On a recent Saturday evening, Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood was overrun with masses of noisy Cubs and White Sox fans, drifting from sports bar to sports bar as the game between the city’s rival teams wound down inside the stadium. But only a few blocks away, on Southport Avenue, a different crowd of Chicagoans—just as passionate—spilled into another city landmark: the Music Box Theatre.

Nearly 700 patrons waited in will call line to pick up their tickets to that night’s headline event, a silent black-and-white film by the eccentric Canadian director Guy Maddin: Brand Upon the Brain! Crispin Glover was narrating and the Music Box brought in a live symphony and sound effects team to accompany. Tickets were a steep $25—the price of two or three regular cineplex tickets—and sold out. On this night, the Music Box even had its own scalper—a woman flanking the entrance, staring hopefully at passers-by. “Wanna go to Brand Upon the Brain!? I have an extra ticket! You wanna buy it?”

Last time the Music Box drew this much attention, director David Lynch personally arrived in March to premiere his new film, Inland Empire—a harebrained, 3-hour opus shot on murky digital video that no major distributor dared touch when it made the rounds at festivals. Some Music Box patrons snagged sold-out tickets to the event for big bucks on eBay, clamoring to catch one of Lynch’s rare public appearances. Here, he was hot.

The Music Box thrives on special events like Brand Upon the Brain! and Lynch’s Inland Empire. In a given year, they represent 95 percent of the theater’s revenue, according to general manager Chris Welch, who wants to find more ways to use the 750-seat main auditorium for events beyond the regular screening.

“You look at the Brand Upon the Brain! thing. They really couldn’t have done that anywhere else in the city, with the exception of maybe the Oriental or the Chicago. But at that point there are so many seats and it’s such a large venue that it becomes cost-prohibitive,” Welch, 27, said.

A picture palace restored

Stones line the entrance to the Music Box’s lobby, where patrons are guided past a small fountain into the main auditorium, with its Spanish columns, purely decorative balconies and twinkling stars painted on the ceiling. The viewer, Welch says, should feel like he’s watching a movie from a Moorish courtyard under the night’s sky.

For 78 years, the Music Box has stood a venue unlike any other in the city, but its bumpy history suggests it could’ve passed away at any moment. Originally opened in 1929, the owners intended to show live theater but when talkies came in they quickly changed business plans. Like most elaborate, old “picture palaces,” it was eventually blindsided by the modern cineplex. Then it lived several short lives as a venue solely devoted to Indian cinema, as a grindhouse theater exhibiting grizzly exploitation films, and, at one point in the ‘70s, as a porn theater. Daniel Knox—a projectionist for the Music Box who, at five years, is one of its longest standing employees—tells the story of two crooked men who once owned the theater while operating an arcade in the lobby.

The ornate interior crumbed along with the neighborhood through the ‘70s and early ‘80s, going in and out of business until Robert Cheney and Chris Carlo restored it in 1983. A sister theater to the Music Box—which is its mirror image but twice as large—still sits shuttered up in Chicago’s Bridgeport area on the South Side. It has been officially condemned, and Welch says it’s in such bad shape he doubts it’ll reopen.

Cheney and Carlo’s restoration was the one that lasted, but the Music Box’s revival long predated the gentrification of Wrigleyville, Welch says, when young families and the busy bar scene descended upon Southport.

“For a long time, up until 10 years ago or less than that, we were the only thing on the street. It was a lot of rundown, really gross places. I don’t know how much we had to do with the area turning into what it is now. But I think a lot of these newer businesses come here now, and they don’t realize we were the only thing on the street,” Welch says.

When the Music Box was reborn as an art house, the new owners planned to show two different classic Hollywood films a day. When that proved too costly, they added cheaper foreign and independent prints, a formula more or less followed by the current programmer, Brian Andreotti.

“We live and die by programming. I mean, that’s it,” Welch says. When drawing up a new schedule, they pay particular attention to critics. “When you’re basing everything on showing really great movies, the reviews are huge.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum moved to Chicago in 1987 and started visiting the Music Box shortly thereafter. Now the leading film critic at the Chicago Reader, he still calls it Chicago’s “sturdiest art house,” a focal point for foreign film distribution, which Rosenbaum champions in his reviews, but also more than that: With the smaller, second auditorium that was added in 1991—known among staff members as the “puppet theater”—the Music Box has opened itself up to a slate of films that is uniquely varied, combining old and new, independent and classic.

