Why turn in early, with the jackals lurking? Our distant ancestors apparently liked to stay up late. If you’re an insomniac (I’m not, but my husband is), it might interest you to know that most of us really are getting enough sleep, or at least as much as the ancient ones probably got. Present-day hunter / gatherers who agreed to wear a special watch to track their sleep habits, catch almost exactly the same number of zzzz’s as the average city dweller (5.7-7.1 hours of sound sleep nightly). Fire, for warmth and safety — and stories to keep the dread away: an ancestral memory,  the same impulse that built the great movie palaces, some, like the atmospheric theaters, offering a dome-full of pretend stars, and a story in a beam of light.

In 1976, along with the above-mentioned husband and a group of friends, I tried my hand for a year at running a 2672-seat movie palace in St. George, Staten Island, the St. George Theatre. 

Our theater was and is a gilded plaster Spanish Baroque six-story cave, where slightly old flicks (Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, The Man Who Would Be King) could be had for a buck fifty. You could share this nightly waking dream, in the time-honored tradition of cinema, without knowing anybody or saying anything to anyone. This week I’d like to offer a story my insomniac husband/business partner shared with me about life at the movies. Here goes, in Dean’s own words:

​I had a grand theater dream. Every once in a while I have one, and they almost always happen at the St. George. It was a Saturday, late afternoon, a matinee. I was in the balcony, but instead of being a twenty-nine-year-old terrified theater operator, I was a boy, maybe 10 or 11. I was sitting halfway up on the extreme left side looking down at the screen. It was crowded, two-thirds full and there was the sweet-grass smell of popcorn. It was a Western. John Wayne, visible mid-chest to the top of his hat, was looking at something offscreen to the  right. I’m not sure I heard him say anything. I was with around 2000 people, and yet I was totally alone. Isn’t that the magic of why we come to theaters?  We want to share with other people the experience of the movie, but we want to be alone — like community and privacy all at once.

When I woke it was such a vivid memory, I switched on the flat-screen and went to Apple TV, then Netflix, searching for movies with John Wayne. Then I stopped. Even if I do have a fifty-inch screen, I didn’t want to see that image shrunk down so small. The John Wayne in my dreams was a couple of stories tall. I wanted to keep him the way I thought I saw him from the balcony.

With all of our personal screens, are we losing something? I have three: iPhone, iPad, flat-screen, but I didn’t want to see that image or any part of that movie on anything so small, and I didn’t want to see it by myself. 

That is what the movies, a product of the 19th century, refined in the twentieth, gave to us, that we must not lose, as we wade more deeply into the twenty-first: being alone together in the dark with a two-story dream.

I reminded Dean that we actually did show one John Wayne/Katherine Hepburn title, Rooster Cogburn. Early in the year as it was, we were so busy worrying about how to keep the place open that neither of us considered sitting down to watch that or most of the other movies that followed.

Yet, in his dream he watched, transporting himself back to his boyhood in Deer Park, Ohio — when John Wayne was fairly standard fare — and, as dreams give us the liberty to do, placing that little boy in the balcony of the theater he would one day struggle with the rest of us to keep open, his own personal version of Back to the Future.  

Have any two-story dreams?

 What is it about the American imagination that makes us — in this Post-Modern, Post-Millennial era — long to spend three hours in a Villa? An Egyptian Pyramid? A Chinese Temple? The halls of Versailles? Or a combination of all of the above? The St. George Theater, a 2672-seat movie palace I was involved in running back in 1976, just a block and a half from the ferries in St. George, Staten Island, was and is a “Spanish Baroque” palace, its interior lobby lined with over-the-top paintings of bullfights and fake balconies. The St. George happens to have been designed by Eugene DeRosa, a lesser-known “picture palace” architect, part of a growing dream. It took an architect with a little bit of P.T. Barnum in him to blow out all the decorative stops, as if the very idea of “moving pictures” — to early audiences —required a temple so audacious it might have been a dream in its own right.

