My father was a used car salesman, walking the lot six days a week, proud to sell his customers a “clean” used car. In this era of impeccably/impossibly new merchandise, vehicles are looked down upon if used — best to buy something “pre-owned.” The snow-blower I’m fantasizing snapping up before the next blizzard is listed as “re-conditioned.”  Second-Hand Rose, a song introduced by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921, and briefly resurrected by Streisand in the sixties (Funny Girl) may be a bit of an anachronism, with its catalogue of second-hand items, like the piano bought “...for ten cents on the dollar.” 

Second-hand, second-run. In 1976 I arrived as one of a number of smitten young entrepreneurs in the lobby of a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which we struggled to run for just that year. By the time we got to it, the St. George was a second-run house, having slid from its prestigious perch as premier — the Staten Island "flagship” of the Fabian chain, hitting rock bottom at last as a “buck fifty” house. In a year when the average price of a movie ticket (nationwide) was $2.15 ( $3.00 in New York City), we were a bargain, a Second-Hand Rose of moviedom, replete with giant stained-but-still-luminous movie screen and lots of broken seat-backs.

When a movie came to us, it had been around. But in an era of used cars and such that was still alright. You (the movie patron) had another chance to see something you’d missed. The Wizard of Oz aired annually on TV, but anything reasonably current, say Dog Day Afternoon (1975) or The Exorcist (1973) could only be viewed in a theater. Hollywood kept a tight fist on its product: it took a decade or more for major pictures to find their way to the Sony Trinitrons and Zeniths that illuminated people’s living rooms. In 1976 at the St. George, we showed not only the previously-mentioned Dog Day and Exorcist, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Man Who Would be King (1975), and Blazing Saddles (1974), to name a few. Third-run though it actually was, Exorcist sold to a packed house both days of one weekend (all 2672 seats full), something we would never witness again, an anomaly probably having something to do with the spookiness of our interior.

Second-run now?  Several years ago, I remember watching Twelve Years a Slave — just released to television — on Oscar eve. Imagine filling all the seats in a single-screen theater with people eager to see a movie that’s three or four years old already — done the rounds of Netflix, etc. Thinking of theaters still showing old product, I’m excluding “rep” (repertory) and art houses — rare enough these days — and oddities like Rocky Horror Picture Show, continuously on-screen in theaters across the U.S. since spring, 1976 — the longest run in movie theater history. 

Speaking of that one-of-a-kind theatrical/cinematic phenomenon, I was jealous of Rocky Horror. It started its eternal run at the same moment as our entrepreneurial adventure. While people were lining up in costume at midnight in Manhattan, waiting to talk back to that iconic movie, we struggled to fill just a few hundred of our several thousand seats. How I longed to be over there, on the other side of the water, an audience member for once — not that oddest of ducks, a motion picture operator.
 
Note:  For an interesting read on what’s becoming of movie distribution/exhibition in 2016, catch this article in the Tuesday January 26 New York Times on who bids on what flix at Sundance. 

On Oscar night, 1977, the evening of the 49th Academy Awards, I warmed my hands in the popcorn machine at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat Staten Island movie palace I was involved that year in running. Nobody but nobody was in our drafty auditorium; I’ve completely forgotten what was on-screen. Rocky — a movie we’d never get the opportunity to show — took the Oscar for Best Picture that night. Whatever remained of our local audience after a cold, cold winter was home watching the familiar gold and glitz: movie stars gasping and running for the stage on that other coast, where film dreams originated.

Did any black actor win an award that night, while I studied my frozen reflection in the glass of our theater’s candy stand? Despite the fact that Roots had just broken every television broadcast record, the answer is no — although by that time, a determined trickle of actors, beginning with Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind (1939), had begun to drip on the (conscious? unconscious?) stone of the movie business’ racial bias. James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope, 1970), Ethel Waters (Pinky, 1949), Juanita Moore (Imitation of Life, 1959), Sidney Portier (Lilies of the Field, 1963), Dorothy Dandridge (Carmen Jones, 1954), Cicely Tyson (Sounder, 1972), the list goes on. Editors and other technical craftspeople don’t begin to appear in that list until 1969, when Hugh Robertson won for editing Midnight Cowboy, a movie I remember seeing at the St. George Theatre before I was involved in going broke there as a manager.

Thirty-nine years later, new landscapes, fresh faces, but the cast of characters in Hollywood who decide what (largely white) picture gets made and, beyond that, a similar cast who pick the winners of  those sleek golden statuettes, has changed very little.

