In the 1930‘s, when the movies were where you went all afternoon — or evening — double features were the order of the day. They lasted well into the 1970’s and play on still in drive-ins. For a long time, I thrilled to bizarre combinations glimpsed on marquees, including, on a trip home to Cincinnati where I grew up, on the marquee of the Royale, Cincinnati’s only porn house: BOX LUNCH followed by THAR SHE BLOWS.

That same week, back home in Staten Island, at the movie palace I was involved in helping to run, our marquee offering might have passed for at least half a porn double feature: Texas Chainsaw Massacre plus Torso. The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace, was on the “buck fifty” circuit in the year we ran it, which more than often guaranteed the movie patron two movies for one “low low” price. Among a number of double features, we ran:
The Devil Within Her and Embryo  (I love this combo)
The Man Who Would Be King chased by the B movie Cops and Robbers
At the Earth’s Core and (if you can dig it) The Land That Time Forgot

But my personal favorite, almost a found poem, was The Giant Spider Invasion paired symbiotically with The Legend of Bigfoot. This last always conjures for me a gargantuan foot grinding into dust a colossal spider.

There is (or used to be) a fine art to creating double features. It’s a great marketing concept — “buy one, get one free” — that probably saved the nascent movie business of the 1920’s during that plunge from the cliff of financial ruin we call The Great Depression. There’s a myth that the entertainment business prospered after Wall Street crashed in 1929, but it just ain’t so. Do the math: national income in 1929 was 85 billion, but by 1932, it was 41 billion. Eighty-five thousand businesses failed, and some of them, you can be sure, were movie theaters, whose owners watched admission sales fall 27 percent by 1932.  

By that time, some theater operators were actually taking items in barter, even food, in exchange for tickets. That’s no way to run a business, so what to do? Raffles? Sure. Dish Night? Definitely. But the most reliable hedge against massive box office losses was, it turned out, the B movie, made quickly at minimal expense. Episodic movies in a series — like The Thin Man  for instance — could be paired with the more costly A feature. Who could resist Myrna Loy and Asta? Often a B was just plain lesser, as with The Rawhide Terror, paired with John Wayne in West of the Divide. Which is not to say a big name actor was never in a B flick. Wayne also starred in the B pic, Ride Him, Cowboy (1932, Warner Brothers) and The Man From Monterey (1933, also WB).

In our brief time at the St. George, John Wayne briefly graced our large soda-stained screen in the company of the notable Katherine Hepburn,  both starring in Rooster Coburn, part of a double feature with the lamentable Gable and Lombard (Jill Clayburgh  and James Brolin). Rooster was the second-to-last movie Wayne would make. As for Gable and Lombard, which Roger Ebert called a “mushy, old-fashioned extraavaganza,” what was our agent thinking? Couple movies? Two more disparate couples there never were. Rooster ought to have qualified as the A picture, but by 1976 our inner-city urban audience wanted nothing to do with romance of any kind--not even Rocky — let alone a Western or bad evocation of  thirties Hollywood.

Double features were in their twilight phase by then, except at drive-ins and on the “buck fifty”  movie house circuit which was all an aging movie palace could hope to qualify for. Everything was second– or third–run. 

We rented one A pic for a percentage of the gate and one B for fifty dollars flat. (Once we tried to book two Bs from two separate distributors — which would have allowed us to rely on candy sales for a living — but Warner and UA checked with each other and squashed our effort).

For a six-hour projection shift, we usually scheduled three films: A B A (the A picture twice, the B feature once), although it was tough sometimes determining which movie we ought to consider our A, since everything was basically shop-worn. We opened with Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and Woody Allen’s Bananas— a good pairing — with Bananas clearly the B in every sense, by virtue of its greater age (already six years old). Looking back without the benefit of my check ledger, I find it difficult to tell in some cases which movie we only paid a flat fifty for; which shows just how short of product the industry really was.

Here’s one pairing where the A pic is obvious. How could we have run the great Dog Day Afternoon with the deplorable (Borgnine/Carroll) Law and Disorder? Some marriages were never meant to be.

Afterthought 1: 
Before the Pandemic, the Urban Dictionary chose to define a “double feature” thus:
The act of seeing two movies for the price of one at a public movie theater. You watch the first movie, take special notice of when the next movie will start, hang out in the restroom until the appropriate start time, and then mosey on over to the correct theater. It causes undue stress for only saving 10 bucks, but it can make an afternoon fly by. 

Afterthought 2: 
Towering Inferno and Earthquake comprised what we called our “Shake and Bake” special, back in 1976.

There are many shades of meaning for the word “occupy...” 
 
