When we opened our doors at the St. George Theater in Staten Island in 1976, there were ten movie theaters still in operation on the island, including two palaces (The St. George — which I was involved in running — and the Paramount), one porn house (the Empire), one small storefront theater which ran 16-mm prints and looked oddly like a dry cleaner, (the Jerry Lewis), a small Art Moderne stadium theater (the Lane), three “twins” — precursors of the multiplex model — and two single-screen mall theaters. Nine years later, that number had shrunk to just six theaters. As of this writing, only two theaters are extant, both multiplexes, with a total between them of 19 screens. 

With its brocade curtain, 2672 seats, gilded dome and full stage, the St. George had been the island’s premier house, run by the Fabian Chain, which had also owned the Paramount, a few other now-defunct theaters and a briefly-successful drive-in, whose land had been sold off to build the mall. In our theater year, the “District Office” (in faded gold lettering) — an office which stood at the back end of our theater’s elegant corridor — was already a storage room. Was that where Sy Fabian had held court in his time? The St. George had been a flagship, first-run, but by 1976, we were reduced to battling the Jerry Lewis and others for scant second- and third-run product, movies like Blazing Saddles (1974), Jaws and Dog Day Afternoon (both1975), not to mention Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It was hard to book viable movies. Once, desperate and ashamed, we even ran a xxx porn title I can’t recall the name of. It drew a sad and scanty audience.

Twelve years later, when I saw Cinema Paradiso — and years before I began to write Starts Wednesday: Coming of Age in a Movie Palace — I longed for the St. George, and I wondered what was happening to the movie business anyhow? Better still these days I wonder what gives with the habit of going to movies? The day after another Oscar extravaganza, I’m reflecting on something Mike Nichols once 
said in an interview (a slight paraphrase), “Film is an act of the unconscious... [You are] sitting alone in the dark, and the dream begins.” Can this happen on an iPad? An Android? The flat screen in your kitchen? Or at a cineplex — which is, after all, a kind of glorified box? 

Tomorrow I’m off to Philadelphia, to see Still Alice with my sister at the Ambler Theater, it’s a ritual —we do this once a month. And while there are plenty of other theaters in Philly, we always go to the Ambler, a restored treasure of a theater. It’s like in the old days, when there was a theater in every neighborhood. What’s showing at the ....? Like then, we’re picking the theater first, the movie second!

The St. George Theatre, like the Kings (formerly Loew’s) — just reopened in Brooklyn  — and other cavernous movie palaces, was built to contain more than just movies:  vaudeville, opera, children’s theater, graduations, dance recitals, even bridge clubs. Movie palaces were the community centers of their time.  Someone I met just the other day told me that her mother used the Paramount, a sister theater, twenty minutes’ drive from the St. George, as a babysitting venue.  How she wished her mother would’ve chosen the St. George instead, but, alas, the 1900-seat Paramount was, at 35 cents for a child, fifteen cents cheaper than the St. George, Staten Island’s premier house. The Paramount also happened to be across the street from the family store. For admission and another half dollar, the ten-year-old Maria could eat Jordan’s Almonds and popcorn, then take in newsreels, cartoons, trailers, and a double feature before  her mother closed the shop and came to fetch her. No babysitter necessary!

By the time we took over the St. George, in 1976, its — and the Paramount’s — babysitting days were over. The Paramount had slipped to showing occasional porn, and our theater survived — if you could call selling only a few hundred tickets surviving — on second- or third-run action films, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Cartoons were unthinkable: they were expensive to rent (fifty bucks per) and the tough crowd we serviced would have scoffed at them.

And yet, the kids who came through our doors, mostly teenagers or a little younger, needed a safe place to come no less than Maria, a generation before, had needed the Paramount. The mothers of our urban teens may not have known exactly where they were, but these kids were safe, the theater had become their sanctuary. That is, once we got a handle on crowd control, and hired men from the community--who knew the families of these kids well enough to say, “Get. down from there! Would you walk on yo‘ mama’s sofa?”

We featured “Pong” — the hot, in fact the only, video game in those days — in the lobby, and the best concession stand in the five boroughs, with fresh-popped corn and ballpark hotdogs. Still we dreamed of more: in the cavernous old downstairs lounge, almost twenty years before Hoop Dreams (how I wish we’d stayed in business long enough to show that!), we even talked about installing a form of basketball! On the mezzanine, we wanted to open a restaurant. While I haven’t heard of any recent movie palace renovations featuring hoops, the model for the future includes mezzanine dining and all manner of activities, in other words, a community center once again. We really were just a little ahead of our time, thirty-nine years, to be exact.        

           

           

 

You can get lost in a 2,678-seat movie palace:  we knew it, and the younger patrons who didn’t want to go home knew it too. The balcony and loge were off limits — we hardly ever sold enough tickets to populate even the orchestra. But kids of a certain age — boys who are thirteen, fourteen — like to test limits. Exit doors in the balcony led to fire escapes. Although we weren’t using the balcony, the FDNY had forbidden us to chain these doors shut. So one kid would buy a ticket and sneak upstairs to let his friends, who had climbed the fire escape, in for free. For the most part, they’d hang in the upper part of the house 'til closing time, even bringing their own concession: beer and KFC. Pot-smoke drifted to the dome. On Friday and Saturday nights after the midnight show, you could hear them breathing up there, waiting for us to close and go home.  

Addressing them directly was the best way to flush them out. Sam, the floor manager, who knew all the kids’ families, would stand center stage and call them by name, “You up there Randall? Wone be pretty… fi hafta come getcha...”  “Nicky, hear me now. Doh make me tell yo Mama...” 
Exit doors on unoiled hinges groaned, followed by the rapid slap of sneakers flying down the fire escape.

What did they want? How many Snickers bars can one adolescent boy consume? Or was it a night in the shadows back stage they were after? 

The theater is a magic — even a sacred — space, a kind of human-made cave. Tired as I was at the end of a theater day, it was hard to go home, so who could fault a boy?  It was, for all of us, our Luray Caverns, our Lascaux, the screen, a cave-wall waiting for the splash of pigmented light. 
  

For Christmas in 1976, the year we ran the St. George Theater, a friend gave us a curious present. In all probability, she had no idea how desperate we had become — or she might have written us a check —but instead she presented us with an antique toy, a Marx Hometown Movie Theater. 

A member of the management staff remarked, at the time, how comforting it was to have at least one theater that wasn’t running in the red! (nice pun, since the tiny theater itself is yellow and red, with red full-length curtains, just like the one that was breaking our hearts down the street).  A moveable paper scroll mounted and visible through the proscenium of the toy theater serves as a movie screen, with its own “movie,” “Bobby’s and Betty’s Trip to Jungleland,” a black and white cartoon.   

This got me to thinking about miniatures in general and small theaters in particular, beginning with something our web designer, Robin Locke Monda, discovered on the net, a Lego “Palace Theater” set of  2,194 pieces, including its own marquee, limo for the child star arriving for the premier, searchlight, staff, patrons, concession stand, sidewalk of stars, and a tiny viewing area that seats 6. One dad adapted his old iPhone to the opening where the movie should be playing, a perfect fit! His sons watch “movies” there non-stop.    

Intrigued, we researched a little further. Dozens of neighborhood theaters, drive-ins, palaces, opera houses and etc. exist as HO- and O-gauge railroad settings for miniature small towns.  Some are pre-fab, such as the Plasticville Drive-In I found on YouTube, but most have been carefully crafted by hobbyists from balsa and cardboard.  Artists have gotten into the act too. One of my favorite artist-built miniatures is Alan Wolfson's Follies Burlesk (based on the real “Follies Burlesque” at 46th and Broadway in NYC), whose marquee proclaims that The Terminator is now playing—and no doubt has been for years.       

Theaters can be edible. We found a few examples of gingerbread designs — none other than Shakespeare’s Globe, (“Had I but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it for gingerbread” --Love’s Labors Lost, scene 1). Then we were on, to the toy theater phenomenon (aka “paper theater”).  

In the early part of the 19th century and in the latter part of the twentieth, toy  or paper theaters were overwhelmingly popular, especially in Europe. Patrons would attend the Opera, a play or puppet show and then purchase a cardboard replica of that particular theater with sets, props and actors, all to be cut out and mounted, to re-create the performance. Family members might speak as actors, or deliver arias, while paper figures walked a tiny stage. An assortment of people as unlikely as Lynn Fontanne, Andrew Lloyd-Weber, W.S. Gilbert and Charles Dickens — not to mention two Princes of Wales — were and are collectors of paper theater. 

From the pages of The Paris Review, we learned that miniaturization — dollhouses, small figurines, toy soldiers, and the like — can be deeply satisfying for adults, who apparently enjoy the feeling of god-like control tiny things offer. 

Which leads me back to the 3.5” x 5” Marx toy theater we got for Christmas the year we were trying and failing to control a real seven-story movie palace down the street.  We went out of business at the St. George only a few months later, but our Marx “Hometown Movie Theater,” sits on a shelf to the right of the fireplace, and only occasionally requires a little dusting.    

Written in collaboration with Robin Locke Monda (graphic designer and media consultant) and my husband — and former theater entrepreneur — Dean Thompson.