Hazmat suits and headlamps: Subterranean salvaging at the Music Box Theatre

The light of Matt Carr's headlamp only goes so far while he's crawling in one of the air shafts beneath the seats of the Music Box Theatre.

His hazmat suit, face mask, goggles and knee pads all click and swish and trap heat as his headway kicks up dust.

It's not a scene out of a horror movie screenplay set in one of the city's oldest theaters — built in 1929.

It's what Carr, a theater manager, does when keys, wallets, glasses, cell phones and other personal items from moviegoers get dropped and accidentally nudged by a shoe before falling into one of the mushroom caps that dot the floor of the theater's main, 740-seat auditorium at 3733 N. Southport Ave.

It's an infrequent occurrence, maybe once a month. And Carr is one of the few staff members who will go into the basement, climb a ladder, enter a small hatch and crawl into the vents beneath the seats to retrieve lost items for customers.

They are called plenum vents — used for heating and cooling — and you don't see them like this modern theaters.

If someone is in a particularly frantic state, Carr might execute a recovery before a movie screening even ends.

Such was the case when the unnerving "Skinamarink" played there a while back, with screeching, creaking and screaming sounds came from above as Carr looked for a cell phone.

"Your human self-defense mechanisms kick in, and you think, 'This is evil. This is not good. I shouldn't be here.' But you've got to keep your singular focus," he said.

"It's like going down in the mines. A lot of my co-workers don't want to do it. I'm just kind of an adrenaline junkie, and I think that it's just interesting to go down," said the 5-foot-7 Carr, who pities his larger colleagues who occasionally do, too. "And because I don't seem to care about it, I've just become the de facto person to go down there. Even if I'm not working, the request will have to wait till I get there.

"I don't have phobias, I'm pretty desensitized. I started watching scary movies like way before I should have as a child. Nothing really scares me, but I can observe something and know that it is objectively frightening, and the space down there when the lights are off is objectively frightening," he said.

Carr, 37, lives in Roscoe Village. He's worked at the theater for three years and has made about seven or eight retrievals.

One was for a man dressed as Magenta, a character from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," who left the theater mid-show dressed in a French maid's outfit with tears threatening his mascara. He'd lost his iPhone, and none of his photos or contacts were backed up.

"I was like, 'I don't want to see a grown man cry,' so I went down there amid pandemonium in the sold-out theater."

Upon seeing Carr return in a sullied hazmat suit, lost item in hand, some owners of the found items offer a tip — though none is required. The biggest one he's gotten for the 15-minute task is $50.

Music Box employees have been retrieving lost items from beneath the theater for years, said general manager Ryan Oestreich, who been known to take the plunge, too.

"I could not put customers down there, right?" joked Oestreich.

Another theater manager, Buck LePard, once retrieved someone's dentures. He got a $5 tip.

Carr tried another retrieval method once to help a mom and daughter who lost a phone. He was in a time crunch between movie showings, so he removed the mushroom cap from one of the vents (a few come off due to age) and used two poles with cups taped to them to scoop up the phone, which took a few tries.

"I was inspired by the movie 'Sandlot' to fashion this thing, and when it worked, we stood there freaking out like little kids, dancing and losing our minds," he said.

The theater underwent renovations for a month this summer and was set to reopen Friday. Renovations include the restoration of the decorative arch that frames the movie screen, known as the proscenium arch, as well as replacing the notoriously rickety and creaky seats with new ones that have cupholders (at long last!).

But renovations did not include adding screens or something to the mushroom cap vents located under theater seats to prevent them from occasionally ingesting keys and phones, sending them to the air shafts below.

It would not be an easy fix, and it would be expensive, Oestreich said.

So the current method will remain.

"It's not like being down there is as bad as that scene from 'Aliens,'" he said.