Here’s a wee trivia question: What do the following theaters have in common?: The Metro Cinema in Kolkata, India, the Midland Theatre in Kansas City, Mo., the Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach, Fl. The Metro in Cairo, Egypt, the Empire Theatre in London, the Lake Theatre in Oak Park, Il., the Capitol Theatre Windsor in Windsor Ontario, and the Bric Arts Media House in Brooklyn, New York? There are more houses that could be listed in this chain (approximately 36), but time and space preclude. The answer: they were all designed by Thomas W. Lamb, who designed more than 300 theaters starting in 1909 with the City Theatre on 14th Street in New York City, where many of his first and best theaters opened their doors, then going international, as the above list indicates, as far away as India. He even submitted a design for the proposed Palace of the Soviets in Moscow — never built, despite his prize-winning “panic-proof” palace idea, with enough exits to permit 20,000 Russians a quick emergency escape, presumably in case of a siege.  

Lamb, born in Scotland, was arguably the dean of an illustrious fraternity of movie palace architects, most of whom seem to have immigrated to the United States to ply their trade. Of his many New York City theaters most are either gone or have been reduced to elements of a facade. The Regent in Harlem, boasted an arcade meant to emulate the Palazzo del Consiglio in Verona. The Strand offered what Ben M. Hall of The Best Remaining Seats describes as “a huge Wedgewood bowl of a dome,” and Corinthian columns flanking the proscenium, the Rialto sported dimmable “color harmony” lighting, and The Rivoli re-created the Parthenon out of white glazed terra cotta. New York’s real estate, except in outlying areas (Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Inwood) is, for the most part, too bloody valuable. So rest in peace, old palaces: Strand, Roxy, Hippodrome, and hundreds of others.

Remember The Music Man? Professor Harold Hill travels the country selling small towns on the civic virtues of a marching band, a plot that has it parallels in the theater business. One John Eberson, an Austrian immigrant and an architect, traveled the Midwest from around 1910 to 1922, with his partner, a promoter who would first sell citizens on the merits of an opera house, which Eberson, “Opera House John,” would then build. By 1922, he’d graduated to his next big gig, the “atmospheric theater,” which he more or less invented. Holblitzelle’s Majestic in Houston, Texas, was the world’s first. The deal here was “no chandelier required” — at the savings of a lot of electricity — as the dome became a “sky” lit by the occasional star or moon. All the architecture in an atmospheric is on the sides, in Eberson’s own words, “a magnificent amphitheater under a glorious moonlit sky...a Persian court, a Spanish patio...where friendly stars twinkle and wisps of clouds drift.”

Chicago’s Rapp brothers (Rapp & Rapp) were the P.T. Barnums of their trade. “Watch the bright light in the eyes of the tired shopgirl...who sighs with satisfaction as she walks amid furnishings that once delighted the hearts of queens,” George Rapp boasted in 1925. Nothing is more opulent than one of their theaters, including the imperiled and leaking but still extant Uptown Theatre in Chicago, which, at 46,000 square feet, is bigger than Radio City Music Hall, Loew’s Kings on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, one of five original “Wonder Theaters,” newly restored to its full gilded opulence, as this writer can testify, and the Brooklyn Paramount, currently the world’s fanciest basketball court. From a list of around 50 theaters that are or were R & R creations, I choose the Corn Palace, a Moorish Revival building in MItchell, South Dakota as the brothers’ most astonishing accomplishment. 

If you’re looking for intact, lovingly-preserved theaters, the best place to find them is the left coast, specifically L.A., home of the movies. They take care of their palaces there, notably the most famous Graumann theaters — Chinese (TCL these days) and Egyptian, both designed by Meyer & Holler. The Los Angeles Theatre (on the Register of Historic Places and available for events and screenings), is an S. Charles Lee confection said to be modeled on Versailles. The theater boasted — on opening — a prism device in the downstairs lounge for viewing the show in the auditorium above — quite a techno marvel for 1931. Its opening night was January 30 of that year, with a showing of Chaplin’s City Lights. It is said that Professor and Mrs. Albert Einstein were in attendance, along with Gloria Swanson, Cecile B. DeMille and other luminaries of the era. Did they mingle by the crystal fountain at the head of the grand staircase? To quote Irving Berlin, “There’s no business like show business...”
            

