Tien Lung Chen, a business executive based in Beverly Hills, leads an ownership group that paid $5 million in cash to a trust that includes descendants of original owner John Muldoon, according to documents filed with the Alameda County Assessor’s Office on Monday, April 20.
The sale of the theater at 2115 Kittredge St. comes less than a year after Gilbane Development Company withdrew plans with its partner, the California Theater Consortium, to build an 18-story housing complex with a performance space that would preserve the theater’s original facade.
It is unclear what Chen plans to do with the Berkeley building.
In addition to this project, Chen is part of an ownership group that owns the Exotic Dreams Resort in Palm Springs. It is described as a “clothing optional” swingers hotel that bills itself as “one of the most exciting, liberal and open-minded resorts in California,” with the tagline, “Where Lifestyle Couples Party, Play, & Stay,” according to its website.
The California Theatre is an Art Deco-style building that had been more or less continuously operating as a movie theater since the Italian epic “Cabiria” opened there on Dec. 9, 1914. It was last operated as a movie venue by Landmark Theatres, which took over operations in 1994, but closed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and never reopened.
It officially shuttered in 2021, part of a wave of post-pandemic closings, which included Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas and Regal UA Berkeley, that left downtown Berkeley without any first-run movie theaters for the first time in more than a century.