​Once upon a time the movies were a way of life. People sent their children to the Bijou, the Roxy, the Ritz, Loew’s Kings, the RKO Albee, to get them out of the house, especially on Saturdays. 

It was literally possible in the 1950’s — even likely — to grow up at the local movie house (which may or may not have been a palace). Many of us did come of age in movie theaters, which is why, in 1976, I and like-minded friends found ourselves running a down-at-heels movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island . 

You started at Saturday matinees, which were at least in part a babysitting service. In grade school you went with friends on Wednesday afternoons or at night; my husband hung out at his neighborhood theater, the Deer Park, where almost everything was third run. Later there were dates. At the Hyde Park, another local house, I saw Dr. Strangelove first run with a pimply-faced boy whose name I’ve forgotten. 
         
This way of life was in full swing when Frank O’Hara (an American poet who famously wrote a number of poems on his lunch hour) appealed to the “mothers of America.”

You can read the poem, “Ave Maria,” here, or at the end if you like.

Meanwhile, let’s go to the movies.

The entire history of movie-going in nineteen fifties America is encapsulated in this poem, anticipating that if the children aren’t sent off to gaze at the big screen they’ll “...grow old and blind in front of a TV set/seeing/movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young.” Many of us did grow old watching formerly forbidden movies (in my case, Psycho). As for the war with television (much talked about in the fifties), if you believe a recently overheard remark by a movie mogul at the Polo Lounge in Hollywood, that war just ended in TV’s favor. I prefer, however, to think TV and the movies have both capitulated to social media — total Sci Fi to O’Hara.
         
He wisely asks, what about the soul/ that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images/ He’s right you know. We used to get that kind of transformation at the movies; there is nothing in streaming or on your cellphone or laptop that can confer any form of spiritual embossment. 
         
There are/were other pleasures to be had in the movie-screen dark: O’Hara assures the mothers, their children "...may even be grateful to you/ for their first sexual experience/which only cost you a quarter/ and didn’t upset/ the peaceful home." Since sex was never talked about and hardly considered as a wholesome experience outside of marriage, most of the mothers I knew growing up would hardly have been consoled by the low cost (a quarter) of the debauchment. One suspects these imagined mothers‘ motivation in getting the kids out of the house may have initially had a sexual component of its own. At the outset, O’Hara thinks they might want to get the kids "...out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to."
         
Getting down to his own nitty gritty, O’Hara imagines, "leaving the movie before it’s over/ with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg/ near the Williamsburg Bridge.” Since the poet arrived in New York as an adult, this is no childhood memory.
         
I’d like to close with a snippet from William Carlos Williams ("Asphodel: That Greeny Flower”) another American poet, who reminds us:
​
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Afterthoughts:
1. I’d like to thank Robin Locke Monda, who keeps this blog and the site that contains it alive and well, for reminding me about O’Hara’s “Ave Maria.”
2. For other movie-connected poems...
3. Also don’t miss this treatment of O’Hara from The New Yorker.

Ever walk into the lobby of a movie theater and instantly want popcorn? If this has happened to you, well, you must have smelled it first. OIfactory stimulation (the nose knows) has awakened the memories of Alzheimer’s sufferers, calmed the nerves of rats, and caused human subjects to lose weight (the smell of grapefruit oil affected the vagal nerves, adrenals, and sympathetic nervous systems of the subjects). 
 
The St. George Theater, a movie palace I helped to run in 1976, had the highest per capita concession sales (translation: most food sold per customer) of any theater in the five boroughs of New York City. We may not have been able to fill more than a few hundred of our 2,672 seats, but most people arrived at those seats loaded down with a chunky assortment of what we offered to eat: fresh buttered popcorn, candy, soda, ballpark hotdogs on Italian buns, and Haagan Dazs ice cream. Many came back for seconds. 
 
How could we make that thirds? My husband and partner, Dean, pondered this question; then he remembered reading about a study of subliminal advertising. In 1957, a researcher named James Vicary had inserted a single frame (not discernible to the conscious mind) with the words “Eat Popcorn” into a movie — as well as another frame that suggested “Drink Coke.” Supposedly, popcorn and Coke sales increased dramatically, results that were subsequently deemed a hoax. Dean forgot the hoax part. 
 
Our experiment in subliminal advertising had as much to do with the smell of pot as popcorn. On a busy Friday or Saturday night, especially during midnight shows, certain ushers were often amongst the missing. Where were they? In the heat room, a space approximately twenty by twenty by forty feet, in the bowels of the theater, where all the air circulated, using large fans. During cold weather, a gigantic radiator covered one whole wall of this room, over and around which cool air was drawn from the auditorium and returned to it warm. Since pot smoke made its way into the heat room along with the cold air, some ushers thought they could get a contact high hanging out there. They didn’t. But Dean thought the system might work in reverse!
 
