I’m an escapist. I like watching my movies big, loud, alone-in-the-dark and, most importantly, indoors. After seeing the Skyline Residence in the Hollywood Hills, however, those feelings just might change.
The estate challenges the very conventions that good Americans are currently dying to protect—like that watching a flick in dark, dank, sticky-floored movie theater is choice. Having been built on a tight-wad budget and from materials native to the area, the Skyline Residence is the cardboard house of the Hollywood Hills…if, of course, your cardboard house was outfitted with a 50-foot movie screen.
Although constructed entirely of materials gathered from local businesses—in order to reduce its impact on the environment—the house has more style and design grace than most of its energy-hungry contemporaries. Projected onto a nearby wall attached to the guesthouse, that’s one eco-friendly, outdoor movie theater. The outdoor aspect even helps you avoid those dreaded movie theater backstage exits.
You know where they are, you just never use them because they’re located near the front of the theater, under a bright green sign that pokes at your peripheral. That doorway shrouded behind heavy, carnivalesque drapes that reveals a series of interconnected tunnels dripping with the same sort of eerie, back-alley dampness found in a Tijuana bordello (not that I’d know, of course). You don’t use those exits because you’d need a shot of penicillin afterwards. You don’t use those theatre exits because, well…I guess it’s really just because you know you’d never find your car if you went out that way.