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- Theaters are magic.

You go into a theater and I don't care if it's a small,

little local one in your hometown or something

as grand as Radio City Music Hall.

When you're in the music hall and the lights go down,

it becomes intimate

and fascinating and magical.

- So many people identify movies with some

of the best times of their lives.

They remember their first dates.

They remember their first time out with their family,

their first time they went to see a movie about being

a doctor, being a politician, being an astronaut.

(inspirational orchestral music)

- There's something about seeing those stories

on screen and you get a chance to understand

other cultures, other experiences, other places.

- We may never live those fantasies or those lives

of the people we're watching, but we do it vicariously.

- You are giving people a complete escape

from their ordinary lives.

From the moment you walk into the lobby: plush carpeting,

gilded leaf-work on the walls and on the ceilings,

magnificent chandeliers, decor from different periods

of art and architecture around the globe.

This at a time when most people,

most Americans, didn't have the opportunity to travel.

- They were places where the rich and the poor

could rub elbows.

- They built these palaces to be the Disney of the day,

so that you walk in off the street and you forget all

of the troubles and all of the things that you had

going on in your life because you're surrounded

by this magnificent building.

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- I remember coming here as a child

and just being completely amazed and taken aback

by the ornate beauty of the building.

- When I first started my job

at Theater Historical Society, it was kind

of eyeopening for me to learn that the places

that I went to to see Broadway touring shows

with a symphony were actually buildings that were

built as movies palaces.

- Toward the end of World War I up

through the Depression, which is the early '30s,

there was just a boom.

That's the only way to describe it: a boom that led

to the building of enumerable movie palaces.

Not theaters but palaces, and ones you can visit today

and still see and still enjoy a movie in.

It seems so incredibly lavish.

You wonder how anybody could conceive of them

or why they would build such structures just to go

to the movies.

(soft piano music)

As Marcus Loew, the famous showman and businessman said,

"We don't sell tickets to movies.

We sell tickets to theaters."

- I first came

into the Rialto Theater when I was probably

eight years old.

My mom was making an effort to educate me in old movies,

so we'd go to Chaplin movies and Buster Keaton movies

and the Rialto was a revival house.

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- When I was growing up,

I always knew that my great-grandfather had owned

a movie theater chain.

It was called the Butterfield Theater Company.

And I wasn't super familiar with it,

but I knew that my mom growing up never had to pay

to go see a movie.

And I just remember thinking oh my god,

like I wish that had been me.

- I have a great memory of going

to the Ziegfeld Theater in New York when I was a kid.

We were actually living

in Charleston, South Carolina and I was always going

to mall multiplexes and it was "Gandhi."

It's the kind of movie that had intermission.

It was people dressed up.

It was fancy bathrooms.

It's the kinda thing that sticks with you forever.

- I went to see "Gone With the Wind"

in the Redford Theater in Detroit, Michigan when I was

in grad school.

- Sir, you are awfully kind.

- I'm not kind. I'm just tempting you.

- I've seen "Gone With the Wind" probably hundreds

of times in my life.

But there's something completely different

about seeing that movie on a big screen,

the organ playing and you're in a room with 1,200 people.

- I don't even remember the movies that I saw,

but I was entranced by the building itself,

by all the scary character faces in the walls, darkness,

the color, the intensity, the sorta musty smells.

- And you come out and it had gotten dark,

so the marquee was lighted up and the sidewalk

is twinkling with the little crystals of mica

they would put in it.

There was a magic going on there,

which I took for granted of course as everybody did.

They were part of life.

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- Movies are one of the United States' most

important cultural contributions.

It's how we've broadcasted our culture around

the world and how we've made that association

between the United States and Hollywood

is through the movies.

So it's a very very important national

and cultural legacy, right?

But we don't actually preserve the movie theaters.

So those are some of our most

important cultural landmarks.

And yet when it comes time to economic development

or redevelopment of the city or real estate development,

someone's come in and take out a whole block

to do something.

People don't ask those kinds of questions.

And so you have all these cities around the country

where there's just nothing left.

You can go to cities where they've torn down

every movie theater they've had.

So we can assume it's just an entertainment venue

or we can actually recognize that it actually was

a vibrant center of city life.

- Some of the first films to be shown and promoted

in a big way in the 1890s were prize fights.

But that was an event and it was an event that was

very successful and they went from city to city

and rented out big existing auditoriums.

This long before the nickelodeon

or the little storefront theaters.

So they were really the beginning of what movies could be

and eventually did become.

When the movie business actually got going

in the early 20th century,

with Thomas Edison and everyone else involved,

the early films were first not projected.

They were shown on you know, little eyepiece viewers.

- [Man] Where you would drop a penny in,

you get a 30-second reel of film on a kinetoscope.

- These little cards that would flash in front

of you on a little viewer and you'd crank this thing

and it made you put a coin in or something.

They were in these little parlors,

like an arcade in a way.

They're all lined up against the wall.

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- This is like Automatic Vaudeville run by a man

named Adolph Zukor and other people around

the country began to open up these penny arcade parlors.

And it was the first kind of chain store, if you will,

build-out of the moviegoing experience.

- People like Thomas Edison and others,

rivals and people who were ripping off

Thomas Edison's patent made a short, short film.

And eventually, some of them had stories.

- There was Thomas Edison with his kinetoscope I believe,

and then there were the Lumiere brothers in France.

The two technologies kind of evolved around the same

time and they were competing.

And so one nickelodeon would show Lumiere products

and then somebody else would show using

the Edison projector.

- We all know about "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903.

May not have been the very first film to tell a story,

but it's one of the first to use up a whole 10

to 15-minute reel documenting a story and making

it seem pretty realistic.

And then someone had the idea that projecting them

meant you could show a lot of people a film

at the same time.

- What was beginning to work was actually having

seats set up and a projector in the back and making

it a public experience of going to the movies.

- [Leonard] Folding chairs were brought into storefronts.

I mean, it was as simple as that.

- I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which many

say is the birthplace of the commercial movie theater.

So in 1905, a gentleman named

John P Harris and his business partner,

Harry Davis, they said,

why don't we take the projector down the street

to a storefront that we have,

put a screen on the wall and 96 chairs

and we'll show films continuously.

They charged a nickel.

They called it a nickelodeon.

- It came from the word nickel meaning American currency.

You know, then it usually cost a nickel to get

into one of these things and then odeon which means

an indoor environment.

- A lot of scholars consider that to be sort

of the flashpoint because within a few years of that,

people were opening nickelodeans like crazy.

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it was kind of the Wild West.

It was something of a free-for-all.

Anybody who had access to a camera and film could make

a film and anybody who could set up chairs

and a projector could show a film.

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- Famously, Loew's began this way.

It was originally called People's Vaudeville Company,

and Marcus Loew, when he went to visit one

of his penny arcades in Cincinnati, he went across

the river to Covington and he saw a man projecting

movies onto a screen.

So he went back to his penny hippodrome and he took

the second floor and converted it into a movie theater.

That was the changeover that began to happen

where you would accompany the films with music

and you could feed off of the crowd.

So falls worked better, humor worked better,

comedy worked better.

- Sometimes there would be someone standing behind

the screen giving voice to actors,

sometimes a singer in a little side stage.

Often, almost always as a matter of fact, a piano player,

that was an art in itself.

The piano player had to be really good at improvising.

- This was a national trend.

You know, it gets a lot of celebrated coverage

in New York and Chicago and cities like that.

But it was national.

It was regional.

It was even rural.

Cincinnati, Covington, Charleston, Dallas,

small towns in Iowa.

People began to wanna watch movies everywhere

and it began already by 1907

when "Harper's Weekly" referred to it as nickel madness.

