Two years ago, there I was, at 11:29 a.m. on a Saturday morning in January, at the Music Box Theatre. Cold outside. Warm inside, though, thanks to the size of the crowd: nearly 500 people, many in their 20s, and many three times older than that, and a lot of folks in between, all seated and chatting and working on their popcorn, while rearranging their overcoats. Greasy outcome with that particular combination of activities, for the record.
Organist Dennis Scott finished his 1944-era pre-show song list, took a bow and turned the show over to the 35mm screening of a black-hearted evergreen of ’40s film noir, “Double Indemnity.” This was one of many titles featured in the Music Box’s retrospective devoted to writer-director Billy Wilder. The series did so well, the Music Box presented a second Wilder retrospective eight months later.
What’s up with this crowd? I thought. So big. And so youngish!
Cut to late 2024. I’m on the phone with Chicago International Film Festival artistic director Mimi Plauché, talking about the festival’s 60th edition, just completed. “You know, something interesting’s going on with our audience demographics, she says. “They’re shifting to younger audiences. Our largest demographic group is now the 25- to 35-year-olds. Over half the festival audiences is now under 45. That’s a huge change from when I first started — back when it was lopsided toward people over 50.”
It’s a very good sign, amid some very bad stressors for modern moviegoing and those whose business relies on getting people in and seated and ready to watch something new. Or old.
The challenges vary for Chicago’s film programmers and presenters specializing in repertory (classic and lesser-known work from cinema’s past), international and specialty fare. Business remains up and down but mostly sideways at best for Hollywood-dependent multiplexes. They’re relying now, more than ever, on bigger, better and just plain more films premiering in theaters, at a time when distributors opt instead for skipping a theatrical run in favor of Apple TV+, Disney+, Whatever+.
But in crucial pockets across the country, niche film programming with a substantial focus on repertory titles are doing well. Really well. And the right rep programming has drawn increasingly younger audiences to older movies from vanished eras.
Those eras come and go. But the movies worth re-seeing don’t have to. And in Chicago, they haven’t had to.
“There’s a whole generation interested in film now seeing “His Girl Friday” or “Bringing Up Baby” on the big screen,” says Kyle Westphal, co-founder and programmer at the nonprofit Chicago Film Society as well as Music Box programming associate. “But it’s always been cyclical. Generational replacement has long been a factor in exhibition. In the 1960s college kids discovered Mae West, the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, finding something strange and wild in their parents’ generation of entertainment.”
What we’re seeing now, he says, “is the latest iteration of the film audience renewing itself.”
And what we’re seeing next from the Chicago Film Society will introduce many younger and older film enthusiasts alike to “The Unknown” (1927). It’s a stunningly perverse visitor from the late silent era, starring Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a fugitive outlaw who fakes his armlessness to join a traveling circus troupe.
“If we do our jobs right,” Westphal says of Chicago’s independent specialty cinema houses, “we’re making a sustainable ecosystem and keeping the doors open. And without showing the same things over and and over.”
Such ecosystems generally have their roots in a college campus somewhere, and that somewhere can be anywhere. At the University of Chicago, Doc Films maintains a remarkable array of narrative, documentary and experimental work. Now 93 (!), it started as the Documentary Film Group in 1932 — the inaugural year of the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, aka the Venice International Film Festival.
Likewise affiliated with a big-name educational institution, the Gene Siskel Film Center continues its creatively far-flung programming of first-run international premieres, retrospectives and repertory titles. The downtown Film Center, across State Street and slightly south from the Chicago Theatre, operates as a nonprofit public program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Business has recovered from the pandemic limbo, says executive director Emily Long. Early 2025 attendance is up 19% from early 2023, she says. And “anecdotal evidence suggests the audiences are getting younger. People, I think, are finding that post-pandemic they’re more interested than ever in coming to a theater, and being part of a community.”
Also, Long says, the audience interest in different film formats remains a selling point as well as an aesthetic bonus.
“To say you saw something on 35 or 70mm — that’s bragging rights. Celluloid is like listening to something on vinyl. I’d seen ‘The Shining’ several times already. Then it played here on 35mm, as part of our ‘Let It Snow!’ series in 2021. And I’m telling you, I saw and heard things I’d never seen or heard in it before.”
Continuing through Feb. 26, the Film Center’s latest curated series, “Persistence of Memory,” consists of 10 explorations of remembrance, unreliable recollection and romantic hypnosis. Typical of the Film Center’s creative populism, the retrospective works like a mixer. It takes some venerated classics, turning up less often these days on undergraduate or graduate level syllabi (Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashômon”), and introduces them to the context of more recent dreamscapes (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” the latter from SAIC alum Apichatpong Weerasethakul).
Both the Film Center’s Long and Chicago Film Society/Music Box programmer Westphal point to the rise of the popular online film forum Letterboxd as a growth factor for repertory titles. “As it continues to grow,” Long says, “Letterboxd is going to become more and more a part of the moviegoing culture and experience.” The Film Center will soon launch an expanded Letterboxd account, thanks to the forum making it available for free to cinema organizations attached to educational institutions.
For Westphal, it’s all about COVID and what the pandemic has done to shape the present state of things. “Since COVID there’s been a change in the overall audience composition for filmgoing in general and repertory filmgoing in particular,” he says. “And the CFS grew out the old Bank of America Cinema series (located in a little-used building on Irving Park Road in Portage Park), which was active in a period when repertory cinema was synonymous with nostalgia.”
But “nostalgia only works for so long.” The films that truly endure, Westphal believes, deserved all kinds of audiences, including audiences graced with first-hand memories of seeing movies made in the ’40s or ’50s the first time.
Younger audiences coming out of the pandemic, he says, “might’ve been casual movie fans prior to COVID. But their chosen way of coping in lockdown was to go to Letterboxd and seek out recommendations for what to watch. And then log their reactions. And then, that same Letterboxd audience started going to movie theaters like the Music Box and others around town.”
Westphal offered a closing axiom. “A ticket is a ticket, whether it’s sold to someone who’s 18 or 28 or 78. The best way to fill a theater is with a broad cross-section, and to engage that audience in different ways.”
And if the Music Box can program Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” in 35mm three years running as an alternative holiday offering — and sell it out every time — then the cinema of the past, thanks to younger audiences of the present, has a reasonable shot at an in-person moviegoing future.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
“The Unknown” screens in 35mm, with live musical accompaniment, at 7:15 p.m. Sunday at the Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Ave., presented by Chicago Film Society; tickets $12 at musicboxtheatre.com
