Wilmette Theatre
1122 Central Avenue,
Wilmette,
IL
60091
1122 Central Avenue,
Wilmette,
IL
60091
4 people
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Showing 26 - 32 of 32 comments
When we first moved to Wilmette in 1955 we lived near 4th & Linden. The streetcar you speak of had already stopped running by then but the tracks remained embedded in the brick streets for years. I don’t recall another theater being around the corner from the Wilmette, but I do recall the EBF offices on Wilmette Avenue. My first job was across the street from it at the now-defunct Smithfield’s Grocery, a tiny grocery store which provided home delivery of phoned-in grocery orders! (After all, it WAS the North Shore.)
My neighbor, the film director for Encyclopedia Britannica Films, was the late William Kay who worked out of the EBF offices in the former Wilmette Theater. I appeared in one classroom film he made called “The Digestive System” which was filmed on a Saturday morning in the teacher’s lounge of New Trier (east) High School in 1964. A one-second clip of me from that film appears in Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary “Crumb”. My earnings for the day – twenty bucks, and that was under the table!
My mother and her brothers saw films at the Wilmette as children. My father was a project manager for EB during the time you speak of. He recalls working on film production in the Wilmette Theater when all the seats were removed. There were EB offices in a building around the corner on Wilmette Ave, which was also a theater at one time long ago (that building is also still there). You lived there in ‘55 Paul. You might even remember the electric train that used to run down Greenleaf Avenue a short distance away. I remember seeing Pulp Fiction at the Wilmette with a bunch of teenage friends after it had been twinned (in the 90’s). There was still some decoration at that time…it wasn’t quite down to concrete walls in the auditorium. Amazing how that building has spanned the generations.
I lived in Wilmette from 1955 to the late 1960s. Our closest theater was the Teatro del Lago at the north end of Wilmette. The Wilmette theater at that time was closed and being used as one of the facilities for Encyclopedia Britannica Films, which headquartered in Wilmette, using various office spaces. My neighbor was a film director for EBF and even had me appear in one of his educational films – but that’s another story.
On weekends my kid brother and I sometimes rummaged through their trash behind the Wilmette Theater building and found reels of 16mm films, mostly junk but sometimes parts of feature films. (EBF was associated with Films Incorporated, a distributor of Hollywood films on 16mm.)
By the time the Wilmette theater was reopened and I finally got to see a movie there I had been off to college and Vietnam. It’s probably changed hands a few times since I was there.
Let me re-state that last post – the theater re-opened later than I indicated. I meant, how was it used about the time frame of ‘65-'67?
Does anyone know how the the theater was used during the ‘60’s before it re-opened (around '65-'67)? I remember looking at some sort of studio stills in the poster frames. They never seemed to change, and it was always the subject of much speculation when we would go to Baskin Robbins next door.
Brian, thanks for the link to the Wilmette theatre. I enjoyed the photo’s and hope to take in a movie during a future trip to the Chicago area.
Some photos of the Wilmette are visible here, the projection booth is shown here, and the incredibly cramped men’s quarters can be seen here