It was a national and soon global phenomenon.

And then suddenly a saturation point.

There were so many nickelodeons everywhere.

- The Warner brothers also started

in the Pittsburgh area and they opened a little

theater called the Cascade outside of Pittsburgh.

They ran that for a few years but then they thought,

oh wait a minute, the money is more in making movies.

And many people in those early days felt they could

make money off the movies,

but they had to deal with the patents folks

and Thomas Edison.

And that's why a lot of the production moved

from the East Coast to New York and then

Chicago, they moved out to the West Coast.

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- Of course D. W. Griffith entered the scene at the end

of the first decade of movies and gave more rhythm, tempo,

purpose, pace and dramatic clarity

to the storytelling and hired very talented

and very camera-friendly actors like Mary Pickford.

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There was no such thing as a movie actor.

They had to come from some place.

Most of them came from the stage: people like

Lillian and Dorothy Gish.

Some of them had circus training.

Charlie Chaplin was part of a famous music hall troop.

In England, they called vaudeville music hall.

That's when Mack Sennett heard about this young fellow,

Charlie Chaplin, and signed him to a contract

and that was at the end of 1913.

- And there was an entire segment

of African-American vaudeville entertainers

that would travel the country just going

in that circuit of African-American vaudeville theaters.

- And there were quite a few black filmmakers in like

the early 1900s such as Oscar Micheaux and that part

of our heritage isn't celebrated as much as it should be.

- [Man] Some of the movie theaters that we think

of as palaces were actually

originally vaudeville theaters.

- Vaudeville houses that I've noticed have

a much higher ceiling.

The balcony is a lot steeper and that's so people

on stage and the people on the balcony could see

the people on the stage and people

on the vaudeville performers,

their voice could reach up to the upper portions

of the balcony.

- Vaudeville theater, you had a desire for intimacy

with the stage.

There was an attitude of see and be seen.

You'd tell a vaudeville house from a strictly movie house

because the vaudeville house has box seats

on the side and sometimes on the main floor as well.

The people sitting in the box didn't have the finest

view of the stage,

but everybody in the audience could see them,

which they cherished.

- This particular building that we're in was built

before the movie theater era,

so this was built for live performance.

A movie theater house is bigger in that way.

It's longer and narrow.

It's easier to see the screen.

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- The vaudeville circuit built a number of these houses.

They would travel from city to city to city.

One of our local vaudeville companies was Finch and Marco.

Finch and Marco was based downtown.

They had a studio in Hollywood area.

They sometimes worked with Sid Grauman and sometimes

were competition, but they would do

what they called ideas,

what Sid Grauman would call prologues.

The individual vaudeville acts turned

into these really programmed dramatic large shows.

- There were attempts at feature length films

in the early 1910s.

Sarah Bernhardt made a famous five reel film

about Queen Elizabeth, one of her famous roles

from the stage.

The Italians made films like "Cabiria," which were

imported here by a handful of theaters.

And then D. W. Griffith famously started becoming

more ambitious in trying slightly longer films,

then slightly longer and eventually making

"The Birth of a Nation."

So everybody realized that's where things were heading.

- Movies were considered third-rate entertainment.

Maybe the top entertainment would of course be opera,

play, classical music.

Somewhere below there and maybe the second rung might

be the vaudeville house.

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The movies in the early 1900s were primarily

for the lower middle classes.

- Bit by bit,

as movies established themselves and started

to shed their tawdry reputation as being kind

of low-class entertainment, people thought

about the idea of building what today

we call purpose-built (chuckles) theaters.

And that became you know, a whole new era.

- As you move into the 1910s, the movie business

really began to boom in terms

of the movie exhibition business.

Let's start with an example.

If you look at Roxy in the 1910s,

you can see the progression

of movie palaces by his own career.

The showmen were people who lived for their own

persona that they created.

They created a brand.

You could rely on the fact that if you went

to a Grauman theater that night or Roxy theater

or something put on by Balaban and Katz or certainly

with Finch on Marco, even if the film wasn't good,

the evening was gonna be great.

In 1913, in February in New York, the Regent Theater opens

and it's the first purpose-built deluxe

motion picture theater.

It actually was not a success,

so Roxy was brought in to essentially upgrade

its capabilities and certainly its revenues.

By the time you get to The Strand in 1941,

they thought we'll open The Strand for a few months.

We'll have people come for movies and then we'll go

to musical comedy.

We'll do live theater like we had planned.

Well, The Strand was a huge hit of 3,000 seats,

so they never returned it to its original intent.

It stayed a movie theater.

The critics are writing about the elaborate cars

and dress and people were coming,

that it's become fanciful for all classes.

Then you have the Rialto, which was opened in 1916,

the Crossroads of the World, 42nd and seventh,

its a huge success.

The Regent, the Strand, the Rialto and the Rivoli from 1913

to 1917, even just in the small area

of New York, you can see that this area,

there had always been dominated by legitimate theater

was suddenly being taken over more and more by movies.

That's what lead to the confidence

of Messmore Kendall and Edward Bowes had in opening

up the Capitol Theater in late 1919.

This is a 5,300 seat theater that they opened

without any studio backing.

So to have gone from a theater when you were hoping

the Regent would do well at 2,000 seats, to 5,300 seats

expressly for movies shows you that meteoric

rise of movie theaters from that period from 1913 to 1919.

The Capitol was the really beginning in a way

of that sense of scale the 20s brings you.

It's not to say there weren't many many other theaters,

the Grauman's Million Dollar here

in Los Angeles, Central Park and Chicago.

But there is something about the Capitol opening

at the very end of the 1910s that just is a signpost

of what's going to be coming in the 1920s.

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- Balaban and Katz was a chain that got started

on the southwest side.

The first theater was gonna be the Central Park Theater.

This was 1917.

The second theater was the Riviera and it became

so successful that Barney said, oh, it's gotta be bigger,

bigger and bigger.

And it became the Tivoli Theater.

It was 3,600 seats.

He said, okay, let's do another theater.

Let's do it downtown and make it our headquarters,

and that was the Chicago Theater, which opened

the same year, 1921.

The money was just flowing in,

so they talked with Rapp and Rapp.

Just build us the biggest, most extravagant theater,

and it became the Uptown.

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- In 1920, Roxy was brought back

to New York to reopen the the Capitol Theater.

He was the director of presentations from 1920 to 1925.

And one of the things that he pioneered

at the Capitol Theater was the transmission

of his stage shows and his own performers

over WEAF, which later became part of NBC.

But when Roxy left,

he did leave so he could start his own theater,

the Roxy Theater.

And not only that it was gonna be named for him

which of course was a nice moment if you have

a famous nickname,

but it was because he had that kind of draw.

They needed his name and his track record to create

all the money he needed for what would then be

the largest movie palace in the country.

That theater opened on March 11th, 1927,

with again almost 6,000 seats, and it was a sensation.

It was kind of the peak of the movie palace moment.

There were three conductors.

There were three different organs, massive Kimball organs.

There were stage shows, they were ballets,

they were operettas.

There was every manner of entertainment on that stage,

even the integration of live performance backed

by a motion picture projection in addition

to the feature film.

But Roxy himself was never satisfied with anything.

And so as the years went on from '27 and '28 to '29,

he began to look for a challenge.

He was plucked away by the Rockefellers

and by RCA and RKO for a new project,

which would be two theaters opened at the same time

at the new Rockefeller Center.

He had always integrated live performance and movies.

And now here in 1932, Radio City Music Hall was

only going to be a place for live performance,

a kind of elevated vaudeville.

And RKO Roxy Theater which was 3,500 seats,

was going to be a place for movies with of course

its famous Roxyettes, which he had had

since the original Roxy.