In 1977, Spike Lee, one of the leaders of the recent proposed Oscar-night boycott, was still six years away from completing his first student film. At our theater, where I was in the business of growing up, a group of well-intended white folk, of which I was one, spent the better part of that year discovering what a mixed bag, in every sense, our neighborhood really was. We’d begun with the intention of booking live rock concerts and showing art movies, a failed business that nonetheless functioned as a kind of community center — where neighborhood kids fled the streets to watch  Jaws, Taxi Driver, The Omen, The Exorcist, Shaft and whatever (mostly second- or third-run) “action” movies our reluctant booking agent could pry loose from Warner and Columbia and the like.  

It embarrasses me now that, of the hundred or so titles we showed, only Shaft, Cooley High, Blazing Saddles and Lady Sings the Blues might have been said to serve our wider audience in some kind of balanced way. When Do The Right Thing came on screen twelve years later, I remember wishing we had our theater back, to show it.

Here’s an idea to support the boycott: why not join me and grab the (very short) list of black Oscar winners--and create your own private film festival? 

“We’re saved!  We’re saved! There’s some people here who want to shoot a movie!” I appeared, breathless, from the auditorium of our 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, which I’d been showing to three women who had walked in off the street. Dean, my impresario husband, whose noble enterprise running the theater largely was, perked up immediately. Fantasies of Brian de Palma or Martin Scorsese briefly interrupted his usual despair.  

Business was in a nose-dive. It was winter, 1977, and we were involved in a heat war with the landlord. We needed a miracle — perhaps this was it. “Could be thousands of dollars!” I chirped on, enthusiastically. The women appeared from the auditorium. One of them smiled and gave Dean a card. “Are you the manager? We’d like to rent your theater for an afternoon.” Dean sighed then tried to disguise his disappointment. “You’re shooting a spot, right?” 

They were — for an upholstery company, it turned out. We settled on around $850. On the appointed day, bin after bin of lighting equipment rolled in. “This is going to cost at least two hundred in electricity,” I mused, glumly. But the inside of the theater had never seemed so luminous; despite myself, I rejoiced. “Is it always this quiet?”, the production coordinator wondered. “Any interior sounds? Banging heat pipes, that kind of thing?” 

I chuckled — “Well that won’t be a problem! ” — then I explained about the landlord and the heat.

The shoot was a wrap by 4 PM, and we returned to our role as movie palace. By 11 PM we’d raked in around $127 in concession and ticket sales. Concession was the greater part of this haul, on account of the hot coffee and fresh warm popcorn that made it possible to watch a movie in an unheated palace. The day’s take was, even in those days, peanuts, but when I added in the $850 (forgetting the probable bump in next month’s electric bill), I could pretend we’d made a grand.

The following day, Dean got two phone calls. The first was from Local 306, the projectionists’ union, demanding we add another 6-hour shift, at $13.75 cents an hour, because we had used the booth--even though the projectionist (had he been around) would have been useless. The second call was from Local 1. How many stagehands had we employed? We hadn’t, of course, but they had a right. Answering the phone, “You've reached the St. George Theatre, located in beautiful downtown St. George...” Dean pretended to be a kid working the box office. He’d pass the message on — he promised — to the manager.  Day in the life. 

BTW, the St. George Theatre has been featured in movies and commercials over the years, among them School of Rock and the TV series SMASH in which it played a role as a theater in Boston. It’s a living!

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This blog post is the result of a back-and-forth in the comments column of the previous blog post, “The Mysteries of Movie Theater Management,” (January 5, 2016). I’d like to thank reader Josephine Scherer for reminding me that we ever DID rent the theater for an upholstery commercial.

​In her first comment, she recalled the projection booth, as it was in 1977, with phenomenal accuracy. In her second, she went on to describe said commercial! You can look it up in its entirety, but here’s the better part of what she had to say:
I remember the St. George well! We used it as a location for a commercial shoot. And what a projection angle! The booth was scary—if I recall correctly, Century SA's on top of RCA 9030 sound heads, with big Ashcraft rotating positive carbon arc lamps... on five-point bases with railroad ties under the back end to get enough tilt-down! Good thing earthquakes don't happen much in New York!!
 
Now for her comments on the long-ago commercial, and a little more besides:
...It was for a chain of fabric stores. We had this wonderful actress who could do a bang-on Judy Holliday impression (we had previously used her in a commercial for a Broadway musical). We start tight on her face, as she says: "My boss said I could re-cover all the chairs in here," and goes on to say that the fabric shop had so many great patterns and colors she couldn't choose just one- "...So, I did one of each!" Then we zoom out, and we see it's a huge theatre, with every seat covered differently.  

