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There’s been countless stories written and films made about Los Angeles, but never one like 18th & Grand - The Olympic Auditorium Story, which makes its East Coast debut this week, streaming online as part of Brooklyn’s Bushwick Film Festival.
Using the infamous “Bucket of Blood” as both its subject and its muse, 18th & Grand tells the story of Los Angeles with its most blue collar arena as the prism through which the light is shined. Armed with a dazzling collection of photos, archival video footage, a never-ending cast of characters and a story so rich it could fill a Netflix mini-series, it's a documentary that adeptly understands the weight of the story it is trying to tell but never finds itself crushed under the massive scale of its attempts.
First-time director Stephen DeBro does an incredible job weaving through the history of boxing, pro wrestling, the mafia, roller derby, the ethnic demographics of the city and later in the film, punk rock, showcasing all the tentacles that spun out of the Olympic Auditorium’s heights and heartbreaks. From center ring to the subterranean dungeons of the locker rooms to the sight lines that brought fans an intimate experience that could lather them into a frenzy and as they cheered their favorites and booed (or worse) their most hated, no corners of the Olympic Auditorium, nor its importance to Los Angelinos goes unexplored.
Amazingly, DeBro somehow condenses decades worth of grit and muck into a roller coaster ride that carries the viewer from the Mafia age through the heights of boxing and pro wrestling riots to the last echoes of punk rock shows fading away as the Olympic morphs yet again, this time into a house of worship.
“My memories were of television growing up in Los Angeles,” DeBro told PWInsider.com. “In the days when there were fewer channels on TV, the Olympic was always on and whether it was wrestling, roller derby or boxing. I watched wrestling and roller derby with my sister and I watched boxing with my dad. The phone number Richmond nine five five one seven one was always sort of omnipresent. It was pounded into your head by, you know, operators standing by to get your tickets now. The action was always kind of larger than life and as a kid just felt surreal almost. It was just really, um, vibrant and as I started to get into the Olympic, a friend introduced me to the photography of Theo Eric, who was the house photographer at the Olympics for almost twenty years from the mid-sixties till the early eighties. His images were incredibly vivid and vibrant and kind of sent me back to my childhood. The more I dug into the story of the Olympics, the more I realized how important that it was for so many people in the city. They touched upon a lot of issues that really hadn't been touched upon in a documentary before usually LA docs kind of focus on the movie business as the way to tell the story of Los Angeles and, which leaves out a big part of the story, including the Mexican American story, which has always been so clearly present and important in LA history a just the story of the outsiders. He found an avenue through the Olympic Auditorium of, you know, the stage that was open to different kinds of people in a way that other places were not and the battles that for people to sort of have their place in the city sort of happened at the Olympic Auditorium that were emblematic of the fights that were going on in the city. So, those were the main reasons and it just got very interesting and the more I dug, the deeper I got in and the more interesting it became and all the subcultures and all the worlds just felt like they weren't really documented very well. So that was the inspiration."
A big part of the film is dedicated to the boxing world but the thread that carries us from there to pro wrestling and back again is the late Aileen Eaton who not only ruled over the Olympic and in many ways, was one of the most connected people in the city of Los Angeles, mother to the legendary Gene and Mike LeBell, helping to market Muhammad Ali and even having a hand in the success of the original Gorgeous George. The story of Eaton is fascinating enough that it could easily be spun into its own project, for the life and death of the Olympic is very much tethered to her own life as when she passed, nothing was ever the same again.
“She was a remarkable person," DeBro explained. “[Eaton] was very smart too. She was incredibly driven and worked really, really hard. Here's a person who had never seen a boxing match or a wrestling match before she was a divorced woman in the early 1940s with two kids, Mike and Gene and she got an opportunity to do some work on behalf of the LA Athletic Club. They owned the building and they'd had a series of failures. The building was created and opened in 1925. It was named the Olympic because it was for the 1932 Olympics. It was where boxing and wrestling and weightlifting competitions were held but the building had been kind of a failure. It was a white elephant. It opened in ‘25. You had the stock market crash in ‘29. It was 10,000 seats, the largest venue west of the Mississippi and a succession of promoters had come in and failed. It was, from what I understand, a combination of corruption and just also hard to keep a building a 10,000 seat building booked a lot and pay the bills. So, Frank Garvin gave Eileen a chance because he was impressed by some work that he did for her. I think he just figured, look, I've given all these men a chance and they have not done well. You know, this woman is smarter than anyone. He gave her an opportunity and she ran with it. So she studied the sport. She didn't come in assuming she knew everything she brought in bookers and talent people for both boxing and wrestling. In the beginning, she was the building manager, but as time went on, she got more and more involved in the actual promotion and in the talent side and in the marketing side of the business. A lot of people take credit for Gorgeous George. I can't say that she invented George though. Gene LeBell talks about the fact that he took her Max Factor and got his nails done, took him to a hair salon here in LA and got his hair dyed and, and done up. He was called the “Toast of the Coast” and she certainly was a pioneer in his development. George deserves way more credit than he really gets in 20th century history. He influenced Elvis, he influenced Muhammad Ali, for sure. He understood villainy and how to draw a crowd and to draw hate and was effective at pulling in the crowds and his particular kind of style really worked at the birth of television. Pro wrestling had a huge boom at the birth of television in the early fifties. So, Eaton was very smart about understanding how television works later in the sixties when boxing was at its low. She doubled down and bet on boxing and created a weekly boxing show in 1965, after many people had been sort of saying boxing is dead.”