(upbeat music)

(shoes tapping)

- When Radio City Music Hall opened December 27th, 1932,

SL Rothafel was his name and everybody called

him Roxy and the music hall was basically his idea.

It had the Rockettes.

It had a ballet company.

It had a singer, a chorus of singers.

It had a full symphony orchestra.

That's what was on stage.

It had costume designers, set designers.

It had a full costume shop up on the eighth floor

where they made all the costumes.

In the basement was a full scenic studio.

Everything was made there.

He wanted Radio City Music Hall to be

the Showplace of the Nation and that's the name it got.

And he didn't want films,

he wanted just stage presentations.

And so that's what they did on opening night

and it was a bomb.

It was a serious, horrible bomb.

And so Roxy

exited the theater that night

in a stretcher and went into the hospital

at three o'clock in the morning.

And so the board of directors went,

the only way we're gonna make this thing work

is to put movies in here.

And "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" starring

Barbara Stanwyck was the first film.

It opened January 11th, 1933,

and that's all they wrote.

It became the most famous movie palace in the world.

- The reason they were able to build great theaters

like this was that they were owned by the movie studios

who developed the product that was shown in them.

- The people who ran the movie studios and ran

the film companies, many of them were known

in part because they named their companies

after themselves: Marcus Loew of course, had Loew's.

- MGM was a division of a company

called Loew's Incorporated.

Well Loew's was a movie theater company,

so Loew's ran the theaters and built and operated

the theaters that just happened to show MGM movies.

- Marcus Loew built five

Wonder Theaters in New York, all opened at the same time,

one in each borough.

One missed. The one in Staten Island never got built.

It was in Jersey City.

- [Leonard] Fox, the same.

William Fox was a hard-driving man who built a large

Fox theater chain.

- Fox didn't build that many theaters,

but they were glorious ones

in Detroit, in St. Louis and Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Grandest of the grand and they would show

their own product.

- RKO Radio Pictures was kind of a conglomerate

for its time because it was built of several

components: The Keith/Albee vaudeville theater

circuit and the Orpheum theater circuit

and the Radio Corporation of America or RCA run

by David Sarnoff.

Warner Bros of course,

which also swallowed up the first national

picture company from the silent era,

had a buying spree of movie theaters in the late '20s

and early '30s.

- [Ross] But in many cases,

there were companies like

Paramount, so Adolph Zukor's name was a little less-known.

- Zukor presided over various combinations

of companies that became Paramount,

and Paramount owned its own chain of theaters.

- They used the theaters, for instance,

to actually understand their audience.

Before there were Gallup and research groups set up,

you know, Fox could phone a movie theater operator

in Oakland and say, "How's my movie gonna play up there?

What do you think?"

(soft orchestral music)

- Columbia didn't own its own theaters.

Universal didn't own its own theaters.

So they were dependent mostly on independent theaters,

mom and pop theaters, smaller theaters,

and occasionally lucked out and had a film that was

so appealing or created such demand,

they got into the bigger theaters.

- They were identifiable brands and they brought

you a certain kind of film.

From the 1910s through the 1940s, many of the best

deluxe first-run movie theaters in the country were

run by Warner Brothers, Fox, RKO, Loew's, Paramount.

So they constrained a lot of trade.

- The other type of theater you had that was built

you know, in the early 1900s, in the 19-teens was

the neighborhood-style theater.

- I call this a neighborhood movie palace.

To me, it's got the same romance and the same

elegant details, but it's on a smaller scale.

- Some of them were very modest affairs,

but they still offered the experience of going

into a nice place and sitting down comfortably

and watching a movie on a screen bigger than life.

There was a tremendous appetite, a hunger for movie-going.

And people in the '20s, '30s and '40s, even drifting

into the '50s used to go to the movies sometimes two

or three times a week.

People would've come to see their favorite stars:

Douglas Fairbanks in films like

"The Mark of Zorro," "The Black Pirate,"

"The Thief of Bagdad."

Mary Pickford in films like

"Little Annie Rooney" and "Sparrows."

Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid," "The Gold Rush"

and "The Circus."

The list goes on and on and on.

And studios got into the business of building

and developing stars.

- The star system was born in the late 1900s,

early 1910s as you begin to have

Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin,

these became national stars and the national stardom meant

collecting, collecting fan magazines and photographs.

- There was merchandising.

People think merchandising is a modern phenomenon.

Oh to look back at what you could buy or get

as a giveaway or a premium in the teens and '20s

featuring all of these stars.

(soft orchestral music)

I collect stuff like that.

I keep finding more of it and more and more and more.

Whatever you wanna call it, cigarette cards,

collector cards, souvenir stamps, souvenir spoons.

(chuckles softly) Anything you can think of.

Movie stars were our heroes, our heroines,

our idols and that hasn't changed all that much.

- Each of the studios would have under contract

a stable of stars and they were assigned parts.

They would pretend, ooh yes,

I was looking over a script and I decided I might do this.

No no, the boss told 'em, you get on stage,

and this is your job.

- Mary Pickford was very shrewd young woman

and she was possibly the first to realize,

and it came as a great shock

to her that the Famous Players Company run

by her friend and in some ways mentor

Adolph Zukor, was booking dozens of films

to theaters on the lure of getting her films.

And if they didn't book her film,

they wouldn't get the other stuff and vice versa.

But her films were the ones that were really bringing

in the big bucks and the big crowds.

So she renegotiated her deal with Mr. Zukor and said,

no no no, you can't sell a whole block.

They used to call it block booking.

You can't sell a block of movies on the strength

of my movie.

My movie gets sold individually.

That was a milestone.

Charlie Chaplin renegotiated as he moved from one

company to another to the point where he was getting

an unheard of sum of money in the teens before income tax,

by the way.

And eventually in 1919, Mary, her future husband

Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and the great

director PW Griffith banded together and started

a company called United Artists.

It was not just a name, it was a philosophy.

They were artists who united together to sort

of control their own destiny, control their own finances,

have complete power over the movies they chose

to make and how they would be released and distributed.

(soft orchestral music)

In 1926, it's said Mary Pickford traveled

to Europe and saw

some of the Moorish-style cathedrals in Spain

and fell in love with them.

When she returned to Hollywood, she said,

I want a theater that looks like that.

So she was the driving force that created

the theater we're sitting in right now,

which was the flagship of that company

the United Artists Theater on the corner of what was

then 10th Street, now called Olympic and Broadway.

- Downtown in cities,

there always tended to be a cluster of theaters.

There would be an MGM theater and a Loew's theater

and an RKO theater because they were competing

and they wanted to be near each other.

You see many photo, vintage photo or even a photo

postcard showing a lineup of theaters on a main street

of a major city.

(soft orchestral music)

- [Ross] Los Angeles is special because it was

the entertainment capital of the world.

We do have two historic theater districts,

so all the movies were premiering not

in Hollywood but in downtown and there was

over 100 theaters just downtown LA which is amazing.

And then later, Hollywood came into being.

Sid Grauman built the Egyptian and then

the Chinese and that sorta put Hollywood on the map

as a place to go see films.

- The movie palace,

especially the neighborhood movie palace became part

of the neighborhood.

Often it was named after sometimes a street

that it was on,

sometimes the neighborhood itself and they always had

a big sign in front and that was the name

of the neighborhood.

- One way to make it a destination on a main street

of a medium-size town or a big city was to have a big,

elaborate, brightly-lit marquee and then

what they used to call a blade.

- [Ross] Well the blade marquee is the vertical

one that's attached to the front of the building

and it's usually just the name of the theater.

- Chicago had an interesting situation happen.

