What kind of maniac becomes a movie theater operator without any previous experience? It’s like jumping into the river with no idea how to swim. I ought to know, having swallowed a gallon or two of metaphorical water a long time ago. In 1976, with my husband and a small group of fellow enthusiasts, and no previous theater operation experience of any kind, I (we) opened a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, struggling seven days a week to keep it lit, with a movie on-screen and at least some patrons in the house. Among things I knew nothing of, but learned fast:  the obscure workings of antique carbon-arc projectors, how to run payroll and calculate withholding by hand from graduated charts, that soda and popcorn stuck to the floors of a giant auditorium provide ample food for a small city of mice, that a fire bucket in New York City has to be a regulation twelve inches off the floor at all times, that we had to have a qualified standpipe operator on deck every day (what exactly was a standpipe?). A half-century later, much of this knowledge is arcane, but I’m never without something to write about. 

Inexperienced entrepreneurship is eternal; there will always be newbies. Why, for example, just because you’ve never run a restaurant, should you hesitate if you’re a good home cook? As for us, we just loved going to the movies.

A friend recently sent me a clip about a theater in Baltimore whose story of redemption by first-timers seems remarkably familiar, with some important differences which may boost its chances of survival. A 617-seat neighborhood theater, the Art Deco streamlined (cream with chrome, black edging and glass brick) Pikes Theatre, in Pikesville, Maryland, opened in 1938 and operated as a movie theater until 1984. A patchy period, during which it functioned as a catering hall or nothing at all, was followed by a brief period as a cinema. Then, roughly a year ago, along came Anthony Fykes and Robert Wright, two buddies, who took over as operators, creating Next Act Cinemas. Beyond their newbie status, what makes the Next Act story compelling in another way is that Fykes and Wright are African American theater operators, a rare thing indeed.

While Next Act has not missed an opportunity to screen Harriet, a recent film on the life of Harriet Tubman (born in Maryland), and will soon screen The Banker, Fykes points out, “We just want to show good movies...” Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, for example. 

How did it all begin? These guys were friends at work who hung out after hours in Wright‘s “man cave,” with a big screen and surround sound. So it was that the entrepreneurship bug bit them.
They couldn’t get backing from a bank, which rang some bells for me. Young, out of work, with several thousand vacant seats facing a single screen, we struck out with the banks too. It was the dawn of  the multiplex era, a real challenge for single screen theaters of any kind. In the Netflix/streaming era, the new theater operators have their work cut out for them.

We had no money, so substituted sweat equity. We did have investors who were our partners, but the money ran out way too fast. Fykes and Wright apparently had some savings. Are their investors numerous, with deeper pockets? I hope so. 

With a staff of 13, which includes one full-time employee, they’re hiring from the streets, and so did we.  

“These are good kids,” Fykes notes, “...giving them jobs gets them off the street.”

Amen! Our staff was our greatest — perhaps our only — asset. Almost fifty years later, I know more than a few of these former teenagers, now in late middle age.

In 1976, children’s theater (the Paper Bag Players), Chaka Khan — before she was recognized, an on-stage concert by The Brooklyn Bridge, and some other lesser programming made us, briefly, a kind of community center. Robert and Anthony have hopes for jazz nights and Karaoke, the model these days, for a refurbished neighborhood or small town movie house. We were just a little ahead of our time, a disaster for a storefront business.

But here’s where the differences really show: they only have 43 seats in each of two auditoriums to fill. Good for them I say! Keep those books in the black, the way ours never were. They actually have hopes of turning a profit by 2021! I would have settled for paying ourselves.

The dollars these partners raised to refurbish their auditoriums went into creating the kind of twenty-first century viewing experience that offers chicken, crab cakes, wine and beer, along with traditional concession (popcorn and the like), along the lines of the Nite Hawk, and Alamo Drafthouse. Who’s providing those meals? Enviably, the diner next door, owned and operated by their cooperative landlord. Sweet!

Well, our concession stand was almost a restaurant, featuring kosher hotdogs on hand-made Italian rolls, the first ever Haagen-Dazs ice cream (the year it appeared in the world with its pseudo-Scandinavian name), and popcorn with real clarified butter. We had the highest food stand per capita in the five boroughs of NYC back in the day; it just couldn’t support the movies. Late nights cleaning up, we joked about letting the screen go dark and just serving food. As for the guy who owned our theater building, suffice to say “cooperative” plus “landlord” comprised, for us a classic oxymoron. 
I wish these guys the best of luck — a lot more than we had. But no matter how Next Act turns out, I guarantee them they’ll always have amazing stories to tell. 

