We were eating fried eggs on the porch of a summer morning fresh in memory, listening to a playlist of song covers by Nat King Cole. “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” Thanks to the requisite devices we all carry it didn’t take long to find a film with exactly that name (William Holden, Jennifer Jones, 1955). The song, by Alfred Newman, won a Best Original Music Score Oscar that year. Ah, the fifties (and early sixties) : “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “The Days of Wine and Roses,” anything by Mancini. Violins. Those fiddles were fading by the time I was grown. “Let It Be” won Best Original Song Score in 1970, give or take a laid-in violin or two. The world was changing, and movie music reflected those changes.

In New York, where, for one perilous and unforgettable mid-seventies year, a team of us ran a movie palace, movie music was a far cry from fifties or even sixties romance. The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre  in Staten Island was our home in 1976. And so Dean and I were wondering over Sunday eggs, what music we remembered from that year, emanating from our grand mostly–empty theater auditorium?

The mid-seventies were a brooding time at best. Jaws, which we ran in early May of ‘76, had won an Oscar in ’74, later ranked as the sixth-greatest score by the American Film Institute. The "shark" theme, an alternating pattern of two notes  became a classic piece of suspense music. Its composer, John Williams, described the theme as "grinding away at you, just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable.” 

Jaws’ shark theme really did penetrate beyond the glass-enclosed auditorium. I could hear it (and see the swimmer about to be pulled down into the water) from as far away as the concession stand.

No wonder we ran the trailer for Gone With the Wind over and over, even though we had no intention whatsoever of showing the movie to our action-obsessed audience. Not so secretly, we craved the kind of movie whose music wraps its violins around you and pulls you in. Could’ve run a Casablanca trailer, come to think of it. “As Time Goes By” was the kind of song I needed to curl up inside of.

Of the more than a hundred movies we ran in our theater year, only the shark and those tubular bells from The Exorcist come to mind as music that penetrated my consciousness, although we did run a number of movies with sound tracks worth noting:

• “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” R&B, Freddie Perren and Chrstine Yarian’s song from the 1975 Cooley High, obscure then, but a cult film now.

• Jack Nitzsche’s score for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  won an Oscar. Speaking of on-edge music, the dominant sound has to do with a bow drawn across a saw; it’s up there with tubular bells and shark music.

• Composer Jerry Goldsmith’s “Avi Satani,” won an Academy Award for The Omen in 1976. It’s a lovely if unsettling piece of music. As late as it came along in our desperate year, I don’t remember it well. Was I in my office trying to come up with a rent check? Probably.

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in a class by itself, an amalgam of music by local Texas talent never brought together into anything as formal as a sound-track. People have tried. See the above link if you’re curious.

As a movie exhibition year, 1976 was between two music worlds. Movies with heroic themes came along afterward: post–‘Nam, post–Watergate, and beyond the recession that, among other things, had nearly bankrupted New York. Is this why the movies I remember loving used music less as a theme and more, the way Hitchcock had in Psycho, as an effect? From Psycho’s brilliant tearing violins — in the shower scene — to the tubular bells of Exorcist isn’t very far in movie music time.

Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Chariots of Fire, Fame, even All That Jazz (despite its dark vein) followed in the late seventies and eighties, offering music with a kind of resolve (as if, well, we survived the seventies, didn’t we?) that might, after all, reach movie-goers standing outside an auditorium and draw them through the doors. Alas, by that time, those doors were in multiplex labyrinths, not single-screen palaces. After we left the movie business, the music changed, in more ways than one.

Afterthought:
Perhaps the music for this moment in time might appropriately be something on the order of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance, written in ’36 by Irving Berlin, for an Astaire/Rogers movie, Follow the Fleet. We are in difficult times right now, and so, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, with WWII to follow, were they.

There may be trouble ahead 
But while there's moonlight and music 
And love and romance 
Let's face the music and dance…

Sequestered at home? Try Dancing! even if it’s just in your own kitchen...

As we slip farther into our pandemic crisis, I find myself wanting more food. How is that? I always want food when times are bad. As A.J. Liebling once said, “A good meal in troubled times is always that much salvaged from disaster.” Right now I want to sink down into a velvet theater seat with a large bucket of freshly-popped corn with real butter. So it was once...and with luck will be again.  