The theater we're in now called

the Music Box, you see the letters there,

but there's no backplate behind it just the stroke

of the letters.

Chicago initiated attacks on the square foot area of signs.

So the theaters rebuilt them just with the letters

so they'd have a minimum of square footage.

- They usually had a box office.

Many times it was a standalone little island booth.

Sometimes it was built into a sidewall.

If you're lucky, you had a forecourt,

an outside lobby area that was off the sidewalk.

Then walk into an interior lobby.

And in the 1920s and '30s, the interior lobby was

really just a congregation space.

There was no concession stands.

- When you walk

into Radio City Music Hall, the first room

that you see is the lobby and they call

it the Grand Foyer, and it is very dramatic.

A secret about that: There are mirrors three stories

tall and they are backed with gold leaf,

not silver like most mirrors.

And they wanted it that way so it ensured a soft,

warm glow fell over the guests.

And it does, it has a very unusual,

interesting lighting when you go in there.

It's just beautiful.

It's kinda hushes everybody as a matter of fact.

- The rug in the lobby.

That's my favorite part: the bejeweled flying carpet

as I like to refer to it.

I believe it's plastic,

but it's textured to appear as if it's fabric.

And of course it's got glass jewels that shine

whenever the light hit them.

It's sort of similar to the columns.

It's a little bit more textured,

but these glass jewels are throughout the property.

The lamps are actually Tiffany lamps which I did

not realize, so that's pretty cool.

My mom told me that.

- The Michigan Theater was built in the late '20s

and that was built as a movie palace.

And so it was modeled off of the opera houses

of the 1800s and so you've got this barrel ceiling.

Both of the staircases sweep down in a bit of an arc.

- This lobby is breathtaking, spectacular.

You don't see lobbies like this.

I mean maybe I've seen them in Europe at some

of the cathedrals.

It's unique to this country.

So this is the money shot.

This is the highlight of the building,

but there are others.

- [Man] There is a mezzanine lobby up the stairs

that would feed the balcony,

Or if it was a bigger theater,

it might feed a mezzanine level and a balcony.

You might even have three lobbies.

And then you have the main auditorium,

(soft orchestral music)

the balcony,

and your gallery or it could be

a mezzanine, another balcony.

They just had different names for these parts.

- [Rosemary] It's a very wide open space.

Because of that fabulous ceiling, it just feels big.

- The level of detail throughout the property

is as I said earlier, it's excruciating.

Like you know, when you come in here every time,

I've owned it for two 1/2 years and every time I come

in here, it's something new that I notice.

And that's just the level of detail and you know,

they really took their time.

And when I first came in here, I thought that you know,

maybe it was some like method of 3D printing plaster

that they use because of the intricacy and the detail

in all of the designs.

But when you look really closely at some of the stuff,

you can see that it's actually hand-painted.

So there were people in here hand painting every facet

of the design, which is just incredible.

I mean I can't even imagine how much labor

that took, you know?

They don't build 'em like this any more.

- These films were all silent.

But pretty early on,

the smart owners of theaters even storefront

theaters realized that sitting in silence was not

very entertaining, and they hired pianists.

Eventually, the pianists became theater organists.

And organ companies like Wurlitzer started

manufacturing theater organs specifically

for movie theaters.

(cheerful organ music)

- [Rosemary] The organs played before and after the film.

- [Man] Organ grills on either side

of the proscenium you'll see some sort

of big ornamental frame.

- There was a Wurlitzer organ and apparently

that's in some rich guy's house in California.

- Because these pipes are in the walls of the theater,

you could feel the vibration of that organ

throughout the entire theater.

And if you were in the dressing room,

you could feel it vibrating on the wall.

That was very dramatic. It was very cool.

- And then in the great-great-theaters,

there were complete orchestras.

Sometimes symphonic symphony orchestras

(soft orchestral music)

all meant to accompany the silent film.

- The time that the movie palaces were created was

a time when people needed an escape going

through the depression, going through the World Wars.

This was a place that everyone rich or poor could

come and escape those things and go into another world.

(soft orchestral music)

- You didn't live in a mansion.

You didn't live in a palace,

but you could walk to that movie theater

and almost experience what the rich people experience.

- [Man] When you went into the theater,

the whole atmosphere was yours.

You could live in a small apartment with a hot

radiator by the window.

But you could enter into a palace or you could sit

on a throne, it didn't cost very much.

- For less than a dollar,

they could come to a place like this and feel pampered too.

Uniformed ushers, ticket takers,

people who are trained with almost military precision

to be courteous and polite to a guy who maybe was

a streetcar conductor.

Everyone was treated well.

That was part of the idea too,

that an ordinary person could come to a place like this.

- We've done some oral history work

with Cherry Balaban Robins and she is the daughter

of AJ Balaban, who was part

of the Balaban and Katz chain here in Chicago.

And they built all of the great movie palaces here.

And she said that her father always said

that everyone that came in the door was a prince

and a princess and they all paid the same amount

and they all deserve to be treated like a prince

and a princess.

They wore crisp uniforms.

They had white gloves.

They had flashlights.

They had rules and regulations and training.

They were the frontlines.

They represented the owners and operators.

- They were inspected every morning.

They had to get dressed into their uniforms

and they'd appear in that beautiful grand foyer.

And like the Army,

they would go down and make sure

that they were all properly.

And if they weren't, fix it.

- One of the appeals of going to the movie house was

that you were treated this way and that you could go

to an elaborate bathroom.

- A lot of these theaters had what was known

as the women's powder room,

which was a room directly in front

of the women's bathroom or the men's smoking room.

- It used to be a treat.

When I was young and my parents used to take me there,

my brother and I would,

"Can we go downstairs to the lounge?"

(chuckles) 'Cause we wanted to go into those rooms

'cause they were just like something you never saw before.

(soft orchestral music)

And the women's lounge looks like something

out of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie.

The men's lounge, there's a painting in there called

"Men without Women."

It's very Art Deco.

It's got all symbols on it of manhood: a razor

and a pipe and all that,

all the things that men do without us.

- [Man] And there were dressing tables with mirrors.

They actually supplied makeup for the ladies.

- Theaters had little banners on the marquee said,

come on in, it's cool inside.

And it was.

Whether it was the early process of air cooling

or later air conditioning,

that was your mecca during a heatwave because not

many houses had air conditioning in those days.

- What's wonderful about this era of movie palaces

in the '20s and '30s is the amazing creativity and design.

They were building fantasies.

I like to call

the sort of general architecture style Hollywood fantasy.

- That's the beautiful thing about an older art house

is you go in and it usually has that theme.

- Then you had this particular type that walked

in and it was like walking into a Spanish courtyard

or a Persian courtyard.

John Eberson, his style was like the theater

that we're sitting in now: a dark-blue ceiling

with twinkling electric stars in it,

a projector that caused clouds to move across.

- [Man] It looked like a night sky and around the edges,

it would look like a small village in Spain.

- John Everson, who's the architect of this building,

designed it as a study in Moorish revival

architecture and you can see it in the facade

behind me here.

You know, it's very like courtyardish,

very Moorish, Middle Eastern influenced

and if you look very closely,

there are different parts around the auditorium

and the lobby.

They're written in English,

but they're stylized as Arabic.

There's one behind me and it says, please be seated,

I beg you.

And then there's several others.

- Another architect

from New York, Thomas W. Lamb, who probably did

more theaters than anybody else, was more refined.

He chose the Adams style.

The Adam brothers being decorators in the 18th century

in England who did a lot of what they call

the great houses over there.

- I don't know why they would choose these themes.

I think it was just because they were building so many

of these theaters.

- The architects could go wild.

There was a certain drive for novelty

and a tremendous drive for grandeur and it depended

often who the architect was.

