The only movie I ever walked out on was the original Pirates of the Caribbean (The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003). I was with a friend, and it was a mutual decision. We looked at each other, nodded, and walked up the aisle of the Niantic Cinema, and out into the rain. The Niantic Cinema is a beach community movie house in Connecticut, a perfect place for escapism, even of a silly sort, but, as I recall, the movie’s special effects caused its plot and characters to walk the plank. Johnny Depp was really sexy, but that wasn’t enough to carry it. There had been no “willing suspension of disbelief” for me or for my friend. We hadn’t forgotten our troubles or our boredom, or even that it had rained for seven days straight. The movie had failed for us. What is that all about?

In the spirit of “one person’s ceiling is another person’s floor,” I remember my dismay at the end of a delicious movie I went to alone in the 1980’s, L’Etoile du Nord, starring Simone Signoret. After the credits rolled, I felt full, the way you do after a good meal. “So perfect,” I was thinking, till one of two patrons sitting on my right, a good twenty years younger than me, turned to the other and hissed, “that sucked.”  They didn’t walk out, but they’d thought about it. There’d been “no special effects!” It was the era of Close Encounters, and to a lot of people movies were a sum total of their effects.
 
A decade earlier, in 1976, I’d signed on, with my husband and friends, to run a neighborhood movie palace, the St. George Theatre, in what turned out to be despite our best efforts, its last year of showing movies. 

You could say I lied in the first paragraph, because, during that year I walked out routinely from whatever we were showing any particular week. That year doesn’t count though; when you’re operating a theater, what’s on the screen has to exert a powerful, almost centrifugal force, to keep you in your seat. Otherwise you’re thinking of re-stocking the concession stand or figuring payroll, or writing that giant check to Con Edison to keep the lights on and the movie actually on the screen. 
Just as I can’t remember more than one movie I paid to see on which I walked out, I can also only remember a handful of movies I watched from beginning to end, while we were trying desperately to keep the St. George’s gilded doors open. Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, The Man Who Would Be King, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

​I now realize that, despite the fact that we were a “buck fifty” house, showing second-, third-, fourth- or even fifth-run flicks, a lot of these movies have ended up in the Library of Congress list of notable films. That I didn’t walk back to the lobby during any of these, but curled up with popcorn and was transfixed, shows what movies can do, in the right time and place. Hollis Frampton, a Structuralist filmmaker of the seventies and an early mentor of mine maintained that, “A good movie should make you forget the balance in your checking account, a bad toothache, or the love you just lost.” 

Amen.

To which I’d add, at a time when I yearn to walk into any theater anywhere, the thought of walking out on a movie, even a bad one, is foreign to me...!   
 
Afterthought:
Here’s a really interesting scientific examination of how the brain manages what S.T. Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief,” that is, how we buy into fiction.

Well Shakespeare said, "What’s in a name?" So I ask," What’s in a sign?" A friend writes that in Fairborn, Ohio, the local historical society has seen fit to landmark the sign from the Skyborn Drive-In, retiring it for safe-keeping until it can be refurbished.  

If you think landmarking a sign seems a bit quaint, consider the HOLLYWOOD sign in L.A, (originally erected in 1923 to advertise “Hollywoodland,” a real estate property, and landmarked in the seventies, as simply “Hollywood..” Okay, you say, that’s Hollywood, not Fairborn, Ohio.To which I say, Fairborn is a suburb of Dayton, and Dayton is the birthplace of Aviation! 

The Skyborn Drive-In showed its last flick in 2015, the theater done in, presumably, by the cost of digital conversion. At one point in the eighties, hard up for product that would get people to come on out, the drive-in had earned itself the moniker, “FairPORN,” for the genre it had embraced. As someone remarked in the Comments column of the theater’s Cinema Treasures page, “For a while in the 80’s (maybe the 70’s as well) they showed porn movies. imagine flying in on final to Wright Patt and seeing porn on a drive in screen!I’m surprise there weren’t more accidents....”
 
The marquee of the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I helped to run in 1976, was rusting, and unremarkable even then, and has been torn down since, replaced by a new ripple-front electronic marquee. But we were not bereft of noteworthy signage inside the theater. 
 
Coming Soon! An entire roomful of signs bearing this and other hopeful bywords and useful clichés existed on the mezzanine, some vestiges of which survive in my basement. 
 
Starts Wednesday, Starts Thursday, Starts Friday, New Release! Double Feature! and my favorite, a tasseled banner, Sneak Preview Tonite! It’s hard to think of our time at the theater without reliving the load-in, when the film canisters arrived, the marquee letters went up, and one or another of these plastic or cardboard showcards bearing a Coming Soon variation was replaced in the poster case by the inevitable Now Playing.
 
It was a time when people came out of their houses and apartments to sit together in a communal trance, in an auditorium large enough to rival Lascaux or the Luray Caverns, and watch Linda Blair’s head swivel three hundred and sixty degrees on her body — and, for a moment, believe it!  
 