Afterthoughts:
1. For reasons of necessity, black-owned theaters back when, say, Pikes Theatre opened, were far more common than they are now. The dividing line is 1964, the year congress passed the Civil Rights Act which guaranteed desegregation in public places, including theaters. With mixed audiences, African American ownership tanked and has yet to return with sufficient numbers. It’s ironic that Jim Crow actually reinforced black business ownership.

2. Credit is due to The Baltimore Sun and author Mary Carole McCauley.
             
            
             

Every Wednesday morning at the St. George Theatre — the 2,672-seat movie palace I was involved in running for a single year, 1976 – two movies, a new feature, and usually a B flick, arrived at the box office, in heavy hexagonal cans. It was the duty of the usher who had the matinee shift to lug them two at a time, up to the projection booth, a long, almost Himalayan trek. 
 
Paul Plonski, these days an aeronautical engineer, but then a teenage usher (when he wasn’t selling candy), recalls,
 
“...I remember picking up those hexagonal cans in the lobby...in front of the ticket booth on the main entrance. There were probably four or more cans on a given day. Grabbing on to two of them, I found, to my surprise, they were much heavier than eye might perceive. My memories take me into the main lobby, the palms of my hands burning from the narrow metal grips of the handles, taking a short break and proceeding up to the mezzanine level. Once there, another short break, then up to the balcony...[where] there was a magnificent view of the theater ...totally amazing to be looking down on the theater below and its magnificent beauty, the orchestra pit, the historical stage, the chandelier above, how powerful it felt to be looking down from above on...such a rich entertainment history. The journey continued, upwards, ascending through the balcony, until I was at the very last seat, again looking down at the stage floor below, how small everything looked. Turning about, a narrow door, very narrow, so narrow most patrons would not realize its existence. I squeaked through the narrow door, with two film cans, one in each hand, a set of stairs, steeper and narrower than the stairs leading to the semi-nonexistent door itself. The film cans would bounce off the sides of the walls as I ascended to the projectionist’s booth above. At last, arriving at the technical perch of the theater, it seemed as though I were atop the world. There were little openings looking down upon the theater below, once again making everything below look so small. It never lost its magnificence ...” 
 
After the usher-on-duty trudged back down the stairs, the projectionist loaded the main feature’s first two reels onto our ancient Century “carbon arc” projectors. “Carbon arc” projection was not exactly high tech anymore, but it was what we had. The St. George was a dollar-fifty movie house (second or third-run) — no fancy xenon bulb projectors for us. The light from our projectors, that shone through the film as it passed the gate, came from an arc similar to the equipment welders use, an actual fire sparked between two carbon metal rods, that lit the film.  
 
And the show began.
 
Blazing Saddles, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Taxi Driver, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Omen: the films we booked had one thing in common. They’d all been around at least a year, in most cases two. Even if we’d had the advance money to put down on a first-run feature, we’d have lost out in a bidding war to the new strip-mall theaters, offering a choice of two or even three screens. There was precious little new film to be had in 1976 and ’77, and nobody could imagine filling all of our 2,672 seats.
 
Still every Wednesday was a new chance at success, our movie booking fantasies reinforced by the heady notion that if we could just sell out a live show once or twice, we’d break even for the whole year. Breathless and in our twenties, with the kind of energy that dared the odds, we never managed to achieve such a boffo socko live show, even once. Yet we were, as Paulie recalls, “atop the world,” in what I still think of as a magic cave.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Although I said we couldn’t imagine selling out all the seats for a movie, we did manage that twice, later in the year, when we showed the director’s cut of The Exorcist, a film ideally matched to our shadowy palace.

2. I just came across this interesting 1989 tidbit about carbon arc and its technological successor, the xenon bulb — itself now obsolete. Check it out! 

3. Bob Endres, a friend who sat in as a projectionist from time to time at the St. George, adds, "The lamps you had when I was there were made by Ashcraft. I’m reasonably sure the projector “mech heads” (the actual projector itself) were made by Century. In this photo the big unit on the projector base is the Ashcraft lamphouse, and the unit directly in front of it is a Century “mech” or picture head. Below it is the Century sound head, although at the St. George you had an RCA sound system so the sound heads were probably RCA. If Abbott Theatre Supply in Manhattan was your equipment and booth supplier, that would make sense since they sold Ashcraft and Century and RCA exclusively in the area.   

