Film Fight: Music Box vs. Loews/M&R in Battle of the Bookers
A turf war has broken out in the city’s movie exhibition business. The giant Loews/M&R theater chain and the one-screen Music Box at Southport and Waveland are locked in combat for offbeat art films. And neither side is even thinking of giving in.
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M&R wooed away former Music Box manager and booker John Schlesinger to help organize its program. And to market the films, they’ve unveiled “Frame by Frame,” a film calendar similar to one the Music Box produces. Among the features touted in the calendar’s first edition is The Second Animation Celebration, the latest of several films the Music Box has tried and failed to obtain.
Though they have grown increasingly frustrated fighting the Fine Arts, Music Box owners Bob Chaney (no relation to Sandy) and Chris Carlo vow not to cave in. “We are fighters,” says Chaney. M&R’s chief booker Tom Brueggemann, on the other hand, thinks everyone will benefit from the competition: “It can only expand the market for art films in this city.”
A Goodman Is Hard to Fund
That “TBA” appearing in the last slot of the 1989-90 Goodman Theatre schedule stands for “to be announced.” For the past several years that slot has been filled by a major musical production, such as Pal Joey or Sunday in the Park With George. This year the Goodman is trying to raise funds for a production of The Gospel at Colonus, a gospel musical that reconceives Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus as parablelike sermons on the ways of fate.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Loren Santow.
