ChiTown Movies in Pilsen is still open, still serving good food, still saving the movie drive-in experience for Chicago as we head into fall
Bryce Bowman is a West Point graduate, U.S. veteran and accidental outdoor movie theater operator.
He specializes in property management and real estate. In 2019, the year before COVID-19, he took over the lease for ChiTown Futbol,the indoor Pilsen soccer and sports facility on South Throop Street, a couple of blocks south of West Cermak Road.
The lease gave Bowman and his staff access to the adjoining three-acre parking lot. Handy, of course. Spacious, for sure. But prior to the pandemic, few would’ve called it a lifesaver.
“ChiTown Futbol is our core business, the one we bought,” Bowman told me the other day. “ChiTown Moviesis the one we started because we had to. And I’m glad we did.” This fall, in the second year of the pandemic also known as the most tediously prolonged disaster movie imaginable, business remains strong.
Who rented out the ChiTown Movies drive-in last year? Well, let’s see: The Music Box Theatre. The Chicago Latino Film Festival and “Destinos al Aire.” The Chicago International Film Festival opened the 2020 edition with the documentary “Belushi.” That’s a partial list.
Bowman’s own bookings kept the drive-in movies coming, in between outside rentals, past last fall straight into the winter months and early 2021. “Fall-into-winter: That’s our prime season,” he said. “For one thing, it gets darker earlier, which is great. Halloween is very big for us. We showed “Love Actually” for Valentine’s Day. It sold out. In February!”
Responding to COVID-19, several valiant Chicago pop-up drive-ins showed what they could, in locations ranging from a Soldier Field parking lot to the Lincoln Yards development to the SeatGeek Stadium parking lot, or a corner of it, in Bridgeview.
ChiTown Movies is physically smaller than those pop-ups. It’s tucked back where South Throop dead-ends near the South Branch of the Chicago River, which sounds like a horror movie, but it’s cozier than that, really. It’s urban, and industrial, and surprisingly quiet without being menacing. No vast parking lot. The ChiTown Futbol lot accommodates up to 130 cars, and some presenters cap the limit closer to 100.
Once it took off last year, Bowman invested in a bigger screen (46 ft. tall and 60 ft. wide), better sound (much appreciated for concert films in particular; I saw “Summer of Soul” there this summer when it played the Doc10 Film Festival) and continued with a way-above-average drive-in theater food service, featuring tacos, frozen mangos, popcorn, what have you. (Plus alcohol, if you like.) When the pandemic first hit, ChiTown Futbol referees and scorekeepers on the brink of a furlough instead shifted to the roles of drive-in food delivery staffers, running orders out from the kitchen inside the soccer facility to the cars parked in front of the screen.
Bowman estimated his drive-in sold 40,000 tickets to various festivals and screenings since mid-2020.
This October, the Chicago International Film Festival is returning to ChiTown Movies with several new titles in October. Among them: the opening night presentation of “The Velvet Underground” Oct. 13. Meantime a newcomer to ChiTown Movies, Asian Pop-Up Cinema, opens its 13th festival Sept. 27 with the world premiere of the Hong Kong comedy “The Dishwasher Squad.”
And lo! The mammoth “Music Box of Horrors” festival, dripping with terror, schlock, thrills and special guests, returns Oct. 1-31.
“How could we not?” Music Box Theatre general manager Ryan Oestreich asked me, more or less rhetorically. “We surveyed some of our Music Box Theatre regulars who went to multiple screenings at ChiTown Movies last year. And everybody really wanted to it to happen there again. It was that simple.”
For more information, go to chitownmovies.com. ChiTown Movies rive-in screening schedules for the Chicago International Film Festival, the Asian Pop-Up Cinema and other Chicago organizations will be available soon.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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