I’m a collector of theater marquees.  I seem to be drawn to them, in towns and cities, wherever, for some reason, I find myself. Sunday found me in Charlottesville, VA for a publishing workshop, with a half an hour to spare. It was spring on the mall, and a healthy sampling of C-ville’s roughly 43,000 folks was sitting at tables or on benches, laptops in full play, as I walked longingly by (wishing I had an afternoon to spend among the crocuses). Then I spied the Paramount’s marquee and knew immediately where I was going to spend my half-hour. Ever since 1976, when I had a hand in running the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, I’ve been hyper-aware of old theaters (abandoned, intact, open, closed, transformed into drugstores, warehouses or churches) wherever I find them. Almost always, as you walk or drive along, you can identify them by their marquees, those overhanging calling cards. And so it was yesterday. I quickened my pace, taking pictures as I approached from the side. The theater, I could see, would open at two, but I’d be at another event by then, a lecture I’d paid sixty dollars and traveled several hundred miles for. Then I spied a man sweeping and asked him if I could dip inside for just a moment.

“You might want to talk to her,” he suggested. “She runs the box office.” And so I made the acquaintance of a lovely young woman, Clarissa, who agreed, despite an ongoing rehearsal of the day’s show, to let me have my peek inside. Clarissa does more than hold down the box office; she also changes the marquee, black plastic letters on a traditional three-line track--but more on that later.

The 1,100-seat Paramount is a Rapp & Rapp Greek Revival gem. The facade and octagonal (stadium style) auditorium is said to honor Thomas Jefferson, whose former home,  Monticello, is nearby. To my eye, the auditorium evokes a French Salon of the eighteenth century: intimate and, in its blue velvet and gold trim, opulent as well. It’s in pristine condition, cared for by loving former patrons, even after its 1974 closing.

This preservation-in-the-midst-of-decline makes Charlottesville’s Paramount a particular rarity. So many theaters in the seventies (I’m thinking of Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn) did stints as  homeless shelters, warehouses or settings for gang warfare. At home in Staten Island today, I drove past our own local Paramount Theatre, closed since 1977, I can’t help but compare it to its namesake in Virginia. Ours has served as a warehouse for sporting goods and a nightclub, and is, these days, closed entirely. Though I haven’t been inside, its silver/gold Deco is apparently intact, waiting for an owner or group of local enthusiasts.

One such group bought Charlottesville’s Paramount in 1992 and set to work immediately on (what else?) its rusting marquee. “After the marquee’s structure and finishes were examined, microanalysis of the paint determined original colors. At midnight on that New Year’s Eve, the marquee’s lights shone brightly on Main Street for the first time in a decade.” Now there’s how to begin a restoration! Without the marquee, including its most recently–restored feature, the “blade” sign, I never would have spotted it on the mall. 16.2 million dollars later, almost exactly thirty years after it stopped doing business as a movie palace, the Paramount reopened. With its refurbished fly loft, backstage areas, and orchestra pit, and a new three-story annex, the theater was ready to become a full-blown performing arts center.

Popcorn, yes! — I inhaled it going past. But the gleaming white and gold concession stand with its homemade goodies, almost a restaurant in its own right, caused a deep intake of breath on my part, which Clarissa noticed. I remarked on the elegance of the setting, cafe tables, wine stems.  “We host the opera here...” she said, proudly.

That’s not only the Met in HD, I learned from their website, but also the Charlottesville Opera itself. If I come back, I’m looking forward to one or two of these: a homegrown “game show” involving local word geeks in competitive play, a puppetry workshop, Casablanca, and, in August, the outstanding Blues guitarist, Buddy Guy (I’m a Blues freak — I’d drive better than five hundred miles to hear him).

Okay, as a lifetime resident of a rough–edged NYC borough, I tend to rhapsodize about small-town life, forgive me!

As we walked out under the marquee, I remarked on the fact that it’s old-school, with three “tracks” to hang letters on, painstakingly, one at a time. Well do I remember how hard that was, how easy to fall from the ladder, how painful when something went wrong and a letter dropped and (if it was cast-aluminum, as most of ours were) broke when it hit the sidewalk. Clarissa was quick to point out that she sets the letters on the Paramount’s marquee. I guess folks ask her how the letters stay on the tracks;  “I tell them no way are they magnetic!” she added.

