Biography | Peter Cullen — The Village Theatre Premiere That Put Optimus Prime on a Live-Action Screen

People treat the 2007 Michael Bay film as the start of Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime. The voice was already twenty-three years old when it arrived at this door.

On 27 June 2007, Paramount and DreamWorks premiered Transformers at Mann's Village Theater on Broxton Avenue in Westwood, as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Four Westwood houses ran the picture the same night. The Village was the named red-carpet house. Press photographs place Cullen on the arrivals line.

The original syndicated series had gone out in 1984. Cullen had carried the Autobot leader through that run and through the 1986 animated feature. This night was the first time a paying Hollywood premiere crowd heard the same voice attached to a full-scale live-action machine.

The building at 961 Broxton Avenue opened in 1931 as the Fox Westwood Village Theatre, a Spanish Revival tower by Percy Parke Lewis. Los Angeles listed it as Historic-Cultural Monument 362 in 1988.

The Regency lease ended in July 2024. The house is slated to reopen under American Cinematheque programming.

Cullen kept the part through the later Bay films and through later series work. The public moment that made the cartoon voice a film voice happened on this pavement.

Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Fox Westwood Village Theatre, public domain, via the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.