4. Speaking of Ashcraft lamphouses and Century heads, here’s a story worth checking out. 

At the St. George Theatre — a 2672-seat movie palace I was involved in running in the nineteen seventies — it was a real kick to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. That’s because the screen, a huge piece of heavy white material stretched on a giant frame over thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, was perforated, with tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual silver embedded in their surfaces. Designed to accept CinemaScope, our screen had a good “gain” — or reflectivity — and was probably “pearlescent.” Blacks came across as very dark gray, and the overall image was bright — except where a long-ago patron had spattered something strawberry or grape colored on the lower left quadrant. 

The screen curved slightly outward at the left and right edges. I always thought the curve had something to do with wrapping the audience in light, and I was partially right. A flat screen makes light travel farther to its corners, encouraging a slightly distorted image, the so-called “pincushion effect.” Godzilla battled Megalon on our screen with no distortion, and the strawberry stain was hardly evident once the movie was underway.

Everything I know about the screen and screens in general, I have learned in retrospect. Back in 1976, we were just trying to stay alive, relieved if more than a few hundred people paid money to sit in the dark and watch the movie, and grateful that we had a screen at all. Although we could hardly afford a new one, our buddy, the head projectionist (Cinema Paradiso Is His Favorite Movie) at Radio City Music Hall — then primarily a movie theater — conspired briefly to get a “used” screen for us at no charge. Radio City traditionally replaced its pristine screen annually. Theirs was better than twice the size of ours, so half a screen would have done nicely. Sadly, our stint at the St. George didn’t last long enough to take advantage of this bargain.

Little did our audience know that, while they were watching, all sorts of antics were going on backstage. Each night an usher went into the shadows behind the screen to engage two switches: one to bring up the red and blue footlights and another to light the house sconces, as the film ended. Leroy — scrawny, barely 5’ 4” and 120 pounds — was always reluctant to go into the dark, even if only a comedy was showing. One night during the last reel of The Exorcist it fell to a reluctant Leroy to do this duty. One exorcising priest was already dead and another would soon hurl himself from a window, possessed by the Devil. Add all of this to the soundtrack of tubular bells — indeed creepy. Unbeknownst to Leroy, Cheri, a bit of the devil already in her, lurked in the shadows, stage right. As he approached, she pushed a flashlight beneath her chin and rasped out, “I willlllllll possess you!” The blood-curdling scream and pounding footsteps that came easily through the perforated screen, probably seemed just one more chilling movie sound effect to folks still seated in the house. Who knows if some long–ago patron of ours hasn’t downloaded the movie recently and wondered as the credits rolled, Wasn’t there a last scream?

Afterthoughts:
1.To broaden your grasp of antique projection equipment...
2. Some movies were made only for the wide screen. For more on this, check out Crossing the Desert on a Camel. 

“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'oeil, 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. Its coming demise had a lot to do with why I pitched in to save a movie palace in New York, where I’d come to live. 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. Meanwhile, 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, a process that had begun in 1963.

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 2,672 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;  you’ll read about it soon enough in Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, the full book that will, within the year, follow this website.

In 1988, 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. Just a note on Eberson: considered to be the great patriarch of atmospheric theaters, he was, like so many involved in the rise of American cinema, an immigrant — from what today would be considered the Ukraine. Beginning with the Hoblitzelle Majestic (Houston, 1923), he designed roughly a hundred such houses, featuring stars in many ceilings, clouds, landscapes left and right of the orchestra that gave the wonderful illusion of being outside. These theaters were shows in their own right, as much as show-places. Remarkably, most of them went up between the years 1923 and 1929; for that decade, Eberson was a busy man.

The week the Palace 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...”

Clouds “drifted,” thanks to a series of mechanically-synchronized slide projectors or a “cloud machine” hidden in the recesses of a theater’s dome.

Ben M. Hall (founder of the Theatre Historical Society of America) whose words opened this post, passed suddenly and violently in the rough-edged 1970‘s. If he were alive today, I’m sure he’d take solace in knowing how many grand movie theaters, atmospheric and otherwise, survived the seventies and eighties after all. 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.

Afterthought:
​Don’t miss this recent post on the Avalon, a tiny atmospheric that just closed on the island of Santa Catalina, off the coast of southern California. Owned by the Wrigley (chewing gum) family, it’s safe, I think, for now, and from what everyone says, enchanted.