“Wall Street Lays an Egg,” Variety headlines read on October 30, 1929. To “lay an egg” in theater parlance means to fail — to flop — and flop the stock wizards did that day, ushering in the Great Depression. One month and four days later, on December 4, a classic movie palace, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, opened its gleaming red and gold doors for the first time, to several thousand souls bent on escape: the talkie, So This Is College, and Blossom Seeley, the original “red hot mama,”  live onstage.

Forty seven years later in 1976, a team of young would-be entrepreneurs who had grown up under the domes of similar palaces, took our turn at running the shopworn, mostly empty but still elegant, St. George. What did I know of movie theater management that April? I hardly understood the lingo agents and vendors spoke, though some of it was recognizable. Alright, so issues of Variety did show up, from time to time, at our house, but I had never cracked them. They seemed clubby, and the brash show-biz dialect put me off. The very first week we ran the St. George, our booking agent (a short dark-haired dude who dressed in Dacron and pulled down his regular paycheck from Mann Theatres) wished us Boffo Socko on opening night with our first double feature, Blazing Saddles and Bananas. Only afterwards did I learn what “boffo” and “socko” mean and that, as a matter of fact, side-by-side in a sentence they actually form a redundancy. Both mean “very good” when applied to B.O. (not “body odor” — “box office”). So  our agent Nick was wishing us a very very good night. Now if he’d added whammo to those verys, he’d have been anticipating something on the order of a sell-out, which Blazing Saddles sadly fell short of, as did the vast majority of the films we showed in our theater year. 

By the time we left the St. George, we were broke, yes, but I was a little more fluent in theater operator patois. I knew that a movie (or any kind of show) with staying power or “stamina,” has got to have legs, a term that’s had such legs it has traveled beyond show-biz. Scandals, the ones that involve senators in washrooms or presidents in oval offices, can also be said to have legs. (What is politics anyhow, if not a big show?).

When, BTW, the actual legs in a movie are as provocative as Madeline Kahn’s are in Blazing Saddles, they definitely have “sex appeal,” a term Variety takes full credit for inventing. Who knew? It’s in their Slanguage Dictionary, a great place to learn a slanguage.

We never ran a horse opera after Blazing Saddles (which was, after all, a satire of one), but we did run three Bruce Lee Kung Fu’s which, I now learn, are sometimes called chopsocky. We ran Cooley High, about growing up black in the Cabrini-Green projects, in Chicago. It’s a classic these days, an early example of black cinema, though some list it under the genre Blaxsploitation. The previous is not a Variety coinage, though it sounds like it. The word was actually minted by L.A. NAACP head Junius Griffin, a film publicist.

Three to five hundred people a day (if we were lucky) in a 2,672-seat auditorium meant we were flopping — or laying small eggs — a lot. But we got lucky a couple of times. Once only, we actually had a sellout: boffo (boffola), whammo, socko, The Exorcist, in its return to the big screen, which required us to open the balcony for two weekends. After that, we returned to our usual doggies, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Bad News Bears, In Search of Noah’s Ark. That last was a four-wall, which Variety reminds us is “...a theater rental contract where the producer assumes responsibility for all of the expenses of a show and gets all of the revenue.” Essentially, it reduces the theater operator to the role of sharecropper, which, by Christmas, we more or less were.     

Six storeys above our theater’s mostly vacant orchestra, in the projection booth, Gabe, our aged projectionist, unspooled the film that arrived each week in hexagonal canisters. “Unspooled” still circulates at Cannes they say, despite a dearth of actual film...

In the end, we failed spectacularly to achieve the house nut, (cover our operating expenses). Short of cash and hope, you could say we ankled (walked out on) our jobs at the theater. The landlord had nixed us, as in a certain well-known Variety headline from 1935, “Stix Nix Hick Pix,” (hit this link, if you want a translation).

