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Nothing could be more retro than the movie theaters of S. Charles Lee, though it’s hard finding evidence, either standing or demolished, to prove that this Chicago-bred architect-designer ever practiced here at all. But he did, and his apprenticeship was formidable: with architectural giants Rapp & Rapp, prime purveyors of 20s movie palace baroque (is “churrigueresque” too strong a word?), whose area work includes the Chicago Theatre, the Riviera, the Uptown, the south-side Tivoli (now demolished) … the first and last completed when Lee was at the firm. But Lee’s own path was different, and after pulling up stakes and heading out to the coast (specifically LA), he developed, from the mid-20s on, a stripped-down, streamlined theater-design style—what’s categorized today as deco moderne (or, in more extreme cases, “automat modular”)—that reflected both changing aesthetics (since International Style was all the rage: white Corbusian surfaces and curvilinear turnings, etc) and the penny-pinching demands of Depression-era construction.