That’s what happens with good storytelling/ moviemaking. It’s called “willing suspension of disbelief.” The poet S.T. Coleridge came up with it, back in 1817, and it more or less means that I throw logic and caution to the winds, in order to enjoy an obvious piece of fiction. Nobody could enjoy a magic show without pretending that the assistant really is sawed in two, and then there’s that novel you wish wouldn’t end. 
 
The best demonstration of the fact that willing suspension works at the movies is that an audience watching Casablanca, most of whom are not completely colorblind, are in a world that is entirely black and white. I’m happy when Dorothy lands in Oz, and the world blossoms into Technicolor (the 3-strip color process no less, in its first iteration), but at the end, I wake with her in black and white, safe at home in Kansas, and I’m still in the movie’s dream.
 
Perhaps my happiest moments at the St. George — talk about being in a world — involved movies so completely satisfying that I was able to forget the overdrawn checkbook I’d left back in my office under the stairs. There was Taxi Driver and its gleaming mean streets of Times Square, that I knew so well having walked through them, desperate myself. There was The Man Who Would Be King, when Sean Connery/Danny humming “The Minstrel Boy,” strides to the middle of a rope bridge he knows will soon be cut down, pitching him into a Himalayan chasm. Since the St. George Theatre, in its twilight as a cinema, was itself a kind of chasm for us, its temporary occupants, I can see why this is one of the only movies I watched from beginning to end, my legs tucked up in a cozy seat in the lower balcony. 
 
I’m a little worried about the line between fiction and non-, these days. Are we getting our willing-suspension fix often enough in a world that’s “post-truth,” whatever that actually means? How can we tell what to suspend, when there isn’t any difference between belief and disbelief? This holds true even for the news we choose (or that chooses us algorithmically).
 
What's coming soon...or next? 
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in owning some theater signage, the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, in a valiant attempt to keep going during Covid-19, was selling, as of July, 2020, its old aluminum marquee letters, along with vintage theater seats. There’s no business like show business, I guess...

2. Thanks to Thom Moon, for the Skyborne info!

Quick! what was the first uninterrupted feature film you ever saw, and where did you see it? Your answer will of course reveal your approximate age. If you’re over forty, chances are decent you saw it in a movie theater. If you’re over fifty, you probably did see it in a theater, and, if you’re sixty-five or above, that theater was likely to have been a movie palace, or at least a modestly-ornate neighborhood house.

Proceeding backwards, if you’re thirty or below, it’s possible or even likely that you saw your first serious movie on cable before you saw any such thing in a shared public environment. The generation that might eventually answer this question “...saw my first movie on Mommy’s ipad,” isn’t old enough to take this survey, and may not be given to reading blog posts about movie palaces, when they grow up. Life goes on — and nothing lasts forever.

I remember well Cincinnati’s movie palaces, (Cincy is where I grew up), and the local single-screen theaters in my immediate neighborhood. 

In 1976, newly-arrived in New York, I took a hand at running a palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat house on the lip of New York Harbor. The first movie we ran at the St. George was Blazing Saddles, but the first movie I ever saw, twenty-six years before that, was Tea for Two starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae, a dream couple in fifties hetero America. This dreaminess is what attracted my sister, then fifteen, to the movie in question. No, the movie hadn’t been my choice (at two, who has a choice?) but my sister had to babysit me, and so off we went with her friend Madge, to watch the first of MacRae and Day’s “...genial, old-fashioned musical films...” The West Point Story, On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon would follow, causing The New York Times to reflect that “...these two [Day and MacRae] complement each other like peanut butter and jelly.” That was sex in fifties middle-class America. Not only was the movie not a PBJ to me, I didn’t like it at all — I screamed through it, as a matter of fact, causing my sister to tie me to my seat. 

Sad as this tale of my passage through the “terrible twos” may be, it was the beginning of my long movie-watching career spent happily in the dark, tickling the bottom of a bag of popcorn for the half-opened “grannies” of corn I still love best. Most of the movies I saw growing up really were my choice. Who could forget Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? — the tentacles of the giant squid  — or Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, with its then-high-tech special effects; a black-and-white saucer cutting off the dome of the Capitol building, demanded I hide my eyes behind my cupped hands. Saw those at the Mt. Lookout, where my other sister, a Bobby-soxer with multiple boyfriends, had a job popping corn and staffing the box office, a glass and chrome single room on the street outside. (She was nearly killed in that box office by a stray bullet fired one New Year’s Eve that went through the glass, but that’s another story). 

Dating at The Hyde Park Art, a local Art Moderne stadium theater, in the summer of ’64, I alternated between two terrors: 1.) fighting off my date’s clammy hand and 2.) watching Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove, ride the bomb out of its bay cowboy style, sparking the nuclear war we all feared. There were plenty more movies before I made it to New York to run a movie palace: Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road at the modest neighborhood Ambassador Theatre, later torn down to make way for a parking lot, and Barbarella: the last movie I saw at the much-beloved grand (and then still pristine) Albee downtown. After Jane Fonda strutted her stuff that night, three drapes (two valences and a formal house curtain) lowered as the lights came up, and a solitary uniformed usher swept the nearly-empty gilded palace, from the top of the main aisle, down to the orchestra pit. The Albee was demolished eight years later, the year after we opened with Blazing Saddles, at the St. George in Staten Island. It was the seventies, and nobody but nobody was going to single-screen palaces anymore; but we didn’t know that.  

