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. We were in a heat war with the land lord, which made the winter seem even colder.

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.
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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 of our failing movie palace; 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, while 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. We never saw him again.

When we opened our doors at the St. George Theater in 1976, there were ten movie theaters still in operation on the island where I live, including two palaces (The St. George — which I was involved in running — and the Paramount), one porn house (the Empire), one small storefront theater which ran 16-mm prints and looked oddly like a dry cleaner, (the Jerry Lewis), a small Art Moderne stadium theater (the Lane), three “twins” — precursors of the multiplex model — and two single-screen mall theaters. Nine years later, that number had shrunk to just six theaters. As of this writing, only two theaters are extant, both multiplexes, with a total between them of 19 screens. 
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With its brocade curtain, 2,672 seats, gilded dome and full stage, the St. George had been the island’s premier house, run by the Fabian Chain, which had also owned the Paramount, a few other now-defunct theaters and a briefly-successful drive-in, whose land had been sold off to build the Staten Island Mall. In our year, at the St. George, the “District Office” (in faded gold lettering) — an office which stood at the back end of our theater’s elegant corridor — was already a storage room. Was that where Sy Fabian had held court in his time? The St. George had been a flagship, first-run, but by 1976, we were reduced to battling the Jerry Lewis and others for scant second- and third-run product, movies like Blazing Saddles (1974), Jaws, and Dog Day Afternoon (both1975), not to mention Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). It was hard, if not impossibler, to book first-run movies. Once, desperate and ashamed, we ran a xxx porn title I can’t recall the name of. It drew a sad and scanty audience.

Twelve years later, when I saw Cinema Paradiso  — and years before I began to write Starts Wednesday — I longed for the St. George, and I wondered what was happening to the movie business anyhow? Better still, these days I wonder in a whole new way, what gives with the habit of going to movies? Will it vanish? 

Mike Nichols once said in an interview (a slight paraphrase), “Film is an act of the unconscious... [You are] sitting alone in the dark, and the dream begins.” I’m ready.

Afterthought:
It’s my birthday on President’s Day, this coming Monday, and I’m going to Manhattan, to that rarest of rarities in NYC, a single-screen theater, The Paris, to be exact, something called Concrete Cowboy. I can almost taste the popcorn!

In 1956, my teenaged sister, the glamor-puss of the family, worked after school at a local movie house, the Mt. Lookout, in Cincinnati where I grew up. She sat in a free-standing Deco box office symmetrically placed between two sets of half-moon theater doors, putting on her lipstick, and waiting to shove another ticket across the marble sill to anyone, friend or stranger, who showed up. Eight years old at the time, I tagged along as often as I could, lucky to cadge free popcorn and free admission to Earth Versus the Flying Saucers or Moby Dick or whatever happened to be on-screen. I had my pick of any of the 750 seats in the small-scale auditorium. Choosing to sit wherever I wanted helped me feel very grown up; more importantly, I could have as much popcorn — Good ‘n Plenties, whatever — as I wanted. But what I loved most was to visit my sister in the box office.
 
It was really a box! Cris sat inside, like the gypsy mannequin in the fortune-telling machine at Coney Island. To this day, free-standing box offices are magnetic to me, they’re irresistible, like the clam on a just-opened shell,  or the ring in a fancy jeweler’s satin-lined coffer, or that little ballerina in a hand-carved music box from Italy. The box office at the movie palace I briefly ran in Staten Island, after I’d grown up and moved to New York, was not free-standing, and a good thing too. Given the dicey nature of our tough urban streets in 1976, it was just as well that our teller’s cage-style box office was inside the lobby of the St. George Theatre. But that didn’t keep me from thinking about my sister at the Mt. Lookout.
 
The term “box office” grew out of the era that preceded Nickelodeons, when any storefront could become a “theater.” With a sheet on the back wall of a bare room, and chairs, often as not, borrowed from elsewhere, early theater owners were in business. A simple box standing in the doorway, to sell and collect tickets completed the start-up. The more successful a little theater became, the more permanent the box, which grew, eventually, large enough to hold at least one employee. As the great movie palaces vied to attract multitudes, that box in the doorway got fancier still, part of the dream of escape.
 
Palaces came in all shapes and sizes, but all were designed to start the movie-going fantasy well before the viewer had even paid for a ticket. On the subject of S.Charles Lee’s Fremont Theatre in San Luis Obispo, Maggie Valentine observes, “...all the lines of the lobby, from the [free-standing] box office and the marble terrazzo to the undulating side walls containing the poster cases, coordinate to pull the customer toward the entry” ( p. 98). 
 