More than forty years ago, when I was involved in helping to run the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in its declining years, we joked about “just closing down the auditorium and putting everything into the candy stand.” Late at night as we gathered around that very stand — our unofficial hearth — we imagined setting out tables in the lobby, putting velvet drapes over the glass that separated that lobby from the movie screen, and upping the menu to include salads, burgers, grilled cheese, what have you. Maybe a liquor license some day, when we could afford to bribe the necessary officials. 

Reasons for these fantasies included such thrills as getting rid of the projectionist’s salary, a whopping $13.75/hour ($60.84 in current dollars), never having to worry about filling all those seats again, and saying fini to Warner Bros. and Fox and the other film distributors, with their percentages that made it impossible to turn a profit. 

Besides, people kept coming in during the last show, passing up the box office and asking if they could just buy dinner. Our seat-of-the-pants operation in a destitute neighborhood happened to have better comestibles than most of the local restaurants: Sabrett’s all-beef hot dogs on freshly-baked Italian rolls, fresh popped corn with Odell’s real clarified butter, Haagen Dazs when nobody else had the stuff, and, of course, as many ways to stoke a sugar high as you could hope for (until I came to NYC, this Midwesterner had never seen a Jordan Almond or a Charleston Chew, and didn’t know from frozen Snickers). 

We had it all, including, at the time, the highest per capita concession sales in the five boroughs of New York City. Our patrons consumed, per capita, roughly $1.38, a little higher than Times Square. By today’s standards, that would be $6.07, which is relatively off-the-charts today, excluding theaters with wine and beer offerings. 

Though we hardly knew it at the time, we’d stumbled onto a basic truth that is now revolutionizing the business of movie exhibition: the concession tail was already beginning to wag the exhibition dog. It hadn’t always been that way.
 
Once upon a time, movie theaters had no concession stands at all; but there is some essential connection between movie-watching and munching. The storefront Nickelodeons of the teens and early nineteen twenties were often flanked at street level by candy shops and outside popcorn vendors; folks snuck these goodies in under their coats — verboten these days — though people still do it. 

In the twenties, when big palaces rose like elegant domed mushrooms all across the continent, their very opulence made theater owners reluctant to sell food. Then came the Depression. If I’m a theater manager in 1932, I’m wondering why, since people sneak food in anyhow, I’m not the one selling it to them? Popcorn happens to be an extremely cheap product, and the price, even with obscene mark-up, was affordable (10 cents a bag) even then. Candy came along for the ride, and suddenly a theater was more than a place to see a show. It was where you indulged the guilty pleasure of food in the dark. 

I’m thinking right now about a lot of people who loved our hot dogs way back when, even when they weren’t all that interested in a Bruce Lee triple feature or Gable and Lombard. 

There was the jazzman, who showed up in a spangled suit and ordered a “yellow dog” (with mustard) once a week, but never went in to see the movie. 

Certain neighborhood families, who preferred our concession stand to Burger King.
​
And tiny old Dr. Oppenheimer (probably in her early nineties at that point) who liked to stand outside the box office (she barely came up to the sill) and talk with me about the Law of Entropy, and other heady stuff, all the time munching on a Sabrett’s with extra mustard. 

That was Dijon mustard, BTW.

Afterthought:
We’ll all get through this, folks; meanwhile, pop yourself some corn, if you have it, with or without the butter. 

Sitting alone in the dark with strangers; do you long for it? — or dread it?  — or both?

If you’re a movie palace fan, you may be, with the on-coming pandemic, at least a little conflicted. With Italy closed down (and me fretting about the fact that I flew five days ago), going out to the movies is the last thing on my  (everybody’s?) list...

And yet...

Everyone has a great love, some have two. So it has been for me, with movie palaces.  

In 1976, while we were trying to save the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, my original great theater love back home in Cincinnati, the RKO Albee, was already flashlight-dark and silent, its Wurlitzer organ removed, cobwebs forming on the cobwebs that shrouded its enormous crystal chandelier. All through my childhood, the Albee had been the palace of palaces. Built by Thomas Lamb (the Scottish-born American theater architect whose works define the movie-palace landscape), Cincinnati’s Albee was lavish, with thirty-five hundred seats, a 40 x 70 Czech Maffersdorf carpet, lamps from John Jacob Astor’s Fifth Avenue Mansion in New York, and...and. 

