On Sunday evening, January 23, 1977—forty years ago—what were one hundred and forty million Americans (half the population of the U.S.) doing? From personal experience, I can assure you that hardly anyone had gone to the movies. More particularly, only one very lonely man had bought a ticket to see Rudy Ray Moore in The Human Tornado plus The Muthers, a double-feature we were showing at the St. George Theatre, our 2672-seat movie palace. For eight consecutive nights, from the 23rd to the 30th of January, Roots, the most widely-watched miniseries in American television history, had everybody who owned a TV chained, metaphorically speaking, to the glowing box. I’m one of a minority of Americans alive in 1977, who failed to watch that night, or any of the subsequent seven nights, even a single episode of the series, based on Alex Haley’s best-selling novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The book followed several generations of enslaved African Americans, beginning with the capture of a young man in West Africa, Kunta Kinte, reputedly Haley’s ancestor. Roots changed the way many white Americans thought about slavery, while at the same time legitimizing the family chronicles of many black families. Despite the fact that I missed the experience of viewing it as it aired, it affected my life—and the business I was failing at—profoundly.

Television, ironically, achieved over the course of those eight nights what we in our grand old movie palace had failed to do. We’d been trying to bring our white suburban and black urban audiences together to watch movies—not an easy feat in a neighborhood which resented upscale whites, some of whom were afraid to drive to our side of the island. It didn’t help that, after winter set in, our beloved St. George Theater had no heat, thanks to a landlord who was actively trying to evict us. Then, in that most desperate winter—for eight long days, while Roots aired—we were completely vacant. Our scant winter audience, those few brave souls accustomed to sitting in their hats and coats in a cold auditorium, had stayed home in front of their own televisions. 

VCRs existed, but most people didn’t have one, so when a program aired, you watched it—or missed it. And everyone knew that Roots was not to be missed, a game-changing event. The last night set a nationwide Nielsen Ratings record for the largest audience ever to view a televised show. That record would not be bested until 1983, when M*A*S*H aired for the last time. Roots was obviously the ultimate triumph of television over movies; that had been coming for some time, but it’s impact was much larger. Except for me, the managers and skeleton crews of other theaters (most of which had the good sense to simply close), and whoever else was unlucky enough to work nights, everyone watched, as the forbidden story of slavery unfolded. 

A scandal some years later, would call into question some of the details of Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tale; was it fiction or non-fiction? Inaccurate or not, it was a story that needed to be told.

Roots opened the door to a lot of African American genetic research. In the aftermath of the television broadcast, more than 250 colleges and universities began offering courses on the tracing of African American geneology and the history of slavery. Although sequels have been made, as well as a recent “re-imagining” of the original production by A&E—which is extremely moving—it was the original that flipped the table on the American saga of slavery, finally making Gone With the Wind not just stale, but a major squirm for almost everybody.

I was glad, the afternoon after each of those eight long nights, to hear our staffers, black and white boys and girls who loved and trusted one another, some of whom had been off the previous night, buzzing about this new phenomenon, ancestry. It took some of the sting out of going broke.

Forty years ago, give or take a few days, on Jan 20, 1977, those of us in charge of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace a few blocks from the ferry in downtown Staten Island, weren’t paying much attention to James Earl Carter Jr., as he became the 39th president of the United States. We’d voted in November. I vaguely remembered dragging myself down to the local public school, the second time in my life I’d voted for anyone for president. It was the end of the Nixon/Watergate era, a moment to pause and reflect. But losing your shirt in a small business has a way of distracting you from world events. There wasn’t any heat in the building, and it was a frigid January, one of the coldest in New York City since weather had been recorded, with an average daily high of 16 degrees F.

Movie attendance had fallen off dramatically beginning in September, after school started, plummeting after the landlord cut off the heat. We’d closed outright for several weeks in December, then managed to book a “four-wall” movie, In Search of Noah’s Ark, which had taken us through December. How had we gotten to January? On the night of the 18th, film cans arrived, containing the oddly-paired double feature, Norman Is That You? (Redd Fox and Pearl Bailey discover their son is gay) and Logan’s Run (Michael York, Farah Fawcett, Peter Ustinov and others, in a sci-fi world-of-the-future, live under a dome, never work, fuck a lot, but have to be terminated at age 30. As compensation, they believe they will soon be reincarnated). I fervently wished I might be reincarnated, as something or somebody other than a failing theater manager.

