An interview with Dennis Scott, Music Box Theatre organist

Dennis Scott is one of Chicago’s undersung legends. He’s the house organist for the Music Box Theatre, where his whimsical, charming music can be heard between screenings and accompanying silent films. Scott cut his chops playing organ at pizza parlors—a fad during the 1970s and ’80s—and first played at the Music Box in ’92. His day job in computer graphics prevented him from consistently performing there until 2009, when he became a regular presence.

Scott’s job involves an unusual feat of improvisation: He needs to bolster the emotions of any film, sometimes without seeing them beforehand, while ensuring the focus never rests on him. While his job may seem thankless, moviegoers frequently praise him for his work, especially in December when he accompanies films in the Annual Music …

I called Scott on the phone to discuss his life and work. We talked about his early memories of playing the organ; his mentor, John Muri; and the joys that come with playing during the holiday season.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know that you grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Can you paint a picture for me of that city and what it was like growing up there?

Dennis Scott: I was just down there for ten days to celebrate my sister’s birthday. Tulsa is surprising. I’ve asked people what their impression of Tulsa is, and they think it’s out in the middle of a desert, but it’s a really pretty city. It survived the depression very well because there was a lot of oil money there. There are lots of very wealthy neighborhoods and beautiful houses, and those neighborhoods all still exist. It was voted a number of times as America’s most beautiful city, but it suffered the same fate as many cities during the 1960s and ’70s because, with urban renewal, they tore down so many buildings. It’s a very art deco city. In fact, the city has been claimed as one of the best examples of art deco architecture.

When I was a kid, there was a vibrant downtown section that had four big theaters as well as some smaller theaters. Three of them were designed by John Eberson, who designed all the famous atmospheric theaters around the country at the time. The other one was designed by Rapp & Rapp, who also designed the Chicago Theatre and the Oriental, now called the Nederlander Theatre. Tulsa was very cosmopolitan at the time, before they started tearing things down.

What early memories do you have of engaging with the arts? Did your parents encourage it?

My father could not have cared less. [Laughs.] As long as he could find a place to go fishing, the rest of the world could take a hike. There was no support there whatsoever. My mother had a passing interest in it. She wasn’t enthusiastic about it—she wasn’t a stage mother—but she liked to paint, and she encouraged that. She wasn’t really interested in my music much until I was out of college and had moved here. I was invited back to Tulsa to play an organ program, and she was surprised. She said, “I never knew that you had such an interest in music; I thought it was just a hobby. I hope you never give it up.” I was probably in my mid-20s then.

Credit: Kirk Williamson

What was it like to hear that?

It was really reaffirming since there had never been any particular support from either of my parents. Even as a kid, we didn’t have a piano or an organ until my dad bought a small electronic organ for himself when I was about 13 or 14. That was my first instrument. I always had an interest in piano and keyboard—I would go to neighbors’ houses and ask if I could come in and pick out tunes on the piano, which they allowed me to do. That’s how I got started. My dad’s oldest sister was visiting us one time from Arizona, and she heard me playing and said, “How long have you been taking lessons?” I said, “I’m not taking lessons.” “Why not?” “Dad won’t pay for lessons.” She went to my mother and said, “Go find a teacher for Dennis, and I’ll pay for his lessons.” I had lessons for about two and a half years. And then this aunt, who was much older than my dad, died, and that was the end of my lessons. Back in those days, in the 1950s and early ’60s, my mother was a housewife and didn’t work, so she didn’t have the money to send me to lessons. Everything I did from that point was self-taught.

Do you remember the organ that your dad bought?

It was a Thomas organ—a pathetic little thing. [Laughs.] It had the worst sound you could imagine. It had one manual [or keyboard], and it wasn’t even a full one; it was like half of a spinet organ. It had 13 pedals, and it also had a turntable at one end. It came with 48 lessons and an album of records with these lessons, and that’s really how I started. I got through lesson 48, and my dad was only on lesson two or three. He worked nights, so when he left for work, I’d play. Did you see The Holdovers [2023]? Remember at the party, when they’re at someone’s home—in their family room, there’s an organ identical to the one we had. Of course, that was supposed to have taken place around 1960, so it was historically correct. I thought all of those things ended up in landfills years ago. [Laughs.]

