The Gardena Cinema stands as the last free-standing, single-screen movie theater in the South Bay. Much of the credit for that goes to the Kim family, who have operated it since 1976.
Three decades before the Kims arrived, Harry Milstein and Albert Mellinkoff decided to build a fourth theater in their local chain. The pair already owned and operated the Torrance and Grand theaters in Torrance and the Gardena theater in Gardena.
They decided to call their latest movie palace the Park Theatre, and hired architect C.F. Normberg to build it on a lot at 14948 Crenshaw Blvd., between Marine and Rosecrans avenues. The location was less than a mile northeast of the then-under-construction El Camino College.
The partners originally intended the 800-seat building to be a showplace for first-run movies. They arranged for several celebrities to be on hand to celebrate the grand opening on Dec. 11, 1946, including guest of honor and celebrated war hero Louis Zamperini. Zamperini’s wife, Cynthia, was mistaken for a movie star by some members of the public, according to the Torrance Herald.
Zamperini’s celebrity guests at the opening included Johnny Weismuller, Martha Raye, Preston Foster, James Dunn and cowboy star “Wild” Bill Elliott. (Unfortunately, the name of the film shown on opening night has been lost to history.)
By 1947, the Park was showing first-runs, second-runs, double features, serials and even exploitation films such as Kroger Babb’s “Mom and Dad,” an adults-only road show movie that featured footage of a live birth, among other things, according to Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Video Guide (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996). Men and women were admitted to separate showings for that one.
The Park became more of a second-run theater during the 1950s, screening everything from b-movie dramas to Westerns to science fiction films. Don Dear, the former Gardena councilman and mayor, told reporter Gary Kohatsu of El Camino College’s Warrior Life magazine about seeing one film in particular:
“I was about 11 when I saw ‘The Thing (From Another World)” (1951). A little girl sitting behind me told me to please sit up straight, so she could hide behind me. It was a very scary movie.”
Around 1960, Joseph and Mary Donato bought the theater, and continued to serve up a steady diet of double features throughout the decade, including beach movies, Elvis doubleheaders, and similar fare.
They would end up selling the operation to John and Nancy Kim, who emigrated to the U.S. from South Korea in 1971. The Kims were running a Mexican grocery store in Colton when they heard that the Park Theatre was for sale.
They worked hard to be able to afford it, eventually selling the Colton market and moving to Hawthorne when their deal for the theater went through in 1976.
Shortly after buying the Park, the couple began to take note of the large Latino population in the area. They found a film distributor for Spanish-language films, and renamed the Park the Teatro Variedades (Variety Theater, sometimes translated as “vaudeville theater”) in 1977.
In addition to films, the Kims also enlisted a promoter who brought live entertainment to the theater on weekends, often packing it to the rafters.
The programming catered to the theater’s Latino clientele until their foreign language film distributor went out of business in the late 1980s. The couple tried focusing on Korean films for a while, with the theater changing names to the “Eden” and the “Morning Calm.”
That market turned out to be less lucrative than they’d hoped. When their daughter, Judy, returned home from Smith College in 1994, her parents enlisted her help in an attempt to reverse the theater’s declining fortunes.
The family decided to go back to screening Hollywood films in 1996, renaming their theater the Gardena Cinema and charging their patrons less than newer first-run theaters. Their emphasis was on crowd-pleasing films.
The theater’s layout has changed little since its early days, and includes two crying rooms on each side of the projection booth. Over the years, the Kims have added neon lighting to the snack bar area, giving the front lobby an old-time theater feel.
They faced a financial challenge in 2013, when they were forced to adopt the new digital projection technology or face closure. Fortunately, they were able to raise the $150,000 for the new equipment.
In 2016, the Kims won a protracted battle to purchase the parking lot adjoining their theater, something the family had wanted for years. The outdoor space has come in handy during the COVID-19 era, allowing the family to conduct outdoor drive-in movie screenings on the property beginning in August 2020.
The death of matriarch Nancy Kim on May 8, 2022 put a temporary halt to the Gardena Cinema’s activities, following a well-attended memorial service held in her honor at the theater.
But, as of this writing, the Gardena Cinema is returning to action, beginning with drive-in screenings of “Clueless” (1995) scheduled for Aug. 27-28, 2022.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
“Gardena Cinema,” Cinema Treasures website.
“Gardena Cinema,” Los Angeles Theatres website.
“Gardena Cinema: A family story with a Hollywood ending,” by Gary Kohatsu, Warrior Life magazine, El Camino College, June 1, 2021.
Los Angeles Times archives.
The Psychotronic Video Guide, by Michael Weldon, St. Martin’s-Griffin, 1996.
Torrance Press Herald archives.