There was a great firm in Chicago, two brothers,

Cornelius and George Rapp, Rapp and Rapp.

They got enamored of the Palace of Versailles.

- Rapp and Rapp designed this theater,

the Loew's Jersey, as well

as the Kings and the Uptown in Chicago.

(soft orchestral music)

- And then you have these amazing murals,

many of them by Heinzbergen and his company

and of all styles.

So he had things that were very baroque,

very classical, all the way to the ones that he did

in the Wilton theater which are streamlined,

deco, geometric shapes.

- The fresco you see behind me depicts some

of the United Artists stars of that period.

Not just the four founders but some others like the young,

dashing Ronald Coleman is there.

Rudolph Valetino is there.

And when modern audiences get to see a film

in a theater like this today, it's a special experience.

Oh my gosh, look at that.

Well 100 years ago, it was an everyday experience.

I can't imagine it either (chuckles)

but this is where you would go on an ordinary

Friday or Saturday night to see a new movie.

- The big transformation came with sound movies in 1927.

Al Jolson was there on the screen.

He sang a song.

That hadn't been done before.

- Wait a minute, wait a minute.

You ain't heard nothin' yet.

Wait a minute, I tell ya, you ain't heard nothin'.

You wanna hear "Toot Toot Tootsie"?

All right, hold on, hold on.

(upbeat music)

♪ Toot toot tootsie, goodbye. ♪

- And people hadn't.

They had not heard anything yet from a movie.

It was a precious saying that is made

in that one sense.

(upbeat music)

Well after the First World War, people thought

that the prosperity and the joyous good times would

go on forever.

Eventually the Depression was gonna come along.

Nobody knew that was gonna happen.

- Once you got into the '30s, that's when it was

getting harder and harder to be a real success.

- These were very very expensive buildings,

and they had to pay for all the upkeep in terms of heat,

electricity, fixing carpets and upholstery

and paying staff.

It's an incredibly expensive operation.

When the '30s hit and the patrons died off,

they were trying to figure out how to keep

these buildings alive.

- [Man] Hollywood suffered from a series of real

body blows in the late '40s and into the early '50s.

The first was the US Consent Decree.

- [Man] Paramount was sued by the government

under an antitrust lawsuit and it went

to the Supreme Court and they decided

that these movie studios could not own theaters any more.

- No longer could MGM count on its films being shown

in Loew's theaters and taking money out of one pocket

and putting it in another,

which changed the entire way movies were made

and financed in Hollywood.

Then there was television and television caught

on pretty darn fast.

By the early 50s, not everybody,

but a lot of people bought television sets

and that became a magnet.

People would gather in Uncle Joe's apartment

because he had a television set.

- When that happened, I think,

that's when theaters started to decline.

- And then tastes changed and the streamlined look

of the '50s and '60s that was reflected in automobiles

and other kinds of modern design,

caused some theaters to change their marquees.

- Your little reader boards,

your little rectangular marquees were replaced

with angles so that people could see 'em

as they were driving quickly by.

Many of the marquees that have those angles,

those aren't the original marquees.

- In the early '20s and you know,

going into the '30s, you didn't have concessions

in the movie theater.

In the case of the Michigan, sometime in the '50s probably,

is when they added that in and you know,

they started selling popcorn and soda.

- [Man] The movie palaces were downtown.

After the Second World War, people began to move

into the suburbs.

- The American dream is to have your nice little

house and yard and your car.

People left the cities.

- And then the baby boom happened.

So the industry responded very smartly.

They developed drive-in theaters.

You could put the kid in the backseat and you could

watch the movie.

- This was just one blow after another to the way

they had done business as usual for decades.

- People did go to the movies.

The attendance was pretty much cut in half in those years.

Hollywood didn't quite know what to do.

Bunch of crazy guys in New York came up

with a system called Cinerama which came

out of World War II, a training device

that trained aerial gunners.

They converted it into three panels on a curved screen,

a regular curved screen and it became very immersive.

(soft orchestral music)

They tried selling this to Hollywood.

Everybody came out and looked at it and was

pretty impressed with it.

But my god, you know?

Your three projection booths,

you got all this film and a giant screen you gotta put

in and all this stuff.

It became impractical for them.

So they just kinda walked away from it.

And then when Cinerama hit in 1952, it went gangbusters.

I mean literally a movie playing in a movie theater

for three years straight you know

and you can't get tickets.

(chuckles) That reserved seat.

That's the shock that hit Hollywood.

It stayed pretty successful for about 12 years or more.

The immersive part of Cinerama sound is the fact

that sound would follow something on the screen,

so it almost had an extra dimension of realism.

As Lowell Thomas would say, It was more real than real.

Cinerama hit so hard.

Hollywood knew they had to do something.

- That's when they developed

CinemaScope and stereophonic sound.

- [Announcer] Celebrities and the man in the street

crowd Hollywood's famous boulevard to attend

the CinemaScope premiere

of How to "Marry A Millionaire," the first romantic

comedy to be filmed in the new miracle medium.

- [David] They came up with CinemaScope.

They started shooting "The Robe" and it became

a big success as well.

- These were all invented with the specific purpose

of drawing people out of their homes and back

into movie theaters.

If you wanted to show wide-screen CinemaScope, you had

to somehow widen your theater, your proscenium.

If you wanted to hear stereophonic sound,

you had to have a porous screen.

That's when the silver screens started to disappear.

- Paramount came up with something called VistaVision.

Then there was Technirama, Technoscope.

There's all these various wide-screen scopes

and ramas all over the place.

But it was expensive for theaters to do that.

This is in the '50s, so people were starting to come

back to the movies again.

But theaters really evolved and did lots of stuff

you know, in the '50s.

Maybe even in early '60s.

You could win plays.

There was a bingo night.

There was always something going

on at the local movie theater.

I can remember in the '50s, they had cartoon shows

for kids where you'd have like you know,

30 cartoons or something, you know?

Big extravaganza on a Saturday.

And of course parents loved that because all

the kids were down at the movie theater.

They can go off and do what they wanted to do

because the babysitter movie theater was gonna cover

'em with all the Tom and Jerry cartoons they could handle.

(lion roaring) (cheerful orchestral music)

(Tom meowing)

- I can remember goin' to the Alger Theater.

I think the admission was 12 cents on Saturday afternoon.

Five cartoons, three serials and a guy's dressed up

in tin foil martians or whatever they might be

and the sound of,

"Yay," coming from the audience every few seconds

as something significant happened.

- 3D in the '50s was an interesting thing and king

of the gimmicks was William Castle who came up

with all kinds of things: Emergo, Illusion-O, all

these various things that were kind of cheap tricks,

but they were fun cheap tricks.

One of 'em was with the movie

"The Tingler," a Vincent Price movie.

They would have these old aircraft parts

that had vibrators on 'em and they would put 'em

under bunch of seats in the auditorium.

At a certain point in the movie,

these would kick in and they'd vibrate and you'd get

a jolt, or skeletons flying from the balcony down

towards the stage.

A guy named Hans Laube invented

something called Scentovision.

And so they decided to come up with a scenario based

on an old detective novel.

And they added all these smell elements to the film

so that they could pump them into the theater.

And how they did that was a bunch of little vials

that would hit and it'd go through a tube and come

out on almost every other seat in the theater.

That's all part of showmanship.

They were thinking outside the box every minute.

Now roadshows were usually extra-large movies

like "Lawrence of Arabia," "Mutiny on the Bounty."

Those were real event movies.

If you wanted to see that movie,

you had to drive to the big city and there'd be

an overture to begin with to get you in the mood

for the movie.

