TCL Chinese Theatre

The idea began in 1923, when Grauman, who had already built the ornate Egyptian Theatre just up the street, met with the young Hollywood royalty Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks about a grand new theater. He leased the site of an actor's Hollywood Boulevard mansion, broke ground in 1926, and spent eighteen months and more than two million dollars raising a movie palace unlike anything in the country.

The design leaned all the way into a romantic vision of China. A stone-carved dragon spreads across the wall above the entrance, two Ming dynasty guardian lions flank the doors, and the ninety-foot pagoda is topped with a bronze-plated roof. The United States government granted special permission to import the lions and other artifacts from China, and Chinese artisans, overseen by the poet and filmmaker Moon Quon, carried out the traditional decoration. Inside, a sixty-foot ceiling glitters with silver dragons and gold medallions under a great bronze chandelier.

For its era the building was a marvel of engineering as well as showmanship. It ran on its own power plant, cooled its audiences with hidden air conditioning years before that was common, and opened onto a stage a hundred and fifty feet wide with a recessed pit for changing elaborate sets. Grauman was famous for staging live prologues before his films, and the Chinese was built to make that kind of spectacle possible.

The tradition that made the theater world famous started, by most accounts, as a happy accident. The story usually told credits the silent-film actress Norma Talmadge, who is said to have stepped into wet concrete in the forecourt while the theater was still going up. Grauman himself later told a slightly different version on the radio, claiming he walked into the soft cement first and then had Mary Pickford press her foot in. Either way, the idea caught, Douglas Fairbanks became one of the first to leave a print, and a ritual was born.

Since then close to two hundred film figures have added their marks, from Marilyn Monroe to Tom Hanks, and the courtyard is full of playful surprises: Betty Grable left her leg, Jimmy Durante his famous nose, and the young stars of the Harry Potter films pressed in their magic wands. A concrete specialist nicknamed Mr. Footprint mixed the extra-hard cement and ran the ceremonies for decades, so each square is meant to last.

The best part is that all of this is free and open air. You do not need a ticket to walk the forecourt, read the dates, and lay your own hand into a print that a favorite actor pressed generations ago. It is one of the rare Hollywood attractions that lives up to its fame and costs nothing at all.

The Chinese Theatre has been Hollywood's stage for arrivals since its first night. It hosted the Academy Awards in the mid-1940s, premiered Star Wars in 1977, and has rolled out the red carpet for openings across every decade in between, its forecourt turning into a river of klieg lights and gowns for the biggest nights in film.

The building has changed names over the years, from Grauman's to Mann's and back again, before the electronics maker TCL bought the naming rights in 2013 and turned the main auditorium into one of the largest IMAX screens in the world. The ornate walls and ceiling were left untouched, so the room still feels like a 1927 palace even as it shows films on a curved screen ninety feet across.

For a road tripper, the theater is the anchor of a walk down the most storied blocks in Los Angeles. The Walk of Fame runs right past the doors, the restored Egyptian and other old picture palaces stand nearby, and the whole boulevard hums with the strange, tourist-thronged energy that has surrounded this pagoda for almost a hundred years.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.