Dean reminded me this morning that plastic letters, should they fall, blow away (at the St. George, they blew straight down hill to the harbor). The aluminum ones, if they fell after the usher had folded his ladder and gone inside, either broke or lay on the pavement until they were stolen. So it was, that we ended up with very few M’s (you could substitute W) and hardly an S to our names. But that was forty years ago, and we were a rag-tag gang, tilting on a rickety ladder, braced on a slanted sidewalk, ‘neath a marquee that had an up– and downhill side. I’m glad Clarissa doesn’t have to contend with these particular perils! And I’m so grateful, both to her and to the friendly fellow (name forgotten, sorry!) who was so kind to introduce her to me. They’ve got a first-class joint.

Each faded red ticket from a pile of rolls I found in a closet off the mezzanine guaranteed a man or woman the right to a few hours in one pristine red velvet seat (orchestra or balcony) for a first-run viewing of whatever had been showing at our movie palace when movie tickets actually cost less than a quarter. It was 1976, the year I had a hand in running the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. The year these unused tickets had been intended for sale was no doubt some time in the late thirties, perhaps 1939, when, I recently learned, 23 cents was the national average movie ticket price. 

The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind happened to be dueling contenders that year for Best Picture at the upcoming Twelfth Academy Awards, each movie available for less than the price of ten minutes at a parking meter today. Also available for less than a quarter that halcyon year include, among other movies, the remaining eight nominees for best picture: Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Stage Coach, Of Mice and Men, Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka, Dark Victory, Love Affair, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Gone With the Wind won, the following February at The Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel where the awards took place. But a lot of people thought The Wizard of Oz should have gotten it, and some movie buffs are still pissed off that Gunga Din and The Hounds of the Baskervilles weren’t even nominated.

Movies were cheap then, and, even after adjusting for inflation, memorable ones were plentiful. Of the ten top-grossing movies of all time, two from the late nineteen thirties (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Gone With the Wind) are still on the list. 

In 1939,  an average of 85 million Americans went to the movies every week. What else, besides listening to the Crosley Cathedral Radio, was there to do? Television, video games, Internet, were the stuff of future sci-fi. In addition to a (perhaps classic) movie like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, what were moviegoers getting in 1939 for 23 cents? Several cartoons, coming attractions, MovieTone News, (and no commercials!!!), all of this delivered in an opulent setting that included a velvet curtain, ushers in uniform and in many cases a golden dome.

How do we fare today? — sans curtain, usher, cartoons, and opulence, but including that tiresome ad for Sprite? Halfway through 2016, the average movie ticket price hit a new high, at $8.73. Remember the 23-cent ticket?  Eight seventy-three in 1939 dollars, adjusted for inflation, equals around fifty cents. In other words, we’re paying twice what our grandparents or great grandparents were paying for a fraction of what they got.

It’s shocking how steadily movie theater attendance has declined since 1939, when approximately 70% of the U.S. population sat in the dark and munched popcorn at a local palace or neighborhood cinema at least once a week. In the year 2000, that figure had shrunken to 27.3 million people, or just 9.7 percent of the population.

Forty years ago, for a buck fifty, we offered second- or third-run double features at our magnificently empty movie palace. Despite the 63-cent  savings (first-run theaters charged around $2.13 cents in Staten Island), we managed to fill only about an eighth of our 2672 seats, even on a good night, and the first-run houses, BTW, weren’t turning people away either.

By then, in addition to a steady drop in theater attendance, ( culprit: television), twins and multiplexes were proliferating. In 1963 AMC famously opened the 2-screen Parkway Twin (Kansas City) brainchild of Stan Durwood, who apparently realized he could double the revenue of a single theater "by adding a second screen and still operate with the same size staff").  

Falling audiences, but more screens, followed by competing entertainments or techno-pursuits equals higher ticket prices. And so we arrive at a family of four spending a hundred dollars for tickets to Kong: Skull Island.

