THE MOST famous movie theater in television history wasn’t a real place — but it was based on a real place. From 1925 to 2012, 445 Central Avenue in Highland Park was home to an unassuming two-story movie house. It opened as the Alcyon and in 1965 was renamed the Highland Park Theater. It also appeared in movies; in Tom Cruise’s breakthrough Risky Business, his character drives past the unmistakable Tudor Revival façade and color-blocked marquee.
In its final years, before it was abandoned, then demolished in 2018, the theater housed four screens. But in its glory years, before it was subdivided in an attempt to compete with larger suburban multiplexes, it held just one cavernous auditorium. It even had a balcony.
Having grown up in Highland Park, Michael Loewenstein knew that balcony well. He had been at WTTW as a scenic designer for 15 years when he was approached in 1975 to work on the set for Opening Soon … at a Theater Near You, the public station’s planned movie review show starring Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert and the Tribune’s Gene Siskel. Instructed to design a movie theater, he immediately thought of the old Alcyon.
“It had a Spanish look to it, with rough plaster walls,” Loewenstein says. “It was sort of a moderate version of some of the big movie palaces downtown. And that was good. From a television point of view, it had some detail to it, and also this certain look, this Spanish look.”
But copying the appearance of even a moderately sized movie theater was difficult in WTTW’s cramped studio space. Loewenstein initially wanted to put Siskel and Ebert into the theater’s orchestra section, but he quickly realized that in order to “get the feeling of the volume” of a big auditorium, he would have to cheat, using a technique called forced perspective, a trick of photography and architecture that fools the human eye into believing something is bigger than it actually is. “To make it real size would have made weekly setup impossible,” explains Loewenstein. “So I started thinking about using the balcony.”
That balcony — “the Balcony,” as it was affectionately known through the years—featured full-size seats acquired from old theaters and furniture companies. (Loewenstein’s files include an ad for Chicago Used Chair Mart on West Grand Avenue that boasts, “We can make them like new … cheaper than you think!”) Everything beyond the Balcony’s brass rail was a miniature, built about one-third of the size it would be in an actual theater. Loewenstein’s architectural drawings for the original Opening Soon set reveal just how meticulously the forced perspective had to be planned. The edges of the set’s side walls were different heights; closer to the camera they stood 15 feet high, but the one farthest from the camera measured just 13 feet, seven inches. Even the lighted “Exit” signs hanging over the theater’s doors had to be specially made at a slight slant away from the cameras.
From exactly the right vantage point, set look like a homey neighborhood movie house à la the Alcyon. Later versions of the Balcony would enhance the simulation even further with tiny versions of orchestra seats. (Crew members nicknamed them “the tombstones.”) The set was so convincing that the show regularly received letters from fans who claimed to recognize the theater where they shot the show.