And then the lights would dim slowly as the music

is building towards its crescendo and then

the curtains would open with perfect timing

and the MGM lion would growl.

(lion roaring)

You almost got goosebumps because they took the time

to do that right.

- Go into the mid to late 1960s, you have a period

of racial division, social division.

(somber piano music)

(crowd shouting)

- Some of the cities continued to thrive, others did not.

And in many cities,

the downtown areas became somewhat deserted.

In some cases, rundown.

(somber orchestral music)

People were known for patronizing the stores

that have been there because there was equivalent

out in the suburbs.

- Retail, as well as entertainment, killed the theaters.

- The movie theater that was popular in 1938 is now

you know, hardly gets anybody in it but bums and stuff

to get warm.

There was a point where someone told me

in Los Angeles in one of the theaters where a lot

of bums would come in 'cause you could get in for like

a dollar or something, you know.

They'd be urinating on the floor.

And at the end,

the cleaning crew literally took hoses

and just watered down the whole floor

for the next day's show.

I mean that's how bad it got in some cases.

(siren wailing)

- You've also got the elevation of crime.

And even if it isn't an elevation of crime,

it's a notion that crime is elevating.

That sort of sets the stage for the 1970s.

- The city was a mess during that time.

It was hard to get tourists to come in

because the city became dangerous to some people.

I lived there, so I was sort of used to it.

But there were certain sections in that area

that you didn't go to.

- People ask me you know, "How was the block?

Were people gettin' robbed all the time?"

And it's like well there's not really much

goin' on out there.

I mean the jerk chicken store across the street

is closed and you know,

there are a couple other buildings across the street

that you know, were once functioning when the theater

was open but are now closed.

There are communities like the south side

of Chicago across the nation.

But of course, this is one of the larger examples

of what happens when there is strategic disinvestment

in a community.

And unfortunately, the Regal sort of was

on the backend of all of that.

- The theaters had to change.

That's the way it goes: everything changes.

And so moving away from some of the first-run product,

they had to go to other programming.

- Some of them became what they called grind houses

as they did on 42nd Street in New York City.

(funky jazz music)

Some of them stayed open all night attracting

a somewhat seedy audience.

Some of them showed blaxploitation films

because they weren't gonna be shown

in the suburban theaters.

- Which are kinda huge success between say 1971 and 1975.

You've got martial arts films,

which are increasingly coming

over from Asia and also being homegrown and then

you have even hybrids, mixing of all those,

so soon there's a difference in terms

of even the content the movie theaters are showing.

- People could live vicariously through that too

because you know, there's the villain again.

There's the bad guy.

There's Bruce Lee.

(intense music) (Bruce Lee vocalizing)

So it did work for a while.

- The art house is growing, independent film is growing.

You have people who are going to film schools

and they're interested in seeing art films

and European films, avant-garde cinema,

experimental cinema, independent films, global films.

You have the adult films which are drawing off

the same kind of importation of European art films

which have higher sexual content.

All of a sudden,

those are becoming more mainstream and soon

the adult film industry figures

out that they can actually have mainstream

theatrical films in movie theaters capped of course

by the incredible success of "Deep Throat."

- [Rosemary] 42nd Street between Broadway

and Eighth Avenue, all those fabulous theaters

that were there turned

into porno houses and they let some

of the theaters just go.

- And then you got into the revival house era

and that's when I really became involved at a lot

of the historic theaters.

Best film education I ever got was

in the Rialto Theater, the Vista Theater,

the New Art Theater where they were

just showing classic movies every single day.

- Here on Broadway in Los Angeles, good example

of what happened to a lot of these theaters.

Some of them became Spanish language theaters.

- If you've got people that speak Spanish, then you're there

to serve the neighborhood.

But what's really happening overall

is that the giant movie palace makes very little sense

in almost all of these instances because you can't

pack most of the movie palaces downtown

with these kinds of movies.

- In some cases, the theaters changed hands.

They were no longer owned by big corporations

and a lot of them were allowed to deteriorate,

some rather sharply and some rather grimly.

(elegant orchestral music)

A lot of those theaters just closed down.

They shut down.

They'd lost their constituency.

They'd lost their vantage of a good location.

- [Man] These are large spaces.

And if you're not filling every seat, heating them

or cooling them, running the electricity

is very expensive.

- Just the cost of cleaning this thing.

All of the ornamentation collects dirt and dust

and the marquee with moving parts

and the electronic circuits exposed to the weather.

It's not surprising that those things started

to fall apart.

- When the roof was leaking,

you could put up with that for another year.

But they turned on the air conditioning

and it kinda worked,

then they went to fire up the boiler in October and bang,

it leaked all over the place and an awful lot

of these theaters closed.

- We had done one show at the Grenada Theater in 1973

on Valentine's Day and they wouldn't let us do

another show there, so I started looking

for another theater to bring our concerts

to and I came across this one.

It was owned by the same company that owned the Grenada.

We started on Halloween of 1975.

They were still showing movies here and they would

take out a movie whenever we had a concert.

Grateful Dead used to play here all the time.

Bob Marley played here regularly.

Frank Zappa, Genesis, Electric Light Orchestra,

Prince, Rick James, The Kinks.

When I walked in here that day,

the bathrooms were barely functioning and there were

some other issues.

So I said to the owner that you had to close this place.

It's not habitable.

It's gonna keep continuing to deteriorate.

- [Man] When a theater has been vacant for so long,

you have a lot of deferred maintenance is a really

polite way of saying it.

Then if you have vandalism, it gets even worse.

- A lot of the theaters that I photographed are

in pretty rough shape.

I have put my foot through a balcony floor.

I've had to climb over seats to get

to the production room because the stairs

are gone completely.

I've seen balconies that have completely caved in.

I've seen ceilings that have completely caved in.

I've also seen ones that look like someone shut them down

and walked out like two days before and they're fine.

I know the Loew's Valencia, 3,000 seat theater

and they just gave it to a church for $10.

But I think a church coming into a theater

and restoring it was the best option for a lot

of these spaces.

- And United Artists, that was also used as a church

by Dr. Jean Scott, the televangelist.

He was a pretty good tenant.

He ended up putting a lot of money into restoration

of the theater.

Another one that is a successful church

is the Academy in Inglewood.

That's an S. Charles Lee streamlined modern theater.

Gorgeous theater.

It's been in continuous use as a church

and they have really been good stewards.

They've taken great care of it.

They've restored elements of it and it's a beauty.

The church tenant.

I wouldn't have thought of it,

but it was a really interesting use

for the historic theaters.

And in some cases very good.

- But eventually the single-screen theaters had

to compete with what was going on in the suburbs.

- The new theaters that came along were multiplexes

built from the ground up and they were nice.

They offered all sorts of comfort and amenities

that some of these older theaters couldn't.

And what's more, they were in the right locations.

But the worst part was that instead of having

eight movies playing or 12 movies playing,

a single-screen theater would live or die from week

to week and a lot of them died.

- Because they weren't filling these theaters

with 3,500 seats any more.

They started to divide these theaters up.

- [Leonard] Cut the balconies in half,

made them two screens.

They cut the main theater sometimes into three

or four screens.

- It ended up making pretty horrible movie theaters

because the walls that would divide them

were four inches thick with not a lot of sound absorption.

So you ended up hearing the explosions in one versus

the explosions in the other.

Sight lines were terrible.

Seats weren't really moved.

It was a bad experience.

When the big movies started happening

in "Jaws" and "Star Wars" and all of those other

films started coming out, most people were already saying,

I'm gonna go off to the new multiplexes in the suburbs.

That's where the parking is.

That's where the air conditioning is.

That's where it's safe.

That's where I can go every hour on the hour.

And that's where the investment was falling

and that's where the banks were lending.