But don’t listen to this discouraging math! Big screens are worth your while, like the Prytania in New Orleans, the last remaining single-screen theater in Louisiana, or the Paris in New York City, or...well, you name it, in L.A., come late (so as to miss the annoying ads for chain restaurants or, ironically, HBO). The theater owner will still get her or his money for placing these billboards — you just don’t have to look at them. And when you see that Manhattan by Woody Allen is playing somewhere on a decent-sized screen, go to it!  Get a large popcorn! Join us and sit in the dark.

The first brainstorm had been, of course, opening our 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre  in Staten Island, as part of what was then called “the buck fifty circuit,” a dollar fifty for adults, ninety cents for kids. It was 1976, and recently-premiered movies played to second-run and third-run audiences for years, before showing up on TV.  Accordingly, we opened with Blazing Saddles, a Mel Brooks comedy that had been around since 1974, paired with Woody Allen’s Bananas from ’71. Revenue was in the tank; what to do?  A gimmick — giving away 50 cent pieces (instead of two quarters) as change at the box office — fell flat. Here’s how it was supposed to work: you got your fifty-cent piece and went straight to the candy stand, where you could trade it in for a small soda and small popcorn, a sixty-cent value for fifty cents. But kids started showing up with pockets full of their own fifty-cent pieces. A coin collector might have had a profitable time sorting through candy stand change for those valuable Kennedy half dollars from 1964.

One night, while I was cleaning up some spilled popcorn and just hangin’ out,  I jokingly suggested we try “Dish Night.” My sister, born during the Depression, had told me that on Wednesday nights at the Hyde Park Theatre, on the village square where we grew up, you could get a free piece of china for going to the movies.

Dish Night was real, a phenomenon that died out, for the most part, in the late nineteen thirties, as the national economy improved. The St. George Theatre may not ever had had a dish giveaway. In its day it had been managed by the Isle Theatrical Corporation under Solomon Brill. The smaller mom and pop houses were the ones that took a flyer on china. Bank Night (a kind of lottery that gave away cash prizes) and something called Screeno were other boost-your-audience schemes worth your while to investigate. The 1937 Romantic Comedy, Thrill of a Lifetime featured a song entitled “Keno, Screeno and You.”

Getting back to the scene around the candy stand, none of our ushers, a generation younger than we were, knew what the hell Dish Night had been, so Dean felt the need to explain.

“Yeah,” he said. “Nana [his grandma] talked a lot about it. She had some fancy dishes with gold rims that she’d gotten on Wednesday nights in the thirties. Trouble was, they would never say in advance what piece of china they were giving out that night — a plate, a bowl, whatever — and Nana didn’t believe in going to the movies just to get china. She had to want to see the movie. She hated Fredric March, wouldn’t go when his movies were on screen. Somehow that’s when they’d give out the meat platter she was dying for, or the serving bowl. The following week she’d go, because she wanted to see that movie, but then she’d end up with another dinner plate.” 

Dish Night and other giveaways turned a lot of theaters around. In the early years of the Depression hardly anybody had discretionary money, and movies, new as they were, suddenly seemed an unnecessary luxury. Theater owners lowered their ticket prices, sometimes as low as ten cents for an evening feature, but that wasn’t cutting it. Enter the china distributors; Salem was apparently the leader. They were in trouble too, having to lay off factory workers, with little demand for dishes, at a time when people were drinking out of canning jars and eating off tin plates. They struck deals with theater owners, selling them china at wholesale prices, and agreeing to let it be given away.

It worked: women especially came out in droves and brought their families to the movies. One Seattle theater owner gave out a thousand pieces of china at a cost of $110 on a Monday night, but he took in $300—a whopping $250 more than he’d made the previous Monday. In some theaters, the ushers stood on chairs by the door, reaching into big wooden crates, dropping straw and wadded-up newspaper all over the fancy carpets. But nobody cared:  it was dish night!

In “Dish Night in New Rochelle, New York,” Edwin A. Rosenberg of Danbury, Ct., recalls:
“...my mother would sometimes attend these shows while my brother and I were in school.  Later, at supper she reported with amusement that, as happened every time, just at the most dramatic or romantic scene, when the audience was most deeply caught up, there would be several crashes as a few of the day’s freebies slid off laps onto the floor.” (Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun, by John Margolies and Emily Gwathmey, Little Brown, 1991).

