#AUSTIN LAZARUS STORE FRONT SERIES#

However, the biggest change came in 2011, when local architect Michael Antenora was hired to turn the empty storefront into restaurants and office space. “Putting Slacker up there just feels like the perfect fit.” Still, there were changes: After a major restoration removed the fire escape and drainpipe, the dangling Lloyd shifted to hang off the Sounder frame, and the row of celebrities was given a wooden stage to stand on, rather than drifting in midair. So the mural survived Tower, and then Follett's Intellectual Property bookstore as a tenant. In 1990, Tower Records took over the building, and faced immediate outcry over plans to paint over Lowry's work. However, the Varsity couldn't last forever. Yet the relative obscurity of some of those titles was absolutely the point: Lowry wanted to reflect the tastes of the UT community at that time.

#AUSTIN LAZARUS STORE FRONT SERIES#

And, suspended in midair like a leviathan of cool – a giant Jimmy Cliff in his iconic 'guns out' pose from The Harder They Come.īut it was best known for the series of stills: Instantly recognizable images from universally acknowledged classics – Battleship Potemkin, The General, Citizen Kane, Little Women, North by Northwest, Giant, and 2001: A Space Odyssey – drifted across the wall with movies familiar to the burgeoning cineaste community, like À bout de souffle, Sounder, Lucía, Norma Rae, and The American Friend. To their right, stunt legend Harold Lloyd hung from a drainpipe below the fire escape on which stood an Oscar ceremony's worth of stars from Liza Minnelli to Toshiro Mifune. Clowns from Fellini's 8½ played before a painting of the Varsity's own front doors, with poster-sized images of Bogart, Garbo, and Monroe beneath a marquee for The Seventh Seal. Lighting crews on a gantry illuminated Antoine Doinel walking across the beach in The 400 Blows. What he created for 2402 Guadalupe was vibrant and surrealist homage to cinema. That's when the owners commissioned local artist Carlos Lowry to paint the south-facing wall with a giant mural. Unlike many of the era's picture palaces, the Varsity survived the arrival of television, and by 1979 it was specializing in repertory and second-run features. 20, 1936, with a showing of The Texas Rangers. Now there's an initiative to fill that space with an image celebrating one of the defining Austin movies, and to immortalize one of its stars.īuilt by the Dallas-based Interstate Theatre Circuit, the Varsity Theatre opened Nov. In that mural there's a series of 12 images, 35mm frames from famous movies blown up to gigantic size. It's a celebration of the building's history as one of Austin's oldest cinemas.

If you've ever walked past the Wells Fargo on the Drag at 24th and Guadalupe, you may have noticed a mural on the exterior wall. from Lowry's original (below), with the empty frame highlighted (photos by Jana Birchum) The changing Varsity Theater mural: in 2011 as painted by Carlos Lowry (above) and its current look, by Ion Art Inc.

Austin lazarus store front