On Inauguration morning, while Jimmy Carter was getting out of his limo to stroll hand-in-hand with Rosalynn down Pennsylvania Avenue, I was cleaning the popcorn machine (the warmest job I could think of to do in an unheated movie palace), while Dean, my husband of eight years, cradled the box office phone between shoulder and ear. He was chatting up a former friend and unofficial booking agent (offices in the Brill Building across the water in Manhattan). We’d been close to Les, until we began to fail.

Les was suggesting we actively pursue live stage presentations, a round about way of saying, you ain't cuttin' it in the movie business.

“What about a country and western festival? No. think about it, Dean! America is changing. There’s a new southern president!”

“I’ll get back to you,” Dean sighed and hung up the phone.

We were freezing. What else mattered? At that moment, country and western concerts, and presidents who hailed from Georgia seemed remote. Carter, as it turned out, would last only four years, and our tenure at the St. George would last a fraction of that time. As I sit today in a heated building, my feet warm enough not to be wearing socks, I can remember the cold, even thrill to it. That’s the way nostalgia works: we (mortals) survived, and we rejoice in it. No doubt a number of citizens alive today will survive to recall, from some future perspective, this weekend’s festivities (and demonstrations) in D.C. and elsewhere.

But back to 1977. By nightfall of that very cold day a few hardy souls, tattered stragglers willing to lose sensation in all twenty digits, dug deep into their popcorn and stared at the miracle of a giant screen under a frozen dome, all from the beloved sanctuary of our balcony. We’d reversed our normal policy, closed the orchestra and opened the upstairs. We rationalized that heat — whatever heat was in the house — would rise. It was true that if you sat on the ground floor, you could feel the earth’s penetrating cold through the soles of your feet, while also staring at a movie through the cloud of your own breath. At least in the balcony, you weren’t touching earth.

In Washington, Jimmy Carter would make himself unpopular, for the Arab Oil Embargo, the hostage crisis, and, early in his administration, certain conservation measures: wearing sweaters, and turning the White House thermostat down. In 1979, he installed 32 solar panels on the White House roof. But in terms of saving on heat, conservation-wise, that is, he had nothing on us. 

At the St. George Theatre — a 2672-seat movie palace I was involved in running in the nineteen seventies — it was a real kick to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. That’s because the screen, a huge piece of heavy white material stretched on a giant frame over thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, was perforated, with tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual silver embedded in their surfaces. Designed to accept CinemaScope, our screen had a good “gain”  — or reflectivity — and was probably “pearlescent.” Blacks came across as very dark gray, and the overall image was bright — except where a long-ago patron had spattered something strawberry colored on the lower left quadrant. 

The screen curved slightly outward at the left and right edges. I always thought the curve had something to do with wrapping the audience in light, and I was partially right. A flat screen makes light travel farther to its corners, encouraging a slightly distorted image, the so-called “pincushion effect.” Godzilla battled Megalon on our screen with no distortion, and the strawberry stain was hardly evident once the movie was underway.
 
Everything I know about the screen and screens in general, I have learned in retrospect. Back in 1976, we were just trying to stay alive, relieved if more than a few hundred people paid money to sit in the dark and watch the movie, and grateful that we had a screen at all. Although we could hardly afford a new one, our buddy, the head projectionist (Cinema Paradiso Is His Favorite Movie) at Radio City Music Hall — then primarily a movie theater — conspired briefly to get a “used” screen for us at no charge. Radio City traditionally replaced its pristine screen annually. Theirs was better than twice the size of ours. However, our stint at the St. George didn’t last long enough to take advantage of this bargain.
 
