ArchitectureChicago PLUS: Chicago Theater

Showing posts with label Chicago Theater. Show all posts

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Marathon! (2013)

marathon 2010 - click images for larger view

Chicago Streets -

. . . meet 45,000 runners in the 2013 edition of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon . . .

Pics from Marathon 2007 . . .

. . . Marathon 2009 . . .

. . . Marathon 2010 . . .

. . . last year's event . . .

Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Death of Variety? The Supply-Chaining of the Magic of the Movies

Nostalgia Alert! If you insist on living in the present, turn back now. (And it's not nostalgia: it's cultural history, dammit.)

The Big Picture: Variety's future looks bleak - The Los Angeles Times.

One of the happiest moments in my early adolescence was walking one day into the old St. Louis pharmacy on Lawrence Avenue near my Albany Park home and finding, on the bottom shelf of the magazine rack, a copy of Variety, a/k/a "The Show Biz Bible". I was already in love in movies and with the architecture of the Chicago's movie palaces, which offered a Cooks Tour, if slightly inauthentic, of many basic historical styles, from the French Baroque of the Chicago Theatre, to the Eastern Hallucinogenic of the Oriental, to the Ocean-Liner Deco of the Esquire.

photograph courtesy of The Chuckman Collection (click images for larger view)

photography courtesy of The Chuckman Collection

I stood, mesmerized, drinking a Coke (dispensed in a bottle from their Coke machine), reading my first copy of Variety, as I discovered its comprehensive weekly portrait of what was going on with those theaters, each of which had its own personality and booking policy. At a time when new releases still opened at a single, downtown theater, the Chicago was the prestige flagship at which the biggest, most prestigious films opened.

photograph courtesy of The Chuckman Collection

Unless they were roadshows, a category that came into its prime in the 1950's as Hollywood as a weapon against television. Roadshow houses, like the Michael Todd, Cinestage, McVicker's and Palace, scheduled films like they were stage plays, as if a movie's cast and crew somehow had a limited stamina for only so many shows a week. Other than holiday periods, there were generally only ten performances a week, one each evening, plus matinees on Saturday, Sunday and Wednesdays. Among many other titles most of which are now mercifully forgotten, roadshow attractions, usually filmed in the much more detailed 70mm format, included such films as Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, My Fair Lady, and Ryan's Daughter. The Sound of Music marked the zenith of the roadshow, dethroning Gone With the Wind as the biggest grossing film of all time, and its run in most U.S. cities was measured not in weeks, but years.

Crowds stretch around the block waiting to get in and see the 1966 James Bond blockbuster Thunderball at the Oriental (photograph courtesy of the Chuckman Collection)

Every week, Variety published the gross receipts for every first run theater, not just in Chicago, but in major cities across the United States and Canada. Just as in Chicago, each theater in each city had its own unique personality, and, often, a distinctive name to go with it. There was the Gopher in Minneapolis, the Grand Circus in Detroit, the Boyd in Philadelphia, the Forum 47th, Astor, Victoria and Criterion in New York, plus Orpheums, Paramounts, States and Stanleys sprinkled liberally all across the country.

I was such a nerd as a kid that I amused myself by creating my own estimate of the rental income for every major release by adding up the week-by-week figures for each theater covered in Variety, and also tracking every second run theater in Chicago, using the aggregate second-run grosses for cities like New York also reported in Variety, and then extrapolating the results for a national estimate. I would always be eager to get my hands on Variety's year-end issue, which included the rental grosses for every film released that year to compare, and my own estimates were usually pretty close to the actuals. (Except for films that did especially well in the South, or in smaller houses and drive-ins, which Variety covered only fitfully.) Yeah, I know, it's pathetic, but it was a lot of fun at the time.

In December of 1964, during the prime Christmas Holiday booking season, Goodbye Charlie, a film directed by Vincente Minnelli and starting Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds, both big stars at the time, and Walter Matthau, soon to become one, opened, not in one of the big Loop movie palaces, but in a wide "Showcase" release to theaters throughout Chicago. No one noticed it at the time, but Goodbye Charlie could also have been named Goodbye Movie Palace. Already, urban population was spilling out in great torrents into the emerging suburban sprawl. Movie theaters followed - every shopping mall with any claim to importance had at least one. 1972's The Godfather was the last major Hollywood release that opened in exclusive run at downtown theaters.


office tower proposed for the site of the Chicago Theater

The "Showcase" release became the only release. The downtown movie palaces lost their central place. More of their bookings began to target what exhibitors thought inner-city minority populations wanted to see: action films or what came to be known as Blaxploitation films. Soon the best week's gross at a Chicago movie palace was what would been considered disastrous only a decade or so before. The economics stopped working. Theaters crumbled, closed, and, in too many cases, were demolished. The Chicago Theater just missed being destroyed for an undistinguished Skidmore, Owings, Merrill office tower.

Variety stopped publishing theater by theater grosses. Motion pictures became relentlessly Supply-Chained. The idea of a 10-show-a-week multi-year roadshow run, exclusive to a single theater, now seems insane. You book your film in as many theaters as you can get away with, especially for the big blockbusters. The Dark Night Rises is on 4,400 screens this weekend. At most multiplexes, you can choose from screenings scheduled every half hour.

Make no mistake. Movies have always been a big business. The major studios that flourished in the 1920's, 30's, 40's and beyond weren't called "Dream Factories" for nothing, and they kept their key assets - the movie stars - under contracts so tight they'd bring a smile to the face of Rupert Murdoch. And they were vertically integrated, both making the movies and owning the theaters to show them in. Yet their business model was predicated on creating a sense of the special, from the fairy tale architecture of the palaces they built to lure in the customers, week after week, no matter what was showing on the screen, to the roadshow release that combined high-tech (wide screens, higher resolution, stereo sound) with the manufactured scarcity of limited showings.