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 U.S., but commandeering a movie house feels just about right to me at this moment, so let’s play on. 
 
In April, 1976, we — by which I mean myself and 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 pulled off are worth noting, along with some odd similarities.
 
Founders of the Movement for the Occupation of Cinemas had, of course, no rights in the place, but they had no obligations either. After crawling down that duct system, they commenced to show, on average, three films a day, having repaired one projector and brought in another, and, despite a leaky ceiling, at least as of March 2015, they were selling plenty of tickets and lots of popcorn. As of 2020, they were still going strong. 
 
“As a kid I came here and watched movies,” said 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 winter, in the Star’s auditorium, another little nip of déja 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 St. George Theatre, 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 claimed to be.
 
Afterthought:
Who knows, given what’s happening in Ukraine, and Serbia’s disappointing response to Russia’s actions, whether the Star Cinema survives? If it does, I hope it’s screening Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin!

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. Paradoxically, it was 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? 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, whether you told anybody or not.
 
Afterthought:
For a novel approach to taking kids to classic grown-up movies, check this out…

I’m thinking this morning about Jonas Mekas, a man I never met but admired all my adult life. As Eastern Europe, which he hailed from (Lithuania, to be precise), shudders at the advance of Russian troops, anyone who knows anything about WWII can’t help thinking this is a re-run. Hitler wanted “lebensraum” (living space), so he took the Sudetenland, then Austria and Poland, then, well you know, he kept going. Mekas and his brother, Adolfus, left their native Lithuania in 1944, ending up in a forced labor camp until the war’s end. 

Roughly a year later, like so many hopeful refugees, they sailed past the green lady in New York Harbor and settled into their lives, as poets and filmmakers. in the artistic ferment of post-war New York City. Beyond his own film making career, Jonas went on to found the one-of-a-kind library of avant-garde film, Anthology Film Archives, still thriving to this day. He lived to the age of 96, dying at home in Brooklyn In 2019. 

The “Godfather of Avante Garde Film,” as he was sometimes called, was an admired, even revered, figure, a filmmaker who, in 2007, aged 85, produced one film a day, for his 365 Day Project, still available on his site. 

What, I wonder, would Mekas think, as the Russians roll west? His native Lithuania is, this time, a safe harbor refugees are fleeing to, just as he and his brother fled from there to escape the Nazis. 

History, I believe, is made of refugees. Empires have been overwhelmed by them (think Rome), and whole countries  (the USA comes first to mind) have been founded by the dispossessed. Who knows who the first refugees in human history  might have been—the Neanderthals? At any rate, large populations have been getting up and moving on since hominids walked on two feet. 

In European history, the first “refugees”—the term was coined to describe just these people—were the French (Protestant) Huguenots fleeing to England in roughly 1670. Ironically, only a little earlier (1620), the “pilgrims” who founded the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, fled England for exactly the same reason. 

Seeking refuge can be a great way to begin a new life. Safely in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jonas and his brother went on to produce films, write poems and, finally, offer a kind of “refuge” to the works of talented, if obscure, film artists, who made films largely unrecognized by Hollywood or the general public. 

Though I never personally met Jonas, I knew him indirectly through two sources. A long-ago mentor, Hollis Frampton, whose films are in the archive Jonas founded, sang his praises to me, worrying only that Jonas wasn’t pursuing his own work enough. That was back in 1973, the same year my husband found himself working for John and Yoko, who had founded a short-lived film company then called Joko. 

Dean went to lunch at the Chelsea Hotel’s El Quijote with a party of people from Joko that  included Jonas. There were some fairly big egos at that film company, but Mekas, in his quiet way, was having none of it. The impossibly clichéd topic of “best movie ever” came up towards the end of that lunch. Hoping to curry favor with J&Y and Jonas, one puffed-up self-proclaimed filmmaker said he thought that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, at that time newly released under the Beatles’ Apple logo, was perhaps the best movie of all time. A small hush fell over the table as all eyes turned to Mekas, “Well, well…Should we not consider…some of the works of, say, John Huston? Or, perhaps, Fellini?” There was nothing left to do but call for the check.

Afterthought:

This blog is, as always, dedicated to The St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace, which I helped in running, along with my husband, Dean, and a small crew of hard-working folks, in 1976.  For more about that adventure, search our archive...

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, 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, which leads me to the real impetus of this post, one painter’s fascination with movie theaters.

This connection is easy to make: Hopper’s style is unmistakably cinematic in its use of light, which 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 movie 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) 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 featured New York Movie (1939, MOMA), in a recent post. The theater in this painting has been identified variously as: the Strand, the Globe, or the Republican; but it’s 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.

Afterthoughts: 
1. 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. 

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.