On November 21, 2014, in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, a small group of film buffs, armed with crowbars, walkie-talkies and flashlights, broke into an old Art Nouveau film house known as Zvezda, (the Star) after scaling a tree that enabled them to crawl through a ventilation shaft and enter the building. Once inside, they broke the lock that had kept the derelict theater’s doors closed to the public for more than seven years and, forty-five days later, began showing movies. There are at least a dozen reasons why this would probably never happen in the US, but commandeering a movie house feels just right to me, almost like déjà vu. In April, 1976, we — by which I mean a small band of entrepreneurial zealots — settled in for a stay at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace in St George, Staten Island. Our occupation of (and in) the theater may have had the fanaticism of a movement, but it was (at least initially) legal: we had a lease on the musty gold plaster and red-velvet that graced our acoustically perfect auditorium. Saving an ornate sanctuary of dreams by whatever means possible had been our quest (or “business plan?” — take your pick). The differences between what we did and what the Serb film buffs are so far pulling off are worth noting, along with some odd similarities.

Founders of the Movement for the Occupation of Cinemas have, of course, no rights in the place, but they have no obligations either. Since the first of them crawled down that duct system, they’ve been showing, on average, three films a day, having repaired one projector and brought in another one, and, despite a leaky ceiling, they continue to sell tickets and popcorn. 
             
If the Belgrade activists don’t all see eye-to-eye on exactly what they’re doing in the Star (is their occupation a political act ? a cultural one? is there a difference?), the recent loss of more than half  of Serbia’s fine old cinema buildings — bought low and sold high by fat cats, to be retrofitted as supermarkets, gymnasiums and gambling clubs — has, for the moment, unified them. 

“As a kid I came here and watched movies,” says Luka Bursac, 26, one of the theater’s lead occupants and a student from Belgrade University’s school of dramatic arts. 

It’s the memory of old well-worn seats, the inevitable smell of popcorn, the comfort of a sweet light coming from high over your shoulder and hitting the screen, that makes the shuttering of old theaters so like the closing down of the imagination itself. Like the magnificent Michigan Theatre in Detroit whose still-existing dome arches over a parking garage, or The Ritz here in Staten Island , sliced and diced into a furniture warehouse, Belgrade’s cinemas are more than real estate, and so was — and is — the St. George.

Apparently you can see your breath in the Star’s auditorium this winter, another little nip of deja vu, reminding me of that long-ago winter, 1977, when I warmed my palms in the theater’s popcorn machine. Our landlord ignored our pleas to turn the boiler on. Letters to Belgrade’s twenty wealthiest citizens for money to heat the movie house garnered no responses either, with one important caveat. If you’re doing civil disobedience, at least you don’t have to sell enough tickets to make the rent.

The word “occupy” has many shadings. Forty years ago, on account of the theater, my husband was hauled into criminal court — roughly every six weeks. Once there, he was routinely fined and fingerprinted, acquiring over time a criminal record, because of certain gaps inspectors continued to find in the theater’s fire sprinkler system. These flaws had gone unaddressed by — who else? — our negligent landlord. Apparently, despite a legal lease, we had no right to be in the building in the first place — which is to say we lacked what is called a “C of O” (Certificate, ironically enough, of Occupancy!). So there you go: perhaps we were dissidents after all, mere squatters in the eyes of the law, and not the entrepreneurs we hoped to be.

But there is one really really important difference between the Serbian effort and ours:  These people actually slept (still do?) in their unheated theater. Now that’s going to the line for what you believe in. To the tiny miraculously-still-open Star cinema in Belgrade, I wish an early, warm. spring.
           
