Movie Theaters

As you might expect, movie theaters have evolved several times over a century of showing motion pictures.

The first places to show movies, when the novelty of a moving image was enough, were not very sophisticated: side rooms attached to taverns, or anyplace that could be made dark and have seats set up. But custom-built theaters soon appeared, initially in downtown areas where legitimate theaters already existed. The division between legitimate theater and movie-house wasn’t so strict in the first decades, with vaudeville and burlesque occupying a middle ground, and particularly vaudeville shows often booked into the same houses as movies. That was the case at the enormous Chicago Theatre, built in 1921 with dressing rooms and other backstage facilities for vaudeville acts, but not the flyloft needed for Broadway plays.

The transition to talkies in the late 1920s required purpose-built cinemas, and these were both more architecturally elaborate and spread to neighborhood “shopping centers” such as Chicago’s Uptown, West Madison Street, or Englewood. These “picture palaces” were often elaborate architectural fantasies that used terra-cotta ornament to evoke faraway places, with lavishly decorated lobbies and auditoriums. By the 1930s, the moderne (Art Deco) architecture of some new cinemas gave them their own architectural pedigree, rather than merely the borrowed glory of those decorated to resemble Versailles or a Moorish palace.

In the 1950s and 1960s, movie theaters went through changes that mirrored American society: new ones were built adjacent to suburban malls while those in declining city neighborhoods went dark. The movie industry tried to fight back against television in the late 1950s with wide screens, elaborate projection and sound systems, and limited “road show” bookings. As part of this movement, a few large new cinemas were built, especially in big-city downtowns and wealthy suburbs. But the next industry transformation swung the other direction: multiplex cinemas that could show multiple titles (for maximum concession revenue) with a small staff. Surviving city-neighborhood picture palaces were often chopped up into multiple auditoriums, sometimes rather ungraciously.

Meanwhile, in several large cities, a few of the grandest picture palaces, usually downtown or in a nearby “uptown” district, were abandoned or threatened with demolition in the 1970s or 1980s. The nascent historic preservation movement, in concert with downtown renewal efforts, sometimes stepped in to purchase, restore, and return to life the grandest of these: Oakland’s Paramount; LA’s Pantages and Wiltern; Cleveland’s State Theater; The Kings in Brooklyn; ones called Fox in Atlanta, Detroit, and St. Louis; and dozens of others listed here. A common issue is that theaters built for movies typically didn’t have sufficient flylofts or scenery storage for big Broadway productions. In some cases, they were retrofitted; but most (like the Chicago Theatre) instead became performing arts centershosting comedy and musical acts with less demanding requirements. In Chicago, only the Oriental and Palace theaters went from movie house to Broadway theaters. For the Oriental that required city-aided conversion of the adjacent Oliver Typewriter Co. Building for backstage needs; for the Palace, backstage areas were created in the adjacent Metropolitan Building.

Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, changes to corporate movie theater chains, the switch to electronic projection, and demands for more sophisticated seating and concessions have now left a generation of 1970s and 1980s cinemas dark, or converted to megachurches. A fairly comprehensive list of former cinemas is maintained by movie-house buffs at http://cinematreasures.org/

Entries on Movie Palaces and Going to the Movies from the Encyclopedia of Chicago are good summaries and cite helpful sources to learn more. In addition, I made a series of maps showing the changing geography of movie theaters in Chicago.