From the scattershot set of aluminum marquee letters we kept in a storage room of the St. George Theatre, the 2672-seat movie palace we operated for one year (1976-77), we were unable to come up with four x’s. This was disappointing, because, despite perpetual destitution, we’d managed to cobble together just enough money — $3,000.00 as a non-refundable deposit — to pay Warner for an exclusive, and we wanted the word EXORCIST to appear twice on each side of the marquee. From the ranks of our tiny management staff, arguments about spelling the word phonetically (EKSORSIST) came to naught. “That’s just plain wrong!” Dean said, and I agreed, along with most everybody else: it was, in addition to being incorrect, confusing, laughable, embarrassing. Why we felt we needed to advertise the movie’s title twice on each side of the marquee is a mystery to me now, but forty years ago it made sense. Like advertisers on talk radio, we were desperate enough to resort to irritation advertising.

As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. The Exorcist was made to play the St. George, a theater gothic enough to match its story of spiritual possession. Details of that night will appear in Starts Wednesday, the book this blog heralds, but meanwhile, I’m thinking about an issue that haunts (pun very much intended) the Exorcist chapter of my forthcoming book: how independent movie theater “operators” — as we were called — are helpless in the face of the big bad boys, the “distributors” —Warner, Fox, MGM, and the like.

Warner, which owned The Exorcist, initially wanted thirty percent of our box office receipts. These were great terms for that or any era, outlined in the usual distributor’s contract. What was wrong with this set up? Distributors are never known for their generosity. Truth be told, nobody but nobody expected our faded palace to do good numbers. That list of nobodies included our booking agent who — how could we have trusted him? — also worked for a major theater chain. As a matter of fact, he’d already booked Exorcist at a strip mall theater on the other side of Staten Island, while assuring us we had “an exclusive.”

An historic weekend. We sold out the house twice, raking in enough soda-soaked dollar bills to pay the rent and a lot else. Whew! That sweet intake of breath and relief lasted around 24 hours, until Monday, when Warner told our agent to inform us they were changing the terms of the contract. We considered calling our ancient toothless lawyer with a threadbare office next door, but our agent asked us to consider two things: first, whether we might ever want to book another Warner title; second, that Warner, MGM,  “...an all da rest...sorta hang togetha.”

So the old contract found its sad place in the circular file, and a new one arrived shortly, stating that Warner was entitled to 60%, retroactive. For 24 hours we’d known what it was like to run at a profit. That we were honestly reporting our box office receipts — when it was assumed by agent and distributors alike that, like most theater operators of the time, we were cheating by palming tickets —is another related story. 

On December 31, 2011 at a site called Quora, Paul Turner, owner of the Darkside Cinema in Corvalis Oregon, wrote, “Being an independent cinema we are the lowest on the exhibition food chain, which means studios can treat us any way they please.... To a few studios we are nothing but an annoyance and they hope we will all die out when 35mm prints are no longer available and we cannot afford to go over to their brand of digital. That way they only have to deal with the bookers of the large theaters — making their lives much easier.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. And yet I was pleased to observe that — since digital is now almost universal — the Darkside is still in operation, with Paul Turner at the helm. This guy is quite a writer, BTW, author of Prancing Lavender Bunnies and Other Stuff from the Darkside of Independent Cinema, which I will read as soon as it arrives. Here are some choice additional words Turner offers on the Quora site, to sum up the pleasures and perils of theater operation:

“Owning a cinema feels like having the honor of being the one who lights the modern cultural bonfire that everyone gathers around to hear stories. It is the job of a theater owner to make sure the story is on time, in focus and can be heard. This is how it feels on the good days. On the bad days it feels like getting a gasoline enema in a fireworks factory while smoking an exploding cigar.”

​I think sometimes I remember the exploding cigar too much, but the cultural bonfire was very real for me, while it lasted.
           

I have’t climbed to the balcony — then the fourteen steep stairs from the back of the balcony to the projection booth — of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I helped to run — since 1977, when we pulled out from under the marquee, taking what was left of the popcorn and candy, a couple of movie posters, some foot-light covers we’d paid eight dollars apiece for, and whatever was left of the cash.

For about a year and a half after the theater went dark, the light of a single bare 40-watt bulb, visible from six stories below in the parking lot, told me there was still electricity up there; then that last bulb went dark, and the booth became, in my memory, a shadowy dream space, its hulking pedestal-mounted carbon-arc projectors a fantasy I had to struggle to recall.  

Even then our projectors were antique, a technology which used actual  fire to illuminate film as it passed through the gate — as primitive in what had then become the age of xenon and platter projection as quill pens and inkwells.  

Every technology is superseded by the next, and the next. What would Gabe, the grizzled old union projectionist we overpaid back then, think tomorrow, if he climbed the stairs to the booth and found, in place of two behemoth projectors of ancient vintage, a laptop? In this most digital of ages, not only has film itself fallen into mortal danger, but so is the thing once called “projection.”  If Tarantino, Scorcese and Nolan are right, the death of film is the death of film art. Is film — hard to transport, easy to scuff and scratch, hard to preserve, environmentally un-friendly,--really better (sharper, richer, just plain more authentic) than digital imagery? Would my old friend and  teacher, Hollis Frampton, a structuralist film-maker who died in 1984, agree?

On the activist side of the argument stood, in 2015, a small but impressive band of directors:  Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), Laszlo Nemes (Son of Saul), Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible —Rogue Nation),  Adam McKay (The Big Short), Todd Haynes (Carol), J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: Episode VII), Judd Apatow (Train Wreck), Sam Mendes (Spectre), Scott Cooper (Black Mass), Bill Pohlad (Love and Mercy), Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs), and David O. Russell (Joy). All of the previously-mentioned movies were produced in 2015, using Tarantino’s newly-tweaked Ultra-Panavision (2.76:1 aspect ratio) 70-millimeter film process. Beyond that, roughly 100 movies were produced that year on film.

But, (as Ron Popeil of Ronco used to say) “...wait!  There’s more!” The slow anticipated demise of film technology that’s been going on since the millennium isn’t just  about aesthetics; it’s about people’s livelihoods. Over the last several years, since Paramount became the first major distributor to announce that it would no longer produce or distribute film as a physical project, mom-and-pop cinemas and smaller chains in the U.S. have been packing up their popcorn, the way we did in 1977, closing the doors, and going home. To combat this, and to create a platform for the new 70mm phenomenon, the previously-mentioned A-list directors went to EBay looking for old projectors to rebuild. In 100 cinemas nationwide, they installed the new systems, their aim to create a viewer experience reminiscent of the fifties, when the palaces were still at a high shine.

In 2011, A.O. Scott of The New York Times, trying not to sound too nostalgic, observed: “The machinery of production and distribution is in the midst of an epochal change, part of the rapid and convulsive digitalization of everything under the sun. If you go to a movie theater, you are less and less likely to see a film in the traditional, literal sense. Cans and reels have been replaced by hard drives and digital files, and some of the old material hallmarks of cinema — the grainy swirl of emulsion as the light passes through the stock, the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector — are quickly taking on an aura of antiquity. Movies are shot and shown digitally and increasingly distributed that way as well, streaming onto the screen in your living room or in your hand.” 

Have the activist directors turned back this tide?-- or just plugged a temporary hole? Do/will audiences miss that “grainy swirl of emulsion?” Is film arguably better, in the way some argue that vinyl is richer than CD’s were or downloads are? “Digital projection is just television in cinema,” Tarantino maintains. Is he right? What is it about technology that supersedes itself constantly, putting whole industries and thousands of small storefront operations inadvertently out of business? It isn’t just storefront businesses, either. 

Kodak, once the “jolly yellow giant,” as one filmmaker friend used to call it, drifted into deep trouble, around the time Scott was waxing poetic about grainy emulsion. The company was losing 100 million dollars annually. Now thanks to Spielberg, Tarantino and the gang — not to mention Nolan and Scorsese, and a growing crowd of others, the big K is back, anticipating profits in 2016, for the first time in years. 

On to the next challenge:  processing labs, many of which no longer exist. Unbelievably, according to Ed Lachman, who shot Carol, “the New York Film Lab [a partnership between Deluxe and Technicolor that was created to respond to film’s shrinking footprint] is closed. They were going to throw out all the equipment. I inquired about it, and the general manager let me have the lab equipment. I have it in storage. We can develop film at Fotokem in Los Angeles, which is a very good lab. ...  But there's a market and [we need] a lab on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.” 

Perhaps enough theaters capable of projecting film will be able to stay in business — which brings me to a thought I’ve been harboring as I read about all this Errol-Flynn-like brinksmanship. What if — way back at the St. George — we’d been required to replace those old carbon arc relics with digital projectors? I have a vivid memory of one Saturday night in 1976, having to hop on the ferry (the St. George Theatre was and is in Staten Island) and schlepp via subway to the porn district in Times Square. We’d run out of carbons to operate our antiquated projectors (probably because we hadn’t paid the supplier). The porn houses were virtually the only theaters left in NYC that had our kind of projection. They loaned us the carbons, and we soldiered on. What if Dog Day Afternoon, Cuckoo’s Nest and The Exorcist could only have arrived in a lovely beam on our wide stained screen if we had the latest technology? Xenon, the techno breakthrough of that time, was way beyond our reach. Fortunately, nobody required us to upgrade: as long as we remained in the movie palace business, smudged and scratched prints, more than one of which burst into fire on-screen, continued to arrive each Wednesday in heavy steel canisters our intrepid ushers managed to lug up seven flights to the booth.