And it's where the people who were living who were

gonna buy the toys fueled the whole blockbuster industry.

From 1975 to 1995, they had this very underwhelming

kind of basic multiplex experience which was spare,

spartan and designed for efficiency and profit.

- So these independent theaters are starting

to lose traction and they started to divest themselves

of a lot of theaters and they sold them off

part and parcel. (somber music)

- I think the bigger cultural loss

is the common experience, the shared experience.

(soft piano music)

- [Matt] There'll be less and less movies

that actually go into theaters and more and more

will come out on whatever streaming platform

you wanna use.

- I mean I can sit in my living room.

15,000 different things I could stream

in addition to cable.

But at the core of all of that,

there's human interaction that you don't get.

- There's always things that you did when you were

a kid that you remember for your whole life

and you carry that good memory with you.

And I think with theaters, if the theater is still around,

you want people to experience that as well.

Whether it's a movie or going to a concert at one

of these places you know, fighting to keep them alive.

I think that's a great thing.

- Radio City Music Hall became the most famous

movie palace in the world and was successful all

the way through until all that happened.

In the mid-1970s, things started to change completely.

People that ran it said, we're losing money.

We can't get good movies,

so we're just gonna tear this down and build a glass box.

- And after all these years,

there was a sad announcement about that music hall today.

- I'm announcing the closing

of Radio City Music Hall at the end of the 1978

Easter show on April 12th.

- What else are you gonna do?

They said, we're gonna close it after the Easter show,

so you're all outta work.

My feeling was they can't tear this building down.

So I love this building, let's try to save it.

When I called the meeting, all the employees came.

I said, "We have nothing to lose.

We're all gonna be outta work on April 12th,

so let's do something."

And I started the crusade and serious battle

to save the theater.

For us, the passion was to move forward and do

something good and save the building.

You don't know where you're going

when you start something like that, and you just keep going.

We had fabulous people help us and it was made

a city landmark and then it was

on the National Historic Landmark list.

And it's saved forever, they can't do anything to it.

Though it doesn't run films any more which breaks

my heart, maybe one of these days it'll come back.

I think people would get a kick out of going back

in there and seeing it so big.

- I think it would be somewhat shocking for many of us

to go to a 5,000 seat theater to see a movie.

Very different experience.

- I worked at the Chicago for a long time,

testified before the city council.

The theater organ that's in there and got it landmark.

And when the theater was saved,

we knew that the organ was saved.

It was just wonderful to go back in there and see

all those people that walked in

and their eyes would open up.

- And it's also good to see things like

the Cinerama Dome surviving because it was goin'

to be torn down.

They were gonna keep the Dome, but they were gonna put

a Koo Koo Roo chicken or something

in there and the whole town fought against it.

Now the whole town may not have gone to a movie

there that often, but when they saw it was threatened,

they all got together, put you know,

practically protest marches and convinced

the theater company not to do anything

with the Cinerama Dome.

And boy, they're glad they didn't.

- Fortunately, a number of them survived intact

and number of them survived intact enough

that they can be brought back to their original glory

and some of them have been.

- The building was built in 1927 originally

as the Avalon Theater and it turned

into the New Regal Theater about 60 years later, 1987.

It was about a 12 million dollar restoration

that they had to do, which is why it's so beautiful.

The City of Chicago saved this property by landmarking it.

Chicago's of course the city known for its architecture,

so that designation I think has really protected

this building from demolition.

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The FDIC had taken over a bank which had foreclosed

on the property and it was newly-listed.

At the time, my mother forwarded me an email saying

that the building was being offered and I jumped

right into it.

I mean I knew that the building being closed was really

a blow to the community.

I'm a private equity investor,

so I like to figure out how things work

and how I can make them better.

In particular with a focus on doing that for social good,

and I saw this as an opportunity to really

revive the neighborhood.

I think the Regal is the foundation of the south side

of Chicago and by extension, the city itself.

We had an opportunity to revitalize the building

and I think we can turn around what's happening

this side of town.

There are no cultural entertainment outlets you know,

basically in this community.

And since the building has been closed,

this was a huge economic engine for the area

and it really devastated the surrounding neighborhood.

We've got about six or seven million dollars

and upwards of 10 that we're going to need to put

into the building which fortunately is not as much

as it could be.

But that being said, it is quite a substantial amount.

Our hope is to reopen the building to the community

not just for entertainment purposes,

but also to culturally enrich the youth and to give

them a creative outlet outside of whatever

it is they might be doing now which isn't too positive.

- Restoration can mean many things.

For instance, the Loew's Kings in Brooklyn,

incredible restoration job in most senses.

But they did add elevators, they did add cup holders.

There are certain concessions that we just have to make.

- These places that you look around like we're in today,

they have a certain kind of architectural splendor

that's not easily created with drywall.

- I salute anybody and everybody who has a hand

in saving these great theaters and finding a way

to keep them alive.

It's not enough to save them,

you have to keep them going somehow.

We have to find a way to breathe life into them,

but it's worth the effort.

It's really worth the effort.

Because once you tear it down, you can't rebuild it.

Once it's gone, it's gone.

- Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation, it was

founded in 1987 by a group of people who were upset

that within a span of just a few weeks or months,

there were three theaters on Broadway that were closed.

The theater business downtown was dwindling,

but these things were closed and turned into swap meets

and turned into retail.

And it happened so quickly that there was this sort

of desperate reaction.

We need to do something.

It is the largest movie palace district in the world.

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With 18 standing theaters,

not all used as theaters but within a eight-block range.

It's really an amazing resource that most people

don't know about.

On the top of our watch list right now,

Hollywood Warner Theater which was more recently known

as the Hollywood Pacific 1-2-3 that the owners

originally came to the community and said,

we're gonna demolish it and keep the facade only.

A number of us said that wasn't acceptable and we are

now in negotiations with the owner to do

a feasibility study.

Fox Inglewood really really are interested in making

that a successful theater again.

It's been closed for quite a while.

There's a number of issues that need to be resolved

as far as the safety of the theater and how it could

be brought back and restored.

So we're really watching that one carefully.

The younger generation actually sees the value

and is seeking it out.

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We are screening more and more classics than anyone

could get on Netflix for free.

They can go and see it in a movie theater

with 1,000 total strangers.

And every time they open their theaters,

they're getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds

of young people that wanna come out.

And people are coming back.

My kids' generation are frequenting these kinds

of shows because they want that experience.

When I started this 30 years ago,

preservation was a dirty word.

And if you called yourself a preservationist,

you were some radical crazy person.

- There's something about people who love

saving buildings, especially theaters.

- The Theater Historical Society goes back

to Ben Hall who was a cultural historian and wrote

the wonderful book about "The Best Remaining Seats."

Book came about in response to when he looked outta

the window in his office.

Straight down, he was looking at the roof

of the Roxy Theater while they were demolishing it.

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We've grown to have a significant archive,

a publication and an annual gathering.

Our goals are to document and to celebrate these theaters.

- I personally believe that landmark status

is a really great thing to have.

Not only does it offer up certain you know,

benefits and if you can get tax credits to help

offset the costs of restoration.

Those are wonderful things.

But it acknowledges you know,

if you have a plaque on the front of your building

that says, this is a landmark structure.

This place is important.

Even to the casual passerby, it adds a little more cachet,

a little more credibility.

- A lot of them in New York City have landmark status

for the exterior.

So that means that a group would come in,

do whatever they want to the inside as long

as the facade is preserved.

- Saving a facade and destroying the theater,

it breaks my heart.

Is it better to keep just the facade?

I suppose it is,

but it just makes me redouble my efforts to try

to save the theaters that we have.

