CityOne: Future Theater
Hollywood, the industry, the myth, and the city, is in transition. The old power struggles of art and commerce, image and material, technology and labor are all shifting. The local entertainment business is contracting. What grows in the space it leaves behind?
Hollywood invented the apparatus of mass entertainment: the studio, the backlot, the sound stage, the movie palace. It built a city on the premise that performance requires scale. Today one major studio lot still operates in Hollywood proper, and most of the theaters that once ran across the city are gone, lost without anyone deciding to lose them. Performance now happens at the scale of a room. Warehouses become galleries, patios become stages, and backyards, garages, and converted storefronts are the new hubs of performance and community.
Independent theater, live performance, and film culture are in a moment of reinvention. People are finding new reasons to gather in person, betting on the irreducible experience of being present in real space. The rooms are small and the distance between performer and audience is a few feet. More people can program a room now, and more people find rooms programmed for them. At this scale, performance is contact.
At Future Theater, the final salon in our CityONE 2026 series, SPEEDBOAT and guests gather in our Hollywood courtyard to ask what this new wave of independent spaces is producing: who they bring together, who they are built for, and how the cultural life of a city takes shape inside its existing infrastructure.
Joining us for the conversation:
Julia Wick (Moderator) — Editorial Director and co-founder of L.A. Material, previously editor-in-chief of LAist and a City Hall reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for revealing the secretly recorded conversation among council members and a labor leader whose racist remarks forced the council president's resignation and upended city politics.
Maggie Mackay — Executive Director of Vidiots, the storied 1985 Santa Monica video store she has led since 2016 and reopened in 2023 inside Eagle Rock's restored 1929 Eagle Theatre. Formerly Senior Programmer of the Los Angeles Film Festival and Director of Nominations for the Independent Spirit Awards.
Ted Gerike — Co-founder of Now Instant Image Hall, the independently curated LA cinema and bookstore, and Director of the Clay Theater, leading the restoration and 2026 reopening of the landmark 1913 cinema on San Francisco's Fillmore Street. Previously head of digital content at New York's Metrograph.
Scott Cameron Weaver — Founder of O-Town House, the exhibition space he opened in 2018 inside the Granada Buildings, the landmark 1927 complex that was the West Coast's first live-work building, dedicated to new models for producing and presenting art. Previously a curator and gallery director in New York, Berlin, and Basel, he has staged nearly forty projects with artists including James Benning, Kim Gordon, and John Boskovich.
Dinner is provided by Heirloom and wine and beer by Tabula Rasa. Thank you to sponsors Urbanworks LLC, Riso Studio Arts, and SPEEDBOAT.