Along with my husband Dean, also something of a renegade and nostalgist, I’m a sucker for a challenge, and I always want to save what’s nearly past, but still somehow beautiful. It wasn’t a waste, because the St George, which we tried to save as a movie house, morphed finally and beautifully into a live local theater, cherished by its community. 

Note: I wrote this blog post almost exactly a year ago, which seems an eternity. The pandemic wasn’t the pandemic — yet. I had just survived a bout with cancer. My sister, the bobby-soxer who worked at The Mt. Lookout and got me started on a life-time addiction to popcorn, was still alive. She died last month, and this blog post is dedicated to her, Cris Hallerman Boone, 1939 - 2021. If the bullet that penetrated the glass of her ticket booth one long-ago New Year’s Eve had veered a little closer, I’d have no nieces or nephews at all, and, perhaps, wouldn’t be able to preserve my fondness for movie houses, and the culture of movie houses. Who knows if I’d have signed on to work at The St. George Theatre at all?

Two years ago, mindless of what 2020 would offer, I wrote, If this blog post feels more reflective than others you may have read in Starts Wednesday, it’s because I am on the cusp of another birthday, thankful for having survived this far, curious as to what’s next. What is life if not the sum of all your mistakes and victories, your noble and ill-advised adventures?
  
Some Afterthoughts:
1. Given the racial tensions we experienced at the very urban/suburban St. George, it was prophetic that we opened in April, 1976 with Blazing Saddles, a movie that’s even more controversial today than it was in the seventies. Mel Brooks recently confessed that, while it could never be made today, at least not by a white American, even then there was one controversial thing left on what used to be called the cutting room floor.  
​
2. When the Pandemic is finally over, when I can go to movies on screen again, I will, choosing the theater and its screen at least as carefully as I choose the movie. Case in point, Lawrence of Arabia, in the 70 mm format it was intended to be seen in, at the incomparable United Palace of the Cultural Arts, one of the original Loew’s Wonder Theaters, on 175th Street in Manhattan. Movie palace viewings are rare, so I will always make do, most of the time, at Loew’s ‘plex of giant-screen theaters on 68th and Broadway; I still adore the Cinema Village in NYC, and movies in Philly, where I visit my surviving sister, are best had at the Ambler, a nicely-restored old house. No, she doesn’t tie me to my seat anymore...

We all miss something. Here’s what Andrew Blackwell had to say the other day in The New York Times, “I think it’s the movies themselves that I miss. If I’ve learned anything from 11 months of watching Netflix and HBO Max, it’s that I’m just no good at watching movies at home. It’s not that I think modern attention spans are that bad — if anything, it’s almost heroic how we make sense of our torrential digital feeds every day. But there’s a restlessness that comes with it. I find myself unwilling — unable, even — to sit down and completely tune in to a good movie. Again and again, I skip over a queue brimming with really good things, in favor of something that won’t suffer if I keep an eye on my phone. (This is how I’ve become someone who’s watched The Da Vinci Code three times.)

“A movie theater, on the other hand, is a beautifully simple machine for enhancing your attention. Between the dark environment, the impossibility of pausing the action while you go for a snack and the understanding that even a quick Twitter check will be met with murderous glares from your neighbors, theaters grant you the superpower of deep, unwavering focus....”

—From The New York Times, Opinion Today, Andrew Blackwell. Underlining is mine...

Marcus Loew, back in the high-rolling 1920’s, opined that, “People buy tickets to theaters, not movies.”  
It was this kind of thinking that persuaded me, my husband, and a small cluster of young idealists to set up camp in an aging 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, back in 1976. That is our saga in brief, and the reason for this continuing blog.

Just one more quote:  “The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie...” — Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. 
 
It was 2016, pre-pandemic. The movie I’d paid to see at an older theater in the West Village, (DeNiro, The Comedian) contains a remarkable performance, which makes it well worth viewing, even if it is, of itself, not a terrific film. I was sitting in the dark with strangers, digging into a large bag of recently-popped corn, staring at an 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. 
 
I believe I’d still think the movie 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. 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. 
 
Yes, I also watch perched on the edge of the bed, at home, but even with popcorn, it’s a detached experience. There’s always the possibility that my cell will chirp with news of a lockdown, or, worse still, we’ll lose the stream and whatever escape from reality has been offered will instantly vanish. This only has happened to me twice in theater-going, both times when the film broke, treating us to an image of burning sprocketed frames. Even in tech failure, movies the old way were dramatic!
 
Afterthought:
Here are some bad movies I remember with fondness: 
• Mommie Dearest (I love Faye Dunaway)
• Easy Rider (iconic film of my twenties, terrible the second time around)
• Gable and Lombard (we ran this doggie to an empty house one afternoon, but I was happy in the dark.
• Lisztomania 
• Horrors of the Black Museum (at the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati, 1957). Watching from your car is still being “in” the movie somehow. Why is that?
• Three Coins in a Fountain
I shouldn’t count three coins — I was only six! At that point popcorn was the only thing I had any taste for. . .