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).
 
Staten Island’s St. George Theatre in the year we ran it, 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 2672 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? Dean (my husband and partner) pondered this question, and 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. Of course, given all that pot smoke, the munchies had a lot to do with why our concession sales were always astronomical. 

​Forty years later, I’ve made the acquaintance of a professional concessionaire, Hot Dog Donna, who operates out of a converted ’88 Toyota Dolphin RV in Nyack, New York. I wish I’d had her pulled pork on a bun to offer my blissed–out pot–drenched customers! I envy her portability: if only we could have hitched our stand to a trailer and towed it away from the lovely, extravagant palace it was fatally attached to. 

What was it like to fall in love with something ancient and mouldering? Chandeliers, mahogany pillars, alabaster lamps, red and gold brocade as thick as elephant skin (the dress stage curtain) with gold tassels two and a half feet tall; stained glass FIRE HOSE signs, fake golden goddesses rising from balconies to catch the light of even the worst movie; a glorious dome that leaked slightly on rainy days and, thanks to perfect acoustics, could be heard with no reverb, dripping into a carefully-placed bucket on the balcony. This was the St. George Theatre (Staten Island) in 1976, the year I was privileged to work — and practically live — there, a 2672-seat hall, when such movie palaces were, like a pre-millennial species of dinosaur, sliding into ruin everywhere. 

​1976 seems to have been the beginning of the last phase of single-screen theaters in America and elsewhere. Take, for example, the Canton Palace Theatre in Canton Ohio. While our small band of twenty–something entrepreneurs was struggling to keep movies on–screen at the St. George, the Canton (built by the well-known Austrian–born theater architect John Eberson)  was simultaneously celebrating its fiftieth anniversary while being shuttered, in preparation for demolition. Other single–screen theaters and palaces that closed and/or were demolished in 1976 include: The Palace in Flint, Michigan, the Warner (Empire) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Loews Kings on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, NYC, the Egyptian Theatre in DeKalb, Illinois, and my own beloved childhood palace, the RKO Albee, in Cincinnati, Ohio. to name a few.

But the good news is that not all of these theaters bit the dust after closing as movie houses. An interesting pattern emerges, if you do a little research. Here’s my own private observation: the larger the city (hence, the more valuable the real estate), the more likely a movie palace was/is to be torn down. Hence, of the palaces listed in the previous paragraph, the Albee in Cincinnati ( a comparatively large city) and the Palace in Flint, Michigan (population roughly 99,000 and a county seat) were torn down. The Warner in Lawrence, Massachusetts (population roughly 79,000) was, as it turns out, also razed. The rest were saved by small-town or neighborhood pride, and the fact that the land just wasn’t all that valuable. The Canton Palace is a classic example, closed in 1976, and, as I mentioned, scheduled for the architectural gallows. Guess who stepped in? According to the Palace’s website: 

Just one week before the building was slated for the wrecking ball, the Canton Jaycees stepped forward to act as the holding organization until a group of concerned citizens could be mobilized to make the Palace Theatre a viable business once again. The Palace was held in trust until The Canton Palace Theatre Association was formed. The building reopened in 1980 and the restoration of the theater has been ongoing since.            

This would never have happened in Manhattan, where hardly a movie palace  survives. Radio City Music Hall still stands, but the Roxy, the Strand, the Rivoli and at least fifty others were less valuable than the land they stood on. Case in point, to quote CinemaTreasures: “Where urban blight had at once shuttered, but saved the Rivoli Theatre from development, a turn around in the city’s fortune made the site too tempting for developers. The Rivoli Theatre, one of the greatest of all New York City theaters, was demolished after closing in June 1987. It has been replaced by a black glass skyscraper.”

The glowing exception to my rule–of–thumb about the value of land affecting the fate of a single–screen palace or theater is, of course, L.A. The home of the movies is also the home of movie palaces. That’s not to say that the Paramount Downtown (a Sid Grauman confection of some 3,000 seats) wasn’t demolished, the lot where it had stood remaining vacant until fairly recently; and there are other horror stories. But by and large tinseltown has done well by its single screen houses and palaces. If you don’t believe me, take a tour of the Lost Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation site and see for yourself how opulent theaters tend to fare on the left coast, in the movie business’s company town. A closed-down palace can serve multiple purposes in L.A.: as a movie location, or a venue for screenings, not to mention first-run movies. 

Not so in much of the rest of America. Most places a theater operator depends entirely on revenue from the likes of you and me. To quote a former San Francisco movie theater operator, Gary Meyer, "People will say with the best of intentions how much they love your theater or the programming on your calendar, but when you ask them which movies they saw, the one thing I hear over and over is 'none,’

They tell me they circle everything they like on the calendar and put it all in their Netflix queue."

There’s a moral to this story: go out to the movies!

Next week on my birthday I’m planning to go to The Lion at one of my favorite miraculously–still–single-screen theaters, The Paris in Manhattan. I’ll buy some popcorn and hunker down in the dark, remembering what it was like to count heads as people walked through the red and gold doors of the St. George Theatre, forty years ago. 