In the year of the theater, there had been some consolations. For one thing, we had a terrific staff, who would have worked for free if we’d let them (we were tempted).  Just up the hill, beneath a bush in our yard, a stray bitch had given birth that spring to six pups. It was a cold April: two died immediately. We took the remaining four inside and raised them on powdered milk from doll baby bottles. The pups -- Boffo, Socko, Ruffian and Ralph -- lived, for a time, in the theater’s mezzanine. It was, finally, Ruffian and Boffo we ended up keeping. You might say they had legs! 

“When I was your age,” my mother said to the ten-year-old me, “my own mother used to take me downtown in Toledo where we lived, to see a movie, but not in a movie theater.”

We were standing in the lobby of the Hyde Park Art a stadium-style neighborhood theater in Cincinnati. She had shoved a dollar under the bars of the cashier’s window, and we were waiting for tickets — one adult and one child — to shoot out of the metal plate where the lady’s bright red fingernails rested. I studied the cashier’s gold hoop earrings; she had pierced ears, which I’d never seen before.

I wanted to say, Look at her ears! That’s really weird how the rings go inside her skin! but I knew it wasn’t polite to talk about the lady.

So I said, “How could you see a movie if there was no theater?” I wanted to know about Mother’s own childhood even more than I wanted to figure out the earrings.

“We went to these movies around sunset,” Mother admitted. “We had to bring some ‘punk’ along — it’s a kind of thing you burn to keep the mosquitos at bay. You see, when the movies were just starting out, there were some storefronts with benches in them — nickelodeons — but if you didn’t have much money there were vacant lots where you could sit, on benches, and watch the movie on the side of a building...”

This really astonished me. Mother was a decade older than the other mothers I knew, and the stuff of her childhood often seemed extraterrestrial.

“Don’t ever believe the words to that song, ‘Nickelodeon,’” she said, on another occasion.

The actual title of that song is “Music, Music, Music,” and it contains the lyrics, “Put another nickel in / in the nickelodeon. / All I want is you tonight / and music, music music!” It was written in 1949. The song writer, Mother explained, had confused nickelodeons, five-cent storefront movie theaters, with some kind of coin-operated music machine. (I’m guessing the orchestrion, ancestor of the jukebox).

“Nickelodeon theaters,” Mother continued “were dirty and full of mosquitos, and they had the same hard benches you sat on in the open lots...”

Gramp had been an itinerant laborer, moving from city to city and job to job. Whatever entertainments my grandmother and my mother indulged in had to be cheap, and movies in downtown lots only cost two cents. 

The movies themselves were young then, the palaces still very much the stuff of dreams.

Arguably the first theater in the world exclusively devoted to showing motion pictures was simply called “the Nickelodeon.” In Pittsburgh, on June 19, 1905, Harry Davis and his brother-in-law John P. Harris dragged some benches into a storefront they had borrowed. In an early example of branding, they embedded the price of admission into the theater’s name, adding “odeon,” Greek for “theater.” Harris and Davis were seasoned showmen, already ankle-deep in Vaudeville, so they knew how to pack a house. Doors opened at 8 A.M. and closed at midnight seven days a week. In some sense, it was an early grindhouse. The “one-reelers” they showed — never longer than 20 minutes — guaranteed a quick turnover. Thousands stood in line, and copycat theaters bearing the original name sprang up all over America. (So goes at least one version of the story; there are others.) 
 
A decade or more after Mother told me these tales, I grew up and moved to New York City, becoming involved (April, 1976) in running a nearly-defunct movie palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre.

Movie palaces were, of course, what Nickelodeons had anticipated, if it’s possible to anticipate the likes of a theater with smoking rooms, nurseries and regiments of ushers. The great downtown palaces had been the ballast of my childhood. Hadn’t they always been there, wouldn’t they continue to be? It just seemed natural and right to run one. The Palace, Keith’s, the RKO Grand, the Albee, all in downtown Cincinnati, were where you went with your family on Sundays, to see Ben Hur and other spectacles. A 3,500-seat Thomas Lamb confection, the Albee was my favorite, our premier theater, as close to Versailles as a middle-class midwesterner of the fifties was likely to get. It was where you wished the movie you wanted to see was showing, even if it wasn’t. Torn down in 1977 to build a Westin hotel, the Albee was a large part of what I was doing in New York, trying to keep the St. George Theatre open for business.