Before it was built, in 1926, The Cincinnati Times Star heralded  the Albee’s arrival, like the birth of some important prince:

“...it is enough to say that it will be an Albee theater. That is, it will have all the magnificent and artistic beauty of the Albee theaters in Brooklyn and Cleveland, which are distinctive as the finest theatrical structures in the world. The realty was taken over on a basis of nearly $2,000,000, so the total investment will be $3,500,000, and Cincinnati will have the finest moving picture house in the world.
Though the theater will be used, for some time as least, for the showing of Greater Moving Pictures, it will have a full stage with complete equipment, all necessary dressing rooms and the same marvelous backstage arrangement, which exists at present only in the two Albee theaters already built.”

The Albee opened on Christmas Eve in 1927, its first movie the silent Get Your Man! starring Clara Bow. For fifty years, the theater itself — and not necessarily whatever movie was showing there — was what Cincinnatians put on silk stockings and Beau Brummel ties to see. I was lucky to be amongst the last generation to watch two layers of curtain — one brocade, the other a sheer scrim — part over every event, to know tuxedoed ushers, and to visit a ladies room with full-length mahogany mirrors.
Phil Lind, who used to work as an usher, recalls, “It was a fun job.... Sometimes we would stand around and talk, and other times we would explore the theater. We went from the roof to the basement....” (which apparently included underground passageways to Wiggins — the bar next door — and the Gibson Hotel, where Vaudeville actors used to stay).  

But every beginning has its end. Here’s a description of what some local citizens had to say, while still others were fighting to save the palace from the wrecker’s ball, in 1977:  

“...the Save the Albee Committee was formed, but it had little effect. City manager [of the time] E. Robert Turner, flatly stated that the Albee could not be preserved ‘...at the expense of tasteful and decent development’ around Fountain Square. The city planning director echoed a similar sentiment, noting that under no circumstance was the Albee worth saving.  ‘We have movie theaters downtown, and entertainment facilities nearby for music, opera, drama and dance. What do we need another one for?’

It’s always about real estate.
​
In 1977, despite best efforts, “...the entire block...was demolished for Fountain Square South [a project] that consisted of a Westin [hotel] and a Firstar Bank....” 

In other words, to quote Joni MItchell, “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Treasures from the Albee remain. Its organ, wisely purchased by the Ohio chapter of The American Theater Organ Society sheltered for many years at a small local hall (The Emery Theater), now itself facing possible demolition. The organ spent about a decade in storage, emerging in 2009 to a safe, and apparently permanent home in the ballroom of Cincinnati’s Music Hall. 

As Joseph Hollman, Ohio Valley chapter president of the ATOS, pointed out, “Too many pipe organs were sold as parts and the organ broken up for sale, eliminating that organ’s originality.  Others were torn down with the theaters they were housed in...”  

Anyone who read my blog post on the whereabouts of what is left of the St. George Theatre’s fine old Wurlitzer will not be able to miss the irony. 

In my life, it is a remarkable coincidence that we lost our lease on the St. George Theatre in 1977, the year the Albee was torn down. The St. George would remain shuttered for decades, narrowly dodging the Albee’s fate.

Beyond the Albee’s rescued Wurlitzer, other parts — including the theater’s ticket booth — survive in Cincinnati Music Hall’s ballroom — a pilgrimage I need to make the next time I go home. The theater’s pair of magnificent bronze doors graces the Ohio Theater in Columbus, a few hours’ drive north. But the Albee’s grand entryway, a classical arch of some distinction, didn’t fare as well. In 1977 it was fitted out to adorn the front of the (very tacky) Sabin Convention Center. In 2006 a renovation transformed that unremarkable building into the Duke Energy Center. Writing in 2011, The Cincinnati Enquirer (Jim Rohrer) remarked that the theater’s arch seemed  "plastered on a modern building of no apparent style...." He wondered if this was “... any way to treat a grand old lady?"  

Few passersby notice the arch, or know what wonders once lay beyond it.  So it goes with the old palaces, the ones that remain, through accident or the prudence of local activists — or — as with the St. George — great financial risk of a single individual. 

The less-fortunate theaters are remembered by grown-up (and grown old) children who remember seeing From Here to Eternity or Olivier’s Henry the Fifth (as my sister recalls), or even Three Coins in a Fountain (that would be me) under an elaborate and sheltering dome.