One Saturday morning, he asked two ushers to haul an old popcorn warmer into the heat room, then, right before showtime, they loaded it with five or six jumbo bags of popcorn saturated with extra butter. Up through the vents in the floor of the auditorium came the smell of fresh buttered popcorn. We’ve lost the statistics, but popcorn sales did increase dramatically. 
 
All this came to a crashing halt when, in the depths of winter, the landlord stopped providing heat, which is part of a much larger story you’ll read some day soon; meanwhile, Dean wonders, “Is that old popcorn warmer still down in the heat room?”
 
Afterthoughts:
1. During the depths of the first wave of Covid, when theaters were closed, popcorn sales, according to Variety, actually increased; check it out. 

2. This blog post is an oldie-but-goody I run every once in a while, especially poignant since the easy culture of movie theaters has been supplanted somewhat by Covid isolation. When I first ran this post, in 2015, I received some interesting comments, which follow below:  
 
Clifford Browder:
Funny! In theory, I disapprove of subliminal advertising, but this popcorn story is hilarious. I'll mention it in my blog.

(v.h.)
Well I don't approve of it either, but we were desperate!
 
Bill Shander:
I love that story, Vicki! As someone who lost his sense of smell a few years ago, but still vividly remembers how seductive the smell of popcorn is, it brought me right there – I can see (and SMELL) that experience. Thanks for sharing!

(v.h)
So popcorn survives even the loss of smell; I find that amazing...
 
Robin Locke Monda:
Buttered popcorn is one of the great aromas of the world.
 
Judy Borie:
What a great story — I worked at an Art School in the 70's and am pretty sure that your ushers and my art students were playing the same game — trying to get high on a fragrance (which all of us popcorn lovers know is easy to do)

In Hollywood, at the Polo Lounge over something called a McCarthy Salad (lettuce so finely chopped you could almost drink it with a straw, according to the NYTimes), disgruntled studio magnates bemoan the shrinking prospects of big studio movie-making. Grosses are in the tank, and Covid is only slightly to blame. 
 
“It’s over,” a glum film executive said at a holiday fete. TV won.”
 
Will there be movies or even, the subject of this blog, theaters? — in what we’re beginning to dream of as the “After” time? And wasn’t it all really slipping even before the Pandemic?
 
A friend sent me this tidbit:
The highest-grossing silent film of all time was an anti-war picture featuring the popular actor Rudolph Valentino in his first starring role; he would go on to be a superstar. The film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's 1916 bestselling novel of the same name. At the time, the film brought in $9.2 million in domestic sales, or about $381.1 million today.
 
Actually, it was the sixth highest-grossing silent, but who’s quibbling? The fact remains that it was big — as in “Boffo Socco,” a film that has “legs”— as Variety, which coined these aphorisms, might have said at the time.  
 
What’s happened to the movie business? Or you could simply do a fill-in-the-blank:  What’s happened to the book trade? to grocery stores? restaurants? 
 
More importantly, when Covid finally is as pervasive as the common cold, just an annoyance, what will happen if we all simply decide to stay home?   
 
People are quitting their jobs or failing to look for new ones in droves. Would Rudolf Valentino or Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford recognize the world we’re living in? Metropolis, a pre-cursor sci-fi of the twenties, fails entirely to anticipate what’s become of so-called civilization. 
 
Theaters — live or movie — at this juncture are hardly full of people. Will all the trouble we’ve gone to to preserve the great movie palaces (where Valentino made my mother, an early fan, swoon) be lost?
 
Since the silents started this rant, I’d like to dedicate the rest of this post to the rise of movie palaces in general. Here goes:
 
“The clouds that once floated over a thousand balconies have drifted away for good. The machines broke years ago. One by one the stars have blinked out, their tiny bulbs blackened... dead stars in the cold outer space of grimy atmospheric ceilings.” Ben M. Hall chose those sentences to end his memorable book about movie palaces, The Best Remaining Seats, evoking the darkened ceiling of an atmospheric theater (a palace whose very ceiling, in an electrified take on Trompe-l'œil, imitated the open sky). By 1961, when the book came out, palaces — atmospheric and otherwise — were going down fast. Only a year earlier, in 1960, Gloria Swanson had posed for Life in a sumptuous gown in the fresh ruins of New York’s most famous palace, the Roxy. Ms. Swanson had starred in The Love of Sunya, the silent that opened the Roxy in 1927. 
 