Little did our audience know that, while they were watching, all sorts of antics were going on backstage. Each night an usher went into the shadows behind the screen to engage two switches: one to bring up the red and blue footlights and another to light the house sconces, as the film ended. Leroy — scrawny, barely 5’ 4” and 120 pounds — was always reluctant to go into the dark, even if only a comedy was showing. One night during the last reel of The Exorcist, it fell to a reluctant Leroy to do this duty. One exorcising priest was already dead and another would soon hurl himself from a window, possessed by the Devil. Add all of this to the soundtrack of tubular bells — indeed creepy. Unbeknownst to Leroy, Cheri, a bit of the devil already in her, lurked in the shadows, stage right. As he approached, she pushed a flashlight beneath her chin and rasped out, “I willlllllll possess you!”
 
The blood-curdling scream and pounding footsteps that came easily through the perforated screen, probably seemed just one more chilling movie sound effect to folks still seated in the house. Who knows if some long–ago patron of ours hasn’t downloaded the movie recently and wondered as the credits rolled, Wasn’t there a last scream?

Back when I was helping to run a movie palace, (The St. George Theatre, all 2672-seats of it, forty years ago in 1976 and 77), time held little mystery for me. I was twenty eight, so the only thing that intrigued me about time was how I’d finally gotten so old. My year in the theater was, come to think about it, a big chunk, 1/28th, of my life at that point. Perhaps that’s why it occupies a disproportionate segment of my current time landscape, like a mountain of ample height viewed from the window of a passing train. In some respects the theater mountain is still visible, from a forty-year vantage point, as it recedes into the dark at the curve of my life’s track. This is why I feel moved, privileged, astonished, even, to resurrect my time in the theater in this blog, and ultimately, when it’s finally published, in Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace. A movie “palace,” of all things! — those chambers of time stopped, or crushed and concentrated: Egyptian, Italian Renaissance, French Provincial, Chinese Imperial styles of decoration often keeping company with each other under the same dome. (Think the United Palace in New York City, one of the five “Wonder Theaters,” recently described by The New York Times as "Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco." But it isn’t just the styles that warp time, making the ordinary movie–goer forget what century s/he’s in. Movies themselves are capsules of time-travel, like The Man Who Would Be King (backward journey), and Star Wars (forward into the future of planetary empire). 

So now it’s New Year’s Day, 2017, in the unbelievable (to me back in 1977) twenty-first century, itself almost a fifth over. Is it the crossing of millennial bridges that generates backward reflections of a slightly nostalgic flavor? It’s no accident that I’m reading (in an audio format, finally!) Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past, if you prefer). He was writing from the vantage point of 1913, looking back on the previous century, his vanished childhood. Does the latter twentieth century, with its movie palaces, carbon arc projectors that utilized actual fire, wooden booths with dial phones, and analogue everything else seem as impossible to me now — endearingly simple — as candlelight, carriages and whalebone corsets seemed to the grown-up Marcel Proust? 

Of all the movies we showed in our year as movie theater operators, perhaps only Mel Brooks’ classic, Silent Movie, plays to the theme of time as something slippery and variable, the way it seems to me now, looking back. Brooks’ comedic tour de force pulls the rug out from under our idea of time, purporting to take place in the present, but observing (with one notable exception) the form of a 1920’s silent film. There are sound effects galore, which truly silent movies didn’t have, but the endless stream of sight-gags is pure silent comedy, reminiscent of Sennet and Chaplin. The only spoken word in the movie is delivered by a mime, Marcel Marceau. How ghostly it seemed, this return to lost time, in an almost–empty 1920’s house. We showed it in cold November, the month our theater landlord began shutting off the heat. I sat for a while in the dark and tried to pretend I wasn’t freezing, sipping a coffee that had gone cold. I’d like to revisit Silent Movie with warm toes sometime.

Movies that toy with the idea of time are my faves, like Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey in which Keir Dullea visits the Theory of Relativity and morphs into a celestial baby, or my favorite all-time romance, Stanley Donan’s Two for the Road, that cuts forward and backward almost randomly from a couple’s present to their near and distant past  as lovers at various times on the road. We never showed either of them at the St. George, but we could have; I wish we had.

I am sometimes maddened by the absence of a movie screen, when I enter the St. George Theatre nowadays, a working live performance house. Blink; look again: it’s as if I can will the screen, with its beloved grape soda stains back into existence. But then, I would be 28, and I don’t think I could bear to live my life all over again.

​So leave it in the past: the unstained screen of my imagination will do well enough.