New Life in This Old Fox
- Joel Beers
- Jul 25
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 29
As the Fox Theatre in Fullerton turns 100, renewed interest and hope in its restoration grows.
Considering it took a unicorn to save it from demolition, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Fox Fullerton Theatre, one of Orange County’s oldest and most architecturally significant venues, turned 100 in May and remains at least $18 million from a full restoration that began over 20 years ago.
It took a fiscal miracle – a $700,000 check from an anonymous donor in November 2004, something so rare that in the world of philanthropy it is referred to as a unicorn – to save the Fox. Since then, it’s been a long and frequently grueling restoration process, from raising money and navigating city bureaucracy to reminding the community that the vision for the Fox – reopening as a modern, multi-purpose entertainment venue as close to its original 1925 grandeur as practically possible – remains intact.
But for the first time since a small group of community members banded together in 1997 to begin their fight to save the theater, the arduous crusade may have reached a tipping point.“It finally feels that the wind is at our back,” said Todd Huffman, a board member of the Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns the theater. “People seem to be starting to fully believe this can happen.”
Visible Progress, Renewed Hope
A big reason for that, said Huffman, who has been involved with the Fox since 2003, is that the public can finally see visible signs of the restoration – such as the nearly fully restored lobby and sparkling new bathrooms that greeted them at the three events held inside the Fox this year: an April 12 screening of a film about the Agnew Brothers, seminal figures in Orange County punk history, which hosted some 650 people; a 100th birthday celebration May 24, in which 3,000 people toured the theater and watched a short film about its history and restoration efforts followed by a Buster Keaton silent film accompanied by live organist David Marsh; and a full day of musical performances June 21 that were part of Day of Music Fullerton.
It’s the most events in a calendar year held inside the Fox since restoration began in earnest in 2008, but a fourth one tonight, July 25, may be the most important. The Fox will host the North Orange County Chamber of Commerce’s business awards and board member installation.
“That’s going to be big for us for a couple of reasons,” Huffman said. “First, it’s the first time the business community as a concentrated group is going to be here. On top of that, there will be politicians who could help us with federal and state grants.”
Just as important, Huffman said, the tangible improvements to the Fox, as well as the development of the Fox Block, an open-air marketplace on adjacent property, might reverse something that has plagued the Fox’s ability to secure local donations from prominent businesses for 20 years: a sentiment that giving money to the Fox is just throwing it away because little or no work has been done.
“I think the prospective donor pool has been polluted for a long time,” said Huffman, who cites two prominent former Fullerton council members, Don Bankhead and Dick Jones, with deep ties to the business community as the main polluters. “They were part of the old guard, influencers in town with the old money. And they just wanted to demolish it.”
He still distinctly recalls Jones saying in a council meeting that if the Fox ever caught on fire, he’d make sure the fire truck got a flat.
Also helping put wind in the restoration effort’s sails is the Fox Block. In 2022, the city approved the 23,125-square-foot outdoor marketplace, which will be built adjacent to the Fox Theatre (on land that formerly housed Angelo & Vinci’s restaurant to the north and empty city-owned property to the east) and will include a brewery, restaurants, retail and a two-story parking structure.
Until recently, most of the work on the Fox Theatre has been, in Huffman’s words, the “unsexy” infrastructure work critical to stabilizing the theater and adjoining retail spaces to the north and south. Things like seismic retrofitting, plumbing, the air conditioning and heating system, installing elevator shafts, and general clean-up of spaces that had sat vacant and unused since the Fox closed as a movie theater in 1987.
A great deal of work remains to be done inside the auditorium, including bringing the Fox’s stage up to workable standards, renovating the balcony, repairing the plaster molding destroyed by a modernization project in 1955, recreating six murals on the walls, installing period-style seats, and meeting ADA requirements. But with the work on the lobby and restrooms, as well as a restored interior ceiling with the two original chandeliers complemented by a new lighting and sound system, the theater “is finally at a place where we can feel comfortable holding fundraisers,” board president Brian Newell said.
The lobby of the Fox Theatre: PHOTO 1: The original lobby of the Fox included a decorative lighting and ceiling mural by artist John Beckman, circa 1925. That mural will be fully restored. Six murals depicting California's early history inside the auditorium are beyond repair but will be re-created. PHOTO 2: The lobby in 2015, just as restoration begins. Restoring the lobby of the Fox was part of phase two of restoration. PHOTO 3: The lobby in 2025. The nearly fully restored lobby of the Fox was unveiled earlier this year. It includes $40,000 of new doors donated by Ganahl Lumber. Six decorative lamps on the walls, which will look identical to those that graced the walls when the theater opened, are in the process of being installed. Photos courtesy of Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation/Chris Tennyson (photo 2), Todd Huffman (photo 3)
Historical Legacy and Deterioration
The Fox opened in 1925 on the northwest corner of what is now Harbor Boulevard and Chapman Avenue as the Alician Court Theatre, a dual vaudeville and silent film venue named after Alice Chapman, the wife of developer Stanley Chapman, the son of Fullerton’s first mayor. The theater cost a reported $300,000 to build, approximately $5.5 million when adjusted for inflation in 2025.
