Paramount Theatre

History

Harry Houdini played eight shows at the Majestic in 1916, a year after it opened as a vaudeville house on Congress Avenue, a few blocks south of the Texas Capitol. Legend has it, the theater says, that the Houdini hole in its auditorium ceiling was carved for a suspended levitation trick. Then the Majestic bet its survival on the movies. In 1930, its new owner, Paramount-Publix, remodeled it, then reopened it as the Paramount. For decades, segregation kept Black Austinites out of its audiences. Activists picketed the box office, and in April 1963, popular support for desegregation pushed the Austin Chamber of Commerce to call for “immediate and complete integration of all public facilities.”

By the 1970s, the Paramount’s owners had given up on repairs, and the building was slated to become a Holiday Inn. In 1973, three men set out to save it. To keep it afloat, they screened classic films, which cost little to rent. Those screenings became the Summer Classic Film Series, which still runs. A listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the federal list of historic sites, qualified the theater for the federal money that paid for nearly all of its restoration. In 2000, the Paramount merged with the State Theatre next door to form the Austin Theatre Alliance, which runs both.

Hauntings & Lore

In 2025, Reporting Texas, a University of Texas student news site, called the Paramount home to “at least three ghosts.” The theater’s own staff tell all three stories.

The Man in the Opera Box

Cheryl Wood is the Paramount’s lead house manager. Early in her time there, she stopped in her tracks. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood up, and she smelled cigar smoke in the theater. “There was nobody in there,” she said. “All the lights were out.”

She had already been told about a ghost who “loves to sit in the opera box left, and he wears a top hat and tails, and he smokes a cigar.” She was so scared, she said, that “I literally could not bring myself to look in the opera box.”

A Snickers Bar for Walter Norris

In the late 1960s, a few years after Austin’s movie theaters were desegregated, Edgar Walter Norris Jr. became one of the first Black projectionists in the city. He was the Paramount’s projectionist and stagehand for 30 years. The theater’s own history says he died in its projection booth on May 26, 2000, while screening Casablanca.

Wood says that during the Summer Classic Film Series, when it was time to switch the reel, “it kept going, click, click, click, click.” People ran up, she says, and “he had died of a massive heart attack while showing his favorite film in his favorite place.” His union hat and stagehand gloves hang next to a picture above the door in the projection booth.

In 2007, the theater’s executive director, Ken Stein, told the Austin American-Statesman, the city’s daily paper, about the booth. Sometimes, he said, the equipment won’t work unless someone leaves chocolate doughnuts or Snickers bars there. Both were favorite treats of Norris’s, the paper said. Wood says the custom holds: “The projectionists will not show a film here without having a Snickers bar in the projection booth.” If no candy is offered, she says, “something will absolutely go wrong.”

The Woman in White

Nate Reid is the senior production manager for the Austin Theatre Alliance. He was working at the Paramount, he said, when he turned around “and there is a woman in white just floating where the seats are, like half in the seats.” She was “just looking at me, with fully black eyes, like looking into the void itself.” Reid said she didn’t seem malicious. He respectfully explained that he worked there, apologized for bothering her, and inched his way out.

Wood says the woman walks “from house left to house right,” across the auditorium, and that “most think she’s looking for her husband.”