Set in the heart of Hollywood on the famous boulevard, Academy LA is a large, high-energy nightclub that has become a fixture of the Los Angeles after-dark scene. Occupying a multi-level space designed around big-room electronic music, it pairs a powerful sound system with elaborate lighting and production to deliver the kind of headline clubbing experience that draws crowds from across the city and far beyond. The club is built for scale and spectacle. Its main room centres on a sunken dancefl.....

Cinema finally got a museum to match its home town when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on Wilshire Boulevard in September 2021. Operated by the organisation behind the Oscars, it is the largest institution in the United States devoted to the art, craft and history of moviemaking, drawing on a collection numbering in the tens of millions of objects, from props and costumes to posters, scripts and equipment. The building itself is part of the attraction. Architect Renzo Piano joined.....

The theatre where the Beatles played their first West Coast show now runs one of America's great club nights. Avalon Hollywood at 1735 Vine Street, across from the Capitol Records tower at Hollywood and Vine, opened in January 1927 as the Hollywood Playhouse - a Spanish Baroque legitimate theatre that cycled through lives as the WPA Federal Theatre, El Capitan, the Jerry Lewis Theatre and, from 1964, ABC's Hollywood Palace, where Bing Crosby hosted, the Rolling Stones made an early US appearance.....

Greenwich Village's definitive jazz room finally crossed the country. Blue Note Los Angeles at 6372 Sunset Boulevard, at the corner of Ivar in the heart of Hollywood, brings the storied New York club's formula to the West Coast: an intimate supper-club layout, two shows a night, and a booking policy that mixes celebrated icons, rising stars and genre-defying collaborations reflecting jazz's ongoing evolution - early calendars have run from Robert Glasper and Samara Joy to Talib Kweli, exactly th.....

Rising over the Hollywood neighbourhood just north of the Hollywood and Vine intersection, the Capitol Records Building is a thirteen-storey tower widely described as the world's first circular office building. It was designed by the young architect Louis Naidorf of Welton Becket and Associates and completed in 1956, shortly after the British company EMI bought Capitol Records and consolidated the label's West Coast operations on the site. Its resemblance to a stack of records topped by a phono.....

A revered institution of the West Coast jazz scene, Catalina Jazz Club, often known as Catalina Bar and Grill, has been presenting world-class jazz in Hollywood for more than four decades. Founded by Catalina and Bob Popescu in 1986, the club has hosted a who's who of jazz greats over the years and has become one of the most respected rooms of its kind in the United States, a place where legends and rising stars alike take the stage. The venue operates in the supper-club tradition, combining an.....

America's first great Black LGBTQ+ discotheque still fills its dance floors on Pico Boulevard. Catch One - for 42 years Jewel's Catch One - occupies a 1925 Mediterranean Revival building at 4067 West Pico Boulevard in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. Jewel Thais-Williams, a UCLA history graduate turned entrepreneur, opened the club in 1973 after being turned away from West Hollywood clubs for being Black and a woman; a state law then barred women from tending bar unless they owned the venue, so s.....

Los Angeles watches movies with its buried movie stars, and it started with eighty people and a Hitchcock print. Cinespia at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, held its first screening on 20 July 2002, when 27-year-old film-club founder John Wyatt projected Strangers on a Train against the west wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum - the building holding Rudolph Valentino's crypt - for members of his Italian film club and word-of-mouth guests. Wyatt had spotted the potential of t.....

Built as a permanent home for the Academy Awards, the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard has hosted the Oscars almost every year since it opened in 2001, making it one of the most televised auditoriums on earth. Designed by David Rockwell at a cost of around 94 million dollars, it seats about 3,400 across four tiers and sits at the heart of the Ovation Hollywood retail and entertainment complex, next door to the historic TCL Chinese Theatre. It opened under a different name. For its first dec.....

Few Los Angeles rooms have a resume like this one: cornfield film set for D.W. Griffith, jail-themed cafe with waiters in inmate stripes, bohemian cabaret where a young Marlon Brando drank, and for six decades now a candlelit replica of a sixteenth-century Spanish tavern. El Cid at 4212 Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake is one of the city's great survivors, a terraced hideaway dug into the hillside at Sunset Junction. The site's film legend dates to 1915, when Griffith shot scenes for The Birth o.....