On Tuesday morning, the Los Angeles City Planning Department held a tense virtual public hearing for an ordinarily benign topic: a new conditional use permit, or CUP, application that would allow a property owner to sell alcohol consumed on-site. Dozens of Angelenos, including many people working in the film industry, turned out to voice their frustration concerning the high-profile project: the long-shuttered Cinerama Dome, a towering icon of ’60s-era Hollywood and beloved theater, that has lain empty for six years with no concrete reopening date in sight. 

“It feels like when the Cinerama Dome is closed, it actually feels like Hollywood is dead,” one resident said on the call. “I believe the entire area is suffering because the Cinerama Dome is closed.”

The historic Cinerama Dome was home to many a movie premiere and night out in the Hollywood neighborhood, until the pandemic forced the theater to close in 2020. Since then, Decurion Corp., the privately held company that owns the Cinerama Dome site, has remained mum about its specific plans involving the beloved complex — even as local pressure to explain the theater’s long absence has ticked up.

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Thus, this week’s CUP hearing became a rare public forum for cinephiles and neighborhood residents to press Decurion’s representative, the land use consultant Elizabeth Peterson-Gower, about what those potential reopening plans for the dome might involve. 

“Are they opening it again as a movie theater? When are they opening it? Why have they kept it closed?” asked a local journalist, Allen Salkin, on the call. “Is this just a strategy to let it rot so they can just get building violations and tear it down and build condos? There’s a lot of fear about what’s going to happen with this thing that people feel attached to. And to not answer questions about it over all this time has frankly been offensive.”

The dome of the Cinerama theater in Hollywood was built specifically to showcase wide screen movies, shown in Los Angeles in February 2010. 

Attendees took particular issue with the application’s request for a CUP “in perpetuity,” meaning the owners would not need to reapply for the occupancy permit that formally allows business to operate publicly. Those permits typically expire after a set period of time, allowing room for more public input — or at least a new look from the permitting department. But for the dome, a timeline for reopening has yet to materialize. “I think it does smell of a way to no longer be accountable to citizens,” said LA resident Danielle von Zerneck in the public hearing, adding that Peterson-Gower had not included information about the property’s restoration in relation to the CUP. “The vagueness of that is deeply concerning.”

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