Helen, our prop lady, had a ball making all the slip covers! 

As director of photography, I was usually able to get a print of the spots I did, but unfortunately this was one I couldn't (it may have been finished by an out-of-town editing service). If I had it, I would have been delighted to send you a video copy. At any rate, it was an honor to shoot in your beautiful theatre! 

Sadly, this was around the time your fine upstanding landlord put the vicious dog in the furnace room so you couldn't turn the heat on... So unspeakably sad.

Why does anyone voluntarily own or run a movie theater? A privately-owned ma-and-pa cinema, the good old neighborhood movie house, is a dangerous — if adorable — anachronism. In 1976, broke and jobless, my husband and I and a group of like-minded similarly unemployed friends took a crack at running one such operation, a 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island. We hoped to run movies and eventually  live concerts, but, under-funded and inexperienced, with an unscrupulous landlord, we started out losing money, and that trend never reversed itself. Even in the mid-seventies, before home VCR’s were standard and long before Netflix or YouTube, we couldn’t begin to fill all those seats. We sold a lot of popcorn though! And hotdogs, candy, ice cream, the whole deal. We had, at the time, the highest per capita concession sales of any theater in the five boroughs of NYC.  If only we could have closed down the movie screen and invited the hoards of people who wanted our ball-park hot dogs and fresh-pop with real butter to just hang out in the lobby, eat and run. McDonald’s with velvet curtains — we discussed that!  We also lamented the fact that we weren’t owners, just renters — so we couldn’t even sell the real estate that was driving us crazy.

In Houlton, Maine, the Temple Theatre is currently on the market, if not exactly for sale. Its owner, Mike Hurley, says he has decided to give the Temple, and the building that houses it, to the winner of a 250-word essay contest who best describes why he or she wants to own and run the theater. You have to pay $100 to enter the contest. I also understand that if you win, you’ll have to set some money aside for taxes. Even though winning the Temple isn’t exactly Power Ball, the IRS will see the prize as a capital gain. To offset the fee and taxes, the winner can claim a bonus of $25,000.00 and optional consultation on the mysteries of movie theater management.

I wish Mike Hurley well. The Temple — converted to digital projection several years ago — has two screens and a total of 400 refurbished seats, a considerable investment. It’s obvious Mike really loves the place and wants to hand it off to just the right person. A committee of literary townsfolk stands ready to judge the essays (minimum 3500 applications or the whole shindig is no go). Although the original deadline was January 15, he’s extended it to the 30th to give procrastinators a little more leeway.   

No, I am NOT thinking of entering this contest!  I’ve done my time as a movie theater operator. Still, I understand the romance of the thing. Just the other day a friend who should know better (he worked for us while we were going broke at the St. George) dreamed aloud about buying a small cinema that just went dark in Virginia, where he lives. Of course I told him he was crazy, but all the same I understood. There is something so compelling about a blank marquee and an empty ticket-seller’s box suggesting rows and rows of darkened seats inside. Mike Hurley no doubt knows about this tidal pull. A citizen of Belfast, Maine — several hours’ drive from Houlton — he already owned Belfast’s Colonial, his childhood theater, when he fell in love (his words) with the Temple. He’s tired now of driving 152 miles, and the indispensable guy he hired to manage the place is retiring. Mike says the Temple “makes a ton of money in concession,” which sounds really familiar to me, if not entirely convincing.  

What is it about contests that is so American? We are an optimistic people. Just Google “win” and see what you find. I was looking for “Name This Pony,” remembering Parade Magazine’s weekly essay contest I entered every seven days, as a child. I was hoping — my mother’s nightmare — that we could keep the pinto I had successfully named in our garage. No ponies available for naming these days, but I did find “win a pontoon boat.” And if you’re aching to win a bed-and-breakfast, the field is wide open As a writer (poet), I’m no stranger to publishing contests myself. It’s virtually the only way, excluding self publication, most poets bring out first books. Thousands of MFA students send away for the Yale Prize, The Brittingham Prize, the National Poetry Contest, the Gray Wolf Prize, yearly, paying anywhere from $15 to $30 for the privilege of submitting a manuscript. The winner is published from the proceeds. Creative writing is even less of a profit-center than movie theater ownership.

If only, back in the day, we could have held a win-the-theater contest!  But we weren’t owners, just renters, which is to say sharecroppers. We could, perhaps, have held a great big popcorn-rich rent party every month. Wish I’d thought of that.