Read time: 10 min.

On Sunday, my brother John and I experienced something extraordinary: a screening of the silent-film classic The Phantom of the Opera, accompanied by one of only three surviving Page pipe organs still in its original theatrical home. Better yet, that home was a bona fide atmospheric movie palace! The whole experience was every bit as spectacular as it sounds, and the best part is that we nearly missed it. A last-minute change of plans and a remarkable string of coincidences came together to make it happen.

The story started last Friday, when J.P. Cavanaugh blogged about one of his favorite memories: watching a silent movie in a grand old theater. Back in 1975, when he was about fifteen, Jim settled into a balcony seat at Fort Wayne’s majestic Embassy Theatre for a screening of The Phantom of the Opera. Between the action on the screen, the Embassy’s surrounds, and the soaring accompaniment of its original Page pipe organ, J.P. experienced silent cinema much as audiences had back in the roaring twenties. 

I knew about that outing long before Jim wrote about it, since my dad was the one who invited him. Dan and Jim were best friends back then, and as John and I made our way into elementary school, Dad introduced us to the classic Universal monster movie series that Phantom essentially started. He also regaled us with stories about how incredible that evening at the Embassy had been. Eventually, I got to visit the theater myself, long since restored, to see ABBA and Beatles tributes of all things. It’s a gorgeous venue.

As J.P. and I chatted, our conversation drifted toward the handful of grand old movie palaces still standing. That got me thinking about Anderson’s Paramount, which is much closer to home than the Embassy. I looked it up and could hardly believe what I found: in just two days, the Paramount was showing The Phantom of the Opera, complete with live pipe organ accompaniment- almost exactly what Dad and Jim had experienced fifty-one years earlier! J.P. was busy, but John was game. We bought tickets.

The Paramount opened on August 20, 1929, to considerable fanfare. “For sheer beauty, exquisite design and unique appointments,” the Anderson Herald proclaimed, “no theater in the midwest states surpasses the new Anderson Paramount theater. It represents the last word in atmospheric theater construction, and contains, in addition to the regular theater equipment, more thoroughly worthwhile features of merit than any theater completed within the last year¹.”

That was high praise, but the $800,000 Paramount² certainly looked the part. Architect A.M. Strauss designed the structure in the Spanish Colonial Revival style as he combined a movie theater with office and commercial space³. Its exterior featured a continuous entablature above the storefronts, a cornice over the third-floor windows, terracotta coping along the roofline, decorative brickwork, and ornate window surrounds⁴. Today, a thirty-six-foot blade marquee towers over the sidewalk.

Like many grand movie palaces, the Paramount eventually fell on hard times. It screened its last film in 1985, and four years later, unpaid property taxes landed the building in Madison County’s hands⁵. Its future looked bleak until a last-minute restoration effort spearheaded by Anderson attorney Leslie Davisson⁶ saved the landmark from destruction. The Paramount reopened as an event center in 1995, and today, it’s every bit as spectacular as its original builders intended.

As impressive as the Paramount’s outtards are, though, its innards are where the place really shines. Beyond the small box-office area, John and I found an ornate lobby with an intricate tile floor that hinted at what was to come. Of course, no trip to the movies is complete without popcorn, so we ducked into the concession room. It was practically a miniature museum, filled with relics of the theater’s past, including an old take-up reel, a projector, and other fascinating artifacts. I wish I’d gotten photos of them all, but the Paramount was packed, and I wasn’t about to shove my camera into the faces of people simply trying to enjoy their evening.

Beyond the lobby, the Paramount opens into an enormous auditorium that originally seated about 1,700 people. The moment I stepped inside, I felt like I’d been transported somewhere far more exotic than central Indiana: designed to resemble a Spanish garden, the auditorium is an astonishing illusion of textured, stucco-like walls, rustic lanterns, sconces, torches, and towers that rise around the seating area. Elaborate facades conceal the room’s actual walls, while an elliptical ceiling seems to stretch into infinity. It’s almost impossible to believe you’re still indoors! Sitting there, surrounded by all that architectural splendor, felt about as far removed from a typical night at the movies in the postindustrial Midwest as you can get.

A ten-foot-wide trellis draped with vines stretches across the old orchestra pit and adds another layer to the illusion. Overhead, the Paramount’s ceiling is painted to resemble a nighttime sky. The effect remains convincing nearly a century after it opened, but. originally, four machines tucked into the auditorium’s corners even projected drifting clouds across the twinkling heavens! Imagine settling into your seat beneath the stars in a Spanish courtyard, watching a movie as clouds floated lazily overhead. That was the experience the Paramount’s architects intended! Without the moving clouds, the illusion still works its magic. The whole place is unreal.

