A narrow, often elevated walkway, as on the sides of a bridge or in the fly loft or dome above a theater.
 
Outside the projection booth, six stories above the stage of the St. George Theatre, a Staten Island movie palace I helped run in 1976, was a world of iron lace, the skeleton of the dome. The catwalk. Yes, it was possible to walk — or, catlike, to crawl — inside the dome, a feat I never attempted. One of my colleagues did, managing to unscrew all the dead lightbulbs in sockets around the lip of the dome, some of which might well have dated to World War II. Bulbing the recesses of the dome, was a perilous activity. The dome leaked on rainy days; who knew if the ancient iron walkway would hold? 

Access to the catwalk was possible via a door at the back of the projection booth. Opening that door revealed something which, at first, seemed unlikely: a graveyard of old televisions. DuMont Philco, Motorola, Muntz, RCA, Admiral, Zenith, were  piled on the ironwork all around. Some probably dated back to the late 1940’s, the infancy of television.

TV was the movie theater operator’s adversary, our entertainment enemy. On the catwalk of a failing movie palace, these discarded televisions, seemed like the other side’s dead soldiers, remnants of a fierce battle. What were they really doing there?

The answer lies in the ennui that confounded the art of movie projection. In our digital age, the job more often than not involves computers and drives, making it possible for theater operators to dispense entirely with the services of a projectionist. But In 1976, in New York and other major cities, projectionists ruled. They couldn’t (easily) be fired; their jobs were shielded by an iron-clad union contract that guaranteed more money ($13.75 an hour) than we poor theater managers could ever expect to see if, by some accident, we suddenly began to break even. His hourly rate, BTW would be  approximately $58.00 by today’s standards.

Local 306 took care of its own — but the job was pretty boring. Most of the work came in the first half hour:  spooling the film onto the take-up reels of both projectors, cleaning and trimming the carbons, waiting for a well-publicized showtime, hitting the switch on the first projector. Assuming no broken film, no mechanical malfunction, there was nothing much to do after that until the first projector’s reel had exhausted itself, at changeover time. Changeovers required some finesse — or at least competence — and careful attention. You had to line up certain cue-marks on reel one that roughly corresponded to marks on reel two, loaded and ready in the second projector. After the first changeover, and the reloading of projector one with the third reel, there was very little, if anything to do again for about twenty minutes. If you happened to have a small (contraband) TV, time might pass a little faster.

A clause in the projectionist’s contract clearly stated “No television or radio in the booth.” In addition to making the projectionist more likely to miss a changeover (resulting in a blank screen and audience ire), Hee-Haw can actually upstage a movie. 

The second week we were open, our announced double feature was Smile and The Sunshine Boys--showtimes listed in the papers. But folks who attended the six o’clock screening were treated on several occasions to a triple or quadruple feature, the audio from McHale’s Navy or Gilligan’s Island which Gabe happened to be watching in the booth — filtering through the movie’s soundtrack. These discrepancies were less obvious later in the evening, but at six the house was often nearly empty, and sound traveled. Long past his prime and just coasting until retirement, our grizzled projectionist hardly cared.

How many of those TVs on the catwalk were his — and how many the cast-offs of projectionists long gone? The researcher I am today would pay some attention to their relative ages. Why dispose of them on the catwalk?  Better to toss them into the theater’s voluminous attic than risk carrying them out the front door.

I only ventured onto the beginning of the catwalk one or two times. It was a dream space in iron, like the habitat of an aerialist. These days, whenever I’m under a dome, I wonder if it has a catwalk. One of my favorites, Grand Central Terminal has one I’m told. From all appearances it’s a lot more solid than the one I remember at the St. George — bet there are no TVs.

tWhat do the Paper Bag Players, Chaka Khan, the Trammps, Sly Stone, a long-forgotten classical Spanish guitar player, Blossom Seeley, various members of the Metropolitan Opera, Tony Bennett, Garrison Keillor, Pink Martini, and K.D. Laing have in common? At one time or another, they all stood beneath the soaring gold-leaf proscenium arch of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat theater and former movie palace in Staten Island.

The arch is six stories tall. In our day — 1976, when I had a hand in running it as a movie palace, the arch framed a red and gold brocade house curtain suspended from iron piping, counterweighted by several tons of weights,  finished off at the bottom with gold tassels four and a half feet tall.

"Entrance of a tent," from Latin proscaenium, from Greek proskenion: pro "in front" + skene "stage, tent, booth" (think “scene”). 

Some tent flap! Back when theaters were more primitive affairs, out in the open, like an amphitheater, or even a traveling sideshow, the proscenium may have housed little more than a tent or a piece of fabric. 

