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"u,vS.,tm.t This Is a Theatre!
. . . yes, and a fetching one to the city-farmers of Five Points, who gather here for mental and emotional subsistence— plus
the problem that faced James Edwards, Jr., of the Edwards Theatres Circuit, when it came time for him to protect a location 20 miles outside of Los Angeles, known only as Five Points, was just a bit different from others. Just as the name indicated, it was a five-point intersection of highways, and that is all, but surrounding this intersection was a community of small homes. The federal government had tried one of its subsistence projects in this area, where a home owner had his acre or half-acre of ground, a cow, some chickens and a low-cost but attractive residence. It was one of the many social experiments for housing, but the entertainment of this population had to be handled privately.
This provided a none too easy task for the theatre operator and his architect. The
HE OPERATES IT HE DESIGNED IT
James Edwards, Jr. S. Charles Lee
theatre operator's problem was to build a low-cost theatre, as the size of the community would not justify a large expenditure. The Government, in providing the type of community it had built up, had really increased the taste and discrimination
of the immediate population. While they were not large money-makers, as a group, they were home-loving, discriminating persons who had moved out of the city to the country fringe — were trying to assimilate rural ways, but after all were still city folk.
Analysis of the budget and the area to be covered by the building left the architect— -S. Charles Lee of Los Angeles — with funds to build a shell which appeared to be nothing more than a barn. A barn? The idea crystallized. Why not build a barn project that would be "artistic," and clever, and would afford more entertainment by reason of its novelty than a cheap "modernistic" or similar type of building, where the price would reflect itself in weak substitution of materials ? Thus came the idea of the Tumbleweed Theatre.
It's the Fifteenth
But just a word about "Jimmie" Edwards. Entering the Theatrical world only nine years ago, and with but a few cents in his pocket, the story of James Edwards, Jr., reads like one of Alger's. Graduating from high school in 1925 with no idea of what to do with himself, he took a job as a dish washer until he could decide what he did want to be. Ambitious, he saved most of his salary in order to take advantage of any opportunity that presented itself. After a few weeks of washing dishes, he easily talked himself into leasing an empty piece of ground across the street from a theatre, and started a parking lot.
It immediately became a success. Branching out, he leased several other parking lots
BETTER THEATRES: December 9, 1939
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