Photo by Don Telford.
ESSAY BY BECKY HANCOCK
IMAGES BY BRUCE MCCAMISH & DON TELFORD
What’s it like to work in a building that seems alive?
I’m the director of the Tennessee Theatre, a non-profit theatre in Knoxville. Since 1928, this theatre has featured countless performers on its stage and screen, creating lifelong memories for the millions who have passed through her golden doors. It’s a theatre that has gone through more lives than a lucky cat.
Formerly known as a “movie palace,” the Theatre was designed to imitate the opulence and magnificence of an old-world palace in Paris or Prague or perhaps Marrakesh. In the early 20th century, Hollywood-based movie studios built thousands of theaters throughout the United States. In movie palaces, their largest and most extravagant type of venue, the studios intended for people to feel like royalty, to be whisked away from everyday cares.
The Tennessee Theatre does not disappoint in that regard. Even with the vertical “TENNESSEE” sign hanging outside—as tall as a semi-trailer is long—nothing prepares you for the sensory overload you experience upon entering. After passing through a small vestibule, the grand lobby pulls your eyes upward for more than two stories, scanning gilded plaster and marble details in colors of gold, bronze, teal, garnet, obsidian, rose, and deep emerald. Five huge chandeliers hang above your head, their sparkle reflected in mirrored panels along the walls. Your feet step across geometric shapes cast in terrazzo, which give way to plush carpeting and swags of velvet curtains in the auditorium foyer. Light from smaller chandeliers and wall sconces warm the foyer with its elegant furniture and decorative art, adding to the palatial theme.
Not to be outdone, the auditorium transports you to another world. A giant oval of ocean blue centered in the domed gold ceiling—accented with a bronze cross-hatch pattern—crowns the elliptical room. Staring up at it, you feel like you’ve been shrunk down to fit inside of a Fabergé egg, or like you’re witnessing an alien spaceship descending at sunset. A half-acre of velvet seats, all arranged in curved rows facing the altar of the stage, absorb soft lighting emanating from every crevice and corner. From the front row of the balcony, the entire auditorium reaches around you in a gentle embrace.
In my nearly 20 years of working at the Theatre, one of my greatest pleasures has been talking with patrons. Some have been coming here for most of their lives. They totter in slowly, assisted by a cane or walker or the steady arm of an adult child. When they see my nametag, they tell me their earliest memories of the Tennessee.
These elderly patrons speak in reverent, hushed tones or in breathless, exuberant wonder. Their stories cluster around several themes: being dropped off to see the picture show while their busy mothers did Saturday shopping, or taking the bus downtown alone after saving up a month’s worth of nickels. They recall first dates, first kisses stolen in the darkness, engagements. They now bring their own children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews. A first visit to the Tennessee Theatre is a rite of passage in their families, a through-line connecting generations.
But not all families have happy memories here. For more than three decades, the Tennessee Theatre was a whites-only theater, opened when segregation in the southern U.S. was widespread. The equivocation of “separate but equal”—heard frequently at the height of the Civil Rights era—was undeniably on display. White people could attend the grandiose Tennessee while more spartan theaters catered to Black moviegoers.
So the Tennessee is troubled by dark memories too: memories of a Theatre porter who removed his apron and set down his broom, walking off his shift to join students in protest out front; of a Black father standing under the marquee canopy, weighing how to tell his children they could not go in to watch Disney’s Snow White; of impassioned but peaceable activists who, being denied entry, were arrested and carted off to jail.
Thanks to those brave souls, the Theatre has been desegregated nearly twice as long as it was segregated. But still, the Theatre and its leadership now have an obligation to facilitate the healing of scars inflicted on an entire community of people. I recognize these scars of rejection and division in younger Black citizens in Knoxville who feel unwelcome at the Theatre—scars passed down from their ancestors like unwanted heirlooms.
The Tennessee faced lean years too, after home television sets gained popularity and sprawling suburbs around Knoxville got their own movie theaters—more modern and compact than the movie palace. In the early 1970s, the manager of a sleek new theater built near a shopping mall made an ominous prediction, which a longtime employee recalled to me: We are the future of cinema; the Tennessee Theatre is destined to become a parking lot. On November 4, 1977, the Theatre abruptly shuttered, its front doors boarded up, the marquee still touting the second-run movie from the day before.
