We never ran Psycho at the St. George Theatre, the 2,672-seat movie palace that I helped keep alive, way back in 1976. Our gold and red poster cases, did feature other thriller classics: The Omen (red and black with a child whose shadow is a wolf’s), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Leatherface in graphic black and white with red letters), The Exorcist (priest backlit on a street corner, in purple, black and white); but the Victorian house that stands in the background of Hitchcock’s Psycho poster never saw the light of our day at the St. George. Long before our time, in 1962, Psycho had opened at our theater, then a flagship; I know, because we found a poster for it in the sign room. It features an image that strongly resembles House by the Railroad (1925, MOMA) by Edward Hopper, one of my favorite painters of the twentieth century.

Hopper was a big fan of movies and theaters. His unmistakably cinematic use of light seems to have influenced poster illustrators after Psycho, including the designer of: Days of Heaven (different take on the same Victorian house), and Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking  (deserted Western street corner, very Hopperesque).

It’s the clear (almost cinematic) light of Hopper’s paintings, the long shadows, and oftener-than-not, intriguing solitary figure, that must appeal to certain directors. So why should it be surprising that Hopper was, in turn, a real fan of theaters too?  The earliest Hopper painting to feature one seems to be Solitary Figure in a Theater, (1903, Whitney Museum of American Art), near and dear to me, as the former manager of a theater that was often empty. Intermission (1963, SFMOMA) was conceived while Hopper watched a movie. Jo  Hopper, his wife, subsequently arranged for him to work on the painting in an empty theater, what particular theater, nobody knows. An original sketch includes “half another person” (Hopper’s own words), but in the end, the moviegoer is alone.         

First Row Orchestra (1951, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC) involves five, possibly six, people — a veritable crowd for Hopper! —  in the first two rows of an elegant live house. Curtain down (blue velvet), either intermission or pre-performance; the primary figure, is a fur-coated woman reading her program.

Let’s step outside for a glance at a movie marquee; in fact, see if you can find that marquee in The Circle Theatre (1936, private collection). As far as I know, this is the only theater exterior Hopper ever painted...

The Sheridan Theatre (1939, Newark Museum of Art) gives the solitary figure a sweeping lobby to wait in. A review of a show featuring this painting, from The New York Times, quotes Hopper, “‘When I don’t feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge... “ The Sheridan may have been his favorite theater, in NYC’s West Village, not far from Washington Square where he and his wife, Josephine (Jo) Nivison, unfolded their lives together.

I mentioned New York Movie (1939, MOMA), in a previous post, identified variously as: the Strand, the Globe, or the Republican, but probably the Palace on West 47th St.  Smoking a cigarette in the aisle is the ever-present Jo Nivison Hopper. Jo was a painter in her own right who (like Lee Krasner of Jackson Pollack fame) didn’t entirely get her due. Read all about it here, if you dare.
   
And precisely because she didn’t get her due, I’ll close with Jo: in the lobby of the Sheridan Theatre, smoking a cigarette in an unnamed movie palace (probably an amalgam of several theaters), and sitting all by herself, her feet crossed discretely, in Intermission. In First Row Orchestra, she extends a curved white leg, and seems to be flirting with the man who accompanies her.  I hope she was having a good time.

Afterthought: 
Not to be missed is the movie, Shirley: Visions of Reality, in a class by itself. It uses 13 Hopper paintings to tell a story. At least one of them is included in the post you just read. Check it out. 

Afterthought 2:
Jo was Hopper’s everything: wife, model, procurer of empty movie houses to paint in, secretary, librarian, you name it. If you try to find her works on the Net, you’ll be surprised at how many trails end up at Edward Hopper. In that, she is a little like Christopher Milne, the son of A.A. Milne, the model for “Christopher Robin,” who fought all his life to be himself and not a fictional character. But Jo had it harder; she was a wife, not a son. She was a muse, and that’s a very difficult role to play and remain human.

At the St. George Theatre in 1976, we never ran Gone With the Wind,  but we ran its trailer. No doubt the theater had run that epic in 1939, but by the time we came along, what the neighborhood wanted was blood and action. A little sex was good, but not romance, and certainly not dated romance that harbored apologies for 19th century slavery. Still, late in the season of our crazy theater entrepreneurship, Dean, my husband and partner, insisted on ordering — and re-ordering, for two dollars and fifty cents a week — the trailer for GWTW, with no thought of booking the movie itself.  When this “Coming Attraction” shone its red/gold light on the first few rows of the orchestra, I could usually find him camped out front row center, with a box of Sno-Caps. Max Steiner’s glorious sound-track had called us both to watch.

