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Owner of the New Beverly Theater Dies

by Mark Mauer

July 19, 2007 3:21 PM

Sherman Torgan, owner of the New Beverly has passed away. In July 2003, Paul Cullum wrote a feature on Torgan for LA Weekly:

When Sherman Torgan opened the New Beverly Cinema in 1978, there were literally a dozen revival, repertory and non-first-run theaters in greater Los Angeles. There was the Vagabond near MacArthur Park, home of “the Vagabond crowd,” pensioners who flocked to Golden Age programs (now largely on display at the Tuesday matinees at LACMA), and its sister cinema, the Tiffany on Sunset. There was the Four Star on Wilshire, now a Christian Youth Center; the Encore, razed to make way for Raleigh Studios; the Sherman in Sherman Oaks; the Loyola near LAX; the Gary I and II on Santa Monica; and the granddaddy of them all, the Fox Venice, at Lincoln and Venice. Of them all, only the New Beverly remains.

“Before the VCR and before the multiplex, there was this incredible time, a small period from about 1980 to 1983, when a lot of [theaters] were becoming archival houses, because it was so cheap,” says Michael Tolkin, writer-director of The Rapture and The New Age and a longtime New Beverly patron. In both his novel and screenplay for The Player, a studio executive murders a screenwriter in an alley behind the Rialto Theater in South Pasadena after a screening of The Bicycle Thief, but it was more likely the New Beverly he had in mind. “I don’t think I’d ever been to the Rialto except once when they were showing The Bicycle Thief, and that’s why I set it there,” he says. “Otherwise, it probably would have been in the alley behind the Beverly.”

Click here to read the entire article, The Last Picture Show.

Photo above by Ted Soqui