A couple of examples of that, painful to me every time,

is the Westchester near LAX.

Big, beautiful towering deco structure.

They still have the box office and everything else

is a medical office inside.

There's nothing in there.

Another example is the Golden Gate in Whittier and it's now

just the theater building and it's a CVS Pharmacy.

Painful to go into when we see the rows of drugs

and fluorescent lights.

But if you look above the fluorescent lights,

you can still see the theater and the organ

and stuff like that.

I was in there once tryin' to take pictures

and I noticed this little six year old girl looking up

at the ceiling with me you know, while mom was shopping.

And you know, just sorta watched as she was

exploring this theater.

She was getting it.

She was seeing what was above.

And at one point she came over to me

and she said, "It's creepy."

And I said, "Yeah, it is."

She got it.

She got a feeling for what was

above the fluorescent theater.

So in that case,

maybe it is good to save 'em in whatever condition we can.

And maybe someday they can be brought back as theaters.

- The Art House Convergence is a resource

for community-based mission-driven cinemas.

I think people have really begun to value these theaters.

We've seen an increase in the number of independent

movie theaters over the last 10 years.

A lot of them lay dormant for a couple years usually

in the '70s, maybe the '80s.

And then there would be a group in town that would

rally around the theater.

There's a couple different types of movie theaters.

You have the Repertory House and that's like here.

We're in the New Bev in Los Angeles.

So that means that they're screening titles that are

not currently first-run.

But a lot of our theaters are showing foreign films,

documentaries, American indies.

Without a doubt, you have to have passion to run

an independent movie house.

Movies are an important cornerstone for a community

and that having a movie theater space which acts

as more than just a movie theater.

It's not just that you're seeing things on screen,

it's that you're doing Q&As after.

It's that you're having conversations

about the movies out in the lobby after.

It becomes a community gathering space.

- The best thing that happened to some

of these movie palaces is that they became

performing arts centers.

They added wings and dressing rooms backstage.

And sometimes they tried to deepen the apron

of the stage so that they could accommodate

touring Broadway shows,

let's say or concert orchestra or ballet.

- The key to keeping these large theaters alive

and thriving is a multiuse model.

If you can offer a wide variety,

whether it's concerts and revival movies

and special event movies.

If you can keep that variety going,

that's how you fill these seats.

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- The remainder of these movie palaces,

a lot of them have already been saved

or already been demolished.

There are very few huge buildings.

The Uptown Chicago being one of them where people

are still desperately hoping to save what are

absolutely irreplaceable architectural structures.

- You'll never see something like this again.

The detail that they put in here.

The things they thought of.

This was the nicest movie palace ever built

in the country and the architects even said that you know,

it's not for today, but for all time.

It was four million dollars to build in 1924.

It's the largest freestanding theater in the country.

It has more square feet

than Radio City, but Radio City has more seats.

In 2008 when we purchased the theater,

if you remember, the economy started to collapse.

So we bought it at the worst possible time.

I didn't know what we were gonna do to save the theater.

I just knew it needed to be saved.

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This theater is in relatively good condition.

We need to put in all new mechanicals, all new plumbing,

all new electrical.

We need to add elevators.

We need to clean and restore the areas that need it.

Those are the things that we're working on

and we think it's a 60 to 65 million dollar restoration.

We're bringing it back to the way it was built

and that's what it should be.

There'll be some minor changes that need to take place.

For the most part,

I'd say it's all gonna be the way it was

because it was designed so well.

We can't beat it.

It's good that we have the original

architectural drawings because all we gotta do

is follow what Rapp and Rapp did.

One of the most important things about getting

the doors open here is this theater is the catalyst

for bringing Uptown back.

So once that's done, once the theater is open,

it will spur all kinds of investment in the neighborhood.

But we think that it's perfect for concerts

and private events.

This is going to be

Chicago's music/entertainment district

because of the other theaters that are here.

Right down the street, you got the Aragon Ballroom.

'Cross the street, you've got the Riviera Theater.

Couple doors down is the Green Mill and there are

other theaters and other properties in the area

that will go back and become theaters again.

- Movie palaces are completely connected to the community.

You have generations of the same family

who will have stories.

In the Rialto, this happens all the time.

I have people tell me,

"Oh, my grandmother went on her first date here."

Or, "My parents proposed after going to the Rialto."

So you have all of these memories that are tied

very closely to a Rialto experience

or to a theater experience.

The community needs the theater just as much

as a theater needs the community.

- Culturally, if we lose these places,

it takes away a sense of identity.

When you see a building like a classic movie theater,

it immediately puts you and gives you a sense

of time and place.

It positions you as part of history.

It lets you feel the connectivity between all

of the people that were there before you.

- If you think about it,

things that are coming and going: trends, passing fads,

that kinda thing.

The movies are always going to be

a destination for people.

People will always wanna see movies in the movie theater.

There may be other trendy things that pop up

that are keeping people from going for a period of time,

but they always come back to it.

Just like you always go back to a museum,

you always wanna go see the art in the place

where that art is best viewed.

- It's more than just caring

about it because there's been great personal

sacrifice that's come along with tryin' to keep

this theater up.

It's something that future generations should always

get to see fulfilling the statement of the architects.

Not for today, but for all time.

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- So one year when our daughter Jessie was about nine,

there was a Laurel and Hardy evening

at the Los Angeles Theater.

Now she had seen Laurel and Hardy before,

so she already liked them.

But she sat in the theater and heard over 2,000 people

rocking with laughter at these films that night.

I don't think she's ever forgotten it.

I know I've never forgotten.

I mean you can go to see a funny movie today.

You can go to see you know,

a new Melissa McCarthy movie or The Hangover or any

kinda modern movie and you can laugh.

But to be in a theater with over 2,000 people

laughing like that is a pretty amazing experience.

- I think the future of movie-going

is in independent cinemas.

That's where people are gonna be in 10 years

because those are the people that are you know,

rooted in their community.

They know the people's names who come through the door.

So if you're a theater, regardless if you're part

of a large chain or not,

make sure that you reflect your community.

- I got involved in the restoration

of Cinerama films besides the fact that nobody

else wanted to touch it was the fact that I had done

a documentary about the history of Cinerama and we had

to find out some clever ways to show examples.

And so when the documentary was over,

I'm ready to go on with the rest of my life, right?

And then the need came up for these films,

were rotting away in vaults

and nothing was happening with them.

So the company that owns the assets then put

a certain amount of money into a couple of tests

and experiments, took that on as sort of a you know,

crusade I guess.

And now to the point where we've literally

restored almost all the Cinerama movies.

- There's where you get into an interesting thing

about historic preservation.

Because a lot of people don't think well say it's built

in the '50s and '60s, it's not old, you know?

Or it's not a movie palace, so it's not really important.

Or you get a fight like

the Indian Hill Cinerama which got a landmark status

from the city, but the landmark status had no teeth

and so they tore it down anyway for a parking lot.

So you have the National and Westwood.

You got all these theaters that were built in the 1960s.

The Beekman in New York.

All of whom have been torn down with nothing

of the fanfare that the movie palaces get.

And so you need to understand all those theaters.

But if all the theaters are destroyed,

then how can you go back and look and see

what it looked like in the 1950s and 60s when people

left the cities and went into small towns and rural

areas and suburban areas and began to go

to the movie theaters and new places.

You can't because they're torn down.

So the preservation movement is one that needs

to be focused on movie palaces but also needs

to think about do we need to save a 1970s theater?

It's a question.

- I get contacts from people who are traveling here

from Europe and they wanna see our movie palaces

because it's just an alien,

it's a foreign thing to them to see wait,

this was a palace built just to watch a movie?

You know, I get such great reactions.