First there was an age of great theaters--the 19th Century--Opera, the arrival of stagecraft — and then the Twentieth, when silent movies gave the proscenium something virtual to frame. Theaters suddenly had two functions, one live — the actors, song-and-dance teams, juggling, magic, mime, dog-and -pony shows of Vaudeville — and that other drama, the one that required an organ playing in the background, the waking dream of cinema.

The proscenium arch was the gilded icing on that cake, as a description of the Canton Palace Theatre in Canton Ohio would seem to indicate: the theatre includes an ornate columned proscenium arch over its stage, an elaborate fly system for the numerous stage curtains and theatrical backdrops, eleven dressing rooms, a chorus room, a musician's lounge, a music room, one shower room, and an orchestra pit with seating for eighteen musicians. Moreover, at 21' x 46', the Palace's silver screen remains the largest movie screen in Canton. The original — and still functioning — lighting system, designed by Peter Clark, takes viewers from sunrise to sunset in the courtyard setting.

Anything as elaborate as all that required an over-the-top frame.

I feel enormously privileged to have grown up when movies were events that still had about them some hint of the theatrical. In the 1950‘s even the smaller theaters had a platform over which the screen hovered, and an arch of some kind to contain the experience of seeing a movie.  

By the time I came along, the proscenium and stage had become an ironic comment on what had once been. Still, in the bigger theaters, it could occasionally be useful, as when Blackstone the Magician came to town and hypnotized a volunteer (my father) from a packed house at the RKO Albee in downtown Cincinnati. And when a movie was showing — Ben Hur comes to mind — the rusty shadows of the film played on gilded plaster, picking up highlights in the dome and lending a kind of drama to the overblown Louis XIV architecture.

A tiny golden Venus inhabits the center of the St. George Theatre’s proscenium arch to this day, keeping watch for almost ninety years — since Blossom Seeley, “last of the red-hot mamas” — belted out her first song in 1929. Venus is surrounded by a confection of gilded sea-shells, as if she’d just risen from New York Harbor, a few paces down the hill. 

The box office was glam. At the St. George Theatre, the 2672-seat palace I helped keep afloat for one glorious and often catastrophic year, there were two box office windows, but in our time only one had a (formerly illuminated) sign — TICKETS — or a noticeable groove in the marble floor in front of this window, where decades of patrons had paused, paid, and pivoted on their way to see a movie. But whoever sat there was carrying a piece of the theater on their shoulders. He or she represented — no, embodied — the theater itself. Perched on an iron stool in front of a machine with black and cherry-red buttons embedded in a steel plate, Brenda (hoop earrings, chewing gum) or Diane (afro, big round eyes) — or a member of management filling in — made the judgement call about who was really entitled to a child’s ticket (“Quick — what year were you born?”), or spotted the guy who had carefully waited — until patrons from the last showing were walking out — for that moment to walk in backwards; lots of stuff happened that the box office staffer had to keep on top of. 

We were privileged, given the toughness of the local streets in 1976, to have interior box office windows at the St. George. Many theaters were built with external brass or chrome booths fronting on sidewalk. Such was the case at the Mt. Lookout Theatre in Cincinnati where I grew up. My sister had a job there when she was around sixteen, selling tickets in the glass booth. I was seven, privileged to a free ticket on Saturdays and all the popcorn I could consume. But when I wasn’t watching Earth Versus the Flying Saucers my favorite pastime those Saturdays was hanging out with my sexy almost-grown-up sister Cris (hair so short she looked like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina) at the chrome booth, which she occupied with the sophistication of a sybil — or a fortune-teller.

Mother didn’t approve of Cris’s theater job, partly because, gorgeous as my sister was, her study habits were abysmal. Our mother also thought the theater a little seedy; but had she known! Years after Mother died, Cris confessed to me that on New Year’s Eve the year she worked at the Mt. Lookout, she’d been sitting in the glass booth when a car careened suddenly around the corner on two wheels spitting out a single bullet, which penetrated the glass just above her head. What a glamorous corpse she might have made...

I thought of this episode later at the St. George in those crazy mid-seventies, and  took heart that our ticket sellers were reasonably safe inside a recessed lobby.

​For an example of a beautifully preserved movie palace with a ticket booth perilously close to the street, check out tampatheatre.com There are scads of other theaters that boast this feature, most of them presumably, as a British cabbie once said, "safe as houses."