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie...” — Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
 
 I’m reading The Moviegoer (an excellent book btw), so later, when I found myself enjoying what turned out to be a fairly mediocre movie, I thought about Walker Percy’s lonely moviegoer, who only seems to be at home when he’s at the movies. Well, I thought, the magic still works for me. By “the magic,” I mean: sitting in the dark with strangers, digging into a large bag of recently-popped corn, while staring at a illuminated screen inside the borders of which, in another world remarkably like our own, people several times our size torture and sometimes even love each other. The movie contains a remarkable performance (DeNiro, The Comedian), which makes it well worth seeing, even if it is, of itself, not a terrific film. I believe I’d still think it was worth seeing, if I’d watched it at home sitting on the edge of the bed, but I can’t — entirely — be sure. Because what Percy’s moviegoer is getting at is that he’s “in” the movie, and I suspect that only happens in a theater.

The first major DeNiro flick I can recall seeing, Taxi Driver,  I watched in 1976, at our beloved St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I eventually went broke trying to run. We showed the DeNiro classic in the eighth week of our theater tenancy, a week after Don’t Open the Window (aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie), a 1974 Spanish-Italian sci-fi/horror flick, the kind of fare we were generally forced, by circumstances, to offer our audiences.

It was a big deal that we got Taxi Driver at all: generally speaking, important movies that were anywhere near first–run were out of our reach as a second– or third–run “buck fifty” house. I actually sat down in the middle of the auditorium, just beyond the overhang of the balcony, and watched it from beginning to end. This was something of a luxury, just watching the movie, since I was supposed to be scooping popcorn, selling tickets or writing checks to vendors. The light of the film spilling out on the golden statues left and right of the proscenium framed New York’s garbage-strewn streets and the paranoid delusions of a lone-wolf cab driver, softening my own personal blues about how to pay the carting service and the rent and just get to the end of the week. When it was over, I got up and went back to work. I knew that I’d seen a great movie, because, after real life hove back into view, washing away the dream state the movie had created, those characters were still with me. 

But if it had been a lousy flick, as the moviegoer in Walker Percy’s novel, seems to be implying, I’d still have been “in” the movie, and happy, at least for the hour or so it lasted. 

I’m afraid I only gave you part of what The Moviegoer had to say about the experience of being “in” the movies. Here’s the last part of the quote:

“...Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
 
Unlike The Moviegoer, I’ve had and continue to have both my Central Park/Parthenon moments, and the movies — both good and bad and everything in between--shared in the dark, with strangers.

*  *  *

It was intermission, a forgettable double feature at the St. George Theatre, our 2672-seat Staten Island movie palace, in that coldest of winters, 1977. 

The name of the guitarist is lost to time, but I remember the stool we’d set up for him center stage, and the glint of the footlights off his polished Martin guitar. It was a free gig: we couldn’t afford to pay, so we bought him a bottle of his favorite brandy. He was a friend, a flamenco guitarist by training.

A favorite M.O. of his, was to stroll into a bar unannounced, and knock out Beatles tunes or something else from the Rock cannon--for a drink or two--to the delight and surprise of everybody. Claimed he did it for an “ego feed.” He was a natural showman. But onstage between movies?--a tough audience.

There was no heat in the auditorium; you could see your breath. Fewer than 200 souls clustered in the first four rows holding free hot coffee to keep the blood flowing to their hands. Jostling and shouts of “where’s the movie?” gave an edge to the evening.

I’ve forgotten what he was playing, was it “Mr Tambourine Man?” Out of the middle of a clutch of kids came a battle cry,

HOT TUNA, HOT TUUUUUUUUNA!   

Only slightly ruffled, our guitarist kept playing, while the chant traveled freely in the occupied first three rows. HOT TUNA, HOT TUNA, HOT TUNA.

A Blues/Rock off-shoot of Jefferson Airplane, the band they were asking for (founded in 1969)  had just released its 7th album.  I could imagine why our freezing audience members might not want to listen to a solitary guitarist between two less–than–stellar movies, but why, of all things, Hot Tuna?  Well, there was that word “hot” in the title...

Or the original heckler had actually been to a Hot Tuna concert at the Capitol Theatre, across the water in Passaic, NJ. November 20, 1976, Hot Tuna played there, around the same time practically nobody was showing up at the unheated St. George for Buzzy Linhart, an older, lesser act. Was the heckler trying to give us a booking suggestion? John Scher, the rock impresario who owned the Capitol, like other old movie palaces converted to Rock venues was doing what we couldn’t afford to do, bringing big name acts to Passaic, a similarly tough urbanesque ‘burb. A 3,200-seat movie palace similar to ours, the Capitol hosted a long list of heavy-hitting acts in the seventies and early eighties: The Grateful Dead, Blue Oyster Cult, Peter Frampton — you name it. Sadly, that palace was demolished in 1991, to make way for the Capitol Plaza, a shopping mall (while, despite our bad fortunes as theater entrepreneurs, the St. George still stands).

Our guitarist kept on with “Tambourine Man” and then, out of pure stubbornness, followed it with “Lay, Lady, Lay.” The chants eventually faded out. He did a Flamenco number, tipped his hat and disappeared into the wings to muffled boos.
 
Fast-forward forty years. I open my email, and what do I see? A come- on from the St. George Theatre under current management:
​
HOT TUNA
Electric!
Saturday, April 15 at 8:00pm
On sale to the public on Friday, February 3 at 10:00am
 
So the heckler (in his sixties or seventies if he’s still alive) finally got his wish! I may go. It’s fun to sit in the balcony when there’s heat...