Prologue to Hollywood: Sid Grauman and the San Francisco Origins of Tinseltown Spectacle

While Sid Grauman is mostly known for spectacular venues reflecting Hollywood’s film fantasies, his early San Francisco period indicates that throughout his career he showed remarkable consistency in referring to the local context of his theaters. In other words, while the Egyptian and the Chinese Theatre became self-referential landmarks of the gilded Hollywood movie palace era, the ideas behind their creation and imagery took form elsewhere. Grauman’s strategy of merging the local and the fantastical, charged by the myth-making properties of the moving picture medium, propelled him to the top of San Francisco’s entertainment brass. By the mid-1910s, it was time to showcase his brand to a wider audience.