April 9th falls on Saturday this year, but forty years ago, in 1976, it was a Friday, the day we opened our movie palace. The 2672-seat St. George Theatre was ours, we’d rented it, a gilded slice of “Spanish Baroque” extravagance within sight and sound of New York Harbor in Staten Island. Blazing Saddles — almost new — was the main feature, doubled with Woody Allen’s already ancient comedy, Bananas. Every other movie we would show from that point on would open on a Wednesday — matinee day — that’s how the movie week typically began. But Friday was the best we could do for our first show:  it had taken us so long just to get the cobwebs out, the wall sconces bulbed, the carpets more or less scrubbed clean of the last proprietor’s soda syrup, to stock the booth with carbons for our (even then) antique carbon-arc projectors.

The Magic Cave
What did it take to get a theater, especially that kind of theater, operational in under ten days? Every moment after we handed our first check to the landlord had a dollar sign attached to it: and showing movies was the only immediate way to recoup our considerable investment. The six of us who styled ourselves managers practically slept at the theater that week.The coffee machine hadn’t been installed yet, but it didn’t matter, we were running on adrenaline, hope, and pizza. 

The previous tenant had left in the dead of night, taking with him everything you’d need to start up a theater: tickets to fit the AutomaTicket machine in the box office, cleaning supplies, carbons, even light bulbs. It goes without saying that there were no food supplies, with the exception of some dirty popcorn cups we’d found in the closet of the concession stand. 

Ever clean a movie palace? It took a small crew of us all Tuesday night to relieve the burgeoning mouse population of the spilled popcorn and other edibles our predecessors had left behind.  As luck would have it — or maybe it was no coincidence at all — a traveling light-bulb salesman showed up on Wednesday afternoon to dazzle us with his display case full of incandescents. SATCO. I remember the name clearly: I wrote the installment-plan checks for some time. 
 
That same day three of us loaded a Volvo wagon to the roof with $181 worth of popcorn, oil, butter sauce, Good n Plenties, Reese Cups, Charleston Chews, Snickers, and the like. Then we stopped off at International Meat Market where Joe, our friend the butcher, sold us at no mark up a case of Sabrett’s ball-park hotdogs and gave us the name and number of a small Italian bakery. Thereafter, every morning, whoever opened the theater’s red and gold doors would find inside a tall grocery bag filled with mini-Italian breads, each one slit down the side, ready to receive its hotdog. 

A proper concession stand ought to have its own soda-head, and a friend had a friend who knew a restaurant plumber. On Thursday he ran a line from the drinking fountain to the candy stand, no charge, as long as we bought the requisite canisters of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and Orange syrup from his brother-in-law for the rest of the year.

Gabe, the projectionist local 306 had assigned to the St. George, showed up on Thursday afternoon expecting two days back pay. The contract specified 7 days, including a Wednesday matinee, whether we were dark or on screen. Matinees would always lose money, but we’d always run them, since we had to pay a projection shift anyhow. Gabe was more or less a permanent fixture in the booth, having worked the St. George almost as long as I had been alive.

By Friday, opening day, the tickets we’d ordered still hadn’t arrived, but in a room off the mezzanine, we found a few old rolls and loaded the steel-plate ticket machine with them, red for ADULT, green for CHILD.

I was worried about money:  just ten days before we’d had $15,000 in the bank, and now we were down to $2000, enough to buy a car, but not enough to run a movie palace for much longer than a week.

5:45 PM, almost time to open. Our first customer, a tall woman in an Indian print skirt showed up, paid a buck fifty and presented her ticket to the usher, who tore it and handed her back the other half. At the concession stand she asked for a box of Good n’ Plenties and a small popcorn. It came to $1.15, and she laid two one dollar bills on the counter. side by side. I gave her back the eighty-five cents, and she disappeared into the darkness beyond the glass and mahogany that separated the lobby from the inner sanctum of the theater itself. I smoothed out her two bills in the wooden tray. Should we frame these? I wondered.  We’d been open for a minute and a half, and taken in two dollars and sixty-five cents, including her ticket and edibles. It was a lemonade-stand moment.

Five minutes passed. Dean, my partner and husband, asked me to hand him the newly-installed concession-stand phone.  “Are we on time?” he asked Gabe in the booth.  

“Rollin’ at six, kid.”

Dean had intended to make a speech from the stage to the small group of people who’d, by this time, settled into their seats, but it was too late, it was almost showtime. The lights went down, our dusty curtain rose, a scratchy "Coming Soon" bloomed on screen, followed by a couple of trailers. A speech might have puzzled the audience, or even annoyed them: it was a bigger moment for us than it was for them, who only wanted to see Blazing Saddles and eat whatever they’d bought, sitting in our  extravagant dark. 
 
Note:  April 9, 2016 commences the fortieth anniversary of our year as operators of the St. George Theatre. I hope, from time to time, to revisit what we were showing on various dates throughout the year.