Today, while we're seeing a resurgence of distinctive design to make a given multiplex more competitive, it's still pretty much all about supply chained, least-common-denominator efficiency. You take the risk out of exhibition by not having to choose which movies you book. You cram enough auditoriums into your multiplex so you can offer the public every major release on any given weekend. When designed and managed competently, each auditorium will offer a high degree of comfort and technical competence, but, other than size, each auditorium will be essentially identical. You no longer buy a ticket for the Orpheum, Fox or Pantages, but for Theatre 16, 2 or 34.

And so reporting success and failure in movies is no longer for insiders and their wannabees, but a promotional spectator sport, the weekend's grosses a hit parade boxscore promoted through every news and media outlet in the world. Who won? Who lost? It's a lot more efficient, but the commodization has killed a lot of the magic - just as it's killing Variety

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Dark Satanic Mills Descend on Boul Mich. Resuscitation to follow?

[Postscript: 12/10/14] Crain's Chicago Business reported that the Allsaints store would be replaced by a T-Mobile flagship store.

click images for larger view (recommended)

It began, not all that long ago, like this . . .

. . . the soaring entrance to the spectacularly unsuccessful Chicago Place vertical mall on North Michigan Avenue, done up in a style that might best be called Prairie School meets glitz generic. It was finally put out of its misery about two decades later. Dominating the entrance were two 42-foot-high murals by Thomas Melvin, depicting Chicago in broad strokes and superbright colors . . .

This is what the same wall looks like now . . .

It's part of the just opened Chicago outpost of AllSaints Spitalfields, the British clothier. Like Chicago Place, it was born in the 1990's, but there the comparison ends. By the time it opened, Chicago Place was upholding traditions that were already dead; AllSaints was defining what was to come.

our mission is to create a brand that blends cultural, fashion and music into a potent formula of desirable clothing that expresses individuality and attitude.

AllSaints doesn't advertise, depending instead on word-of-mouth, and it keeps in place a kind of corporate omerta about itself. Staff is forbidden to speak about the business - you can make up a far better back story for the Mise-en-scène in your own head. One description of the chain's design mantra is "crumpled fabrics and clothes that often to the untrained eye might appear to be lopsided."

The design of the new 11,000-square-foot Chicago flagship is surreal and spectacular - Dickensian Gothic. It's been described as being modeled "after an industrial European rail station," but it seems much more like an abandoned factory, scrubbed to a high polish that never existed in its original incarnation. According to a great account by Tim Girvin of the evolution of the Allfields Spitalfields brand and design of its Seattle outpost . . .

“The All Saints store is an expensive monument to the distressed style of decoration: the brickwork is exposed, the wood flooring carefully aged.” According to friends working as the architects of record for the Seattle location, the concept of detailing that degradation is one of careful staging — teams working for weeks on the blasting and chiseling of every single brick. All Saints Spitalfields becomes in this light, a kind of set design, a cinematic production.

In place of the Mag Mile's long-faded pretensions to high elegance, we get a massive heavy-metal denture jammed into the untoothed maw of a Po-Mo relic.

The entrance is framed in ancient-looking black steel beams and columns, beaded with bolts, and framing distressed brick, also painted black.

The same brick, unpainted, sides the 42-foot-high entrance foyer. It's all dominated by the back wall, a soaring-to-the-ceiling grid of hundreds of antique Singer sewing machines. Along with the ram's horn, they're signature motifs of the chain and its fashions.

The selling space beyond has the same distressed brick walls, even on the tall, squat columns. Bolted metal pilasters climb up the walls, to a metal molding course topped by squat brackets. Furnishings are similarly retro-industrial - heavy metal tables, often wheels of uncertain function, interlocking gears in framed black panels mounted high up on the walls, an iPad held in place by a thick, thumb-screwed wood block. Everything has been painted a light buff. As with most of the apparel on display, the palette is so constrained you feel as if you've fallen into sepia.

Today, sewing machines tend of be not black but white, but the basic principles of manufacturing remain in the factories in China and other developing countries where almost all the clothing we buy is made. Perhaps a century from now, we'll be purchasing our apparel in stores designed in a kind of nostalgic replication of the typical contemporary industrial setting you can see here.

Retailing as stage set, of course, is nothing new. A century ago, department stores attracted their newly-middle-class customers with palatial architecture and furnishings, repackaging the gilded age luxury of the robber barons for the mass market.

In the 1920's, movie theater operators brought in audiences with the fantasy of having been given the keys to an Egyptian temple or the Palace of Versailles, examples of an authoritarian world order in which the middle class was limited to the bureaucracy serving the royal court. Now we've apparently graduated to a super-scrubbed, nostalgic recreation of a brutal industrial past that our ancestors struggled at great sacrifice to transcend.

"And other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" Comedy=tragedy+time. Certainly a parallel formula holds true for high-end retailing. As brutal as the early industrial age may appear to us now, at the time - to capitalist and laborer alike - it was an age of optimism, of moving beyond the Malthusian uncertainty of rural life.

AllSaints Spitalsfield could be a mainstay or a fad. Just this past May, running dry of cash after having been owned successively by an Icelandic firm that failed, and then a leading Icelandic bank, that also failed, the company was acquired by British private equity firm Lion Capital.

In either case, they'll be plenty of time later to mine the deeper, darker meanings of AllSaint's Terry Gilliam/Mark Romanek vision of the perfect selling space. For now, be sure to check out the trippy architectural concoction that has Potter Palmer and Arthur Rubloff turning over in their graves. But then again, Rubloff was always a snappy dresser . . .