The free-standing box office was an intentional clam-shell, with Venus at its core! S. Charles Lee himself admitted that one of his architectural goals in designing free-standing box offices had been to flatter the attendant. Here’s Valentine again, pursuing the theme of theater visibility, “Rippling plaster ‘lids’ resembling the caricatured marcelled hair of leading men sat atop glass walls, which were etched with flowers, the name of the theatre, or the pattern of the terrazzo. The base was polished aluminum, stainless steel, bronze, or marble. The entry doors echoed these motifs with circular windows, etched glass, or polished bronze.” (p 102).
 
Ah, those circular windows!  Even in the Cincinnati suburbs, the Mt. Lookout had them: two half-moons of glass meeting to form a pair of doors to the left and right of my sister’s magic showcase.
 
So here’s to (fancy) portals of commerce in cities and towns all over the world: the Crest Theatre in Fresno whose box office resembles a cake with royal icing, the glass-brick and chrome box office of the Surf Theatre in Ocean City, New Jersey, the Ohio Theatre in Columbus, whose pagoda-like box office could qualify as an elaborate “tiny house.”
 
That’s what probably attracted me in the first place, to my sister’s Art Moderne single room on a Mt. Lookout sidewalk. I was after all a little girl, and wasn’t it, really just a doll house? My sister, the living doll, dwelt inside. 
 
Afterthought: 

My mother didn’t approve of Cris’s theater job, partly because, gorgeous as my sister was, her study habits were abysmal. Our mother also thought the theater a little seedy; but had she known! Years after Mother died, Cris confessed to me that on New Year’s Eve the year she worked at the Mt. Lookout, she’d been sitting in the glass booth when a car careened suddenly around the corner on two wheels spitting out a single bullet, which penetrated the glass just above her head. What a glamorous corpse she might have made...!
 
A decade and a half later, I sat behind the bars of our (interior) box office at the St. George Theatre, wishing I could just let a few kids slide by for free, the way my sister had waved me through. But the 35-cent free ticket of my childhood was, by then, ninety cents, and we needed every penny.

In an attempt to fire up business recently, Cinemark, a national movie chain, celebrated National Popcorn Day last month on the 19th by offering their membership base the opportunity to win a year’s worth of the buttery stuff. (Alas, it’s too late to enter; the promotion ended January 31st). But the question remains:

What exactly is a year’s worth of popcorn?

When I was scooping the stuff from behind the counter of the St. George Theatre, back in those primitive times, the mid-seventies, when a gang of us kept a 2,672-seat movie palace going for just one year (1976), I came about as close as I’ll ever come to OD-ing on one of my all-time favorite foods. 
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Breakfast was tea and a yogurt chased by a cup of fresh-pop — almost cereal! 

Lunch was sometimes egg salad on a roll (the eggs were from home, the rolls had been bought for Sabrett’s dogs) — and, of course, a handful of kernels in clarified butter to round things out.

Dinner? That Sabrett’s hotdog on a fresh Italian roll, with dijon and a handful of corn. 

By the time our theater venture failed, I was sure I’d never want popcorn again, but if you’ve always loved the salty fluffy stuff, that craving miraculously never vanishes.  

Popcorn is a strong revenue source at the movies. almost as important as ticket sales themselves. While Cinemark is raffling off popcorn futures, AMC, their larger competitor markets their popcorn in supermarkets and on the web, in and out of the theater. They brag that “Every day, we pop about 35 tons of kernels. That adds up to 52 million bags of popcorn sold each year.” Now that you’re less likely than ever to go out to the movies they hope you’ll pick up some on the way home to binge Netflix. 

What got me thinking in this direction was a comment by a reader (Judy) who wrote in after one of my recent posts:

I manage an art house cinema. We installed a large exhaust fan above our popcorn popper. It vents to the outside. When popping popcorn the delicious aromatic smell of fresh buttered popcorn fills the theater and the sidewalk outside drawing pedestrians in off the street and exiting with buckets filled with the buttery treat. During Covid we may not get our seats filled but people’s taste for this salty pleasure keeps them coming in our doors.

Judy was responding to my story about how we employed “subliminal advertising” way back in 1976, by placing an old popcorn machine in the room with the giant AC system that cooled the auditorium. Popcorn and the movies: who knows where one ends and the other begins? 

Afterthought:
For an early treatment of popcorn and ticket sales, check out this oldie. The stats are still pretty accurate, which is surprising, given inflation...