In his essayistic meditation on ‘film's end’, Stephen Barber details the decaying string of old theatres concentrated on Broadway avenue in central Los Angeles, which he deems physical fragments of cinema's living end in the digital age. Once glamorous picture palaces whose audiences have since migrated to other, newer theatres elsewhere in the vicinity, these cavernous spaces fell into disrepair during the second half of the twentieth century, eventually becoming grind houses for Spanishlanguage films, exploitation cinema and hard-core adult movies. When I coincidentally ventured down this same street in 2010, during the period of my research about 42nd Street, I quickly recognised the lingering traces of former grind houses in these ignored, repurposed theatre facades nestled amid the surrounding inner-city bustle. The pavements below, primarily peopled with Latino faces, remained vibrantly alive with activity but the ornate theatre frontages seemingly aroused little attention. In discussing the memories attached to these spaces, Barber's elegiac tone (not uncommon to such treatises on the ‘death’ of cinema) is worth quoting at length: