currently identifying with new cinema history focuses on the connections enacted with other places and practices through the simple act of moviegoing, linking the spaces and places of cinema to community, personal and cultural memory, class identification and mobility, and ethnic and/or national identification. Future research on this topic would do well to more fully engage practices of oral history, but ideally with the combined efforts of “archival research in corporate records and local and trade press” -- specifically in Spanish-language press, as Laura Serna and Colin Gunckel have explored for the first half of the twentieth century -- and “tracking [of] programming and exhibition patterns” in order to produce a “social geography” of Downtown Los Angeles’ Spanish-language cinemas throughout the 1970s and 80s.[i] This section gestures toward this framework, while making no claims to accuracy or authenticity of cultural memory. Included are excerpts from one set of interviews conducted with Francisco (Pancho), who currently works at the Million Dollar Farmacia with his wife, Lizbeth; and Rafael, who ran the Discoteca 2000 video stall in the Broadway Arcade until relocating to the Broadway Trade Center in 2014. Both men worked at or near the Million Dollar Theatre after arriving in the United States from Mexico in the 1980s. Videos also document how Rafael shared research leads for films that were shot on South Broadway and the practice of candle preparation at the Million Dollar Farmacia.

[i] Richard Maltby describes a call for “triangulation of data, theory and method” in an essay from Daniel Biltereyst, Philippe Meers and Lies Van de Vijver in the same anthology, “New Cinema Histories,” in Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 28.
Es Million Dollar Rafael at Broadway Arcade remembered when this film was shot at Million Dollar in the mid 1980s, his sharing this scene with me is described in this field note.
"¿Sabe?" Learning about South Broadway
Rafael Moreno has worked at record, video and now DVD stores on Broadway since the mid-1980s. He began working at a record shop next to the Million Dollar Theatre shortly after moving to the United States from Michoacán in 1983. He opened his own stall right before 2000 and called it Discoteca 2000 to commemorate this timing. We met in 2010, during a time when he shared his stall space in the Broadway-Spring Arcade with an especially gregarious woman named Samanta, who was fluent in English and Spanish. We continued to converse about movies and South Broadway even when Samanta moved to the Santee Alley area, and he eventually to the Broadway Trade Center. Here is the field note belonging to the above video clip, when he showed me where Million Dollar Theatre could be spotted in the film Yako.
Field note from Wednesday, February 27, 2013: Rafael and I started talking about Million Dollar Theatre and I mentioned the scene in México de mi corazón where Lola Beltran and Lucha Villa sing “Canción Mixteca.” He began reciting the first line, and we began to sing the song together for that line. Rafael shared that the song used to make him cry when he first arrived in Los Angeles. It made him think about how much he missed his ranch and his home in Michoacán. Then he remembered another movie that featured a scene at the Million Dollar, a movie called Yako. The DVD cover is not indicative of a film from the 1980s. Though it was released in 1986, the cover appears to make it look as though it was released more recently, with the main character’s head seemingly pasted over a more contemporary film poster, which also features a female character absent from the film altogether. Rafael had two customers while we talked, one was a man with a wife that would not enter the stall, staying in the arcade corridor. Why do the women never enter? Have I ever seen a woman in Rafa’s shop since Samanta moved out?

It is through Rafael that I met Francisco, who still works in the area he and Rafael at, at the Million Dollar Farmacia. The farmacia has been covered by the Los Angeles Times recently and Downtown News in the past. Francisco collects these stories and displays them in the store, his archives catalog the place history of Los Angeles and its diasporic nodes. He shows Adán (my partner in interviewing Rafael and Francisco) and me images of the ranch he aspires to return to in Mexico, mixed in with clippings of new stories promoting tourist destinations.
Video Gallery: Marquee Stories Experimenting with other discursive modes in this primarily "photo essay," I have included potential examples of oral histories. Together with the photographs of stores and shop owners on South Broadway, this audio-visual research aims to counter studies from various disciplines that overlook the creative and entrepreneurial activities of the street’s commercial culture. Videos document how Rafael shared research leads for films that were shot on South Broadway and the practice of candle preparation at the Million Dollar Farmacia.