An authentic “flapper,” Mother had been there the night the Albee opened, December 24, 1927, standing in line in her cloche hat and beads to catch the “It” girl, Clara Bow, in Get Your Man!

Nickelodeons had vanished. Between 1913 and 1922 better than 4000 movie palaces sprouted on the map of North America, pristine and elegant as long-stemmed mushrooms: The Regent Theater (1913) in New York’s Harlem, a Thomas Lamb-designed Venetian palazzo in red, gold, and blue with Spanish-Moorish decor, was perhaps the first real movie palace, followed a year later by the Strand, also a Lamb house, in Times Square. Both theaters were operated by the impresario S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel, who’d gotten his start (where else?) in NIckelodeons. Though he washed out, finally, at Radio City Music Hall, the high-water mark of movie palace opulence, he had a good run. On the West Coast, the first-palace award probably goes to the Million Dollar Theatre, Sid Grauman’s extravaganza. The Biograph in Chicago rose in 1914, a less-than-thousand-seat treasure where, twenty years later, John Dillinger would be shot after watching Manhattan Melodrama. His ghost is said to haunt the Biograph. (Forgive this digression; I can’t resist the details).  An interesting example of an early palace not in a major city is the tiny Al Ringling Theatre in Baraboo.Wisconsin, the circus showman’s gift to his own hometown — still standing.

By the time my own beloved St. George Theatre in Staten Island opened its door, on Dec 4,1929, the stock market had crashed, and the great movie palace impresarios (Rothafel, Grauman and their crew) had dreamed the better parts of their dreams. Rudolph Valentino (“the Sheik,” the “It” guy to Clara Bowe’s "It Girl") had been dead three years.

“I had a serious crush on him,” Mother confessed one night over a martini. She had watched his New York funeral on (Pathe) film at the Albee.

So the twenties passed into the thirties. Silent flicks flickered, and talkies, eventually in color, kept people, my mother included, shoving ticket money over the marble sill. It was the movies she went to, once or twice a week, not any film in particular, just the movies. Cartoons of course, and newsreels. You went.

In the lobby of the Hyde Park Art, the picture we were buying tickets to was, I think, Vertigo, way too grown-up for  me. She said so at the time, but she loved HItchcock, she just had to see it. We’d have ice cream afterwards.

I was fine; it didn’t matter. I loved our neighborhood theater with its chrome deco doors, soft wall sconces and tufted seats. Eighteen years later, I’d be pacing the swirled carpet in a palace temporarily my own. Who knew?
        
          
 
 
 
 

Have you ever walked out of a movie halfway through? A long long time ago at a shopping mall theater that no longer exists, I got up and left abruptly. It wasn’t a flaw in the movie that sent me — and a friend — out suddenly into the light of day. It was something someone shouted, from one of the rows behind us, a comment that irrevocably tore the curtain of film fiction. We just couldn’t watch anymore. The movie, That Cold Day in the Park involves a single (virginal) woman who imprisons a teenaged boy in her apartment. A lot of other stuff happens  in this early Altman flick that’s weirder than that. In reality, the movie is a failed psychodrama teetering on the brink of a horror film. The tension builds, the audience doesn’t quite know how to respond. All of this took place in an outer borough of New York City where niceties of theater behavior were — and still sometimes are — more or less theory.  Just as things with the repressed older woman in the film were getting really intense, an audience member who couldn’t restrain himself a second longer bellowed, “Just fuck her already!” 