It was designed by the same firm that designed the Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian theaters in Hollywood. Unlike those theaters, it featured an Italian Renaissance motif. But it shared many of the same ornate design elements, such as a pipe organ, murals inside the auditorium and on the lobby ceiling, as well as being one of the few movie palaces to be built with a courtyard lobby.
During the Depression, the theater was acquired by Fox Film Studio owner William Fox (or merged by Fox with the West Coast Theatres chain), and was renamed the Fox. It had various owners over the years, but the Fox name stayed. According to the foundation’s website, the Fox was the first Orange County theater to be wired for sound in 1929, its premieres brought Hollywood luminaries like Mary Pickford, Judy Garland and Douglas Fairbanks to Fullerton, and it was one of the first Orange County locations to host a Mickey Mouse Club in 1931.
In 1955 and 1961, it underwent two modernizations that would see the interior murals painted over and the proscenium blocked by an enormous screen. By the late 1970s, with the rise of multiplexes – specifically two in Brea, including the Brea Mall – the theater wasn’t being maintained and was running on fumes. It wheezed to a finish in 1987 with a screening of the Mickey Rourke film “Angel Heart.” The owner at the time, Ed Lewis, a Los Angeles attorney, was reluctant to seismically retrofit the building, so the city issued a red ticket, effectively condemning it. A fire in 1994 prompted the fire marshal to cut a hole in the ceiling, and the theater remained open to the elements for a decade.
The men's and women's restrooms are complete at the Fox Theatre. (Men's on the right, women's on the left.) Work on installing modern and ADA-compliant restrooms at the Fox began in 2019 and was completed in 2024. Photos courtesy of Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation/Todd Huffman
Grassroots Rescue Mission
The closing and eventual demolition of another downtown Fullerton theater, the Wilshire, in the mid-1980s prompted a small group of Fullerton residents in 1997 to form a group in hopes of preventing the Fox from suffering the same fate. That morphed into the Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed in 2001. In early 2004, it learned that Lewis had given a developer a $3.3 million option to purchase the theater. It planned on demolishing the building and building an apartment complex.
The prospective developer agreed to give the foundation its option to buy the theater, but a deadline was set for later in the year. The city agreed to pitch in half the amount if the foundation could raise $1.65 million, and the foundation began a truly grassroots campaign to raise the money.
“We had six to eight months to raise $1.65 million, and the race was on,” Huffman recalls. “So we started selling seats for $2,500 and anything else we could think of to raise the money, like volunteers on the street in front of the Fox holding buckets and people pulling over in their cars to dump spare change into them. And checks were rolling in – $500 checks, $10,000 checks – but it wasn’t nearly enough and now it’s early November and we’re about $700,000 short and just days away from the final deadline.”
And then, on Nov. 17, a small miracle ensued.
Enter the Unicorn
Huffman still vividly recalls the day that an “unassuming elderly gentleman” walked into the foundation’s borrowed offices in an unused bank a couple of blocks from the Fox and said, “I hear you’re trying to save that old theater up the street. How much do you need?”
Two hours later, Huffman and Jane Reifer, the board president at the time, met the man at Citizens Bank in Fullerton, and he handed over a $700,000 cashier’s check and said he’d give another $100,000 each month for three months, making the total donation $1 million.
“He said, ‘This is a gift to Fullerton,’” Huffman said. “‘Just promise me that if you don’t save the theater, you keep the money in Fullerton. Give it to the Boys and Girls Club or something.’
“There was no paperwork or naming opportunities,” Huffman said. “No request for free tickets for life or a parking spot. All he asked was that we keep his name anonymous. That was it. And then he walked out, and I never saw the guy again.”
When it comes time to open a permanent bar in the lobby of the Fox, it will be dedicated to the anonymous donor. His name will remain a carefully guarded secret, Huffman says, but the name that volunteers have given this fiscal angel will be on that bar, a name that salutes another angel from a film that opened during the Fox’s heyday: Clarence’s.
The Long Game of Restoration
The anonymous donation secured the building, but since then, restoration has moved much more slowly than originally anticipated, due primarily to a lack of funds. Some $14 million has been spent so far, which has largely come from state grants and a $6 million loan from the city. About $18 million of work remains. No tentative completion date is currently set because “all the work done here is when money becomes available,” said Brian Newell, the president of the foundation’s board since 2009.
But Newell said midway through its most public year to date, with thousands of people seeing the work that has been done, momentum is on the Fox’s side.
“I think over the last six months, the chatter over what’s going on over here has really stopped,” he said. “ At the 100th anniversary, we had thousands of people. And they all see the real work that has been done and is ongoing.”
No one knows where the money will come from or when the Fox will finally reopen. But though the finish line can’t quite be seen yet, Huffman said for the first time it feels like there is one.
“It really has been an uphill battle for the longest time,” he said. “We’ve had to deal with the (2008) economic crash, COVID, the local and state economy, you name it. But this place is too special to not do it right. And the Fox has been around for 100 years. So what’s a few more?”
FROM THE FOX THEATRE WEBSITE
These videos, produced by the Fullerton Historic Theatre Foundation, document the history of the theater and the three phases of construction required to bring the theatre back to life.
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