Ever wonder why a trailer is called that, when it actually comes before the featured movie?  Silent one reelers were frequently serialized, so the first trailers actually “trailed” a movie, asking in text, Will Miss Emily be crushed beneath the speeding train? then urging, Don’t miss next week’s episode! It didn’t take too long for theater operators to figure out that it’s better to run promotional materials before the movie — when the audience is, literally, captive — which is why I sit obediently, even to this day, eating half my popcorn before the feature actually hits the screen.

What else are trailers but short films? They’re hors d’oeuvres. If we couldn’t dine out on a classic, we could snack on brief glimpses of it: A spooked horse and a rickety wagon against the backdrop of burning Atlanta, Scarlett and the white portico of Tara. The trailer was a satisfying glimpse of the epics our endangered movie palace had been built to contain.

National Screen Service — around since 1920 — had a lock on posters and trailer production and distribution for most of the twentieth century. I remember fondly the checks I wrote to NSS; I say “fondly,” because these amounts were small enough I could actually pay them more or less on time. For the most part, these checks were for movies we actually showed — and posters for those movies. (If you’re a poster freak, you know all about NSS and its distinctive poster numbering system which, these days, helps collectors identify valuable items).

Back to trailers. Matthew Schimkowitz observes that, “Every NSS trailer followed a similar recipe: 1.) typography and text (expressions that take cues from the silent era: “You’ve Never Seen Anything Like It!” and “Sensational! Marvelous! A Romance for the Ages!”),  2.) narration to clear up some of the murky complexities of plot,  3.) music to showcase the intrigue, danger, romance, and timeless good feelings of the film, and  4.) montage—quick clips and sharp one-liners to help draw the characters.” In my childhood, we were, like lab animals, conditioned to receive information (about coming attractions) in the aforementioned order. The trailers got you juiced for the next big fantasy.

The formula has been gone for some time — more on how that happened in a minute — but good trailers are still getting us ready. Sometimes they’re actually better than the movie they promote. The worst trailers, in my opinion, tell too much and make you not want to bother, or actually warn you away (message: Don’t pay money to see this movie!).

Warnings have been around for a while. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t exactly discourage viewers from coming to Psycho, but he did threaten the audience with penalties for showing up late. His brilliant trailer also set the tone for seeing the movie, walking the viewer through the Bates Motel, with a nasty taste of the shower scene. The poster features a Victorian house that references an Edward Hopper painting, “House by the Railroad;” (more on that some time soon).

That trailer, and, later, Kubrick’s promotional short film for Dr. Strangelove have two things in common: 1.) They’re both hand-crafted by the director, and  2.) Being homemade, they’re trendsetting. It was 1964, and predictable was out. The Strangelove trailer (link above) is a sixties time capsule.
           
Our GWTW trailer came from the old (formulaic) tradition; perhaps that’s why we were drawn to it. By the time we were tearing tickets at the door to our mostly-vacant movie palace, the young directors, Spielberg, Lucas, and the crew, had followed Hitchcock’s and Kubrick’s lead,  cutting their own trailers, and NSS had been reduced to the role of a delivery service.

One man, Don LaFontaine, had just begun his long career as a voice-over artist, the famous “voice of God” for trailers, best remembered as the “In a world...” man. Some 5,000 film trailers actually bore his stamp. (a delightful movie entitled In a World, a comedy based on the LaFontaine character, is well worth checking out.
 
But here’s to 1939 (think GWTW, The Wizard of Oz, Ninotchka, Stagecoach, The Hunchback of Notre Dame...); it was the golden year of movies, when stylized Deco letters swung in from the right and popped over scenes of a promised film: THE LAUGHS ARE MONSTROUS!  MIGHTIEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIME! SPECTACULAR! , MILLIONS HAVE BEEN THRILLED! in high-contrast black and white. Even though GWTW was one of Hollywood’s first full-length feature films shot entirely in color, its trailer stuck — but for the use of color — with the classic formula: typography, narration, music, montage.

The original GWTW trailer is hard to find, buried beneath latter-day versions. The one I visited currently boasts 409,305 hits, while a more modern adaptation stands this morning at 1, 342,336. I’ve added one to each of these numbers. Remarkable! You don’t have to rent a movie palace to visit Tara after all.

