Opened in 1927, the Tower Theatre at 8th & Broadway was commissioned by H.L. Gumbiner, who would go on to build the Los Angeles Theatre as well. It was the first theatre designed by architect S. Charles Lee.

But that is not what makes this theatre part of film history. In 1927, Warner Bros. was about to release one of the world’s first movies with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Producers were nervous and wanted to do a secret test screening, so the Tower Theatre became one of the first theaters in the world to be wired for sound. The audience was awestruck. It was the birth of what was at the time called “talkies,” but it was a revolution in movie making. It was also the end of many silent movie actors’ careers that could not transition to sound. The Tower was also one of the first theaters in the USA to have what we today would consider modern air conditioning.

The Tower Theatre stopped being used as a theater in 1988. From the 1970s through 2018, the interior or exterior of the theater was used in almost a dozen movies and TV shows.

In 2015, DTLA Rising reported that Apple was interested in leasing the Tower Theatre for a flagship retail store. Refurbishment and renovation began in 2020, and Apple opened the new store on June 24, 2021. Given reality, it seems appropriate that a theater on the cutting edge of technology at its beginning would now have a tech giant occupying its space.