Property developers drooled at the tired, cavernous room. Look at all this wasted space, they thought. Across the country, wrecking balls demolished countless movie palaces to make way for tomorrow. That the Tennessee was spared such a fate is practically a miracle.
A miracle, or a fool’s errand. In early 1981, James A. Dick, an enterprising radio broadcaster with a soft spot for the grande dame, bought what his employees (and even some family members) considered an enormous albatross. Still, the Tennessee Theatre was saved from destruction despite 15 years of operating in the red.
Mr. Dick then transferred ownership to a newly formed non-profit organization. Its leadership got to work figuring out how to preserve and transform the beautiful but worn and functionally inadequate venue, preparing it as a suitable home for live entertainment.
Over a decade, the non-profit did just that. A comprehensive restoration and partial rebuild closed the theatre for over 18 months and cost nearly $30 million. The ambitious plan called for painstakingly preserving the theatre’s decorative beauty and artistic craftsmanship. Her shallow stage, built for a movie screen and a handful of vaudeville actors, was enlarged to accommodate complex touring productions like Broadway shows.
After teetering on the edge of irrelevant nostalgia, the Tennessee Theatre was reborn on January 14, 2005, resplendent and ready to entertain future generations. (Oh, and that modern movie theater that signaled the demise of the Tennessee? Its former location now offers parking spots for the shopping mall.)
Like those patrons who generously share their remembrances of the movie palace, I too carry a trove of memories. My father, born just two days before the Tennessee Theatre opened, used to tell me, “When you were serious about a girl, you took her to the Tennessee.” Although I surely visited the Theatre on field trips in elementary school, my first solid recollection was on a date in high school. My friend Allen and I got all dressed up, came to the Theatre, and watched Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina.
In college, as a music major, I came to the Tennessee Theatre dressed in black, carrying my clarinet in its case—not because I was a musician playing in the symphony, but so that I could sneak in through the backstage door unnoticed, without paying, and enjoy the concert from a vacant seat in the back of the auditorium.
As much as I have loved the Tennessee Theatre, she undeniably loves me right back. I felt this particularly when I navigated a period of immense grief a few years ago. I was crushed by loss upon loss over the span of 13 months: the deaths of my humble father and ebullient mother, followed by the demise of my 19-year marriage. My work at the Theatre, and the building itself, became a refuge. The love from throngs of adoring patrons soaks her walls. This same love infused me as I walked, trance-like, through the earliest months of grieving.
Now, removed from the most brutal days of grief, I still find steady encouragement from her when I am lonely. Long before her 21st-century renewal, she suffered similar hard times, when her opulence fell out of fashion and downtown Knoxville was stone-silent on a Saturday night. And yet the Theatre persevered, knowing that one day her magnificence would regain its rightful place in the community. She knew she would be surrounded by love again. She reminds me that there is always room for hope.
During the pandemic, when we were all paralyzed by the unknown, I wandered through the Theatre’s lobbies and sat in the auditorium by myself, with all of the lights turned off. In that darkness, I swear I felt her sigh as she tried to reassure me. And once again, she was right—we emerged from the pandemic to brighter days.
But in that closure period, seeing the Theatre sit quiet was like watching a racehorse restrained at the starting gate. She was not meant to be closed up and empty. The Tennessee relishes flinging open her doors to the pulsing, expectant crowds who stop to gape at her glittery chandeliers. She delights in children imagining themselves in the grand halls of a secret castle, as twirling princesses or brave wizards.
She welcomes home the elderly gentleman as he reminisces about a wife who has passed away, 60 years after sitting with her in the balcony on a first date. The Tennessee is revived by the energy of younger fans as they are swallowed in the auditorium’s expanse—singing, dancing, entranced by the music of their favorite band. She blushes when a performer marvels at her extravagant beauty, telling the audience, “How lucky we are to have this theatre.”
So very lucky indeed.
Becky Hancock is an arts nonprofit executive who has lived most of her life in her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. When she is not working at a historic performance venue or at home weeding her native flower garden, she loves traveling to visit loved ones or enjoying nature, history, food, and architecture. Becky is just beginning to explore writing, focusing mostly on loss and learning in midlife. And she is perpetually, hopelessly tardy.