Ojai Playhouse Relaunches as Awards Season Destination Under New Owner

The 110-year-old Ojai Playhouse, a movie theater darkened for the past decade, has been revived by music industry impresario David Berger. He bought the historic property, which debuted in the silent era, after selling his VIP concert ticketing company to WME in 2018 and moving to industry-favored Ojai. Berger has since invested more than $10 million into turning the theater into a state-of-the-art venue.

Other high-profile Hollywood figures with homes in the area — including Universal Studios head Donna Langley and Eric Goode, the Tiger King and Chimp Crazy documentarian who’s developing the boutique El Roblar Hotel across the street — had also looked into purchasing the Playhouse. “I grew up as a ticket-taker and usher and concessionaire and, later, a projectionist at theaters just outside of Boston,” he says. “So, for me, this was meant to be.”

Berger’s iteration of the 200-seat Playhouse will blend first-run studio films, art house offerings, repertory cinema and select live small-scale performances. Think, in L.A. terms, a cross between the ArcLight, the New Beverly and Largo at the Coronet. It debuts Nov. 22 with multiple showings of Heat (“because the neighborhood has given me so much heat about how long it’s taken to open”). The near-term calendar also includes a thematically appropriate Werner Herzog double-billing of Fitzcarraldo and Burden of Dreams — as a nod to the quixotic endeavor of bringing the Playhouse back to life after it was heavily damaged by a water main break — as well as the set-in-Ojai Easy A and, on Christmas Eve, the twofer of Die Hard and Bad Santa.

Since it’s awards season, and Ojai and neighboring Montecito are dense with Academy voters, there’ll also be showings of Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Sing Sing, Emilia Perez and — as a sneak peek — Babygirl. “We’ve begun building relationships with studios,” Berger says. “They know who lives around here.”

Berger has tricked out the Playhouse with seemingly all the A/V equipment money can buy: Dolby Atmos surround sound, a Simplex 35mm reel-to-reel, Barco 4K digital projection, top-of-the-line streaming capabilities. But his proudest achievement may be custom quadratic diffusers along the theater’s ceiling which, yes, optimize acoustics, but also feature lighting that can be programmed to color-match the sky in real time.

“We have a camera outside where we look at, for example, the Topatopa Mountains and can capture the ‘pink moment’ at sunset that everyone loves and then put it in the theater,” he says of the effect, which draws inspiration from the revered conceptual artist James Turrell, a founder of the Light and Space movement. “It’s magic.”