P.S. Check out this interesting example of reverse discrimination, exhibitors miffed over having already done the digital conversion, rendering them unable to project Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in 2014.
​

“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.

If you Google the term “movie palace,” the first item that hits you in the face is the schedule for a working movie theater, located at 1231 Woodland Drive, in Hardin County, Kentucky. An actual palace? I got my hopes up, but, trouble is, it looks more like a large dry cleaner, and the other trouble is it’s currently showing Kung Fu Panda 3, The Finest Hours and Dirty Grandpa. In other words, a plex. To those of us (me) who once operated an original 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, in Staten Island for about a year starting in early 1976, this is not just a lie, but the degradation of language. It’s like “luxury apartments for rent” on the sign affixed to a certain row of brick slums I know all too well, having once lived in them. Will children growing up today think a movie palace is a strip-mall plex? Or that “luxury” means what my husband likes to call “hot and cold running roaches?”

Fortunately, the next Google offering is dead-on, the Wikipedia entry: “A movie palace (or picture palace in the United Kingdom) is a term used to refer to the large, elaborately decorated movie theaters built between the 1910s and the 1940s. The late 1920s saw the peak of the movie palace, with hundreds opened every year between 1925 and 1930. With the advent of television, movie attendance dropped and many movie palaces were razed or converted into multiple screen venues.”

Sadly true.

What happened between 1976 (when a couple of us went personally bankrupt trying to keep our single-screen palace open and in the black) and now, to make it possible for someone to call a strip mall theater a palace?  At a party several weeks ago, I described to a young woman I met, the title of the book I’m about to publish (the subject of this blog), Starts Wednesday, Coming of Age in a Movie Palace, and she asked, all innocence, but what exactly was a movie palace?

Was--or is? If you’re lucky enough to live in L.A., it’s is — there are plenty of choices, including the Orpheum and most of the Grauman houses — such as The Egyptian Theater, The TCL Chinese Theatre — for more just check out the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation. In New York, on the other hand, home of some of the most spectacular palaces ever built (The Regent, The Roxy, The Strand) all that’s left is the Paris — not really a palace at all, but a very very nice art house. The Ziegfield, which came too late and lacked a certain magic, just closed. I’d like to count the Village East, which has an amazing history, including Yiddish Theater, but the main auditorium has been twinned and stacked. It’s also, arguably, not a palace at all by virtue of its modest size (1200 seats), although its Moorish elements make it very elegant.

In Ben M. Hall’s The Best Remaining Seats, a movie palace is defined as beyond opulent — that is to say luxurious. It is that very quality that caused me and a few of my friends to abandon all reason and go head-over-heels in debt in 1976 trying to save a way of life that was clearly dying. The carrara marble and decorative plaster of the outer lobby, the two-foot wide mahogany pillars in the inner lobby that frame the glass separating the auditorium from that lobby, mosaic-tiled fountains, stained glass everywhere — even the thirteen exit signs and “fire hose” doors, alabaster lamps (of which there were once 24), a 3 manual 30 rank Wurlitzer organ (gone to a pizza parlor out west before we arrived, but still evident from its elevator that rose out of the stage). And the stage itself: a full fly-loft with a six-story red and gold brocade curtain.  

Now that’s luxury! I could (and will) go on — as I have already in this blog and in the book that will soon follow it.

At this moment, like so many former movie palaces nationwide, the St. George is a working theater. Although its original dedication to single-screen cinema is no longer sustainable, it and a number of  its sister palaces nationwide have been preserved as shrines to the very human desire for beauty — and, yes, luxury — that brought people out of their homes, when there was no TV or radio or internet, to sit in the dark watching shadows, with strangers.

Here in America, we don’t have a Taj Mahal or Alhambra — our past isn’t long enough for that — but there are hundreds of surviving theaters. It’s tempting to go out with a description of Radio City or Grauman’s Chinese or the Atlanta Fox, all famous, but big isn’t everything. I just found a description of a theater you probably haven’t heard of, one I want to visit next summer:

The Ohmann, located in Lyons, 14 miles north of Seneca Lake, first opened its doors on December 6, 1915, making this treasure one of the three oldest operating movie houses in New York State. On opening day the theater boasted a red velvet curtain, an organ and 750 padded wooden seats. Downstairs, patrons could find "retiring rooms" for both men and women. The vintage Deco marquee still greets visitors coming through the downtown business district. And to top it all off, the theater is still owned by the Ohmann family.   
It’s not a palace, but who cares? It’s family-owned, and sometimes charm is better than glamor!