Teitel followed his father, Abraham, into the film distribution and theater business. Abe Teitel opened the World Playhouse Theater in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue in 1933, and in the years after the war exposed film buffs to works by directors Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa.
But the films distributed by Teitel were often seen as less than artful by the city censorship board, which held final approval on what movies could be seen in Chicago through the 1960s.
During the Red Scare-era of the 1950s, the board sometimes thought the foreign- language fare was transmitting communist ideas, Zweig said. Later, Europe's more progressive attitudes toward sex and nudity led to struggles over the right to run titles such as “Lady Chatterley's Lover" and “I, a Woman."
“His theater was one of the first to show foreign films in Chicago, and those films generally attracted a lot of trouble, and he fought it," said Barbara Selznick, author (as Barbara Wilinsky) of “Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema."
In 1968, Teitel, represented by famed civil rights attorney Elmer Gertz, took his fight to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled that the way the censorship ordinance was enforced violated the company's rights, a win that stripped the board of much of its power.
