Kristen Stewart gets her hands dirty

Do you need a reason to love Kristen Stewart? Well, in case you do, here’s one: she bought a dilapidated movie theater in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood with the intent of restoring it as a home for independent film. At a time when movie theaters are struggling and Hollywood itself seems at odds with its own mandate as a “dream factory”, Kristen Stewart is putting her money where her mouth is and revitalizing a space for cinema.

Specifically, she bought the Highland Theatre, a 1925 movie palace that closed in 2024. It needs serious work, an article featuring KStew in Architectural Digest includes some photos of the building’s current rundown state. This is not going to be trifling project, she is making a huge commitment, and in so doing, she joins a growing community of filmmakers rescuing the venues that exhibit their work.

Quentin Tarantino is obnoxious in a lot of ways, but he bought the New Beverly Cinema and made it a place devoted to preserving and showcasing celluloid cinema. Jason Reitman led a group of dozens of filmmakers in rescuing the Village Theater in Los Angeles’s Westwood neighborhood. And Jeff Nichols founded the Arkansas Cinema Society and Filmland, its marquee event, to promote cinema and filmmaking in Nichols’ native Arkansas. As Hollywood staggers around like a disoriented bear, tearing up its own sh-t, filmmakers are learning to save themselves.

But for Stewart, it sounds like it’s about more than just cinema, that rehabilitating this theater contributes to a larger community project. She talks about “tak[ing] care of each other” and creating a space where people can be “super vocal and say what you want to say”.

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In the AD interview, she also talks about her support of the Downtown Women’s Center, which supports unhoused women in Los Angeles’s Skid Row area, saying, “There has to be a way to unearth a tender, empathetic approach to getting people off the streets. I wanted to align myself with an organization and people who’ve been doing this work for decades at a grass roots level.”

What comes across is her love of Los Angeles, and a desire to see the city thrive. It’s not a secret that the last several years have been hard on LA. The pandemic, the labor strikes of 2023, the fires, that LA cannot catch a break. And within the film industry, specifically, work has been drying up, many people who were already struggling had their homes destroyed by fire, compounding the problems and need for steady employment. All this while the companies that own movie studios are reporting record profits. Anyway!

Kristen Stewart is stepping up, doing what she can to create and/or revive and/or support the kinds of spaces she wants to see, contributing to what is hopefully a brighter future for her beloved hometown. And while most of us aren’t millionaires and can’t buy and renovate buildings, we can follow her example and get out in our communities and get involved, helping to build the futures we want to see in our own neighborhoods. Kristen Stewart is not showing up in haute couture for a fundraiser, she bought a rundown building and is trying to make a community space for everyone. She’s getting her hands dirty. We need to get our hands dirty, too. The future won’t build itself, but we can build it together.