           
 
 
 
 

 Failure is Hot! At Failcon conferences all over the world, young entrepreneurs who have fallen on their faces and are ashamed — or haven’t failed yet and are afraid — trade stories and listen to featured speakers who’ve fallen off the tightrope and used that experience to get back on the wire. TED talks feature failure as a goad and inspiration, and sites like Medium invite members to blog about their career disasters.  If only this support network had existed when I threw in my lot with a gang of young movie exhibition enthusiasts in 1976 at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace that it took us not quite a year to bomb out running. 

I addressed this topic in an earlier blog post, before I knew about Failcon, or that failure is literally the new success, at least if you “fail upward,” which means letting your failure propel you into a great new venture. In 1976 and the early months of 1977, in our unheated movie palace, which was slowly driving us into mammoth debt, “failing upward” would have seemed like a cruel joke. Even now, forty years later, I’m not sure how I feel about the upward part, but I DID learn a lot in that theater year, that has helped me run or help to run various businesses which have succeeded in paying us a salary. Here’s a glimpse of failure before there were conferences about it, with a few comments on the new cult of falling flat on your face. If you’ve been a follower of this blog for a while, you may recognize the next few paragraphs (from Young Start-Up Entrepreneurs, 8/28/14): 
 
There were no tech start-ups in 1976 — there was hardly any tech to speak of. The most sophisticated thing I had ever heard of was Pong, a slightly monotonous video game, the grandaddy of all such games. It was in black-and-white and consisted of a “ball” bouncing back and forth between two “paddles” — we played it endlessly in the lobby of the the movie palace we were going broke running.
 
What else were we going to do?  A deep recession in the aftermath of the Vietnam War had rendered jobs beyond minimum wage ($2.75 an hour) a rarity. In 1975, New York City itself — yes, the city! — had barely avoided bankruptcy, rescued at the last minute by its teachers’ union, which cashed in a pension fund.
 
At twenty-seven, I knew two people who had respectable jobs:  one was a piano tuner, and the other delivered mail. I took the USPS civil service exam myself, hoping to walk the streets cheerfully with a bag slung over my shoulder. I scored 70 — F was 69.  I’d graduated from Hunter College, Summa Cum Laude, but my memory for random lists of names was hardly impressive. I clung for a while to the part-time job that had gotten me through Hunter, teaching children’s after-school art classes, but soon enough it dried up. My husband, at twenty-nine, was already living on the dregs of what had been a brilliant early career in show-biz. Friends, also “creatively unemployed,” were sharing our big old rented house on a hill overlooking New York Harbor in Staten Island.

Down the street a magnificent movie palace had just gone dark for the first time in its long career. What to do but rent it?
 
If only, before renting the theater, I’d known a few things about movie distributors (Warner, UA and their brethren) who took whatever percentage they wanted of our box office sales and could change the terms of a contract retroactively (“The Exorcist, Triple X” ). If only I’d had a clue what “overhead” is; you can’t expect to make money if your operating expenses are too high — marquee bulbs and carbons for the projectors and carting services and rent, to name a few lead weights. And just because you know something about a business (my husband had a showbiz resume) doesn’t mean that prior experience translates into profit.

Failcon and Medium feature various people who failed for various reasons:  a lawyer who went to prison for his failures, a chef who washed out as a marketing consultant to other chefs and restaurant owners. So far nobody has come forward and confessed going bankrupt after trying to run a movie palace, but I’m waiting!

The aforementioned lawyer says he cried the day he entered prison. I cried the afternoon we were forced out of the theater. I didn’t eat popcorn for a long time: it was for me the taste of failure, a bitter taste, not bitter anymore.
 

What exactly is a “ghost light?” All legitimate theaters have one. It’s that single bulb in a cage that stands on a wrought iron post in front of the curtain when the staff has gone home at night. Older theater traditions allow as how a theater’s ghosts must in some way be appeased — the light left on. When I arrived in 1976, with a group of like-minded young entrepreneurs, at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque movie palace we hoped to run, the ghost light wasn’t center stage as it ought to have been. We found it, nonetheless, beneath the fly loft, along with a number of other functional items: footlight gels, old poster cases and so on. Probably as old as the theater itself, the ghost light flickered unpredictably when lit; it had a frayed cloth cord, and its post was none too stable, so we generally didn’t use it.

