Big-Screen Palaces Make Movies Shine With Magic

News recently of plans to convert three movie screens to live theater spaces hit close to home, and not just because it’s the latest of many movie theater closings in my part of the city.

It’s particularly galling to think of eventually losing the big screen at this theater, McClurg Court, which many movie critics and fans consider one of the city’s top movie venues.

Should we care? One reason given for the threatened demise of the McClurg (which began life as a 70mm single screen until its balcony was sealed off for two other screens in 1988) is the projected fall 2002 opening of a new 21-screen multiplex by AMC “virtually right across the street.”

But will there be a big screen like McClurg’s in that bunch?

I like the new multiplexes--especially the state-of-the-art kind with stadium seating--because they offer more variety and encourage more adventurous booking. But somehow, there’s nothing that can really replace the excitement of attending a movie in a huge house with a huge screen, like one of the old ornate movie palaces that used to flourish in Chicago and the other big cities.

The very name “movie palace” suggests something grandiose and overpowering. And that’s what the experience used to be. Back in the 1920s, when many of the movie palaces were first built, they were designed to be as fantastic and otherworldly as many of the movies themselves, to give the impression of an actual palace or opera house and stun the audiences with their grandeur. Up to then, movies had been the chosen entertainment of the masses, the urban poor. The places where they were shown--such as nickelodeons and peep shows--were mostly considered tawdry and disreputable by the more fastidious classes.

Now, they were transformed, remodeled, presented as something grand and dreamy. Almost royal. The decor was baroque. The stage was vast and heavily curtained. When you looked at the balconies back in the ‘20s, the ambience suggested that Doug Fairbanks might appear at any moment, brandishing a sword and bounding down to the stage.

And the screens, of course, were as huge as the theaters.

Decades later, in the ‘50s, when the studios were trying to woo back audiences lost to the new monster of TV, they offered Cinemascope (the anamorphic wide-screen process) and then Cinerama (the super-wide-screen process). And, for a while, it worked.

What accounts for the magic of a big-screen presentation? Consider the huge five-story screen showings at the Imax or Omnimax theaters, where the movies (often documentaries with heavy scenic values) swallow up your peripheral vision. This is the ideal way to see a movie about Niagara Falls, Mt. Everest or “The Seven Wonders of the World” (an early Cinerama production). But a big screen, whether at Imax or theaters like the McClurg, is also the ideal way to see a real spectacle movie: one of those shows, like “Gone With the Wind,” which try to wow us with the plenitude of their imagery, their vast canvases and windows on another world.

The spectacle films of D.W. Griffith--1915’s Civil War blockbuster “The Birth of a Nation” and his massive 1916 historical fugue “Intolerance”--provided much of the impetus for the movie palaces and in the ‘20s, they housed that decade’s biggest hit, King Vidor’s war epic “The Big Parade,” as well as the first “Ben-Hur” and Cecil DeMille’s original “The Ten Commandments.”

From then on, throughout the 20th century, the most popular movie in each decade was usually a big spectacle movie: “Gone With the Wind” in the ‘30s, DeMille’s second “Ten Commandments” in the ‘50s, “The Sound of Music” in the ‘60s, “Star Wars” in the ‘70s, and “Titanic” in the ‘90s--with either “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” or “Fellowship of the Ring” poised to take the early crown for the 2000s.

All these movies had their ideal environment in the old big-screen theaters, in road shows or gala premieres. That’s part of the special magic and excitement of the movies. These movies and many others (including art films such as Abel Gance’s 1927 Polyvision spectacle, “Napoleon”) are at their best on vast screens. Though a great film plays well almost anywhere, in any format, big screens have a special allure that nothing else can match.

Perhaps I have a special weakness for screen size because I grew up in a town of 1,100 (Williams Bay, Wis.) that didn’t even have a regular movie theater, big or small. So, when I lived for a decade in Los Angeles, I chose a neighborhood, the Hollywood area, where my neighborhood theaters included the Chinese Theatre the Egyptian and the Cinerama Dome. I still remember the excitement of seeing a new epic at the Chinese or one of the old Todd-AO or Cinerama movies--like “Around the World in 80 Days” and “How the West Was Won”--at the Cinerama Dome. Truth to tell, “Around the World in 80 Days” is only good when you see it large.

In Frank Darabont’s new film, “The Majestic,” the plot involves an improbably gorgeous movie theater, called the Majestic, which Jim Carrey’s character helps restore to its former glory. It’s a crock, of course. The movie’s fictional locale, Lawson, isn’t much bigger than Williams Bay, and few if any towns that size would have a theater as ornate or a marquee as splendiferous as the Majestic’s.

But one of the reasons Darabont used that image is that he knows how much those old movie palaces appeal to us--even in this age of fast food and faster movies, of crackerbox subdivisions and 21-screen multiplexes. We still love to see a movie in a palace, on the biggest screen our eyes can hold.

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Michael Wilmington is a film critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.