Parallax, the Nuart and a 1974 start.

Landmark Theatres did not start out as Landmark. Variety reported on 18 January 2024 that the chain was founded in 1974 by the producer Kim Jorgensen as Parallax Theater Systems, and described the company as based in West Hollywood. English Wikipedia says Parallax Theatres opened with four houses in southern California — the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, the Sherman in Sherman Oaks, the Rialto in South Pasadena and the Ken in San Diego — and that Steve Gilula and Gary Meyer became partners in 1976, as the chain expanded under the Landmark name.

A company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, republished by FundingUniverse, tells the story with Stephen Gilula as a co-founder who led the business through its later changes. It dates the start to the completed purchase of the Nuart in 1974, adds the Ken Cinema, built in 1946, in 1975, and the Rialto, built in 1925, the following year. It says the Rialto was nearly demolished soon after the purchase and was spared when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

The Nuart is the house that the story keeps returning to. Wikipedia says the building on Santa Monica Boulevard dates from 1929, was bought by the company in 1974, was remodelled in 2006 and celebrated its 50th anniversary in February 2024, and that it has shown The Rocky Horror Picture Show every Saturday night with a live shadow cast since the 1980s. It also notes the Nuart’s run of specially made trailers, including a “No Smoking” spot with John Waters.

The early format was repertory. The company history says Landmark’s theatres showed classics, foreign films and late-night titles such as Harold and Maude and Pink Flamingos, with a different bill every night, and drew queues by handing out free monthly calendars of their schedules. Wikipedia adds the River Oaks in Houston and the Oriental in Milwaukee in 1976 and the Harvard Exit in Seattle in 1979. The anniversary series Variety described in 2024 looked back to that era, with a strand titled “1974 – The Year Landmark Opened” inside the chain’s Retro Replay programme.

From repertory to new art-house releases, and a string of owners.

The programming changed in the 1980s. The company history says home video eroded the repertory model, and that Landmark responded by booking new independent films and foreign releases instead. Wikipedia says larger single screens were divided into two or three auditoriums while the outside architecture was kept, that the Oriental in Milwaukee became a triplex in 1988 with the main auditorium’s artwork preserved, and that Canal Place in New Orleans, also 1988, was the chain’s own new build. The company history records a merger with Movies, Inc. of Santa Fe in 1982 and with Seattle’s Seven Gables circuit in 1989.

Ownership then changed several times. The company history says Heritage Entertainment, run by Arthur Steloff, acquired Landmark in 1989; Wikipedia lists the Samuel Goldwyn Company as owner from 1990, Silver Cinemas from 1998 and a period under Oaktree Capital, during which the Sunshine in New York, Bethesda Row and E Street Cinema were built. On 24 September 2003, Wikipedia says, the chain was bought by 2929 Entertainment, the company of Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, which folded the exhibition wing of its distributor Magnolia Pictures into Landmark. Wikipedia dates The Landmark in West Los Angeles to 2007 and The Landmark at 57 West in Manhattan to September 2017, both venues carrying the chain name itself.

The current owner arrived at the end of 2018. The Hollywood Reporter (Pamela McClintock, 4 December 2018) reported that Wagner and Cuban had found a buyer in Cohen Media Group, the film company owned by the real estate developer Charles S. Cohen, that the deal had closed that Tuesday, and that president and chief executive Ted Mundorff and his senior team would stay. Wagner and Cuban said in a statement that they expected the change of owner to be smooth and seamless for customers. The paper said Cohen had founded Cohen Media Group in 2008 and had earlier acquired and renovated the Quad Cinema in New York; Wikipedia says Landmark took over booking for the Quad after the purchase. Variety’s 2024 report again named Cohen Media Group as owner. Cohen Media Group has owned Landmark Theatres since 2018.

A letter that marks the spot.

Many cinema chains do not run a single brand so much as a small family of them. A recliner hall with food brought to the seat, a large-format screen, a room built for children and a seat that moves with the action may each carry its own name, and that name has to sit on the booking page, the ticket, the auditorium door and the trailer before the film. Some chains give these formats a shared prefix or suffix, so that each one reads as part of the house; others license a technology partner’s name and place it beside their own. Either way the designer’s task is to set an order of precedence: which name leads, which follows, and how a format label looks when it appears on its own on a small screen.

Loyalty schemes and memberships add another layer. A membership card, an app account or a points programme often has a name of its own, and for regular visitors it may be the part of the brand they handle again and again, at the box office, at the counter and in their inbox. When a chain buys another circuit, it may keep a familiar local name over the door for years, rename sites one at a time, or move everything to a new name at once, and each choice changes what the signage, the membership and the app need to say. Read this way, a cinema identity is a naming system as much as a logo: a parent mark, a set of format labels, a membership name and, sometimes, a heritage name that is allowed to stay.

One neon “L” that each venue can make its own.

The present identity is the work of Pentagram. The firm’s case study says it followed the 2018 acquisition by Cohen Media Group, for which Pentagram had already designed a brand identity, along with graphics for the Quad Cinema, which it says keeps its own identity inside Landmark. Pentagram says the system centres on a dimensional letter “L” with a smaller neon “L” inside, in bright neon colours, and runs across the website, promotional campaigns, social media, signage, environmental graphics and animations at the theatres.

The brief had to cover very different buildings. Pentagram says some of the theatres were already known by their own names and graphics while others were simply called Landmark, so the logo can be customised for each location with its own neon “L”, and a venue’s existing logotype can be set into the mark as a signature. The identity changes colour and supplies a set of neon-style icons for parts of the visit, and its typography extends to sub-brands for film series and special screenings. Mark Mulcahy, Landmark’s head of brand and marketing, said the aim was to open the brand to a younger generation and a more diverse audience. The case study says new signage drove the project, and that the logo is also built as a large three-dimensional piece — a neon “L” inside a larger glass “L” — placed near entrances or in lobbies as a physical “landmark” for the venue.

For a design guide, Landmark Theatres shows how a chain assembled from old single-screen houses, each with its own name, can be tied together by one letter rather than one façade. Compare Magnolia Pictures, the distributor that shared owners with Landmark from 2003, and Angelika Film Center, another American art-house cinema brand in this collection. For this guide we use neon rose, glass teal and marquee night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Landmark Theatres’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.