Q: How can make my home theater look like the real thing?

Stadium Style

If there's room in your dedicated home theater, give the seating arrangement a real boost. Talk to your A/V installer about creating risers for the one or two rows of seating you have behind the front row. Just as with the stadium-style seating at your local cinema, you won't have to worry about someone's head getting in the way of your line of sight. Plus, doing so makes it easier to add other enhancements such as pathway lighting along the risers themselves or perhaps a long countertop behind a row or two to place your big popcorn bowl and boxes of Whoppers during the movie.

A Box Office Smash

If you really want to bring the vintage theater experience to your own home, there's no shortage of ways to spruce up the surroundings. Inside the theater itself, you can start with nicely framed movie posters. If your theater or basement area has enough space for a mini lobby or even a bar, posters can add some beginner-level glitz to those spaces, too. If you find movie posters or cardboard cutouts mundane, you might like the way theater installer Hampton Black of Florida-based Hampton Silver Screens thinks. "When you build these very nice theaters that we all do in the industry, to have cardboard standups of a character in a $100,000 theater I [think is] just cheesy. I thought, 'Let's make it artistic, make it a big wow factor,' and that's kind of where I went with it, because I like to put that extra step into a theater." What was his extra step? Contracting a designer to build life-size movie character sculptures out of mannequins-using props and including other materials-to line the walls of a theater.

While sculptures may be extreme, for jazzier wall hangings, you can try a number of companies that provide framed memorabilia such as glossy photos accompanied by autographs. That could be especially fun if you're a big fan of concert DVDs-your lobby or theater room could look like the inside of a Hard Rock Café.

But don't stop now: Your theater decorations are just getting going. Look for a company such as Bass Industries, which has items like animated "action graphics" movie posters and bulb-lined cinema marquees. Add a small marquee above the door on which you can change the letters to display your "Movie of the Week" or what's "Now Playing," or simply showcase that family members and guests are about to enter "The Smith Theater," for example.