The battle for etiquette in theaters  has been going on since actors traipsed from town to town performing out of the backs of wagons. Audiences at the original Globe talked back to the players on stage, all the while crunching peanuts and throwing the shells into the dirt of the floor they were standing on. By the time, 1976, that I became part-manager of a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, audience interruptions were more or less benign. They consisted for the most part of a constant low mumbling, as if the theater itself were a crowded marketplace. Patrons had, apparently, no idea that silence was even desirable. A number of folks talked, sotto voce, and there was just nothing we could do about it  Across the water in Manhattan, the same mumblers would have been shushed or even removed from the premises, but in the Staten Island of forty-plus years ago, manners, including not throwing half-full sodas on the carpet and (when it came to the neighborhood boys) not walking on the backs of the seats, were largely unenforceable.

1976 audiences were even worse in the bathrooms, where they moistened bits of toilet paper and shot them, through straws, at the ceiling. (Those tiny pellets are really hard to scrape off, BTW.)  When I tried to guilt them out with a sign that read, This is your theater too, help us take care of it!, I unwittingly brought the anger of the pellet-shooters to a boil. Rebels responded by jamming whole rolls of toilet paper down the toilets, then leaving them on flush, which flooded the bathroom floors.

I should have known better than to appeal to reason or decorum; the seventies were an era of rebellion. In my own circle, jumping subway turnstiles or buying slugs to substitute for subway tokens had become a normal way to thwart “the establishment.” And in the theater we were just that, somebody else’s idea of authority.

The badly-scratched fifties trailer we used to run with the animated soda, hotdog and popcorn bucket (who jumped willingly into the proper receptacle after consumption) never did any good either, as mouse populations of the time would have been happy to attest.

Post-millennium, much of the babbling in auditoriums is still going on, increased  mightily by the constant distraction of hand-held devices. Those animated food items in trailers have been joined by cartoon iPhones that admonish us to "Turn me off and put me away," the small screen crying for us to pay attention to the bigger one.

Our audiences at the St. George knew they should stay in their seats when the show began, even if they did mumble. But these days, people used to watching at home in their jammies kick off their shoes literally and wander the aisles, and if you think movie theater operators have it tough, live audiences can be worse. No less than Madonna was denied access backstage after an early showing of Hamilton, for texting through the second act. Patti Lupone became a poster-girl for the enraged actor movement in 2009 when she stopped her performance in Gypsy to lecture an audience member taking a photo. “Stop taking pictures right now! You heard the announcement! Who do you think you are? How dare you? Who do you think you are? Get them out! I won’t continue with this! Get him out! This is the theater and all of you, every single one of you except for that person has respect, and I and the rest of this company appreciate it. Thank you.”

​Pity Saoirse Ronan or Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis who, in their Oscar-worthy two-dimensional performances, can’t defend themselves! But the audience and an army of movie-going bloggers can do it for them. 

“Yes, of course something important might happen during the two or so hours you're sitting in theoretical rapt silence, but if you really can't handle the thought of going without your texts for that long, you either shouldn't be at the movies, or you could probably stand disconnecting for a couple hours....You can do this. You can turn off your phone at the movies.” Advice from Thrillist, who also admonishes would-be moviegoers not to groom themselves or hook up (well, that’s been going on since there were movie theaters, hence the bra we found once in the St. George balcony and innumerable condoms — hazards of cleaning up). Also don’t explain the movie to your friend or pre-react to the good parts of a movie you’ve already seen once. How about hogging those armrests? Don’t do that either.

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema has taken the unusual step of establishing itself as arbiter of movie theater etiquette. Alamo’s “rules for watching movies” include deputizing audience members to help keep order. “We don’t tolerate disruptive behavior in the theaters.... If you are a person who likes to talk, text or use your cell phone during a movie, we are not the place for you.... We position ourselves as a theater that takes extreme pride in providing an excellent and undisturbed movie watching experience.... We enforce the policy with pride and people who disrupt other patrons will be ejected from the theater.  Should you find this policy being broken, please help us and raise an order card to alert the staff and management about a disruptive patron.” 

Haven’t yet been to an Alamo Drafthouse, but will soon. As a former theater operator, I’d like to see ejection in action!   