One of the true gems of the film is that it includes one of final interviews with the late, great Roddy Piper, who waxes nostalgically about being sliced by knives hidden in popcorn boxes as he walked to the ring as one of the most hated men in the city at the time. Piper is transparently honest about the fact that his job was to make everyone hate him, completely fearlessly going about doing that, no matter the cost.
“Every interview was illuminating and fascinating, but none more than Roddy,” DeBro recalls. “So we got into it. Everything sort of started out kind of okay, but he was clearly kind of sizing me up and at a certain point in time, he went off and he [had] a fit and it was fascinating. He wanted me to understand something and I didn't get it at first. I think I didn't realize, and maybe underrated about Roddy is just how smart he was as a person. He wasn't well educated. He dropped out of school. He was, uh, a runaway, basically, but would answer a question and he would go off on an incredible tangent in which you would think that he just sort of lost sight of what you were talking about but he would always wrap back up into the question. So, we ended up having this, this intense moment in which he turned the camera back on me. He told me he was like he became the director. He turned the camera back on me, made me sweat and then he taught me a lesson. Once I understood the lesson that he was trying to teach me, we got along great and he gave me an incredibly vulnerable, wonderful, powerful interview. That was one of the last, if not the last, it's really the last major interview that he did. I was forever changed by that moment and I will never forget the man.”
Like every great community, there is a great cast of characters in the film, including Gene LeBell, who even at his advanced age carries himself as one of the toughest people in the world yet at the same time is completely endearing. The late Destroyer Dick Beyer and Mando Guerrero, representing the Guerreros as they were massive Latino superheroes in that territory, are also absolutely great in their roles.
“To me [The Olympic Auditorium is] hitting the big time,” remembers Mando Guerrero, who headline the Olympic, including a major Battle Royal victory in 1982. “You came into not only the Olympic, but LA. This is Hollywood man. Walking into the Olympic Auditorium and seeing the pictures that I saw there and seeing it, and there was an old building. When I went in and that, you know, I wasn't looking at that. It was just the fact that, that [this building] I could see on television and one time I saw Muhammad Ali there. We could see what was happening at the Olympic auditorium here in Los Angeles bay way back in El Paso, Texas because we bought a satellite. It was gorgeous, cold. It was cold all the time but when I walked in there, I felt that I was sitting in the big time. I still, when I drive by there, I like to see how it looks from the outside, then my mind goes into memories. I saw a roller Derby Saturday mornings for many years at night. Back then, it was a feeling of all,you're in this building and I was there to get a job, but at the same time, I had to go sit up in the audience and I did that a lot. I would go up and sit up in the empty building, when I would go to get paid. I would sit up there and just stare and look or sit it, see the setup that was happening. Like for instance, the ice, it was going to happen for the hockey team or whatever programs they would present on ice. I was in awe of them building the ring every time. I used to set up rings for my father so I was interested in how they had this big ring. They had a 25 footer when my dad only had 17 footer. It was interesting for me. I think I took a lot of the attitude that I carried into the ring from performing there. [Being there] helped me anywhere I went, because they would see me at the Olympic Auditorium wrestling. It helped my career immensely.”
The venue last hosted events in 2005 and is now utilized as a church. Shockingly, despite its history and importance culturally to Los Angeles, the Olympic Auditorium is not landmarked, so there’s nothing preventing it from being changed or even torn down one day.
“I would certainly like to see that no matter what its use is, it should be landmarked,” DeBro noted. “It should never be turned down. It is too important for the city to see that building go away. It’s almost a hundred years old, but carries so many memories and so much culturally important history. Would it be great if one day it became a venue again? Yeah. What was unique about the building was the sight lines. It was built in ‘25, but it was modern construction in the sense that there were no posts. It was a great place. Every seat was good in terms of seeing the action. It was really designed well for boxing, wrestling. [Ring announcer] Jimmy Lennon, Jr. who has done fights all over the world in, in stadiums and much larger arenas said it was the loudest place that he'd ever been in his entire life, still to this day. I would love to see it return to action or become a museum or something, but I'm not going to be critical of the church in the sense that it could have, they could have torn it down, or it could be. It's still at risk of being torn down. It is not protected. I would hope that the building, if it stays a church, that's fine, at least, you know, now in the same spot where people bled and fought is where they're communing with a higher power. I would hope that the building lasts and, you know, who knows what the future holds. I just hope they never tear the building down.”
While one never knows what the future may hold for the actual physical building, The Olympic Auditorium in all its glory will stand eternal, propped up by incredible imagery, indelible memories and like all great haunts, a most impressive cast of characters who fought, bled and battled, sometimes in riots, sometimes in mosh pits seeking to live and achieve their dreams on 18th & Grand. That is and always will be The Olympic Auditorium Story.
18th & Grand - The Olympic Auditorium Story will stream this week, making its East Coast debut as part of the Bushwick Film Festival. For more details, visit www.Bushwickfilmfestival.com.
For more on 18th & Grand, directed by Stephen DeBro, visit www.18thandgrand.com.
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