Gonzo and Fozzie Bear are back, and I can’t wait to see what type of havoc they intend to wreak. Today is the premiere of “The Muppets,” the most anticipated feature starring the celebrated cast of puppets to hit theaters in 27 years. Jason Segel was intent on reviving the franchise -- essentially shelved since Disney’s 2004 acquisition -- by staying true to creator Jim Henson’s comedic voice and early technical style. Given the talented colleagues with whom he’s surrounded himself*, not to mention his work with felt dolls in the past, I’m confident Segel will capture the whimsy and sincerity Henson deployed to charm audiences three decades ago.

Just as Segel cites Henson as an early comedic inspiration, the Muppets’ mastermind counts Burr Tillstrom as one of his primary creative muses. There’s a strong case to be made that Kermit and his friends would never have gained a foothold on PBS, much less graced the silver screen, were it not for the innovative (and often overlooked) Chicago-based entertainer. As Henson admitted in a 1979 profile with the New York Times, “Tillstrom had more to do with the beginning of puppets on television than we did.”

That man, born on the city’s North Side in 1917, saw puppeteering as his calling. At the tender age of eight, Tillstrom started wiring teddy bears so he could put on shows mimicking Buster Keaton movies for his parents and neighborhood friends. After graduating from Senn High School and briefly attending the University of Chicago, he picked up a job in 1935 with the Chicago Park District managing a puppet theater, an operation that was bankrolled by subsidies from the Works Progress Administration. This financial support gave him the flexibility to try more experimental pieces, choreographing puppet versions of classics like "Romeo and Juliet” and Saturday morning kids shows influenced by European Punch and Judy plays. Tillstrom was invited to the 1939 New York World's Fair and by the mid-1940s had built a steady, if humble, career starring in vaudeville revues and at private parties and shows for schools and women’s clubs.

The invention and popularization of television altered the trajectory of Tillstrom’s career dramatically. In 1947, RCA suits came to Chicago to develop a children’s show and asked Tillstrom if he’d perform for an hour, five days per week, on WBKB, the station owned by movie palace tycoons Balaban and Katz. Tillstrom agreed on the condition that he could have one human actor with him on set. At the suggestion of a WBKB official, they hired Fran Allison, a former Iowa schoolteacher turned radio singer. The pair settled on a simple premise for their show: Allison would play an exaggerated version of herself and would hold normal, improvised conversations with a series of hand puppets manipulated by Tillstrom, including Kukla (described in Life as “an earnest, strangely bald youngster”) and Ollie (an “irresponsible, one-toothed dragon”). Named “Junior Jamboree,” and later “Kukla, Fan, and Ollie,” it premiered on October 13 and became “in a little over a year and with a cast of only one visible human, one of the most popular of all TV programs.”

What made the series work? For starters, viewers who watched Tillstrom’s puppets perform alone and with minimal sets and costumes for five hours every week developed a deep attachment to the characters. “They ‘lived’ on television,” Tillstrom would later say. “It went from characters in a play to living people.” And while the humor was “tailor-made for a juve audience” (as one obnoxious reviewer for Variety put it), adults appreciated that “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie” treated its subject matter seriously and its audience with respect. (In a fan letter, John Steinbeck noted that the "show’s ease and naturalness delight me.”) For his part, Tillstrom was convinced that filming on the Third Coast as opposed to the East Coast set his series apart. "In his opinion,” wrote TV Forecast, “Chicagoans are fearless, take chances, experiment with new and original ideas, whereas New York is massive, rich, and traditional."

Tillstrom took his show off the air in 1957, 10 years after it launched. Along the way, he earned a Peabody Award and an Emmy for Best Children's Program. Yet he made arguably his greatest contribution to American popular culture in 1960 at the Puppeteers of America festival in Detroit. That’s where he met Henson, a young college graduate who still didn’t quite know what he wanted to do with his life. The two struck up an immediate friendship. Burr later introduced Henson to puppet builder Don Sahlin, who created Rowlf the Dog (Henson’s first puppet to make regular appearances on network television) and helped hone the Muppet “look.” When Jim and his wife moved to New York in 1963, they rented an apartment in Tillstrom’s building, allowing the two artists to discuss their craft with regularity. Sesame Street was optioned six years later.

For those interested in Tillstrom's career, the Chicago Historical Society houses dozens of crates filled with his puppets, props, and musical scores in its archive. Rich Samuels has posted a great collection of KFO links and videos online, too. Before you go see “The Muppets” this weekend, give them a glance.

*Nick Stoller ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall"), Bret McKenzie and James Bobin ("Flight of the Conchords"), Amy Adams.

Mere steps from my front door sits one of the most opulent buildings in the country. I’ve never been inside, nor have the vast majority of my neighbors. It’s not because we don’t appreciate beautiful things. Quite the contrary. It’s because the local treasure has sat abandoned for over three decades.

