Maude Standish

On one side of a red-brick building, a mirrored storefront window advertises Absolute Massage in frosted letters with an image of a sweaty blonde woman working the flexing muscles of her male client. On the other side is a Magnum Security office with a neon-laminated "Beware Of Dog" sign. Just a little farther up is a Today's Avon with a glass case of plastic pink roses, shimmering angels and faux pearls. And intermingled among these storefronts rests the last operating silent-film theater in Chicago.

At two in the afternoon, The Portage Theater, with its stately signs and decorative shell, empty ticket booth and turquoise metallic curtains, looks abandoned to the past. Only a few potted plants peeking out of the windows indicates its inhabitation.

I had been told to knock loudly, tapping with a set of keys. There is no need as a man exiting unassumingly lets me in. The 1940s streamlined-style lobby is empty and my footsteps make loud echoing noises as I cross the ceramic tiles. Dennis Wolkowicz bustles into the room, wearing a Northwestern sweatshirt (he grew up watching Northwestern football games sitting on the living room floor with his dad), a pair of oval red plastic glasses, graying hair with a fading dye job and a kind smile. "When we came here we realized it was incredibly simple. Here is the lobby and here is the theater," he says.

The theater is dark, except for the lit golden curtain, which Wolkowicz found in scraps. Then his wife painstakingly sewed the linen pieces back together, a fact you can only tell if you should run your fingers across the curtain's scars. Radiators along the Rococo-style walls hiss. "It was those radiators you see that saved this theater," Wolkowicz says, taking off his glasses and absentmindedly wiping them with the cuff of his sweatshirt. "Most theaters don't survive. They have tremendous plaster damage, and this survived because it's on the same heating as the apartments in the building."

That's not to say that reopening the theater in 2006 was any small task.

"The chandeliers are gone," Wolkowicz says, pointing to a vacancy in the ceiling. "The theater in the eighties had been divided into two real unceremoniously and painted all black. I have been involved in a lot of theater closings but sad to say of all the theaters I have seen, this had to have been the dirtiest. There had to be World War II dirt in the place. I mean it had always looked great to me growing up but house cleaning was not an issue for many years subsequently. We put it back to the way it was when I was a kid."

Wolkowicz still lives in the house he grew up in just a few blocks away from The Portage. "My most vivid memory of the Portage was in 1960 when my brother took me on a Wednesday afternoon. It was the summertime and the place was just wall-to-wall people for `Ben Hur,'" he says. His grandfather, who was in the meat business, bought the house before it was even finished being built, on a whim. "He was the kind of guy who would drive to the car lot to get his car fixed, see something he liked and come driving home in a different car to my grandmother's dismay. I was in the meat business myself before I started messing around with theater."

Despite his age there is still a youthful awe present in Wolkowicz's voice as he guides me through the theater. "It was opened in 1920 by the Asher brothers. The Asher brothers owned a number of theaters. This was prior to Balaban & Katz buying this theater. B & K were the prolific operators of theaters in Chicago. For B & K again this was their top-grossing theater on the Northwest Side. Well, you have to remember that Six Corners was like going downtown. A young person wouldn't believe it, but it was like hordes of people crossing all the intersections at one time."

Wolkowicz gestures around the theater as if pinching himself to make sure it's not just a dream. "This triangular shape was a guess as to how it would work acoustically. It's like an opera house from that era, like a big megaphone, designed to project the music from the orchestra pit for the silent film. Never was vaudeville acts or anything to speak of. Stage was strictly screen and film."

The front-row seats have been stripped and a stage has been added, allowing for occasional live performances like the Italian singers that were there the night before. When I am given a behind-the-scenes tour, the simplicity of the theater becomes apparent. Other than a broom closet, a tiny office in what used to be a box seat and two skinny dressing rooms with electric heaters, a green projection booth with elegant steel 35mm projectors with xenon lamp-houses from the thirties, there is no behind-the-scenes.

Perhaps the only complicated thing in the whole theater is the organ, which to turn on requires you to enter into two chambers, switching on various components, standing on your tiptoes to find a socket to plug the organ in and then, finally, a hair-raising whistle when the organ is turned on. All this trouble is worth it when Wolkowicz finally makes the machine work and plays a chase sequence. "We like to not only accent film preservation but to accent the music that accompanies some of the films. So many times nowadays we have a rock score or a jazz improv. Musicianship is of the highest caliber but it is out of place with what is going on the screen. It's like DayGlo-ing the Mona Lisa. It's all real cool, but we tend to go along with the authentic accompaniment. So we will have classic theater organists."

Wolkowicz often operates as the theater organist, making guest appearances as Jay Warren. "Jay Warren and I have the same problem that Clark Kent and Superman have. We are never in the same spot at the same time." A couple of weeks ago when Mayor Daley attended a screening, Wolkowicz was introduced to him, resulting in some confusion as to exactly who Jay Warren is. "That's my alter ego."

Why in the world would one create an alter ego of a theater organist? He laughs and says, "As I told Mayor Daley, it has really cut down on the hate mail at the house."

Being the proprietor and the organist allows Dennis great insight into the modern desire for silent films. "As an organist you can hear what's going. For instance, in `The Phantom of the Opera,' everybody is like, `Oh, this going to be cool, ha-ha ha.' All of the sudden the first time that the Phantom speaks to Pristine from behind the wall, you can hear a pin drop."

The audience at the silent-film screenings is not a stuffy or drab one. Wealthy older women with their furs, older men with their beer bellies, hipsters in their skin-tight jeans and families all come to watch. They all share the desire to be entertained, to be lost in the great roots of American cinema. "People kind of discover what we are doing and kind of go in with a `Well, show me' attitude," Wolkowicz says, shaking his head. "I think the innocence of the era, the sentimentality and the goodness of these films are something you don't see in this age of the anti-hero. Good was good. Evil was evil. And good shall always triumph over evil no matter what it takes--even if they bungle their way through, hanging from the clock like Harold Lloyd did. Somehow the right thing was done and everybody lived happily ever after."

(2007-04-10)

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