The theater opened as the Pantages, named for Alexander Pantages, the Greek immigrant who built a vaudeville and movie palace empire across the American West. Pantages commissioned the architect B. Marcus Priteca, his go-to designer, who gave the Fresno house the ornate ceilings and lavish detailing that defined the movie palace era. But Pantages would not hold it long. In 1929, just a year after opening, the theater was purchased by Warner Brothers and renamed the Warner Theater. The studio was riding the wave of sound film it had helped create with The Jazz Singer, snapping up theaters across the country. The Warner name stuck for decades until the 1960s, when trademark concerns forced another change. The theater became Warnors, close enough to evoke the old name, different enough to avoid the lawyers. The misspelling became the identity.

Before the Robert Morton organ arrived, theaters employed live orchestras to accompany silent films. The economics were punishing: paying a dozen musicians for every screening ate into profits. The unit orchestra was the solution, a single instrument so comprehensive that one skilled organist could produce the sounds of an entire ensemble. The Robert Morton Organ Company built these instruments in Van Nuys, California, engineering them with the theatrical flair the market demanded. The Fresno installation had everything: the pipes, the percussion, the sound effects. It was state of the art for an art form that was already dying. Sound film made the organ redundant almost immediately, though it continued to be used for motion picture accompaniment until 1973, long after most theaters had removed theirs.

On November 15, 1956, the Berlin Philharmonic performed at the theater under the baton of Herbert von Karajan, who had recently become the ensemble's music director. That one of the world's most prestigious orchestras played a concert in a mid-sized Central Valley city speaks to the touring patterns of the era, when major ensembles barnstormed across America playing every sizable venue available. The Warnors had the seats, 2,100 of them, and the acoustics that Priteca's design provided. Karajan would go on to lead the Berlin Philharmonic for 34 years, becoming the best-selling classical recording artist of all time. Fresno was one stop on a long American tour, but it connected this agricultural city to the highest tier of European musical tradition.

The movie palace was built for a different kind of moviegoing, one where the architecture was part of the experience. Priteca designed spaces that made patrons feel they were entering somewhere extraordinary, with ornate ceilings and decorative flourishes that modern cineplexes abandoned in favor of efficiency and screen count. When multiplexes arrived and downtown theaters across America went dark, venues like the Warnors faced a choice: adapt or close. Warnors adapted, shifting toward live performances, community events, and the kind of programming that treats the building itself as the draw. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places formalized what audiences already understood: the theater is the attraction, not merely the container for one.