Old movie house organs still filling theater seats

The line that starts forming outside Richmond’s Byrd Theater well before showtime every Saturday night is hardly an unlikely sight for Washingtonians used to cult films and world premieres. But the Byrd is a second-run movie house, meaning that the films it shows have been out for quite a while.

So what’s the story here?

The answer comes when the crowd, a diverse group of younger folk, old-timers and families, settles into the Byrd’s cavernous auditorium complete with French Empire appointments and an 18-foot chandelier hanging from a central dome.

The house lights dim, and from the depths of the orchestra pit rises the centerpiece of it all, a spotlit theater organ, built especially for this theater back in 1928 and played with aplomb by master organist Bob Gulledge. The crowd cheers. There are even a few “woo-hoos.”

“I love the sound when he plays,” says Blake Butler, 13, from Mechanicsville, Va. “Dad plays the organ in church, but there’s nothing like the Mighty Wurlitzer.”

The Mighty Wurlitzer. The very phrase conjures up images of a largely vanished time, when grand movie palaces dotted downtowns and folks got dressed up to see the show.

Just don’t expect to find any in the District: Our own movie palaces and their organs are long gone. You’ll have to venture farther afield to check out the vintage tones of a Wurlitzer or a Kimball.

But they are there to be heard, whether in solo performances, accompanying a silent film or, as at the Byrd, before a show of “talkies.” And they are all within a two-hour drive of town.

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The 1928 Byrd Theater operates 365 days a year, and a glimpse of its elaborate interior alone is enough to make a jaunt to Richmond worth the price of gas. But Saturday nights are special, because that’s when the Wurlitzer wows the crowd before the movie show.

“It’s one of the greatest things in the state of Virginia,” says John Donati of Richmond, who has been coming to the Byrd, along with brother Humbert, since it opened and he was “just a baby.”

During the glory years of the 1920s, just about every downtown theater, along with more than a few neighborhood venues, had its theater organ, capable of reproducing the sounds of a full-scale orchestra and complete with a wide array of sound effects to accompany the show.

Theater owners regularly competed with one another to see who could have the organ with the most keyboards, or manuals, and regularly upped their number of ranks, or sets of pipes. So having a 3/18 organ, meaning one with three manuals and 18 ranks, would be better than having a 2/9.

But the halcyon years were short. Once the movies began to talk, the theater organ largely fell silent.

“In a lot of theaters, owners simply stopped making the payments,” Mr. Gulledge says. “Some organs were repossessed and others were just thrown out.”

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