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Henry Ford wanted to put a Model T in every garage. Theo Kalomirakis wants to put a movie theater in every home. Not just a
"screening room," but a real theater, re-creating the pizzazz and showmanship of the classic movie palaces of the 1920s, when
the lobby was part of the show. My wife, Chaz, and I have one of Theo's dream palaces in our home. Its neon sign announces
its name (the Lyric, recalling our first date at Chicago's Lyric Opera). It seats fourteen. The little ticket booth is
permanently manned by a life-size mannequin of Oliver Hardy, which began life as a tailor's dummy in Brazil. Next to the Palais
Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival, it is my favorite place to watch a movie.
The first giant-screen television I can remember seeing was in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, where the assembly lines
were overseen by a Big-Brother type. The notion that such technology might find its way into the home was suggested in Francois
Truffaut's Farenheit 451 (1967), in which one wall of the living room was given over to a flat-panel TV display. At the time, it
seemed like a vision of the future. By 1989, I had one myself.
I love movies, but I hate watching them on small-screen television sets. The experience of the film is diminished; the ambiance
is lacking. A movie should be bigger than its audience; it should loom over us; its sound should surround us, and we should be
contained by the experience. Robert Mitchum once asked his wife, Dorothy, why she thought movie fans made such a big deal over him.
"Bob," she said, "its because when you’re up there on that big screen, they’re smaller than your nostril."
When the first rear-projection TV sets came onto the market, I didn’t much like them. You had to position yourself just so in
front of the screen, and even then the picture lacked focus and clarity. But later models were much improved, and eventually I
bought a 45-inch Mitsubishi, and enjoyed it enormously. Of course, I played laserdiscs on it; tapes didn’t supply the necessary
detail. It was fine. But it was still a television.
In 1988, I was asked to do a frame by frame analysis of Citizen Kane for a group of students at the Canadian Center for Motion
Picture Study outside Toronto. The center, dream-child of director Norman Jewison, had a screening room, including a front-mounted,
three-lens TV projector aimed at a large screen. The moment I saw Kane on it, I was lost: I had to have one for myself.
Private screening rooms ideally bring the movie experience into the home without greatly diminishing it. At first, they were
the playthings of the rich. (I once asked the young son of a studio owner if he went to the movies with his father, and he replied,
"Dad says he doesn’t go to the movies. The movies come to him.") There is a wonderful book named The Hollywood Style, by Arthur
Knight, with photographs by Eliot Eliofson, that documents the private screening rooms of Hollywood stars and moguls from the 1920s
through the 1960s.
The advent of high-quality projection television and surround sound has brought this plaything of the moguls into the realm of
more ordinary people. To be sure, a high-quality home setup isn't cheap. Your own theater, with let's say a 10-foot screen and
good sound and a ceiling-mounted projector, can cost from $5,000 (rock bottom, with a one-gun projector) to $12,000 (very nice) to
$25,000 and up (videophile's fantasy). Part of the extra cost will be for a line doubler (or even quadrupler), which is essential
for a picture that looks more like a movie and less like a television.
That's assuming you install the equipment in an ordinary room. There is no place for ordinary rooms in the vision of Theo
Kalomirakis. A former art director with a love for the great movie palaces of the past, he re-creates on a smaller scale the
glorious excesses of the Golden Age of cinema architecture. He sizes up your available space, discusses your memories, assesses
the twinkle in your eye, and returns with plans for your own Ziegfeld or Paramount or Mayfair.
Look through the pages of this book, which represents a cross-section of Theo's work, I am reminded of some of the feelings I
had when I first went to the movies. There was a different level of reality inside a movie theater, even inside the relatively
humble palaces of my home town of Urbana-Campaign, Illinois, where the Rialto, the Orpheum, and the Virginia all recalled the glory
days of vaudeville and silent films. The architecture helped prepare your mind-set for the movie experience. It suggested that
reality ended at the door, that dreams were manufactured inside. Every house should have a room like that.
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