Afterthought:
All my blog posts are really trailers, of a sort, for a book you’ll eventually read. This particular post bears some striking resemblances to an earlier one, like the myriad re-do’s of the original GWTW trailer, from 1939. There’s more research in this post, of which I’m proud.

Life, after all, is about revision!
 
Afterthought 2:
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a post that features the Edward Hopper painting mentioned here (“House by the Railroad”). He was a fan of theaters, as well as a man with a cinematic eye...more on that later.
 
 

I’ve been collecting stories of forbidden movies, movies people will now confess, from the safety of adulthood, that they lied about going to see. Or at least were evasive about. In my case, I  just happened to stay up late enough (midnight) in the summer of ’60 at the Oakley Drive-In to see Suddenly Last Summer, based on the Tennessee Williams play involving cannibalism, lobotomy, and — shocking for the time — “homosexuality.” I knew I was watching “grown up” fare. Everybody in the car was asleep but me, so it was even more delicious to watch movies that showed things nobody in middle-class Cincinnati talked about, things that happened in faraway places. Shadows, by John Cassavetes was coming soon to the Oakley, a film that depicted the lives of struggling black jazz musicians in faraway New York City. Black girls and white boys dating! I saw the previews and would have seen the movie, but Mother made me stop going to the Drive-In. It wasn’t exactly because of what was on the screen, which she didn’t know about, but because of what she feared was happening in the front seat of the car, between my best friend’s mother, a divorcee, and her boyfriend, an ex-rodeo cowboy named Harvey. Besides, no fourth-grader should be out that late.

Hard to believe that just fifteen years later I’d be running my own movie theater, a 2,672-seat palace in an outer borough of New York City, the St. George, showing all manner of movies, even soft X (by then the Hays Code had faded to black, and there were ratings).

A friend I just had coffee with, born in 1963, recalls, “Well I was a good girl, so I never saw anything with an R on it until I was actually 17, but a day after my birthday, I snuck out to see an R movie with my girlfriend. It was Bloodline, and all I remember is somebody got his knees broken by the mob.”

The movie has a fantastic cast — Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, Irene Papas, James Mason — but it sounds like a doggie, so no wonder broken kneecaps are all she remembers. What’s more important is what happened before and after the movie.

She continues, “On the way to the theater, in my parents‘ ’76 Buick LeSabre, we hit a kid (maybe thirteen?) on a bike...clipped him with the side vision mirror. I was horrified, his bike was smushed a little, and in retrospect I fear we might have broken his arm. We wanted to help, but he couldn’t wait to part company with us because he had a secret too, he was smoking.”

Notice how every kid in this story has something to hide?

“After the movie we headed back to my house. I was uncertain whether I ought to tell my mother what we’d seen...the Cinema had always shown adult movies, but by 1980 it was featuring a little of each, R and PG and G too. The road home had a steep hill in it just outside of town, and if you hit that hill going a little too fast, you can bottom out. Well we hit it at a pretty good clip, and...”

Ouch.

She continues, “...we cracked the LeSabre’s suspension.”

A mother twice-over by now, my friend blushes, averting her eyes, at this almost-forty-year-old tale. 

“Am I the only one you’ve ever confessed this to?” I ask her.

“I must have told my mother we were going to a movie,” she continues, “...Where the car was parked was part of the story. At home I made up something about somebody clipping the side-vision mirror in the parking lot. Mother never asked which movie we saw, and I never told anybody about the boy on the bike.”

Guilt about seeing an R picture without confessing this liberty to her parents is guilt with a small g, but what happened to the family car, and the fate of the boy is pure R-rated Remorse.      

Between my story and her story lies a gulf of twenty-plus years, from 1958 to 1980, a period in the movie exhibition business defined by the emergence of the ratings systems that separated adult movies from kid or family fare. But wind back to the 1930‘s and my sisters’ childhoods, and, although the Hays Code — which, among other things, forced the cartoon character, Betty Boop, to dress more modestly — was firmly in force, it was, paradoxically easier to sneak into “sophisticated” movies on your own.

My oldest sister (who remembers the Wizard of Oz first run) also remembers sneaking off to see Leave Her to Heaven, starring Cornell Wilde, when she was ten years old, in 1945. She couldn’t drive, so she had to be clever.