Last week, the Tribune’s Mark Caro wrote an excellent feature on the Uptown Theater, Chicago’s luxurious and endangered North Side landmark. Despite the sour economy and hefty price tag ($70 million), Caro found a “newfound sense of optimism” among preservationists and public officials that a full restoration of the structure’s elegant lobby and 4,400-seat interior -- badly damaged by flooding and years of neglect -- was a legitimate possibility. "It's like the stars are all in alignment," gushed Chicago Cultural Affairs and Special Events commissioner Michelle Boone.

Whoever ultimately bankrolls the project will earn my enduring admiration. They’ll also salvage the crown jewel of Balaban and Katz (B&K), an entrepreneurial local company that transformed both Chicago’s entertainment scene and its visual landscape in one short decade.

Before Lowes or AMC, there was B&K. From 1916 to 1926, West Siders Barney Balaban and Sam Katz developed "chain store organization for movie exhibition within the city of Chicago,” opening more than 50 separate movie theaters, including the Chicago (with its famous marquee), the Riviera, and the Congress, among many others. Their explosive growth was a product of the firm’s creative business plan, which Sam and Barney developed to compete directly with theaters controlled by film production studios, which at the time held exclusive rights to air Hollywood’s first-rate fare.* Instead of promoting the pictures themselves, B&K took the “films others did not want” and sold the experience of going to the show. As the firm noted in its 1926 book The Fundamental Principles of Balaban and Katz Theater Management, “we must build up in the minds of our audience the feeling that we represent an institution taking a vital part in the formation of the character of the community.”

Douglas Gomery, a journalism professor and broadcasting business expert, credits B&K with several crucial innovations that allowed the small-timers to construct its movie empire. Most notably, Barney and Sam were early believers in transit-oriented development; the firm built most of its theaters in neighborhoods newly served by the L and home to a small but booming population of upwardly-mobile consumers,** a slice of the city overlooked by the existing purveyors of vaudeville and silent cinema. And these movie houses weren’t just holes in the wall. With the help of architects Rapp and Rapp, B&K erected entertainment palaces, with giant lobbies, comfortable seats, colonnades, marble floors, massive chandeliers, and stained glass windows. The structures also boasted state-of-the-art carbon dioxide cooling systems, a luxury at the time,*** along with impeccable customer service. One advertisement for the company promises that each usher -- generally college-aged men -- is “trained by a graduate of West Point,” “selected with as much care as the cadets at the Nation’s Military Academy,” and “must come from a good family.” “The theater[s] occupied a rare moment of shared democracy,” Lynn Becker noted a few years ago, “where anyone with a quarter or 50 cents could spend a couple hours steeped in the sort of luxury usually reserved for the ultrarich.”

In 1926, just 10 years after B&K opened for business, the company was bought out by Famous Players Lasky (now Paramount) in a deal that represented $100 million in assets ($1.2 billion in 2010) and consolidated over 500 theaters under the control of one banner. Katz was named president of The Publix theatres group, a subsidiary of FPL, and immediately went about implementing on the East Coast the same strategies that worked so well on the Third Coast. In five years, Publix opened 900 new theaters, all of which were supervised intently by the Chicago boys planted in NYC. Barney Balaban was eventually elected President of Paramount Pictures, a position he held for 28 years.

The first major cinema wave crashed with the popularization of free television in the 1950s, and the majority of B&K’s local palaces were ultimately demolished. But before business tanked, the execs back home saw the writing on the wall and purchased multiple experimental television licenses. In 1943, using a 400-foot television tower that the Tribune (April 20, 1941) said “surmount[s] all but the tallest skyscrapers,” they began broadcasting over WBKB (now WBBM), the first commercial television station in the city. Unfortunately, B&K tried to have its cake and eat it too by televising sporting events, parades, and news reels on its big screens, a promotion that failed to draw crowds. “The high hopes Balaban and Katz officials held a year ago for theater television have crumbled,” read one blunt Trib lede (March 4, 1952).

For more about B&K’s imprint on popular culture, read this 1993 interview with Barney’s younger brother Elmer or click through the website of the Balaban and Katz Historical Foundation. Don’t miss their slide show, which features some wonderful stills of glamorous theaters and theater-goers.

*The U.S. Supreme Court would eventually declare this type of vertical integration monopolistic in a landmark anti-trust case.
**Lawndale, Woodlawn, and Uptown.
***In newspapers, B&K usually printed icicles near their theater listings to remind customers that the central air would be pumping.

I’ve got a few things to take care of at Khakles HQ this morning, including some telephone calls to Baltimore City, so I’ll leave you with Mike D'Angelo’s excellent textual analysis of “Do The Right Thing.” Like he did for his misdiagnosis of the Iraq invasion, I think Joe Klein needs to atone for his ridiculous review of this masterpiece in New York, which Spike himself tore to shreds in the magazine’s letters section shortly after it was published. If the film was good enough for Barry and Michelle’s first date, it’s good enough for the rest of us.