When were you born?

November 1946.

Do you remember seeing musical accompaniment to films when you were younger?

I didn’t see many films accompanied by theater organ until I became interested in theater. My older brother lived here in Chicago. When I started taking organ lessons, he went to Rose Records on Wabash—which, even after it was taken over by Tower Records, they still referred to it as the Rose Store because it had been there for so long, and all the Rose employees still worked there. He went there in 1960, and they had a theater organ recording department. Somebody bought theater recordings—that was unusual for a record store. He sent me a whole stack of records for either my birthday or Christmas, and they were all theater organ instead of electronic or Hammond organ recordings. Two or three of the recordings were made by people who eventually became close friends of mine.

I joined the American Theatre Organ Enthusiasts, who eventually changed their name to the American Theatre Organ Society, around 1970. I came to their national convention here in Chicago in 1969. I heard silent movies being played, including one by my mentor, John Muri, who became my dearest friend. He had played in the silent-movie era during the 1920s. I saw him many times accompany silent films. He also recorded many silent film scores for Blackhawk Films, which is now part of Kino Lorber.

He was never my teacher—I never formally took lessons from him—but he was my mentor. I would go to a lot of his silent movies and look over his shoulders. I’d go to some of his rehearsals too, so I’d see the process of preparing to play for a silent film. And then I’d be there for a performance so I could see what he actually did. That in itself was an education. And occasionally we’d talk, and he’d give me bits of information, like, “Try not to play music after the film was made if you want to be authentic about it. Don’t put published songs into dramas because it’ll detract from the story, but you can do them in comedies.” He said, “All these rules can be broken from time to time, but these are all general rules.” That was my first introduction to silent film because you never saw them on TV back in those days.

Were there specific silent films that you saw him accompany that left an impact on you in terms of how to play the organ?

There were so many different silent films because he’d do feature films, and many of the theater organ concerts from the ’70s would feature a two-reeler, which were these 18- or 20-minute films. Lots of Buster Keaton. Back in the 1970s, this was very unusual, but the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge hired him for a week to play for *Wings [1927] *every night. He lived in Detroit at the time, and he stayed at my house for this. I was there with him every evening, and that was an education because I saw the way he’d weave themes in and out. He’d have a theme, and it’d sound happy in one scene and then pensive in another.

What’s the protocol for playing along to a movie? Do you have to see it beforehand?

If I really have time, I like to see it once. If there’s another score, I’ll listen to it while I’m watching it. If there’s no score, I’ll take it to the organ and play along with it, and then I see it again and perform it. Years ago, I asked John how he would prepare for a film back in the old days when he was working in the theater. He worked six days a week and had Wednesdays off. He played from the first show around noon until the last show in the evening, and he made good money doing that. I asked him, “How much time would you have to prepare for a movie?” And he told me that a film truck would pull up to the theater in the morning, they would drop off the film cans, one of the ushers would take the film cans to the booth, the projectionist would thread the machine, and he’d play the matinee. He’d play it cold. He’d say, “Hopefully I had it under my fingers by the evening shows.” In those days, they changed films maybe twice a week, so a film would play for two or three days.

I’ve had this happen at the Music Box. We’d get a film in, there’s no screener, and the film might come in on a Friday night, and I’d have to play on Saturday morning. If they had time, I’d come in early, and they’d play the first reel and the last reel, or at least the first few minutes of the opening scene. I’ve heard organists from the old days say that if you can get into and out of the film, the rest of it more or less takes care of itself. But there have been a few times that I’ve had to play films cold. And truth be told, it’s fun to do. [Laughs.] It’s a challenge. After you play them for so many years, you learn how to do that.

Credit: Kirk Williamson

Is there a particular film you had to go into cold that proved especially challenging?