On a site dedicated to Hammond High School in Hammond Indiana, I found the reminiscence (below). It contains a reference to a story by the highly-regarded comic writer and performer Jean Shepherd.
 
“When I was a teenager, I happened to come across a story by Jean Shepherd, published in Playboy magazine, about the ‘Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot.’ It struck me as being so funny that I had to share it with my mother one morning as we sat in the kitchen. Doing so was a confession that I had been reading the cultural smut publication of its day, but I thought that by telling her about Jean Shepherd's great story, I would reveal that I was truly reading the literature and not just thumbing through the photographs of bare-breasted women.

I went through every detail of the story as to how the Orpheum manager, Leopold Doppler, enticed women during the Depression to attend movie matinees by handing out an inexpensive dinnerware. The entire promotion came to a halt, I explained, when Doppler handed out gravy boats after the dinner plates failed to arrive on schedule.

He encouraged the ladies to return next week, bringing their gravy boats to exchange for the sought-after plates. After four weeks of the same story, however, the women could bear it no longer. As Doppler got up on stage during the intermission to explain yet another mix up in the shipment,' Shepherd writes, 'Then it happened. A dark shadow sliced through the hot beam of the spotlight, turning over and over and casting upon the screen an enormous magnified outline of a great Gravy Boat. Spinning over and over, it crashed with a startling suddenness on the stage at Doppler's feet.’ ”

I’ll leave your imagination to fill in the the rest, a china avalanche, of sorts. The story is part of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, by Jean Shepherd; I just ordered it and hope you will too.

Slightly tipsy on champagne one long-ago New Year’s Eve Day, I stumbled out of a car driven by a thoroughly crocked driver, into the vast beatific space of Grand Central Terminal in New York City.  Some of my euphoria, as I moved out of the hallway and into the rotunda was, no doubt, due to the fact that I had survived a dangerous car trip up the FDR Drive. But in fact, sans any drug or mind-altering substance, I am always lifted into a trance state when I enter that beloved hall — or any domed space. What is it about domes? Two years after my Grand Central epiphany, I was part of a small band of people who rented a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre, a kind of red and gold Spanish Baroque cave, sweetly capped by a dome that rests like a benevolent mandala, six stories above the orchestra.  To sit there, even when no movie or performance is going on, is a transformative experience.  Why?

There seems to be some evidence that human behavior and emotions are profoundly affected by the size, shape and quality of the structures humans work, live and recreate in. To quote from a 2011 article in Wired, “...creativity and abstract thinking benefit from high ceilings...”  Movie palaces and opera houses, cathedrals, train terminals from the heroic age of steam trains: these were designed to lift the heart and free the imagination. And, as every acoustic designer of any worth fully understands, you hear a space as profoundly as you see it. 

As a five-year-old about to board a train to Chicago (The James Whitcomb Riley), I closed my eyes under the great Deco dome of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal to listen to the space. Then, of course, I opened them and took in the wonder of the vaulted ceiling, with its mosaics of WPA workmen and concentric red and gold bands. About that same time, I was savoring weekly trips to the Albee, our premier movie palace, whose golden dome convinced me — eyes open or closed — that there must be a heaven. (How could there not be, if we could create this kind of soaring space on Earth?)

By the time I joined on as a partner in a movie palace of my own, I was beginning to understand that there was such a thing as acoustics: you could stand center stage at the St. George and talk, unaided by amplification, without raising your voice, to a friend standing six stories up towards the back of the dome, in the area just in front of the door to the projection booth. That’s what’s called a “sweet” house, as much a mystery, in its way, as a  perfectly-built violin.

I like to think that all the voices that ever inhabited the St. George Theatre, from Blossom Seeley’s on opening night, December 4, 1929 (last of the red hot mamas, or so she styled herself) through Tony Bennett’s, K.D. Laing’s, Pat Benatar’s, and even mine (offering free popcorn to angry patrons while the film was being spliced) actually live in the space below the dome, the way it’s said that radio signals inhabit outer space. That would go, as well, for the soundtrack to every movie that ever played there, including the grinding of wheel against wheel in the Ben Hur chariot race sequence, and rasping violins interspersed with running water Hitchcock used in Psycho’s shower scene. They’re all in there, hovering just below the dome; and if you go in, sit down and close your eyes, you can almost hear them.