Afterthoughts:

1. This blog post is, for the most part, a revised re-issue; I seem compelled to present it each time I fly to Cincinnati, which I did last week. The Albee is of course, gone, as are all the original downtown palaces, and so many other theaters that defined my childhood, like the Ambassador on Oakley Square (these days a parking lot). The Mt. Lookout, where my sister sold tickets and popcorn,  survives now as a night club), while the high Deco Twentieth Century, with its vertical pink neon,  has morphed into a reception hall.  Just outside the city limits, in Mariemont, a town entirely styled in English Tudor, the Mariemont Theatre offers five screens  (up from the one I watched Yellow Submarine on, in 1968); the current ownership may have altered its integrity, but hey, it’s still showing movies.
2. In so many cities and towns across the U.S. in the sixties, seventies and eighties, including (perhaps especially) New York City, real estate greed and short-sightedness greatly reduced the number of surviving palaces. Think about the Roxy, on fiftieth street, so magnificent it warranted a line from Cole Porter: “You're romance/You're the steppes of Russia,/You're the pants,/ on a Roxy usher,” But those pants and its lavish 6,214 seats didn’t save the Roxy in 1960. To quote its Cinema Treasures entry, “Despite numerous protests, it was razed in the summer of 1960... In its place sits a nondescript and unremarkable office building. The neighboring Taft Hotel survives to this day (now the Michelangelo Hotel) and is the only evidence that this epic structure was ever here. A TGI Friday’s restaurant and a KFC...now occupy the theatre’s original entrance.” 

"Thanks for calling the St. George Theatre, at 35 Hyatt Street in beautiful downtown St. George, just a block and a half from the boats in lower, lower Manhattan." 
 
St. George is actually in Staten Island, near the ferry docks, about six miles south of Manhattan; but humor can be a balm when you’re going broke running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre — and who knew? Maybe someone, anyone, would venture out on the ferry, discover us and want to book a few live acts on our empty stage, or at least buy a ticket. 
 
Long before voicemail, our outgoing recorded message resided in a fifteen-pound box with a narrow slot that took an eight-track tape. This technological marvel cost nine hundred dollars — a small fortune — and it was entirely necessary. We had to get the word out any way we could. It was unusual enough to have an answering machine in 1976. Jim Rockford, the fictional TV detective had one. The fancy new Fox Plaza Twin, a rival theater, had one too, possibly the only other answering machine in all of Staten Island. 
 
“What’s showing?” It was possible for a patron to walk under a lighted marquee into a lobby filled with posters and ask that question. It was also possible for a patron to call our cutting-edge message system, years before Fandango and decades before the Internet.  
 
People called, often with no intention of coming to a movie, just to listen. My husband, Dean, a natural entertainer, kept this invisible audience listening, with his own mini podcast. 
 
He often enlisted another member of the staff  to play foil; lowering his voice to a guttural version of Linda Blair’s character in The Exorcist, he began with his usual patter, after which the foil asked, “Who the devil are you?” 
 
 “I am The Devil, this week on screen starring in The Exorcist, though I’m miffed that I have no on-screen credit whatsoever...” Dean replied. 
 
“Well,” the foil asked “when can I catch your act?” 
 
Showtimes for the day followed, including, “our low, low prices,” and a tip that the Devil would be haunting our snack stand throughout the film.
 
Our bored staff often spent hours huddled over the machine’s mic when Dean wasn’t around, performing vignettes. A discussion of where the Devil slept in the theater, or some other piece of trivia, might ensue.  
 
When it came to movie promotion, it was hard to get the word out. Our only regular vehicle for advertising, The Staten Island Advance, frequently got show times wrong, if not the feature itself. The previous tenant at the St. George had gone out of business owing the paper more than a thousand dollars, so nobody at the local rag loved us.   
 
The New York Times was no help at all — they required a listing two weeks in advance to make “The Movie Time Clock,” but we seldom knew, till the last minute what (if any) flicks Warner, UA  and their cronies might grant us. 
 
“The ad says you’re showing The Exorcist, but the Time Clock, says it’s The Omen,” a caller complained one Saturday. We were lucky if we knew, by Wednesday morning, what the film canisters would contain when they rolled in.
 
Sometimes I try to imagine how the me of now would tell that young woman — me then — about a world where everything happens in the palm of your hand and the nine-hundred-dollar answering machine is history, along with land-lines and perhaps newspapers, let alone movie time clocks.  The New York Times, whose actual pages I still occasionally smudge my hands reading, retired the Time Clock some time ago, but the paper still runs a much-reduced column of theater strip ads for perhaps three theaters, all that’s left of what once was a full page. Theaters themselves struggle to occupy space, in a fast-disappearing world.
 
As for the Devil, as far as I know, he’s still sleeping dead center, in the fifteenth row...