“My best friend and I were desperately in love with Cornell Wilde,” she muses, “...and we longed to see the movie, but Mother said it was too grown up for us. We figured that must be code for sex and were even more determined to go....

It was showing downtown... but we weren’t allowed to go there by ourselves. so we noticed it was also at the Mariemont, a suburban theatre a bus ride away. My friend knew the bus route, from trips she’d taken to the dentist.... We told our mothers we were going to the movies, which wasn’t a lie...they assumed we were planning to walk to the 20th Century in Oakley. The bus ride was easy, and no one stopped us from going into the theater....”

Leave Her to Heaven is film noir (interestingly in technicolor) — apparently one of Martin Scorcese’s favorite movies of all time. Gene Tierney was nominated for Best Actress for her role as Ellen Berent, an unstable socialite, and, according to some, she should have walked away with the gold as “the fatalest of femmes.” (New York Post). Sex was not the big deal here: there are a lot more shocking things than sex, and anyhow Mother was right about suitability. Berent watches a disabled man drown without lifting a finger, throws herself downstairs to abort her unborn child, which she refers to as “the little beast,” and I could go on.

“Stunned,” Judy continues, “...we left the theater and walked right into Aunt Eva, one of Mother’s oldest friends. ‘Why Judy’ Aunt Eva exclaimed, ’I’m surprised your mother let you see this.’”

As might be expected, Aunt Eva wasted no time finding a phone. The bus ride home must have seemed endless.

What exactly do these fugitive adventures demonstrate? My friend was really old enough to see an R-rated movie, but she chose not to tell her Mother she was going to one. And my sister and her friend were willing to evade, just not out and out lie. They wouldn’t go for the big cheat and take a bus all the way downtown. Ironically, if they had, they wouldn’t have run into Aunt Eva.

I‘ve been saving my husband’s story for last. When he was a lad of eleven in 1957, all the guys wanted to see Wild is the Wind, Starring Anthony Quinn and the amazingly sexy Anna Magnani. Needless to say, they didn’t even think of asking their parents. It was showing downtown, and boys being boys in those days, they weren’t afraid to hop a bus to the seamier part of Cincinnati, but they had to do a little subterfuge. Coincidentally, Pursuit of the Graf Spee, a WWII flick of historic interest, was also showing downtown, so they told the dads, all of whom had fought in WWII, they were going to that movie. Good midwestern dudes of the fifties, they went to the library and read up on the ship Graf Spee, assuming that after the movie, they’d be expected to talk with some authority on the subject. It all went off without a hitch, they saw Magnani flash her dark eyes and hurl epithets at Quinn, got a burger and went home. That night Dean’s dad, a high school teacher, quizzed his son on the Battle of the River Plate and various aspects of the Graf Spee’s story. Dean was eager to show off his hard-won knowledge, pointing out the Graf Spee sought shelter in Montevideo Harbor. As you probably know, that harbor, in Uruguay, where the stricken ship was dry-docked for a while, is not pronounced, in its latter syllables, the way the word for television is. Dean had read the word not heard it ("monty video"), gave himself entirely away. Dad had been a boy once, so he didn’t ask.   

How much forbidden cinematic fruit is left for the plucking these days, and do kids bother to lie anymore? Apparently, as this link will tell you in depth how to get into a movie rated R if you’re under age. But notice that the guilt people felt in days gone by wasn’t about the movies anyhow, but about going somewhere on a bus, or knocking down a kid on a bike, or bottoming out the LeSabre. Lying’s important. You’re almost grown up when you first do it, and for your whole adult life, you carry the delicious guilt around with you. ‘nuff said.

Afterthought:
For a taste of what the ratings did to our neighborhood juvenile watchers back in 1976, catch the previous blogpost...

Afterthought: For a novel approach to taking kids to classic grown-up movies, check this out…
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2006/nov/20/kidsfilms
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
             

Two kids approach the box office window.

Little kid:  “One adult.” 

Brenda (hoop earrings flashing):  “How old are you?”

Kid (stretching himself to appear taller): “How old you gotta be to see the movie?”

Brenda: “Answer the question...how old?

Kid (studying his feet) “uh, fifteen...”

Brenda (leaning back): “Funny, last week you told me you were twelve.”

Kid: “No! No I wasn’t, I didn’t...”

Brenda: “I remember. You said you were twelve — we did the math, I asked you what year you were born, and you were thirteen. Suddenly you’re fifteen?"

