Serious Movie Lover

THE MUSIC BOX THEATRE, CHICAGO
A recent trip to Chicago led me and my teen traveling companions (two short people that look and behave eerily like yours truly) to this charmingly creepy gem of an art house in the Southport neighborhood. Pleased to have stumbled in on their Monday Special, we found shockingly affordable tickets ($5 for a 5:30pm showing of the hilarious [and teenager enthusiastically approved] doc Best Worst Movie) and sweet concession prices (a two-for-one deal of a pair of pops and ginormous bags of popcorn came to $11). Also welcoming was the staff, who didn’t mind us sprawling out on the lobby couch for an hour or so before showtime. Which was nice, because that couch was of a particular interest to us, as it is a key element of a certain bit of the theater’s lore.

Main auditorium, the Music Box Theatre.

All great old theaters have a ghost story or two, and the Music Box is no exception. Whitey, the ghost of the original manager who ran the theater from opening night in 1929 through 1977, is said to haunt aisle 4, by the exit doors to the alley, where he used to lurk while keeping kids from letting their friends sneak in. One day in 1977, after walking from home to close down the joint for the night, he laid on the lobby couch and never woke up.  The couch in question is quite comfortable, but I would not recommend it for napping, obviously.

Wrong Whitey.

In the ‘90s the Music Box expanded into the storefront next door with a fine but slightly claustrophobic second screen. Due to their newspaper and online listings not mentioning which auditorium is showing which feature, I would recommend asking at the box office which picture is playing in the main auditorium. And then pick that film, no matter what.

Under the stars inside the main auditorium, the Music Box theatre.

The main auditorium is set up like an open air palazzo, with cove lights and twinkling stars and clouds overhead. In between showings the room is lit by spotlights from the balcony, as if the projector is still projecting, but it is now projecting the theater itself, instead of, say, a breezy doc about the making of Troll 2. For a movie buff, it’s truly captivating. At 800 seats, what was once a charming “little brother” to the movie palaces of 1929 is currently the largest capacity theater running full time in the city. Check out their site for photos from several of the major film premieres they’ve hosted, including Where the Wild Things Are, Inland Empire, The Break-Up, and, uh, Year One. (Forget I mentioned that last one.)

Roger Ebert wrote a lovely post on his blog about a Sundance 2010 outreach screening he attended there—check it out here.