Aaron Kemp spent 12 years building his basement theater and adding period details. He recently began dismantling the Art Deco palace after his parents sold the home, and he will put the pieces (below) in storage “until they can rise from the ashes,’’ he says.
(Photos By Yoon S. Byun/Globe Staff)
His was a real movie house
Inspired by the old Art Deco palaces, he created one in his parents’ basement
Aaron Kemp spent 12 years building his basement theater and adding period details. He recently began dismantling the Art Deco palace after his parents sold the home, and he will put the pieces (below) in storage “until they can rise from the ashes,’’ he says.
(Photos By Yoon S. Byun/Globe Staff)
ACTON - For 12 years, Aaron Kemp spent hours in the basement of his parents’ home, bathed in the dim light of frosted sconces, applying gold leaf and arranging curtain pleats in his handcrafted theater. It is a memorial, Kemp says, to the great movie palaces of the past - those gilded halls with wine-colored seats and walls etched with pyramidal flourishes.
“Since I was 15 years old,’’ Kemp says, “all my free time, every moment that I’ve had, I’ve thought about this theater.’’
From outside, the house itself is cheerfully unremarkable: a pale yellow building hemmed in by coiffed shrubs and a white picket fence. But opening the door to the basement feels like stepping back in time. An antique vending machine, fully stocked with candy, looms beside an authentic Art Deco ticket booth paneled in glossy wood. A massive sarcophagus cowers in the corner. Plush red curtains are drawn across one wall so that the movie screen - a slick, modish thing - is hidden from view.
“People always ask me, ‘When is your theater going to be done?’ ’’ Kemp says. “The truth is, it’s never-ending. I could keep working on it forever.’’
But the end, it seems, has finally come: Several weeks ago, Kemp’s parents sold their house.
“I’ve been in denial about it,’’ he says, collapsed in a front row seat of the theater. “I have poured so much into this. I thought my grandchildren were going to be coming here.’’
For years, he had envisioned the way opening night might look, if the theater were ever completed. He pictured everyone in 1920s attire: the women in their slinky low-waisted dresses, the men peering out from under fedoras, perhaps cigarette smoke swirling thickly in beams of light.
At age 15, Kemp - then a gangly teenager who mostly kept to himself - told his father that he wanted a fort in the basement. “My dad replied, ‘Why don’t we make a movie theater instead so you can have friends over to watch TV?’ ’’ he says. The original plan included one couch and a television. But when his father, who worked in furniture sales, mentioned Art Deco as a possible theme, Kemp’s imagination began to churn.
“Art Deco is rare,’’ said his father. “When you see it, it’s special.’’ Art Deco appealed to Kemp because the excavation of each item seemed like a new adventure. He combed through newspaper clippings and found a story about an old theater in Claremont, N.H., that was about to be torn down.
Art Deco is an architectural style, popular from the 1920s to 1940s, influenced by Aztec and Mayan designs and characterized by bold geometric shapes. The long-closed Paramount, downtown, and the Coolidge Corner, in Brookline, are prime local examples of Art Deco theaters.
Kemp and his father drove to Claremont, and contractors let them into the Latchis Theater, built in 1927. It had been boarded up for more than 30 years. The auditorium swelled with the stench of rot. Dead pigeons littered the floor. Cobwebs swaddled the seats.
“I had never been so excited in my life,’’ Kemp says. “It was like magic.’’ He stood in the mucky dark and imagined the way the original ceiling must have looked with its projected constellations as the cloud machine puffed mist into the air. The next week, they brought home 25 seats, cleaned them up, and installed them in the basement.
Now 27, Kemp has spent over a decade transforming the space from a concrete cellar into a rigorously precise 1920s cinema. His father taught him the technical skills he needed to create his designs: making crown moldings, cutting pieces of wood. “I used to refer to him as the boy who lived under the stairs,’’ Susan Kemp says of her son.
Meanwhile, he graduated from high school, traded glasses for contact lenses, met his first girlfriend, majored in communication technology at Cornell because his parents thought it was more lucrative than architecture, and spent four years working for
Through it all - even after he moved out of his parents’ house and into a downtown apartment - the theater remained Kemp’s primary obsession.
He found the ticket booth in the window of a warehouse while wandering through downtown Ithaca. He recognized the pyramid motif immediately and knew it was Art Deco. “I was with my girlfriend at the time,’’ he recalls. “Her words were, ‘you will never look at me the way you look at that ticket booth.’ That was pretty much the end of our relationship.’’
Kemp describes his theater with kingly aplomb, sweeping his hand across the room as he faces the empty seats. He points to the carpet, which he replaced three times because the color didn’t feel right. He runs his fingers along the seats that he hand-painted with silver and black enamel. He traces the railing that he welded out of steel pieces he found in a marketplace in Madrid. He looks up at the chandelier that he stripped of brown paint to expose the original nickel and gold-plate finish. “I think I see details more than other people do,’’ he says.
“He had a vision, and he brought it to life,’’ Jim Kemp says of his son. “Very few people have a chance to do that.’’ The whole thing cost less than $5,000, Kemp says. The ticket booth -for which he paid $700, plus an additional $300 for restoration - was the most expensive piece. He spent a total of 600 hours restoring the ticket booth alone.
“This doesn’t exactly line up with how I would have spent my early 20s,’’ says Kemp’s older brother, Jonathan. “But this was a one of a kind labor of love.’’
Last Friday, the night before Kemp began to dismantle the theater, he hosted his Opening Night, at long last, for family and friends. He showed “A Woman of Affairs,’’ with Greta Garbo, the first movie ever played in Claremont’s Latchis Theater. “It was so amazing to see all the seats filled up,’’ he says quietly.
One by one, nearly all the majestic theaters of the 1920s were reduced to rubble - their richly patterned carpets ripped from the floorboards, their lavish chandeliers dismembered, their seats left to fester with mold - and replaced with parking garages and malls and concrete lots. “But they were so beautiful,’’ Kemp says. “They were built as palaces for the common man.’’
Soon, his theater too will be razed and repurposed. The seats have already been wrenched from their moorings; by the end of the week, the column capitals, sconces, and curtains will be gone and the walls will be bare again. The next family wants a plain finished basement where their two young boys can play. Kemp will box all the pieces and stow them away, he says wryly, “until they can rise from the ashes.’’
Kemp has bought his own home now, an 1873 building on the Charles River, in Cambridge. It’s too small to house his theater, but Kemp is optimistic. “I’ve already got visions in my mind about the next one,’’ he explains. “And anyway, the arches on the walls weren’t quite right.’’ He shakes his head and smiles. “This new house,’’ he says, “is a clean slate.’’
Laura Bennett can be reached at lbennett@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
