The Brief

I remember the first time I went to the Nuart Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard.

I didn’t get out much as a teen. My middle school years were marked by a strong focus on grades and, for high school, I went to a boarding school on the edge of Los Angeles County.

Most weekends, a few teachers would offer to drive vans of students into downtown Claremont or Upland to go to the multiplex near an In-n-Out. Your options were limited to what showtimes fit into the driving and dorm check-in schedules that night. It was still the closest thing we had to being out on the town as kids — without risking suspension — and we did feel the thrill of running to grab a post-movie burger before teachers showed up to shuttle us back to school.

I was, I admit, a tad bit sheltered.

The thrill of a 'Midnight Movie'

When I was back home in the Inland Empire one summer after graduation, and the invite from a friend came to go see an old movie … at midnight ... in L.A., it was an immediate “Yes!”

I expected to get a surefire “no” from my parents when I asked permission to go into the city with my musical theater pals, but after many assurances of “they’ll drop me back off I promise!,” three of my friends and I piled in a car and headed to a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Nuart Theater.

How to LA producer Victoria Alejandro poses with her high school theater director and friends at school, celebrating news that she just got accepted to college.

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Courtesy of Victoria Alejandro

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I watched movies with my parents all the time growing up, but we weren’t big on actually going to movie theaters. Always a little too expensive, a little too uncomfortable, and the showtimes were never quite right. And with the rise of video on demand in the 2000s? It just got easier to throw things on at home and save the theaters for a special occasion.

Going to the Nuart that first time was a transformative experience for me. Packed into a screening room with other theater nerds, we watched the film as a shadow cast in full garb performed “Rocky Horror” live on stage in sync with the movie. Tim Curry never looked so good.

The Sins o The Flesh actors group that performs as the shadow cast during The Nuart Theater's midnight screen of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"

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Courtesy of Sins o The Flesh

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Audience members watch and participate in the "The Rocky Horror Show" interactive production at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles. The Vs on the forehead indicate they are "virgins," watching the film for the first time.

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Courtesy of Sins o The Flesh

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After joining in with the audience singing and dancing, throwing rice and roaring with laughter, I made it back home at 4 a.m., desperately rubbing off my cheeks the red-lipstick Vs that marked me as a first-timer at a “Rocky Horror” midnight screening (the V, in case you are wondering, is for virgin). I was elated. It was so thrilling to be at this old theater that had so much history, and having this collective experience with all these other film fans. Save for my three friends, we were all strangers. Still, there was a connection.

I was about to leave L.A. for four years to go to college but I knew the city and its theaters would have me back.

Finding love at the movies

It’s March 2020, and I’ve been living in L.A. post-college and the COVID pandemic is about to go into full swing. I’m trying to keep a conversation alive over text with a boy I met on March 4, as my graduate program in arts journalism “moves online for just two weeks.”

Our second date has been canceled. Doors around the city have closed. But we stay in contact.

He tells me I’d probably really like the film Before Sunrise. So, as I settle into quarantine life, with two hours to kill and nowhere to go, I spend the $3 on a rental. I was curious — what is so special about Ethan Hawke in this movie? What can I learn about this guy I just met through his love of this?

And it struck a chord. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about two artsy twenty-somethings who meet serendipitously, wander a city on an hours-long sprawling date, and are parted without a guarantee they’ll ever meet again.

We watch the sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, together on FaceTime — propping our phones up and hitting play at the same time so we can watch each other watch the movie. That is how our relationship evolved — each of us sharing a movie we love with the other. Eventually we quarantined together so we could actually watch the movies, side-by-side, in person.

A picture taken of How to LA producer Victoria Alejandro as she watches the film "Before Sunrise" with her boyfriend via Facetime during the COVID-19 quarantine.

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LAist

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A 'collective experience'

Two years later, summer of 2022, we leave our apartment and drive to the Academy Museum — there’s a screening of Before Sunrise on film in the Geffen Theater. We hadn’t technically seen that one together. Certainly not with an audience.