Phillip Kennicott observes that technology “...has scrambled the lines between public and private. Cellphones make our most intimate conversations available to anyone within earshot, while headphones create zones of pure solitude even in the midst of the liveliest crowd.”

There has been a gradual erosion of attention and community, over recent decades. Roughly ten years after I tried my hand at movie theater management, I began a twenty-year spate as a teacher in NYC public schools. I got out in 2003, just in time — cellphones in classrooms were not yet ubiquitous. But friends who still teach tell exasperating tales of classroom management in an age of personal digital immersion. Movie theater? Classroom? It’s all the same. Performance is performance. Community is, after all, community.

Who’s listening?
 

That headline could have come out of yesterday’s New York Times (given our most recent cold snap) but it didn’t. The date at the top of the column is January 8, 1978. Radio City, Roxy Rothafel’s great gold Deco clamshell of a theatre, occupying — since 1932 — several blocks of prime NYC real estate, about a half-block of midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was in trouble. Everybody knew about it; 5,690 mostly-vacant seats in Midtown? “Vacant” anything is a no-go in Manhattan. Management promised to keep the doors open till Easter. Then the Rockettes, (originally Russell Markert's Music Hall Roxyettes) and the whole shebang would be gone. Folks from as far away as Minnesota braved the frostbite of forty years ago, in lines four deep around the corner, compelled by the notion that the Music Hall was going the way of so many palaces. It had been “curtains” (pun intended) for the Roxy, Radio City's sister theater only a few blocks farther downtown (demolished in 1960) and on the other coast, for the 3,387-seat Paramount (aka Graumann’s Metropolitan) in L.A. (torn down in 1961). By 1978,  it seemed there were more movie palaces down than standing.

I’d read the headlines too, and felt the despair. I was still grappling with my own severe depression: less than a year before, part of a team of hopeful twenty-somethings, I’d crash-landed after trying and failing to keep the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, open as a movie palace. It’d been a scary year: my old favorite hometown palace, the RKO Albee, had finally been reduced to a pile of marble and plaster dust in Cincinnati, despite a vigilant citizens’ committee. My friend and colleague, Robert Endres, at that point head projectionist at RCMH, recalls the shock of hearing that the hall would close:

“I guess you could say I was “stunned” at the closing announcement as was everyone else. I had been out in Illinois with my parents over the Christmas holiday.... I walked into work that first day back to be told there was a meeting in the large Rehearsal hall and we were told to attend. When I got there the Music Hall exec staff was there as was Marshall [president of Rockefeller Center] who made the announcement. The mood was pretty grim.”
           
It was a time, the late seventies, when hardly anybody could see far enough into the future to imagine how the great halls could ever be useful again. Across America, in most cities, nobody went “downtown” anymore:  derelict palaces in deserted urban settings made movie-going a lonely, even dangerous experience. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb. Such was the life of the urban movie-goer.

The Music Hall had an entirely different problem. Manhattan is the ultimate “downtown, “ so even in the dire seventies, there were plenty of people on midtown streets, and the Music Hall was certainly safe, if deserted. But with nearly six thousand seats, a dwindling NYC tourism couldn’t begin to support Radio City; and New Yorkers didn’t think of the Music Hall as a place to go for movies. To quote New York on the subject of moviegoing in 1978, “ You consulted one of the foldout sheets everyone had tacked above their desks or in their kitchen, from the revival houses, blessed be their names—the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Regency, Theatre 80 Saint Marks, the Bleecker Street Cinema.” These were the theaters of the day. Ironically, it’s these very art houses that are mostly gone now, but, among other refurbished movie palaces, Radio City stands. How is that, exactly?

The palaces started as, in many cases, live (Vaudeville) theaters. The ones that have survived have mostly gone back to that legacy. With fly lofts, solid acoustics, dressing rooms and a full stage, theaters from Greensboro, NC to Glendale, CA have returned to their roots in performance. How did they get there?

