Stanford Theatre, Art deco movie theater on University Avenue in Palo Alto, US

The Stanford Theatre is a movie palace on University Avenue in Palo Alto, designed by Weeks and Day and opened in 1925 in a neoclassical Persian and Moorish style. Its interior was restored using more than 5,000 original sketches to match the 1920s colour scheme. A Mighty Wurlitzer organ, played live during intermissions and to accompany silent films, rises from the orchestra pit.

Designed by Weeks and Day, the theatre opened on June 9, 1925, with a showing of I'll Show You the Town, at a construction cost of about $300,000. By the 1960s the organ had been removed and the interior was so neglected that many moviegoers refused to enter. After Fred Astaire's death in 1987, David Woodley Packard held a two-week Astaire festival there; its success led his father, Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard, to buy the theatre through the Packard Foundation for $7.7 million. A $6 million restoration, matching the original palette from over 5,000 sketches, reopened it in 1989 with The Wizard of Oz.

The Stanford Theatre's organ, a Mighty Wurlitzer, is played live during intermissions and accompanies silent films, a practice kept from the theatre's early years. Seasonal festivals at the venue are built around figures such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis and Cary Grant, and the theatre often accounts for as much as a quarter of all classic film attendance in the United States.

The theater is centrally located on University Avenue and accessible on foot or by car. For current information about showtimes and ticket availability, contact the venue directly by phone or visit the official website.

The Stanford Theatre's Wurlitzer organ was assembled from parts of other instruments: its 1926 console came from Grauman's Chinese Theatre and its 1928 pipes from Loew's Theatre. The original organ had been sold off in pieces before the Packard restoration, and it took two years to gather and restore the replacements.