CHICAGO — For more than two years, whenever I’ve driven past the Cinemark 18 in Evanston, Illinois, arguably the go-to multiplex for the Far North Side, I have wondered what it looks like inside right now. How quiet it must be. Is the concession stand sticky? Are the seats dusty? Do lobby posters promise a summer movie season the pandemic stopped before it could start? Like other theaters across the country, the Cinemark 18 was crushed; it closed with the initial round of lockdowns, never reopened and finally shuttered for good a year ago. The hopeful news is that AMC just announced it will reopen the theater later this year. But the existential threat remains: How long can movie theaters stay open?
Two years after those stay-at-home orders, we stream now; there’s no going back. And so that trusty old Cinemark 18 plans to reopen as the AMC Evanston 12, with the space formerly occupied by six movie screens developed into something that is not theaters.
I was supposed to be pretending to care about the Oscars on Sunday.
Instead, I was wondering about the future of the medium itself.
For a disquieting hint, I turned to “Movie Theaters,” a new cemetery slab of a coffee-table book by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, best known for capturing the evocative ruins of Detroit. Here, for 300 pages, they splay open the crumbling corpses of cinemas that closed, often decades ago. Think of it as a tangible, narrowcasted reboot of virtual doom-scrolling. Or maybe a coast-to-coast funeral procession. Either way, the Chicago area is a little too well represented. There are the decaying walls and flattened seats of the Lawndale Theatre, once a Roosevelt Road fixture, before the building was demolished a decade ago — it hadn’t shown a movie in 50 years. There are five pages of the relatively sprightly Uptown Theatre on Broadway, looking just $1 billion, a robust rust-scrubbing and a full repainting away from filling its 4,381 seats.
You get a single image of the Central Park on Roosevelt, constructed in 1917, one of the first air-conditioned movie houses in the country; the photograph shows a grimy, walled-off balcony divided from the floor seats below — an image taken before the building’s loving, ongoing restoration. It’s a success beside the Times Theater in Rockford, which comments on itself: Large signs reading “Times” curl ornately over a sad, empty facade. That said, according to the Rockford Register Star, even the Times is a-changing, thanks to a real estate firm’s $14 million scrub, announced in December.
Still, nobody really expects these buildings to become just movie theaters again.
As Marchand and Meffre show with a palpable Euro-irony, the success stories have been mixed blessings. We lost grand movie palaces in the past few decades, but we gained, in those same spaces, a dollar store in Berkeley, California; a storage space for mattresses in Cincinnati; a climbing wall in Denver; a cosmetic shop in Toronto; a gym in Brooklyn. Sometimes, as movie theaters once reflected the dreams of their communities, the refurbishments do the same: Old cinemas became UFO museums in New Mexico, boating museums in New Hampshire, gun-shooting ranges in Texas.
But mostly, considering the evidence in these photos, taken over the past decade, we let theaters rot; collect dust; loose roofs, paint and ornaments. As Ross Melnick, a film professor at the University of California Santa Barbara and co-founder of the Cinema Treasures website, writes in the introduction, it’s hard to tell from these pictures if we’re looking at the past or future of movie theaters.
In an image showing the former balcony of the Varsity in Evanston, among newish ventilation ducts, we see a proscenium arch that resembles Disney’s Magic Kingdom. (The building is expected to be developed into a 35-apartment residential complex) The rich midnight blues of the ceiling at the Kenosha Theatre in Wisconsin still pop in places where the ceiling hasn’t crumbled into a skeletal lattice of iron framework. Where it hasn’t darkened, peeled or succumbed to encroaching tree roots, the bright canary yellow walls of the Gem Theatre in Cairo, down on the Missouri border, are still striking.
On the marquee of the Palace in Gary, Indiana, it still says (minus two letters) “Jackson Five Tonite” — but the picture was shot in 2009, and the marquee was a cosmetic renovation of its facade, made by Donald Trump’s Miss USA pageant, held in Indiana 20 years ago.
Inside the theater?
There’s a painted curtain still hung across the stage, its fading Egyptian scene still clear, but the rest of the room (closed to movie showings since the 1960s) would work only as the already-dressed set of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. (One Connecticut theater in the book even serves as storage for military rations in the event of WWIII.) The insides of many of the theaters in these photos suggest their staffs scattered abruptly. Handwritten sheets of movie schedules are found on desks; there are vintage candy boxes, stacks of marquee lettering and, in one Ohio cinema, a coin-operated bathroom scale.
You might assume whatever calamity befell these places came suddenly, violently.
But in fact, many of the theaters in this book have been closed so long, you’re looking at several generations of heartaches, everything from the encroachment of TV in the 1950s to antitrust decrees that broke up Hollywood’s control of theatrical exhibition to fears of violence in downtown hubs, real estate prices, VHS players, Xboxes, iPhones.
Mostly, you’re looking at the long fade-out of a way of life, and a splintering of vibrant communities that happened so long ago the ruins became neighborhood wallpaper. Many of the repurposed theaters found in these pages are in other parts of the country. In the images taken around Illinois, the theaters tend to exist in neighborhoods — the Colony on 59th Street, Ramova on South Halsted, several in downtown Rockford — still responding to suburban flight, decades of divestment and years of real estate redlining.
As a lover of movie theaters, though, the saddest parts of “Movie Theaters” are not those crumbling cathedrals, many of which opened before the Great Depression and understood how to diversify, serving as launching stages for Benny Goodman (Central Park), tour stops for 1970s rock acts (Uptown) and neighborhood Baptist congregations (Lawndale). At least for me, who came of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s, after many movie palaces had sputtered to an end, it’s painful to see the shoebox-sized screening rooms crumbling. These were unloved spaces, often created by theater companies dicing up vast single-screen properties into tinier houses, to add screenings and maximize profit.
They did what they could.
In the end, everything comes apart.
Times change. Even at the Times Theater in Rockford, Illinois, should it be restored someday. Its developer is picturing a 900-seat concert venue, and every now and then, movies.
