Kill your darlings: Music Box series invites filmmakers to show a new movie once, then destroy it forever

CHICAGO — On Tuesday night, at the Music Box Theatre in Lakeview, a most alarming affair unfolded in front of a near-full house of movie lovers: Local filmmakers, Chicago directors, each of some distinction, discussed the films they just completed, then, one by one, they destroyed those films. They showed the works first. They’re not nuts. But if you were not in that audience on Tuesday night to see those works, unless someone was shooting the big screen with a phone — a fair possibility — you are fresh out of luck.

Poof.

Or rather, swoosh, sizzle, crackle, poof. Gone forever. The method of destruction was blowtorch. “Destroy Your Art,” the title given this extreme annual celebration of the impermanence of art and the fickleness of audience memory, was created in 2017 by , director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and Jack Newell, her husband, a filmmaker