A.M. Strauss designed the Paramount’s exterior, but the astonishing auditorium was the work of John Eberson, a master of the atmospheric movie palace. Eberson designed more than 500 theaters during his career⁷, but only seventeen of his atmospheric creations remain in use today. Aside from the Paramount, Indiana has two other examples of his work: Terre Haute’s Indiana Theatre offers an earlier, more restrained take on the concept, while the once-spectacular Palace Theatre in Gary has fallen irreparable decay. Together, the three offer a fascinating glimpse at the evolution of Eberson’s vision, and just how fortunate Anderson is to have preserved its own.

Anywho, John and I arrived early enough to snap some pictures and make a dent in our popcorn before organist Clark Wilson appeared to introduce the film and the Paramount’s original Page theater organ. Calling the visible part of the instrument an organ hardly does it justice, though, since the auditorium was built around it. The Page’s pipes are concealed behind grilles in the room’s false walls and, let me tell you- it means business.

The main event -that silent film that was already a century old- came soon. John and I had seats off to stage right, near some of the Page organ’s lowest-pitched pipes. its deepest notes moved serious air and, even from the side, seemed to hit me square in the chest! As Phantom rolled, John and I were amazed by the sheer variety of sounds Wilson coaxed from the console.

One moment, the music was merry-go-round whimsy straight out of RollerCoaster Tycoon. The next, it erupted into eerie glissandos, percussive tones reminiscent of a marimba, and jarring dissonance whenever the Phantom appeared. The range of the Page was incredible, and hearing it all from an instrument as integral to the experience as the movie itself was extraordinary.

I won’t say too much about Phantom. Now that it’s entered the public domain, you can find all sorts of old prints on YouTube. For a horror movie, it has a surprising amount of humor, including a classic gag at the very end I’d forgotten about. Lon Chaney’s makeup isn’t quite as startling as it must have been a century ago, but the film moved along much faster than I remembered from my last viewing. Its 104 minutes practically evaporated at the Paramount.

Much of that was thanks to seeing the picture in the kind of palace it was made for, accompanied by the kind of instrument audiences would have heard when it was new. When we weren’t chuckling at the exaggerated performances of vaudeville veterans turned movie actors, John and I kept turning toward each other in disbelief at the sounds pouring out of the walls. The organ wasn’t just accompanying the film. It was almost another character!

The Phantom of the Opera ended with a “Finis” but John and I weren’t quite ready to leave. Fifty-one years after Dad and J.P. watched the same film accompanied by another Page organ in a different movie palace, it was crazy to think we’d just experienced something similar. Dad’s been gone for fifteen years, and he’d have loved knowing that his sons got to share an experience that had meant so much to him. Then it all happened because J.P. wrote a blog post, I got curious, and the stars aligned over an artificial Spanish courtyard in Anderson.

Beyond that personal connection, I left with a renewed appreciation for what a treasure the Paramount is to Anderson and all of East-Central Indiana. The Paramount isn’t just a relic of Anderson’s glamorous industrial past, or a pretty building to admire from the sidewalk. It’s a living, breathing piece of history that still does exactly what it was built to do nearly a century ago: transport ordinary people somewhere extraordinary. Last Sunday’s screening of The Phantom of the Opera proved that to me. 

For a couple of hours, John and I sat beneath a painted sky with twinkling stars, listened to a pipe organ from another age, and felt closer to our dad. I can’t imagine a better tribute to the magic of the movies, or to the fantastic old theater that made it possible.

Sources Cited
1 New Amusement Place of Big Publix Chain Finest In Indiana (1929, August 20). The Anderson Herald. p. 13.
2 New Anderson Paramount Opens Today (1929, August 20). The Anderson Herald. p. 13.
3 National Register of Historic Places, Paramount Theater Building, Anderson, Madison County, Indiana, National Register # 91001165.
4 (See footnote 3).
5 de laBastide, K. (2022, January 1). Restoring Paramount was ‘labor of live’ for Abraham. The Anderson Herald Bulletin. Web. Retrieved October 13, 2026.
6 The Paramount Theatre (2020, July 15). Clio and Graeme States. Web. Retrieved October 13, 2026.
7 Atmospheric Theaters – When The Theater Was Part Of The Show (2014, July 13). The Designer’s Assistant. Web. Retrieved October 13, 2026.