Every rescued theater needs at least one savior.  At Holyoke Massachusetts’ Victory Theatre, it was Helen Casey, who kept the wreckers’ ball at bay, spurred on by childhood memories of Casablanca. In Dayton, Ohio at the Victoria, it was Fred Bartenstein and friends, aided by a local DJ who spurred Daytonians to grab some cash, get into their cars, and head downtown to save their favorite theater.

It was — who else? — the Rockettes who saved Radio City. Two days after Alton Marshall made the announcement that the theater’s last day would be April 12, Rosemary Novellino the Dance Captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company and Eileen Collins, the Rockettes' union rep, founded The Showpeople’s Committee To Save Radio City Music Hall, with the Rockettes at the movement’s core.
 
While all those patrons were standing in lines four deep on the cold pavement, Rockettes were entertaining them! The committee, meanwhile, launched its letter-writing campaign gathering better than 150,000 signatures worldwide, an impressive feat pre-internet. This and a number of efforts at publicity, including some guerilla theater, in which committee members gathered signatures while dressed in suits of armor (to highlight their “war” to save the Music Hall) could not be ignored by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the morning of March 14, the day of Radio City’s Landmarks Commission hearing, the committee organized an “impromptu” Rockette kick line on the steps of City Hall. 

Two weeks later on March 28, the Music Hall's interior was declared a landmark, and not a moment too soon, given Marshall's deadline. Six weeks after that, on May 12, 1978, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Almost exactly forty years after the Rockettes danced in the cold — for all those people who assumed they were getting a last look at Radio City — the hall is still standing, a live house featuring occasional film.  As are many grand theaters across America, including my own St. George. Despite our failure to keep it alive as a movie house in 1976, and a number of failed subsequent efforts by entrepreneurs at repurposing the St. George (roller rink, dinner theater, antiques venue), it’s alive and kicking; and I mean that literally, with a children’s corps of dancers onstage many afternoons. This story can be had via the recent PBS Documentary, Treasures of New York: St. George Theatre starring our theater’s eventual savior, Rosemary Cappozalo,and her family. Rosemary, or "Mrs. Rosemary," as she's known in Staten Island, was a Julliard-trained dancer and veteran teacher herself. What is it about dancers? In the cold, on the sidewalk, or in a deserted theater, they just keep moving!
 
Afterthoughts:
1 - The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York City would never have existed if the city hadn’t demolished one of its most glorious buildings, the old Penn Station, and felt a deal of remorse about that fact, passing the Landmarks Law in 1965.  So without the loss of that fine Beaux Arts transportation hub, Radio City Music Hall (and a number of other buildings, including Grand Central and large parts of the Broadway Theater District) might never have been spared.

2 - Bob  Endres gets the last say:  “I heard one interesting story from a former vice president who, after he retired, had lunch with Alton Marshall...President of Rock Center. Marshall apparently told him that they really didn't want to close the Hall, but...had to do something about the current format, so they put the story out that they were going to close...to get enough attention to be able to restructure...”

I wonder if it's true?

I used to be a Raisinets gal, but after running a movie theater, I would never touch a packaged chocolate covered raisin. I won’t say why in this post, but, if you really want to know, ask in the comments column and I’ll spill the beans — so to say. What’s making me think about candy and concession sales right now? Well, for one thing, I just read Kristen Roupenian’s "Cat Person," the entirely arresting New Yorker story that recently went viral; it involves a young woman who works at a theater concession stand. She meets a guy who likes Red Vines.

“What are Red Vines?” I asked my husband and former theater partner.

“Oh they’re the same as red Twizzlers...” he answered.

We sold Twizzlers, not vines, back in 1976 at the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, (whose candy stand sales, BTW, surpassed most houses on Broadway).  When we first opened the St. George, there’d been scads of confections I was unfamiliar with: Charleston Chews, for one thing (I now know they were invented by an actor in 1925, and named for the dance craze), and Jordan almonds for another. I was from the Midwest, where these particular sweets were not to be found. Now, after all these years, here was yet another mystery. It troubled me that one more candy name had slipped below my radar. Red Vines, it turns out, have been around a long time, since 1914, to be exact. What did I know?

