My partner Albert Berger and I re-opened the Sandburg Theatre as a repertory house showing double features of classic films on May 22, 1979. Our opening week was a festival of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Although home video was starting to appear back then, most of these films could not be seen at that time except on television. We leased the theatre from famous Chicago real estate mogul Arthur Rubloff, who had developed much of the Magnificent Mile among other properties. The theatre was shuttered when we took it over and in very poor shape. It still had the bunny logo design carpeting from the days when it operated as The Playboy, and a marquee with disco style lighting. We put in a new silver screen, but I remember that we had no ability to adjust the drapes or masking in the theatre except manually, and as we screened old films of different aspect ratios from 1:1:33 to VistaVision to Cinemascope, we were always have to run down between films to open or shut the drapes or raise or lower this huge 35 foot wide bunting. We were just kids out of college and knew very little about the business of exhibition. We were helped by a man named Robert Taylor who ran the Village Theatre on Clark Street and North Avenue at that time. And a young executive named Tom Brueggemann who worked for a large theatre chain, M & R Amusements, and helped us book our movies and deal with the distributors. In 1982 we ran our last show, and for a short time the lease on our theatre was taken over by Larry Edwards, who was the proprietor of The Biograph Theatre on Lincoln, famous as the location of the killing of John Dillinger after he attended a screening there. In somewhat typical Chicago style, what happened to the Sandburg was that the site was coveted by developers. Our theatre and an adjacent building (the home of the old Ting-A-Ling ice cream and candy store) were all occupied by tenants who had month to month leases, except for one tenant, I believe it was a small pizza parlor, who had a long term lease. Sure enough, that business mysteriously caught fire one night, and in the wake of that incident, all of the tenants were given notice, and the building was torn down. As someone posted, a Walgreens was built on the site. But what they didn’t write was the true ironic detail that Cary Grant, a family friend of heiress Betty Walgreen, came to dedicate the opening of that particular Walgreens, right there on the site of the old Surf/Playboy/Sandburg cinema where so many patrons had enjoyed his films.
My partner Albert Berger and I re-opened the Sandburg Theatre as a repertory house showing double features of classic films on May 22, 1979. Our opening week was a festival of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Although home video was starting to appear back then, most of these films could not be seen at that time except on television. We leased the theatre from famous Chicago real estate mogul Arthur Rubloff, who had developed much of the Magnificent Mile among other properties. The theatre was shuttered when we took it over and in very poor shape. It still had the bunny logo design carpeting from the days when it operated as The Playboy, and a marquee with disco style lighting. We put in a new silver screen, but I remember that we had no ability to adjust the drapes or masking in the theatre except manually, and as we screened old films of different aspect ratios from 1:1:33 to VistaVision to Cinemascope, we were always have to run down between films to open or shut the drapes or raise or lower this huge 35 foot wide bunting. We were just kids out of college and knew very little about the business of exhibition. We were helped by a man named Robert Taylor who ran the Village Theatre on Clark Street and North Avenue at that time. And a young executive named Tom Brueggemann who worked for a large theatre chain, M & R Amusements, and helped us book our movies and deal with the distributors. In 1982 we ran our last show, and for a short time the lease on our theatre was taken over by Larry Edwards, who was the proprietor of The Biograph Theatre on Lincoln, famous as the location of the killing of John Dillinger after he attended a screening there. In somewhat typical Chicago style, what happened to the Sandburg was that the site was coveted by developers. Our theatre and an adjacent building (the home of the old Ting-A-Ling ice cream and candy store) were all occupied by tenants who had month to month leases, except for one tenant, I believe it was a small pizza parlor, who had a long term lease. Sure enough, that business mysteriously caught fire one night, and in the wake of that incident, all of the tenants were given notice, and the building was torn down. As someone posted, a Walgreens was built on the site. But what they didn’t write was the true ironic detail that Cary Grant, a family friend of heiress Betty Walgreen, came to dedicate the opening of that particular Walgreens, right there on the site of the old Surf/Playboy/Sandburg cinema where so many patrons had enjoyed his films.