You wouldn’t think such an item valuable, but if you go to the Urban Remains site, you’ll find one of about that vintage for four hundred ninety-five bucks, along with a lot of other “movie palace artifacts.” Small pieces of movie palaces — most of those theaters now defunct — are apparently worth a lot of money; for example, stained-glass exit signs (the St. George Theatre, under our management, had sixteen). Cast aluminum marquee letters, and whole aluminum words, such as “With,” “and,” “The” and so forth — go for anywhere from a hundred fifty to three hundred dollars. The pricier items are attributable to specific theaters, such as the Cadillac Palace in Chicago built by the famous architects, Rapp and Rapp. An “ornamental cast-iron gold enameled staircase baluster panel” from the Cadillac goes for $695, which is particularly interesting, as that theater is actually back in business.  

But for every movie palace/vaudeville house that still stands, and there are many, the list of deceased ones is growing. Statistics are hard to pin down. Cinema Treasures lists “movie theaters” in the United States (a category wider than “movie palaces”). Those that have been “demolished” stand at 12,199, while theaters that have been “closed” number 24, 930; “restoring” and “renovating,” two hopeful categories, together round out at approximately 600. Because the previous list also includes multiplexes, neighborhood houses, and drive-ins, and because such lists change daily, it is difficult to say how many palaces in the US have met the wrecker’s ball, either recently or in the decades since they were built. This is what haunts me when I visit Urban Remains: how many communities might think a grand old space, like Grauman’s Metropolitan (aka The Paramount Downtown) in L.A., demolished in 1962, hardly worth saving, when even a small piece of a decorative frieze from such a theater is worth seven hundred bucks? Developers have probably sold many such houses piecemeal, but knowledge of the intrinsic value of their smallest pieces ought to galvanize whole communities. 

When we ran the St. George Theatre, in 1976, we were told by a visiting  representative of the Theatre Historical Society that the formal red-and-gold brocade house curtain, with its four-foot gold tassels, was worth $40,000. Even if we had owned the theater, selling the curtain would have been like cutting out the heart of a living being. What happened to that sumptuous cloth is even sadder, but I’ll save the story for Starts Wednesday, the book that will soon follow this blog.

I’d like to close with a tip of my former-theater-operator’s hat to the Carolina in Greensboro, North Carolina. Opened in 1927, arguably “the finest theater between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta,” the Carolina seated 2,200. With a facade and decorative theme that evoked ancient Greece, and a Robert Morton theater pipe organ, the Carolina served movies and Vaudeville, then as a movie house until it fell on hard times in the 1960‘s — when Greensboro’s downtown hub began to fail. In 1977, a local citizen’s group raised over $550,000 to save the deteriorating palace from demolition, and, with volunteer labor, refitted it as a 1,200-seat community performance space. 1977, BTW, was a dark year for movie palaces nationwide, a year which saw the closing of Loew’s Kings in Flatbush and the demolition of my favorite old childhood palace, the Albee in Cincinnati, to name just two hard-luck stories, so kudos to the citizens of Greensboro. Sadly, the Carolina’s original salvation was short-lived. A fire in a stairwell in the 1980s threatened the theater yet again. No problem! The unstoppable community rallied, under the flag of the United Arts Council, staging a “Renaissance” capital campaign, and going beyond repair, to expand and enhance what far-sighted citizens clearly recognized as a treasure.

Today, the Carolina is open for business, home of the local opera company and the Greensboro ballet, to name two fortunate organizations. I know of it thanks to a friend, Eleanor Schaffner-Mosh, who, with fellow citizens, has worked tirelessly to keep it open and vital.

No part of the Carolina’s precious terra cotta is for sale, BTW, and a good thing too.         
I wonder, do they have a ghost light?