By 1976, when, with a group of friends, I tried my luck at running a (non-atmospheric but nonetheless exquisite) movie palace — the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque confection) — hundreds more of the grand old houses were closing or about to close, losing their livelihoods, about to meet the Roxy’s fate.
 
1976-1979 could be said to be prime years of dereliction for movie palaces. Loew’s Kings on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and the Beverly in L.A. were both darkened in 1977; The Victory Theatre in Holyoke, Massachusetts went dark in 1979; The Albee in Cincinnati, my hometown, was demolished in 1977 to make way for a hotel; the Michigan Theatre in Detroit was converted to a three-level parking garage in that same year; and the list goes on. The Michigan is perhaps the most touching example of a fate worse than demolition — a French Renaissance dome that once sheltered 4,000 seats, given over to the protection of (what else in Detroit?) automobiles.  
 
There are several reasons why great single-screen theaters were particularly vulnerable in the mid-seventies. The country had been through a serious recession, and  whoever was arguably prosperous had moved to the suburbs. The knock-out punch TV delivered to movie attendance made selling thousands of tickets to a single screening almost impossible: theater operators fought back by building (mostly suburban) multiplexes.
 
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.
 
Six years later at the St. George in Staten Island, a group of us struggled to sell enough tickets to fill at least half of our 2672 seats, despite fights that often broke out in the auditorium between neighborhood boys; one in particular featured broken beer  bottles. Another time there was a gun —but I will not elaborate just yet. You’ll read about it soon enough in the full book, Starts Wednesday, that will in due time follow this website.
 
Some twelve years later — 1988 — and eighteen years after the Bronx pipe bomb incident, a shootout between gang members at the aforementioned Loew’s Paradise — by then divided into four smaller theaters — resulted in an actual fatality. Such was the life in downtowns everywhere, and in the age of palace decline.
 
Despite thousands of wrecking-ball parties, there have been and continue to be notable victories in the saga of America’s most opulent movie theaters. I’d like to close with a tip of my former motion picture operator’s cap to the Palace Theater in Marion Ohio, saved from demolition by a local arts group in 1976, the very year so many other theaters went dark forever. I began with a description of a typical atmospheric, so it’s fitting that I should end with one. The Palace was one of the last such theaters to be built (1928, John Eberson) and is said to be one of 16 to survive today.
 
The week it opened, The Marion Star offered its readers a glimpse of what the new theater’s atmospheric dome might evoke, to a patron gazing up from one of the new plush seats:
“Allow your imagination to carry you to the gentle slope of a moon-lit Spanish hill...a vine covered garden wall, broken here and there with graceful arches. Through the archways spreads the soft light of a harvest moon, and the dim glow casts shadows over the somber colored walls. Overhead myriads of stars [electric light was still a miracle in 1928!] are twinkling in an azure blue sky, and soft, fleecy clouds are drifting gently...”
 
BTW, clouds “drifted” thanks to a series of mechanically-synchronized slide projectors or “cloud machine” hidden in the recesses of a theater’s dome.
 
Ben M. Hall, who passed suddenly and violently in the rough-edged 1970‘s, might have taken solace in knowing how many grand movie theaters, atmospheric and otherwise, have survived. The preservation and/or resurrection of so many palaces proves how important they ultimately were, and are, to their communities, thousands still standing as arts and community  centers, churches, live theaters, and yes, Marion proves it — as movie houses.

Film — the real thing, with sprocket holes, that runs through a projector — is rare these days, but in 1976, when we ran a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, it was plentiful and thankfully not explosive. This didn’t keep the fire inspectors from fining us if fire buckets in the projection booth weren’t precisely 12 inches off the floor, a regulation that dated back to the bad old days of nitrate film. Almost all movies, certainly major motion pictures, were on a nitrate base before the late forties and certainly after 1952, when Kodak finally stopped making the volatile stuff, and switched entirely to a variation of acetate, the base they’d been using all along for home movies. In the heyday of the movie palaces, going to the movies, let alone working as a projectionist, were risky activities. Theater fires as dramatic as the one depicted in Cinema Paradiso were, before 1952, common, if not somehow likely. 

How likely? A 1936 issue of International Projectionist estimated that one American projectionist died, on average, every 18 days, probably not of a heart attack. Nitrate often simply exploded. And get this: while projectors were carbon arc (which we still had at the St. George in seventy-six), nitrate film, whose base is essentially a solid form of nitroglycerin, had all the aspects of a bomb (fire, volatile material). 