I worry about every one of them. [Laughs.] Some days you’re just not inspired to do much, but once the theater goes dark and the movie hits the screen and the audience is sitting behind you . . . something clicks, and I get into a different gear mentally. Sometimes I don’t know where it comes from. “How’d I pull that one out of the hat?” [Laughs.] I try to keep each film fresh. I don’t do the same themes. I’ve seen organists who play the same figurations for every film, but I try to come up with themes that fit the film, fit the mood. If it’s a period piece or a costume drama, I’ll try to come up with sounds that fit into that.

I played a Japanese film a few years ago at the Music Box: [Yasujirō] Ozu’s An Inn in Tokyo [1935]. I went on YouTube and found a video with Japanese popular music of the 1930s. I listened to that just to get the flavor of it. Some fella came up to me afterwards and said, “Where’d you find that score?” I told him, “Truth be told, I just made it up.” “No, no, no, that’s authentic Japanese music. I’m a Japanese scholar.” I told him what I did, and he said that I had him fooled. I told him, “Why are you paying attention to the score! You should be paying attention to the film. I failed!” [Laughs.]

Do you remember the first film you accompanied on the organ?

In another life, I was working in a pizza parlor playing a pipe organ. This was in Michigan, and the owners wanted to do silent films every night. They wanted to do a couple two-reelers. That’s where I developed my chops.

And it’s a lower-stakes environment, which is nice.

People were there to eat pizza and drink beer, which became the death of the place because the owners crawled into the bottle and stayed there. They basically drank themselves out of business. But it was good while it lasted. But that’s the way I really got started playing for silent films. And then some of the organ clubs around the country said, “Oh, can you do this film?” It kept going from there.

What was the name of the pizza parlor?

It was Pizza and Pipes in Pontiac, Michigan. After they closed, I played at a local restaurant. That was my career at the time. I couldn’t get into the music department at the University of Tulsa because the teacher I had for two and a half years was not state-accredited; they didn’t even let me audition for the music department. I was a journalism major, so I have a degree in that. I worked in public relations and did administrative work for a few years, and then accidentally fell into a music job. I was at a National Association of Music Merchants convention here in Chicago back in 1976.

I was at the Thomas Organ Company hospitality suite and everyone was getting pretty well smashed. Someone said, “Dennis, come on and play something!” So I played for a few minutes, and this fella, who was the director of product development [and] also an organist, walked over to me and said, “How would you like to go to work for us as a product specialist?” I said I’d think about it for a while. I honestly didn’t give it another thought, but then, a week later, my phone rang at work, and he said, “What do you think?” “I thought you were kidding me!” At that point, I was 29 years old, and I thought, you know, I always wanted to work in music, and I’ll probably never be asked again. And the job I was in was a job that I really liked, but I knew that I’d gone as far as I could go—I could sit in that same chair until I was 65.

So I took the job. It only lasted about a year because the organ company went out of business, but in the meantime, I traveled around the country playing in music stores. I was doing training programs for dealers, telling them how to demonstrate and sell organs. I ended up getting a job in San Francisco. They had pizza parlors there, and I was playing at one in Daly City at the Serramonte shopping center. It was a chain of three restaurants—one in Daly City, one in Redwood City, and one in Campbell. Then I got a job offer in Pontiac that was for a lot more money, and I was there for about seven years. After that, I moved back to San Francisco, and after five years there, I said, “I’m too midwestern to live here.” [Laughs.] I moved back to Chicago in 1992.

How did you land the Music Box gig?

I told my brother that I was going to move back to Chicago, otherwise I’d be doing a swan dive off one of the bridges—my choices were the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate. [Laughs.] I had around $200 in my pocket; I had a piano and organ and records and books and furniture and put them all in storage. I got on a train and came back to Chicago. I worked with a friend here doing pipe organ maintenance and repair for a few months. I was studying computer graphics when I was in San Francisco, and I got my first computer graphics job in ’92, and at the same time, I started to work at the Music Box. Then I changed graphics jobs and went to work at a movie theater chain, Classic Cinemas, and was their graphic artist for almost 14 years. It got to be too much to work that job at Downers Grove and then at the Music Box on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I was working seven days a week.