“They get a reputation as an art house, but the fact is that they show older films. A lot of the old Hollywood films they show could be shown at cineplexes, but people think that just because something is old it’s automatically an art film, which is ridiculous,” Rosenbaum said. “Black Book [currently showing at the Music Box] is a film I like a lot, and not only is it a Hollywood film in the way it’s done, but it’s better than a lot of Hollywood films.”

“How movies should be watched”

Growing up in Warsaw, Poland, Greg Brecher sat in fascination of the old Hollywood stars who flickered across his television. He ate it up.

“My parents [who had lived in Chicago] would tell me stories about going to the 3 Penny Cinema and the Music Box—standing in the rain for hours to watch [Michelangelo] Antonioni movies,” Brecher says. “I always had this nostalgia in me, that these stars were the stars—the Golden Age of Hollywood.”

Now Brecher, a sophomore film student at Northwestern, goes to the Music Box four or five times in a month. As they were exiting a showing of Pulp Fiction, he even pushed his friends to hold the department’s “film prom” at the theater, to no avail. Brecher says the Music Box for him is another window into Hollywood’s past, an appreciation lost on newer cineplexes. It’s not just about the movies, but about how they’re handled.

“It’s just not very personal anymore. The Music Box recalls that old way of watching movies. It’s how movies should be watched,” Brecher says.

And cineplexes may be what gives the Music Box its appeal, the way Welch sees it. As mainstream theaters continue to move toward no-frills presentation and modern conveniences, he hopes patrons will seek out his theater for the charm.

“Home theater is replacing the moviegoing experience, which makes sense when you go into a movie theater and it’s like your living room. The seat looks like your recliner, and they’re showing stuff digitally, and it’s all plain walls,” Welch said.

Rosenbaum’s love for the Music Box runs deep: He comes from a family of cinema exhibitors, including his father who ran a theater in Alabama. Old theaters are rare these days, he says, and finding one in good condition is even rarer. For him, the stars affixed to the top of Music Box’s main auditorium recall the planetarium ceiling in Atlanta’s Fox Theatre, for which he has a “particular affection.”

“It makes going to the movies more of an event than going to the multiplex—there’s more of an appeal to the imagination,” Rosenbaum said.

A black dot appears on the corner of the screen—so quickly the audience probably doesn’t realize it—and Daniel Knox knows it’s time to change the reel in the projector. The Music Box still uses a process that has been ditched at AMCs and the Century Evanston, who have moved to giant platter systems that save on labor, according to Knox. He believes people visit the Music Box for, among other things, the finer details that make an authentic moviegoing experience.

“Most theaters these days don’t have a curtain. The lights don’t dim. Here we have a little cloud machine, and the stars, and the lights on the side dim and the curtain rises, and the organ player—and all of these elements create the sense of a real show that you’re going out to see. You just don’t get that when you go to a theater when the lights blink off and the ads come on,” Knox, 26, said. “It’s really an experience.”

Is the Music Box haunted? A rumor circulates among staff members that Whitey roams the theater’s aisles, the ghost of an old manager who died on a couch in the lobby. When the walls start to creak or the film breaks, they blame it on Whitey, Knox says.

Brecher thinks it’s an interesting yarn. In at least one sense, the Music Box is haunted: From its programming to its physical structure, the Music Box is a theater imbued with the past.

“I get it. It’s so old. I think you know why it feels haunted. I think it’s because the place is pretty genuine. If it were a new place trying to be old, I think it’d be more popular but it would feel like bullshit. It’d be false, fake. But it does feel genuine. The seats don’t recline, it’s not stadium seating—there is something about it that is creepy, I guess, to think of going back in time. The actual movie theater looks more like an actual theater where you’d stage a play rather than show a movie. Today [with cineplexes] it’s not a theater. It’s just a room with a fucking screen at the end,” Brecher said. “Yeah, I can see why people say it feels haunted.”