The very existence of  projection booths in theaters had been established early in the silent era, largely as a safety feature, an attempt to contain anticipated fire. Should a fire begin in the booth, the wax that lined the projection ports — if not a fuse of some sort — melted, and flame-proof shutters sealed the booth from the theater, like a tomb, which, as a matter of fact, it might become. Case in point, the June 1947 issue of the aforementioned International Projectionist eulogizes a fifteen-year-old — presumably breaking into the craft of projection — Marion Shea, who lost his life in a theater fire.
 
What is it, or was it, about nitrate film stock? A US Navy instructional movie about the safe handling of celluloid/nitrate film includes footage of a full reel of the stuff burning underwater. Water, in fact, is the worst thing you can add to a nitrate fire: it only encourages dangerous gases!

Beginning in the thirties, the fact that practically the whole history of movies as an art form was laid down on unreliable stock that might explode spontaneously, meant that a number of archives were destroyed on hot summer days, in storage vaults that lacked ventilation. Everything Fox ever made before 1937 went up in an archive fire that year, requiring seven fire companies to extinguish.
A similar calamity happened to MGM’s archives in 1965. 
 
We hardly show movies on nitrate anymore, except in rare circumstances, which still doesn’t solve the problem of preservation of rare reels, because, over time, in the presence of the kind of heat you experience in a hot car in a parking lot in July, these films will either explode or bubble and degenerate. 

This leads me to the anecdote that started off this post. My friend, Robert Endres, now retired from his long-time job as Chief Projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, reminisced recently about his attempts to save some archival footage of the Center Theatre’s opening. The Music Hall had, in those days, vaults for the storage of nitrate film, and Bob was trying to get the fragile newsreels converted to acetate before they disintegrated altogether.

One of my great regrets was that I couldn’t save newsreel footage of the opening of the Center Theatre. There’s very little documentation about it, and I had the footage in our vault.  It was nitrate and when I opened the can I noted that it had started to bubble. Our Chief Operating Officer suggested taking it to Technicolor and having the Lab director take a look at it. I did. When I walked into his office, he closed the blinds over the inside window. He opened the can, took one look, and said, “Get it out of here!”  I said, “Can’t you do something?” and he repeated, “Get it out of here!”  I picked the can up and put it under my left arm and he said, “No, put it under your right arm. That way if it blows up it only takes a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took it back to the Hall very gingerly!

I couldn’t resist asking  Bob what happened after that...to which he replied,

I held the can out at arm’s length most of the way back. I took the subway and I’m sure violated a number of rules of the Fire Department and the MTA in doing so, although they probably wouldn’t have known about the hazard of nitrate film by that time.

Nitrate film seems to be a perpetual hot potato. Michael Zahs’ collection of early Miele films, which he kept in a shed on his Iowa property for many years, were nitrate; this didn’t keep him from mailing a number of them to the Library of Congress, which duplicated them and mailed them back! 
You might be wondering why, if Kodak had acetate as far back as 1909, which it happily sold to amateur filmmakers, it kept producing nitrate materials to sell to the studios? The myth surrounding nitrate’s beauty, the dense blacks and luminous whites, is probably the answer. To which I say, what price beauty?

Afterthoughts:
Here are a few more hot potato anecdotes from Bob Endres, and one other afterthought besides;
Bob’s comments:

1. We actually had a nitrate film vault at the Hall complete with two sets of doors. My boss discovered that it wasn’t cooled in the summer and had some of the film brought down to my office in the booth. Since you’re not supposed to have more than a few thousand feet of film outside of a fireproof container at one time, this startled the city inspectors when they came to check the booth, particularly since one of the cans on top had a big red label saying “Nitrate” on it. There was quite a bit of nitrate footage stored in the nitrate vault still, when I started there. Our Head of House Operations knew about it and when he saw Towering Inferno he said we should get  it out of the building. 

2. I...didn’t want to destroy the documentary footage that we had on the history of the Hall. Since it was operated by RKO, there were a lot of RKO newsreels that contained Radio City stories.  We also had a “March of Time” episode that featured the Hall. I made a deal with MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] that they could have the footage if they would pull acetate prints for me, thus enabling me to show footage that I didn’t want to take a chance with when it was on nitrate. A stagehand and I filled a shopping cart with reels of nitrate film and wheeled it up 6th Avenue to MOMA.

3. We did a tribute to Myrna Loy at Carnegie Hall with a film retrospective. I got a call from an editor wanting to know if we would run a clip on nitrate film. When the editor said she would take the clip out of the 2000’ reel in was contained in, I said O.K.  She brought the three-minute roll to New York in her purse on a plane.

Final note: Acetate is no optimal medium either, not volatile like nitrate, but imminently perishable.
​Check out “vinegar syndrome.”