I had to give up the Music Box. Classic Cinemas had the Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove, and I’d play down there on Friday nights. After I finished up my job, I’d play a couple intermissions and then go home. About the time I was ready to retire from Classic Cinemas, I got an email from Brian Andreotti at the Music Box. The fella who played the organ after I left had quit, and he asked me if I could play for their first [Noir City Film Festival] with Eddie Muller. They asked if I could play for some or all of the programs, and then they wanted me to play for something in October, and then for the sing-along Sound of Music screenings, and for any and all of the Christmas sing-alongs, and said, “By the way, would you like to come back as house organist?” The timing was right. I sent them a note back that said yes, yes, yes, and yes. This was 2009.

For the first noir fest, one of the guests was Harry Belafonte. They had the Allen organ that they had since the mid-80s. It was on its last legs, so they bought another used Allen organ. My partner, Thom Day, bought the Kimball pipe organ console that you see at the theater now. It was built here in Chicago as a pipe organ the same year that the Music Box was built—1929. We bought the console in 2015, spent three and a half years restoring, refinishing, and respecifying it, and it now works with digital samples. We installed it in 2018, and because of the movie schedule, we only had a few days to get it going before the Christmas sing-alongs. It played its first notes on a Tuesday, and we had two sold-out sing-alongs on a Friday—no pressure, of course. [Laughs.]

So that’s how that went. But this organ sounds more realistic—sounds more like a theater pipe organ—and it has more sound effects. At the time, the only other pipe organ at a theater in the city was at the Chicago Theatre, and they rarely used the organ for anything there. And it really needs a complete rebuild—it’s not in very good shape.

Credit: Kirk Williamson

Can you talk about your partner, Thom, and what it was like to go through the process of restoring the Kimball pipe organ console?

He has a background in electronics—that’s what he studied in school. He worked right out of college at Heathkit, a company in Saint Joseph, Michigan, and they made kits for people to put things together, from radios to TVs. It was a build-it-yourself thing. I think they even had electronic organs at one point. That’s a company that was in the process of going out of business, and he came back to Illinois—he grew up about a hundred miles southwest of Chicago [in] McNabb. He actually grew up on a farm that was a mile and a half outside of there. When he came back to Illinois, he was the audiovisual guy at Illinois Valley Community College. He did that for 25 years, and when they started, they were dealing with 16-mm film and reel-to-reel tape records. By the time he retired from that job, he was putting together smart classrooms, which are also now a thing of the past.

He was ready to take on this project with the organ. We had the opportunity to buy this console, which had been in a couple of other theaters in Chicago—once as a pipe organ at the Gateway Theater in Copernicus, and then at the Portage Theater. As an electronic organ, it was similar to what we have in the Music Box now, but it only had four audio channels. We have 24 audio channels now, but the console was really a mess, so we had to restrip it, put new keytops on all the keyboards, and put new stops in. It had been modified so many times over the years that when we stripped all the stops out of the bolsters, there were stop tabs from four different manufacturers—it was a hodgepodge. Thom wired the entire thing, and it’s running from two Mac Mini computers with digital sample sets. I wanted to use sounds from two different sample sets, and you can’t run them both at the same time from the same computer, so there are two computers.

During that period of time, we were raiding the Internet to find speakers, and through eBay and other sources, we bought all the amplifiers and speakers for the organ—otherwise we would’ve had to pay thousands of dollars more since we were using Klipsch speakers and Crown amplifiers. We found used ones at bargain prices. So that’s how we put everything together. The house left chamber has ten speakers, and the house right chamber has 14 speakers. The theater was designed during the silent era, so it has pipe organ chambers on either side, but by the time the theater opened in 1929, they said, “Well, silent film is dead.” They never bought a pipe organ for the theater, so the chambers sat empty until the operators from the 1980s, Bob Chaney and Chris Carlo—who had been in the organ and piano business before they took over the Music Box—put the first organ of any kind in the theater. It was an electronic organ. The pipe chambers just sat there empty from 1929 to 1983!