The screening was full. Scanning the crowd during particularly romantic moments, you could spot couples; heads leaning into each other, hands touching. There’s obvious dust, scratches and grain on the film print and it made me think: people must have fallen in love in front of this specific film reel countless times.

“I know so many people that have met their husband, wife, partner here, you know, friendships just because they came to the New Beverly,” says Jules McClean, the programmer for another one of L.A.'s great independent theaters, The New Beverly Cinema. “I think you get something emotionally and even though you might not know the 200 people you're sitting with, you just had a collective experience.”

Whether you are solo or watching with friends, these theaters are kind of sacred spaces — to laugh, to cry, to just feel something.

Photos of How to LA producer Victoria Alejandro and her boyfriend taken in a photo booth at Vidiots in Eagle Rock.

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Courtesy of Victoria Alejandro

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In 2020, sitting in my boyfriend’s apartment after the requisite quarantine period, watching our umpteenth weekend-at-home-double-feature, I wondered if I’d ever get to go back to my neighborhood theater, the Los Feliz 3 (just a block away!). Or get to see a film at the New Beverly, or the Vista, or Vidiots — spaces that hadn’t been on my radar when I was growing up in the Inland Empire.

How thrilling that they’ve all opened back up — some with brand new remodels — and that we can again sit among strangers and people we love, and have an experience together in the dark in front of the big screen, whether we’re revisiting an old favorite or discovering something new.

There’s so many of these places to discover in L.A. — and any of these theaters could provide a life-changing experience for any of us.

Join How to LA as we visit these theaters, and learn about their histories and how they continue to add to the fabric that help make up arts and culture L.A.

A new space celebrating the art of autistic and neurodiverse youths has opened on Abbott Kinney Boulevard in Venice, amid the trendy coffee shops and boutiques.

Called “Limitless,” the space is a project of Help Group, a nonprofit that has served people in Los Angeles with autism and mental health challenges for 85 years.

“What art does is it allows people to have a voice who can’t communicate typically. It gives you an insight into who they are as a being,” Susan Berman, CEO of Help Group, told LAist.

Berman said the prime Abbott Kinney real estate was a gift from a board member. Help Group is using the square footage for a community space and gallery to feature neurodivergent artists.

Among the artists included is Noah Remis, 15, whose piece “I <3 NY” incorporates watercolor over the titles of famous musicals like Hamilton and Sweeney Todd.

“Those are different musicals that I know and love,” Remis said.

“Some I saw on Broadway. Just so you know, I also put Cats on there just to anger my dad,” he joked. He said his dream is to act on Broadway.

Noah’s dad, Rich Remis, might not be a fan of Cats, but he is a fan of seeing his son’s love of theater expressed in his painting.

“To hang it up in a gallery with everyone else’s work, it just really adds a special weight to it that I think is certainly not lost on Noah,” he said.

Noah, in response, added: “Don’t get emotional.”

Noah said he hopes other kids will be inspired by his work and maybe even take it home.

Berman, who’s been with Help Group for more than four decades, said she has big plans for the space, which opened last week.

“Our plan is for the community to see the gifts that our neurodiverse artists have, not only in their art but as human beings,” Berman said.

Los Angeles County has exotic wild animals roaming about, such as wild parrots and peacocks. But what about camels?

No, we’re not talking about that ancient camel found in the La Brea Tar Pits — these animals were brought over for a U.S. Army experiment.

How camels got into our military

We’re going back to the mid-1800s, before gas-powered automobiles changed the way we travel. The U.S. was on the brink of civil war and in the middle of westward expansion.

Typically, the army relied on mules and horses as beasts of burden, but in the new states and territories, they had a hard time hauling supplies over long distances. That was especially true for the Southwest’s dry deserts and mountains.

Meanwhile, camel brigades (also known as Camel Corps) were already in use in armies around the world. These were made up of camel drivers who ferried supplies, transported troops and conducted military cavalry operations.

Great Britain and India used the animals in the 19th century, according to London’s National Army Museum. The Imperial Camel Corps was also established during World War I, with British, Australian and New Zealand forces in the Middle East.