This rumination led me to the topic of concession supplies in general, all those candies, their stories and their sweet — if often peculiar — names. Almost as old as Red Vines is Baby Ruth (1920), a re-invention of something called the “Kandy Kake.” Betcha thought Baby Ruth was named for the baseball player, right? Well, Curtiss, the company that invented it, claims otherwise. The candy was named for Grover Cleveland’s eldest child, Ruth, they insist. Ruth was long dead by 1920, and Curtiss was within an outfield-relay throw of Wrigley Field, where Babe Ruth slammed in the most famous of his more-than-700 home runs, (1932 world series) but never mind, just a coincidence.

Baby Ruths are old enough to pre-date their own sale inside theaters. Silents-era patrons had to go next door or out on the street to buy whatever they munched in darkened movie palaces: Baby Ruths were some of the first contraband they smuggled in. And the popcorn vendor was always out there on the street, making a killing. But this smuggling, permitted by management back then, quickly became verboten as it more or less is today. By the thirties, the Depression in full swing, theater owners accepted as fact two things: 1.} People weren’t going to stop eating in the dark and 2.} candy represented profits they could rake in. By that time Milk Duds (1926), Sno-Caps (1922) and Jujubes (1920) had joined the club of beloved confections. The Duds were named because they were, literally “duds,” their non-spherical shapes a mishap. Sno-Caps were re-named and downsized from something called “Bob White,” a 2.5 inch/diameter nonpareil. Jujubes originally came in lilac, violet, rose, spearmint, and lemon flavors, a true 19th-century confection, requiring some patience, a hard candy, broken down over time in the mouth.  The 1996 Gummi Reviews published by NewTimes, Inc., stated, "Jujubes are a nearly inedible delicacy, that have less in common with gummi bears than prehistoric amber droppings have with old insects." Are you a Jujube fan? If so, how long does it take to eat an entire box?

Then, of course, there’s Snickers, arguably the most popular candy bar of all time; at least that’s true on my front porch at Halloween (annual global sales of 2 billion dollars). This nougat/caramel/peanut/chocolate confection (which followed the not unsuccessful Milky Way) is named for a prized horse the owner, Franklin Mars, kept in his family stable. Snickers’ no-nonsense logo and font are perhaps as famous as the bar itself.

Popcorn, my drug of choice in a darkened movie theater, didn’t hit its full stride until World War II. in 1938 a Midwestern theater owner named Glen W. Dickson installed popcorn machines in the lobbies of his theaters, so the movie/popcorn marriage had begun. Then sugar rationing cut the pins out from under concession sales, and by war’s end Americans were eating three times as much popcorn as they had. You can bet the “butter sauce” had no butter at all in it, but who noticed?

M & M’s, invented in 1941,  were named for a partnership between Forrest E. Mars Sr., son of Mars’ founder, and Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey Chocolate’s president. Hershey, it seems, had control of rationed chocolate, so M&M’s went viral, but only in the armed forces. The returning GI’s brought a taste for them home to the local theater and beyond. They were, it so happens, inspired by a British candy Forrest Mars encountered in the Spanish Civil War that preceded WWII. Interesting, their invention first as soldier-food, given that Mars (god of War!) invented them. They are, perhaps, the easiest of all candies to stuff your face with, in or out of a darkened theater. 

There are so many candies, I could go on ad nauseum -- a verbal eating of the sugar bowl. And since British candies came up in the last paragraph, just leap across the pond to grab Irn-Bru Bars, Brighton Rock Sweets, Jelly Babies, Flake, Licorice All-Sorts, and anything Cadbury. We don’t know these confections very well, except maybe the babies, and All-Sorts, which I love but hardly ever find. But go into Tea and Sympathy on Greenwich Avenue next time you’re in NYC, to get a load of all the Brits stocking up on Aero or Yorkie Bars. Maybe they’re on their way to a movie!

Afterthought: What’s your favorite movie candy? Hope it isn’t Raisinets...