Are there particular films you’ve learned to appreciate as a result of accompanying them?

Oh boy. I’ve accompanied so many, and after a while, they all blend together. I’m the organist for the International Buster Keaton Society, so I enjoy accompanying any Buster Keaton film, especially this one I just did last month in Ohio, which is College [1927]. The reason I like doing that is because I have the DVD and the 16-mm film and the Blu-ray of my mentor, John, accompanying that film. He accompanied it for Blackhawk back in the 1970s for a 16-mm film, then they came out with the VHS versions on Kino. They kept his score there, and also when they came out with the DVD and the Blu-ray. Up in my attic, I have John’s papers, and I have the themes that he wrote out for that film, and I play those themes when I accompany it. Whenever he accompanied something for Blackhawk, he wouldn’t use published music because he was afraid of copyright, so everything was original.

So the Buster Keatons are my favorites to play. I also love the Janet Gaynor films, like 7th Heaven [1927] and Sunrise [1927], which is such a beautiful and powerful film. She had the perfect face for silent film. She’s the only person who could laugh and cry at the same time and you could understand why she was doing both at the same time. I thought she was an incredible actress.

At the Music Box, one of my favorite things to do is the Christmas sing-alongs. Over the years we’ve done more and more of them. Last year we did 30, and before COVID we did 34. Some of this depends on how the holiday falls in the calendar. When I first started at the Music Box, we only did a couple nights of Christmas sing-alongs, and over the years it grew and grew, and we’ve got more people coming each year.

I wrote a song for the sing-along with [emcee] Joe Savino. We both say that there’s so much positive energy during that run. When we get to the final two shows on Christmas Eve, we look at each other and say, “Are we done already?” At that point it feels like we’ve just hit our stride, and on some days we do four shows. People ask if we get exhausted, but we don’t because we get a lot of feedback and energy from the audience. That’s how people in vaudeville must’ve done it back in the old days when they did five shows a day. We call ourselves the last two vaudevillians in Chicago. [Laughs.]

The audience response is so good, and we have people coming up to us and saying that it’s become a family tradition for so many years. In 2019, I had three women on the same day tell me the exact same story, as if they read it from a script. During one of the movies, they were out in the lobby with their baby, and they said, “This is my daughter, she’s six months old. This is her first Christmas, and I’m starting this tradition with her because my mother started this tradition with me before I was a year old, and I’ve been here every year since. I’ve never missed a year since I was born. I hope my daughter keeps this tradition going.” So we’ve created something here that people have latched onto. And with all the goofiness going on in the country, I think people like it as an escape.

** The 42nd Annual Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long and Double Feature** *White Christmas *(1954) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), through Wed 12/24, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, musicboxtheatre.com/series-and-festivals/the-42nd-annual-music-box-christmas-sing-a-long-double-feature

I end all my interviews with the same question, and I wanted to ask it to you as well: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Boy, you had to ask somebody who is lifelong clinically depressed. [Laughs.] I think I like that I can do something that can make other people feel better. Like with the Christmas shows, people will come up to me and say, “Do you realize that you’re a part of my family’s Christmas tradition?” And I’m not even religious! [Laughs.]

A woman came up to me one year between shows for the Christmas sing-alongs, and she said, “You need more Jesus in your shows. You don’t play any music to celebrate our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” And I’m thinking, OK, here we go. I say, “We’re not a church, we’re a theater.” She kept insisting, and I said that there were these beautiful carolers out in the lobby and that they do a lot of traditional Christmas songs. I told her that she could hear this music out there. “Oh no, you need to do it here.” I pointed at the console and pointed at the doors that enter into the auditorium and I said, “From that point forward, everything here is just pagan ritual.” And she looked at me like, “What?!” I said, “Seriously, we have people who come to our Christmas shows who are Christians and Jews and Muslim and Buddhist or have no religious faith at all, but they’re all here to have a good time. That’s the whole point.” I asked her to find another place in Chicago with more Christmas spirit than here. I’m not sure if she bought it, but she didn’t have a comeback. [Laughs.]

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