In suburban Gardena, 800 chairs shoulder 79 years of intrigue, mystique, frights and laughter from their countless occupants.

For the upcoming decades, Judy Kim – operator and heir to Gardena Cinema – has a plan to raise enough funds to both take care of certain structural improvements and transfer the single-screen theater’s ownership into a nonprofit. Through that, she hopes that nonprofit’s stewardship can make the theater – and her family’s legacy – an everlasting piece of the South Bay.

“The nonprofit never dies, right?” Kim said. “Unless the board of directors dissolves it, it will stay alive forever, so I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I could do that, and then I could die peacefully, knowing that it’ll be shepherded by some board of directors after I die.’”

The historic theater has survived many iterations and remains a destination for repertory screenings, events and the cinephiles who attend them. Kim’s father, John Kim, had listed the landmark for sale shortly after her mother, Nancy Kim – the true heart of the cinema – died in 2022. Kim hopes her nonprofit, Friends of Gardena Cinema, will be the one to close the deal.

A family makes its mark

After operating as Park Theatre when it opened in 1946, Gardena Cinema came into ownership of Kim’s family in 1976.

South Korean immigrants, John and Nancy had dreams of becoming business owners when they moved to the United States. For Nancy, this movie theater was love at first sight.

Sensing a business opportunity for the South Bay community, the Kims took what was then a first-run theater for mainstream American cinema and switched it to being a Spanish-language theater. They dubbed this new look Teatro Variedades, although the “GC” abbreviation crowning the marquee outside never changed.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, the operation pivoted back to the Gardena Cinema name and back to first-run movies – memorably, Judy Kim recalled, with the blockbuster “Independence Day” in which Los Angeles was destroyed by an alien invasion.

“It started Will Smith’s career in film,” she said. “Fourth of July was ‘Will Smith Weekend’ every year from that point on. We played all the Will Smith movies.”

In giving a tour of the theater, Kim highlighted the remaining “cry rooms” – elevated, sound-proof seating areas for mothers to bring their crying infants during shows – as one of the many relics from its era. For a while, the rooms were repurposed as private seating areas for children’s birthdays, but nowadays, they serve as a private perch for high-profile attendees – such as “Anora” director Sean Baker, a repeat patron of the theater.

The projectionist booth is similarly a window in time, with the so-called “guillotine windows” still in place. (Nitrate film stock, in wide use before the 1950s, was extremely flammable; guillotine windows were designed to drop shut and suffocate a blaze.) Old outlines on the floor indicated where older projectors used to be; a modern digital projector currently occupies the space and Kim said she hopes to upgrade to a laser projector in the future.

As Kim came of age, her parents began to encounter financial troubles with managing the theater, in large part after being defrauded on multiple occasions. This prompted her to shift course, become a lawyer and help her family untangle themselves from the rut. This proved to be the kind of investment that continues to pay off today.

“I didn’t even realize it at the time, but seriously, the fact that I have a legal background helps me think outside of the box,” Kim said.

Some of those thoughts outside of the box include a recurring short film screening event – which bestows a wrestling championship belt to the creator of the voted-upon best short. Another out of the box oddity about the theater is that the wall behind the concession stand is actually a prop: it was installed in front of the mirrored wall for the on-site filming of the 2019 biopic “Dolemite is My Name.” Kim simply kept it after they wrapped the shoot.

Changing its identity

Gardena Cinema’s most recent pivot to repertory cinema – screenings of older movies, typically as special events – is in keeping with a handful of other niche, single-screen operations throughout Los Angeles.

The New Beverly Cinema in Fairfax showcases a variety of older movies, often from owner Quentin Tarantino’s personal collection of 35mm reels. Tarantino’s other theater, Vista Theatre, showcases both first-run movies and older movies – sometimes as events featuring directors or actors from the films.

Garden Cinema found success as an alternative venue during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it took advantage of its parking lot to create an impromptu drive-in against its northside wall. The 2023 strikes by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists as well as the Writers Guild of America ultimately forced Gardena Cinema to start screening older movies – otherwise, nothing would be screened.

Pivoting to older, event-driven movies to ride that wave has continued to be a success for the business. One recent example: Westlake Village-based horror entertainment vertical Gorgazma in October hosted a screening of “Army of Darkness,” preceded by one of the company’s own short films plus offering exclusive merchandise and a Q&A session with Gorgazma founder Mark Villalobos – who worked on stop-motion animation for “Army of Darkness.”

This change in how fans consume film, Kim speculated, it motivated in part by people wanting to experience movies in more interesting ways than what their home TV or smartphones offer. For older movies especially, there is also nostalgic appeal for older moviegoers and a chance for younger ones to see it on the big screen.

“I just showed ‘Lost Boys’ last year, and I remember somebody saying ‘I’ve already seen this movie on my phone, but I want to see it on a big screen,’” she recalled. “And then when they came out, they were like, ‘Oh my god, I could see glitter in the blood!’”

Plotting for the future

At the time of the interview, Kim was preparing for November’s monthly screening for members of the Friends nonprofit, who make an annual donation toward the fundraising effort to acquire the property.

It was one member’s birthday, so he had the chance to pick out the surprise screening that month. He’d arrived early, along with some others who style themselves as “volunteers” – patrons who take the place of employees behind the counter or behind the scenes.

Bill DeFrance is one of those volunteers.

“I first discovered it in 2013,” he recalled. “When I was going to film school, I’d take to 210 bus down Crenshaw and I’d pass it and think ‘Oh, there’s a single-screen theater in the South Bay,’ which was a dream for me, growing up in the South Bay.

DeFrance first got to know Kim when she interviewed her for a YouTube series on single-screen theaters. He noted that she would show more esoteric films alongside the mainstream ones and his interest grew from there.

It all reminded him of when he, as a boy, would be driven by the former Pussycat Theater in Torrance, where filmmaker Tarantino once worked as an usher. That’s why he’s happy to offer free labor to Gardena Cinema’s programming.

“I’m living the dream,” DeFrance added. “I can’t just ignore fate leading me in this direction. And there’s opportunities that come from that.”

These opportunities speak to an important part of movie theaters for Kim: like Tarantino, other prominent filmmakers count theaters as their first jobs.

“People like Sean Baker and even David Fincher, they’re not just filmmakers. They used to work in the movie theaters. That’s why they know so much about film,” she explained. “Sean Baker said he used to work in a movie theater just like this in his hometown in New Jersey. David Fincher said that he worked in a movie theater just like this in Oregon. Everybody that’s very well respected in the film industry,  they’re well respected because they’re very knowledgeable. Why do they have so much knowledge? Because they actually were working in the trenches.”

It was actually a brainwave from Baker, the “Anora” director who is also known for “The Florida Project,” that put Kim on the path to the nonprofit. She recalled coming up short on the theater’s property tax bill several years ago; once Baker got wind of that, he offered to contribute to that bill, but she hesitated to accept a donation without being able to provide a tax deduction.

That lit up a lightbulb in everyone’s heads – and now Friends of Gardena Cinema has a goal to raise $15 million. There’s $10.5 million to acquire and transfer ownership of the landmark, plus $2.5 million to pay for capital improvements and another $2 million to create an endowment to cement its future – by being able to pay operators to keep it going.

“I’m not really an employee either. I’m kind of a volunteer myself,” Kim admitted, noting that she occasionally taps into her legal background to handle personal injury cases to generate her own income. “All the money that we make here goes into the cinema to keep it open.”