Afterthought:  I’d like to credit the Rubin Museum’s "BrainWave 2017: Perception" exhibition. And for an intriguing link that informs, check out this Epoch Times' blogpost.

​“We go to see them, much of the time, in search of something else — the comforting darkness of the theater, the play of light and shadow on the screen....”

Richard Schickel, the late movie critic, viewed the experience of moviegoing as carefully as he did movies themselves. He’d begun at age five, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and went on to see — or so he boasted — 22,590 movies. I have no clue how many movies I’ve seen in my long lifetime. I know that, in the year I ran a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, I saw 71 features.

Well, not exactly saw, because, as a theater operator and would–be entrepreneur, I didn’t spend all that much time sitting down in the dark, staring at the screen. I took them in, sometimes standing transfixed behind the mahogany–framed glass in the lobby, other times glimpsing a giant spider or naked torso, on the way to my office or the concession stand. Other people were inside, in the dark, forgetting the meager balance in their checking account or a toothache or a lost love, what Schickel calls “...consolations...for some temporary trouble.” 

Before I signed on to run a dream palace, I’d had twenty-six years of sitting in the dark as a patron, starting aged two with Tea for Two, which my sister dragged me to at the Twentieth Century in Cincinnati, my natal digs. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I galloped through an eclectic mix: Three Coins in a Fountain, Ben Hur, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, Alfie, Two for the Road, Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, to name a few features I remember. Never saw Psycho: my mother believed sex in movies was okay for a young teen to watch, but not violence (oh how right she was). Accordingly, she let me attend steamy Tom Jones  when it came out in 1963 (Albert Finney), and, that same year, Cleopatra, complete with Taylor and Burton, hardly able take their hands off each other. I came of age at Cincinnati’s downtown palaces, the Albee, the International 70, in the company of equally horny girlfriends, some of whom didn’t have their mothers’ permissions. There was freedom in the dark, in the words of Richard Schickel, “...at a public event for private reasons.”

It seems plausible that I saw at least seven hundred movies in early–to–mid childhood, the 1950’s, judging from titles that spring from lists I’ve read. There were 199 American films released in 1955, and I saw at least half of those. Once the curtain had risen, and you’d settled in with Good n’ Plenties and the all–important popcorn, your afternoon was covered. You could see two features or just stay and watch the whole thing over again, including — in the early days — MovieTone News, the wascally wabbit (Bugs Bunny), Coming Attractions and Selected Short Subjects.  

My (and everyone’s) theater attendance went down in the sixties, or did it just become more selective? Only 130 American films were released in1963, way down from the yearly two-hundred-plus release lists of the mid-fifties. By 1963, I’d become the ad hoc TV Guide in my parents’ household, the person who knew every second of prime time, what was showing. Theater operators had to compete with the likes of Ben Casey, Mr. Ed and The Lucy Show; but they also lost out to their own product in different settings. In 1961 TWA began showing in-flight movies in first-class, via a Bell and Howell projector aimed at a tiny screen (By Love Possessed, Lana Turner). I didn’t know anybody who flew first class, but in September of that same year, Saturday Night at the Movies premiered on NBC, with How to Marry a Millionaire (Monroe, Grable and Bacall), and you could say the single–screen movie exhibition dam had pretty much burst.

By the time 1976 came around, a movie palace like ours had to compete not just with the “vast wasteland” of television but with consumers’ willingness to wait for movies to come to TV. The Fox Plaza Twin on Hylan (eventually to morph into the UA 15 on Forest) didn’t have to fill 2,672 seats and could offer a choice of screenings.  

It was my birthday a week ago Tuesday, and what did I choose to do?  In Manhattan, The Ziegfeld is closed, but there’s still the Paris, on 58th Street, just below the park, and it happened to be showing The Lion, a movie I was keen to see. Single screen, hardly a palace, but the Paris has stadium seating and, delight–of–all–delights, an actual curtain, which rises at showtime! To my friends in L.A. who can drop into Grauman’s Egyptian anytime they want, the Paris, in grey velvet, may seem a bit dull, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get.

As Richard Schickel reminds us, “It is the occasion, the atmosphere, that we crave.”