As the daughter of legendary actor Jack Nicholson, Lorraine Nicholson was immersed in Hollywood's glitz and glamor from a young age. Despite her proximity to the industry, however, she initially found movies dull. That all changed when she saw one of the final films screened at a beloved Santa Monica theater, just blocks from her childhood home.
More: Playing at ‘Playboy’: Lorraine Nicholson’s unconventionally idyllic childhood (The Treatment, 2024)
For her Treat, Nicholson reminisces on seeing the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause at the Aero Theatre, a historic single-screen movie theater which opened in 1940. Seeing the Nicholas Ray-directed film starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo as outsiders on that screen Nicholson’s mind wide open, reminding her of the operas she’d attended with her father. The film’s focus on the struggles of teenagers, especially the “beautiful” Dean, resonated with her and began her journey of discovering the language of cinema.
[Editor’s note: The Aero Theater (now formally called the Max Palevsky Theatre at the Aero in Santa Monica) wasn’t closed for long. The theater reopened in 2005 and is now part of the American Cinematheque.]
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I want to talk about my love of the film Rebel Without a Cause, which I actually watched at the [Aero Theatre] when I was 13 years old. It was actually at this point in time, [when the theater] was closing, and the last film that they were going to show was Rebel Without a Cause.
At this point in my life, I found movies to be incredibly boring and stupid, and my father tried to show me, because I was a kid, the sort of slapstick films of the ‘40s. I thought [they] were fine, but I was like, 'why are people talking in these accents?' And it's so zany. Then I went to the [Aero Theatre] to see Rebel Without a Cause, and it was like a bomb went off in my mind, because it took these themes of being a teenager and elevated them to this level of almost opera.
One of the first art forms that I really, really responded to, actually, was opera. Going to the opera with my dad, I remember, I have these little photos of me going to see Madam Butterfly with him in the little white gloves. And so he would take me to the opera all the time. And here was this opera on the screen and it was about teenagers, and it was about being an outsider.
I also could understand, 'Oh, this is the language of cinema.' Even in my limited brain, I was like, ‘I can see the color red suddenly means something else than just a color.’ And James Dean was so beautiful. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this man is so beautiful, and he’s dead.’
I like characters who can't express themselves because I think so few people actually can. It feels very human to me, and once again, the Nicholas Ray film just elevates that to art. I also loved the fact that the kids knew something that the parents didn't. That, to me as a teenage girl, was very attractive.
Then on top of it, the [Aero Theatre] at that point was closing, and so it was like, ‘Oh, I'm being introduced to this thing that I love, and then it disappeared again.’ I mean, there was no [other] revival theater [in the area]. I actually grew up probably seven blocks away from the [Aero Theatre] and when it closed… It was like I was just getting turned on to this thing, and then it was the end of an era. It was gone. It was like the last picture show, or something like that. So I think that also gave it a gravitas to me.