
What kind of civilization invents the movies? A place where you can sit in the dark and dream
the same dream the citizen next to you is dreaming? — all while sticking your hand into a bag of buttered grain that has been exploded (Zea mays everta, aka popcorn).
The movies were everything to America once. In 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, Americans went to the movies 95 million times a week (our population in those days was roughly 125 million). Movie theaters, especially the palaces, were the ultimate and only places many people ever went when they went out: the dating scene, the after-church matinee. They served as virtual babysitting agencies, where mothers could drop kids for a Saturday afternoon. Smaller neighborhood theaters followed, until by the 1950’s the map of America was studded with movie houses. Then came the decline: in 1943, despite the war, Americans had spent 25.7 percent of their recreation budgets in movie theaters, a figure which dropped to 5.2% by 1960, and, by 1976, when I signed on at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, as part of a group of optimistic young entrepreneurs, determined to keep an aging movie palace open for business, that figure had plummeted to less than 2.9%. It was a terrible year in the business sense. We lost our shirts, but, with its 2,672 mostly vacant seats, it’s deliciously ornate Spanish Baroque inner sanctum with perfect acoustics and its giant stained movie screen, the St. George, among other things, helped me become a writer.
How many other writers had an opportunity to work in a movie palace? Dunno. But I do know a number of folks who’ve written about going to the movies. Here’s the inimitable Frank O’Hara addressing the mothers of America as only he can (from "Ave Maria"):
Mothers of America
----let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
—--but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
—--they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
—--they’ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
—--for their first sexual experience...
O’Hara is blending the babysitting function of theaters with the sexual-initiation ritual, every bit as important to audiences. So what about that?
What about sex at the movies?
In Variety Photoplays, by Edward Field, (poem: "Graffiti") a patron of that beloved Third Avenue theater (now sadly torn down) breaks into the famously sleazy men’s room and cuts away an old wooden partition between stalls that was about to be replaced.
It’s what was written/carved on the old partition he wants to haul back to his flat (from Graffiti An Excerpt from Sex Stories):
...and telephone numbers saying "call me,"
and dates and times when free and where
and descriptions of partners wanted
and acts and roles desired:
----Sex slave, white, looking for black master
----Got a sister? Fix me up. Signed, Desperate
----Couple marie cherche troisieme
----Have six hard inches meet me here tonight
(Poems from Variety Photoplays don’t seem to be readily available on line, so you can find “Graffiti” in its entirety at the end of this blog post).
In "Scary Movies," Kim Addonizio remembers time spent,
...at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless
between my older brothers, pumped up
on candy and horror...
I remember well The Exorcist, how it played off the shadows and statuary of the St. George in 1976. As for the horrors that follow Addonizio, I sympathize, having lived a whole life haunted by various undead entities.
I also, BTW, remember well the Baronet (and its twin the Coronet) on Third Avenue.
In "A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie!", Amiri Baraka observes:
...On all the/screens of america, the joint blows up every hour and a half for two dollars and fifty cents./
Well, not every single screen, but a lot of them. When we were running the St. George, gunfire and things blowing up sold more popcorn than the world’s best love story, so we booked more Taxi Driver than Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.
In my movie palace year, we could never keep people from talking while the movie was on screen; sometimes the crowd gathered under our dome reminded me of people in an open-air market place, like the one in Casablanca. Here’s Robert Polito on the subject of not talking:
from "Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie":
When I can’t make you understand I repeat myself
I repeat
If you don’t stop asking me all these questions how
Will I understand anything
Please refrain from talking during the movie
I need a life that isn’t just about needing
To escape my life
...
Escaping your life is a big part of the movie dream. An old teacher of mine, Hollis Frampton, a Structuralist filmmaker, used to say that, “A good movie ought to make you forget ‘...the love you’ve lost, your toothache and the balance in your checkbook.’”
Alas, during our time at the St. George, I never ever forgot the negative balance in the theater’s checkbook, but then we were only the keepers of the dream, not the dreamers: proprietors trying to scrape enough money together to book the next film.
Here’s an ekphrastic poem by Joseph Stanton, riffing off an Edward Hopper painting, New York Movie:
We can have our pick of seats.
Though the movie's already moving,
the theater's almost an empty shell.
----All we can see on our side
of the room is one man and one woman--
as neat, respectable, and distinct
----as the empty chairs that come
between them.
That’s just the way I remember the St. George on so many afternoons and evenings, a couple of hundred people in a sea of mostly empty seats. Hopper’s painting dates back to 1939, an era we don’t usually associate with empty movie houses. Hopper used a couple of theaters as his models — the Strand, the Globe and the Republican — before settling in at the Palace Theater on West 47th Street. That’s supposedly the model for the painting. And speaking of models, if you’re an Edward Hopper fan, you know the lady at the lunch counter in his well-known painting, Nighthawks? That’s his wife, Jo Hopper, the same woman standing to the right in his movie theater painting.
Here are just a few lines from "Theater Ruin," part of a longer poem called “The Body Opened:”
A temple to the dark, house of shadows.
The jazzman in his spangled suit eats his eternal hotdog
and watches one more movie through the glass,
mumbling old lovers to himself.
The shaggy woman in the marquee’s shadow
warns as we pass.
And the projectionist who stashed
his television just outside the booth
is here too in some lost atom.
The poem is, as a matter of fact, mine, written in the mid eighties (when it found a home in an issue of Southern Poetry Review). You can check out more on "the jazzman" here. At the time I was convinced the St. George would be torn down. It was not, and I’m grateful to those who have kept that from happening.
Graffiti
----An Excerpt from Sex Stories
When the Men’s Room was being demolished
to make way for a newer model, all steel and cement,
he broke in, holding his breath against the ancient stink,
and cut out an old wooden partition between the booths,
with its writings and pictures, and its glory holes,
some sealed repeatedly by the authorities
and others barely begun
where defects in the wood allowed pencil points to dig in
and one well-used one hacked out with knives and fingernails
with dried come encrusted on the rim
decorated with lips of mouth and cunt,
and around that, the cheeks of an ass;
...and telephone numbers saying “call me,”
and dates and times when free and where
and descriptions of partners wanted
and acts and roles desired:
----Sex slave, white, looking for black master
----Got a sister? Fix me up. Signed, Desperate
----Couple marie cherche troisieme
----Have six hard inches meet me here tonight
and true sex stories written out at length,
and instructive drawings of the sex organs in all positions
some half-washed out by the char, or painted over
but dug so deep or traced lovingly so often
they were still visible through the paint;
and still faintly seen but nearly overwhelmed at last,
the political slogans of past generations.
He took that whole wall, the size of a school blackboard,
figured over as it was like an oriental temple,
the work of a people, a folk artifact,
the record of lifetimes of secret desires,
the forbidden and real history of man,
and leaving it just as it was, hung it up in his house.
Respecting tradition
he charged everyone a nickel to see it.
Edward Field