The Camel Corps caught on in America around the 1850s, according to the Army Historical Foundation. The idea bubbled up to Maj. Henry C. Wayne — a camel fan himself — who recommended their use to a skeptical War Department and Congress.

After some years of political finagling, they gave the experiment $30,000 in funding in 1855 (about $1 million today). The money was used to buy 74 camels from the Mediterranean and put them into military service.

The Los Angeles arrival

They were brought over on the Navy store ship USS Supply and went to Texas first, to Camp Verde. As the camels got used to their new home, the time came for one of their first test missions. The federal government planned to build a wagon road to connect the eastern U.S. to the California/Arizona border.

The Secretary of War at the time required the land surveyor to take 25 of the camels on the expedition in 1857, according to the foundation. These “ships of the desert” ended up thriving where horses and mules couldn’t.

The camels could carry a 700-pound load with ease, traveling up to 40 miles a day. They ate off the land and could go over a week without water. After the camels completed the job, the army sent them to L.A. in 1860.

This was for another test to see if camels could be used for mail delivery. They were essentially racing against mules to see who could get from Camp Fitzgerald (a short-lived Civil War camp in L.A. County) to the Colorado River fastest. What the army didn’t realize was that speed wasn’t the camels’ strong suit — several died from exhaustion.

A historic marker on the L.A. Times' old building in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 1967. The plaque mentions that the area was used as a "corral for camels from Fort Tejon", which is one of the places the animals were sent to in California.

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Mildred L. Harris

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Los Angeles Public Library/L. Mildred Harris Slide Collection/Los Angeles Photographers Collection

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As the Civil War continued, the camels’ future became uncertain. The army was tired of the experiment and the money it cost. The camels were never officially designated as the U.S.’s “Camel Corps” and thus given no real purpose. In California, they essentially floated around L.A.-area outposts, such as the Los Angeles Quartermaster Depot in downtown, Culver City’s Camp Latham and the Drum Barracks in Wilmington.

The U.S. Army eventually sold the camels in California for about $50 each ($1,000 today) in 1864, according to the foundation. These noble animals, roped into what many called a failed military experiment, ended up as circus attractions and on ranches as pack animals. Some were even let loose.

The last of California’s “Camel Corps” is believed to be Topsy. After the experiment shut down, she was used in the Ringling Brothers Circus and movies.

Topsy was eventually sold off to what’s now the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, according to the Natural History Museum, which found her bones. She died there in 1934 at approximately 80 years old.

Tanaka Day, an epic meet-and-greet of people with the Japanese surname, is happening the weekend of Sept. 19 and 20 at — wait for it — Tanaka Farms in Irvine.

"I'm the idea guy around here," said proprietor Glenn Tanaka — aka Farmer Tanaka — who dreamed up the inaugural event. "Some of them [were] pretty good, some turned out OK."

For this one, 400 people from across the country RSVP’d, bonded by a Japanese surname that is one of the most common in the U.S. — and one that speaks to the history of Japanese immigration that first brought laborers here starting in the late 1800s.

Glenn Tanaka runs the family Tanaka Farms in Irvine.

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Courtesy Tanaka Farms

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One of them was Glenn's grandfather, Takeo Tanaka, who put down farming roots in California that span four generations and counting — Glenn's father George Tanaka, Glenn himself, and Glenn's son Kenny, whose three children are a regular presence at the farm.

"Tanaka literally means middle of the rice field," he said — farmers, essentially. And because many early immigrants were from farming villages, he added, "a lot of Tanakas came over."

The 69-year-old figured, why not bring as many of them together as possible — to hang out, tell family stories and help fill in the tapestry of the Japanese American immigration experience united by the surname.

One example is how the incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II had touched those who worked and owned farms — and ended up having to sell their holdings on the cheap.

Already, stories are flooding in. Tanaka said different siblings from one Tanaka family had sent in their experiences.

One brother read them and wound up learning new things about the family.

"What's really good to know is I've helped create families that talk," Tanaka said. "Because now they're asking, 'What did, you know, great-grandmother do?'"

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article.