Big kid, his buddy (stepping forward): “So how old you gotta be to see this movie?”

Brenda: “Seventeen or accompanied by an adult.”

Big kid: “So I’m seventeen, am I an adult? Can he come in with me?”

Brenda (knowing when to quit): “Two tickets then. That’ll be three dollars.”

Little kid: “Wait a minute, if I’m not an adult, I only gotta pay ninety cents!”

Brenda: “No way. Read the sign; kids are under twelve. Right now, near as I can figure, you’re somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. Soooooo.... that’ll be three bucks, ‘joy the show!”
           
By 1976, when we ran the St. George, a 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, the Hays Code, which dictated movie content, had faded into history, replaced by an early version of the ratings system now in place. Taxi Driver, like so much of the “action” fare we showed, was R rated, Under seventeen not admitted unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Obviously, the elder of the two kids who stood at the box office window barely qualified as the “adult” to accompany a child of dubious age. Brenda was, technically wrong to let this duo pass, (the seventeen-year-old was clearly not the younger kid’s parent, and likely not his guardian); but we needed the three bucks.

Such dodging and weaving had been unheard of in my own childhood and the childhoods of many of my friends, who grew up under Hays, which forbade so many things, such as “lustful kissing,” and pledged that no movie should “lower the moral standards of those who see it...”or that, ”The sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin."  Obviously, Taxi Driver (and Deliverance, not to mention Dog Day Afternoon, and almost every movie we showed except for In Search of Noah’s Ark and The Man Who Would Be King) would have failed the Hays test.

Things had been different before Bonnie and Clyde (1967) -- talk about the “sympathy of the audience” thrown to the side of crime! -- and The Graduate (1967) and Midnight Cowboy (1969) hove into view on giant screens in the late sixties, breaking every rule in several books. 

For most of the people I know, the movies of childhood are a kind of amber their memories are preserved in. A friend who grew up in the 1930’s, when the Code was firmly in place, writes:

When little, I went with my mother (no baby sitter) and asked too many questions, because I really didn't understand all that was happening onscreen... In time of course I went on my own, alone or with a friend. Boys, of course; we didn't go with girls — not yet.  I remember one film with Dorothy Lamour (in a sarong, of course). The villain was about to be eaten by crocodiles, and as their mouths gaped voraciously, we couldn't take any more and ducked down on the floor till the scene was over.  We loved action films — the Wild West or British empire stuff (Alexander Korda), not mature enough to ask if the native peoples had some rights, after all.  No, we were with the Brits against the natives, but all we really wanted was a good battle with the (presumed) good guys winning, which they always did.

I love Dorothy Lamour in a sarong.

But let’s pause for a minute to reflect on ducking under the seat so as not to see the crocodiles. In my own childhood, twenty years later, I ducked (or put my hand over my face) for Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (would the aliens vaporize everybody, even me?) and Horrors of the Black Museum, which actually featured eyeballs being punctured. The segregation of the sexes which my friend recalls from the thirties was absolutely in force:  I went to the Drive-In or a local stadium-style theater like the 20th Century, and I went with girlfriends (or alone, during the period when my sister worked in the glamorous chrome ticket booth of the Mt. Lookout Theatre, and got me in for free). British Empire adventure films were, by that time, passe, but The Blob was another hide-under-the-seat flick; it beat any man-eating crocodile, tails down.

Forward to the St. George, where, in 1976, neighborhood boys like my friend Clifford Browder — whose reminiscence I quoted above — had come in droves to see “action,” but the action by the seventies, was all about underdogs (like Cochese and Preach in Cooley High) and anti-heroes like Scorcese’s Travis Bickle. We showed The Man Who Would Be King, a perfect rear-view mirror of the British Empire movies Clifford remembers. But, brilliant as Huston’s epic was, it didn’t sell very many tickets. Who wanted white men or Alexander the Great’s lost kingdom? We had our own home-grown mean streets. Hence the two kids at the box office, one clearly under age, the other hardly mature.
 
Afterthought 1: A fuller glimpse of the Hays Code shows its filthy underside. Buried in the list of things it prohibited ("excessive and lustful kissing,” "sex perversion,”  “profanity” and "indecent or undue exposure”) is, no kidding, “miscegenation,” a word I sincerely hope you’ve either forgotten the meaning of or never knew.

Afterthought 2: Clifford Browder, mentioned in this post, is also a terrific blogger, whose beat is all things NYC. Check it out!