Ever wonder why showoffs are said to “upstage” their rivals?  (You knew it was a theatrical term). Well, in that magical space beneath the proscenium arch of a theater, there was once (and is still occasionally) a literal “upstage” and a “downstage.” The platform, in other words, was --and every once in a while still is--tilted. Since 1900, the rake — or slant — of modern theaters has been, for the most part, transferred to the audience: the seats at the back of the orchestra are set at higher (graduated) levels than the ones near the pit. But in some existing older theaters (The Broadway Theatre, the Gershwin) the stage is actually tilted — raked — so that actors in the back part of the platform stand at a higher level than ones in front. The actor who gains the higher ground at the back is more visible, capable of upstaging less–visible thespians. At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace which I helped to run as both a live and a movie house in 1976, the orchestra seats were raked, or tilted, and the stage was perfectly flat, a more typical modern situation. And a good thing too, because it’s hard for performers to work on an uneven stage surface. As one chorus member recently noted, “...at first it is extremely odd. You always feel as if you are going to fall straight into the audience. It absolutely takes some getting used to....” 

Sly Stone, was in an extremely altered state of consciousness when, on Friday October 3, 1976, he finally appeared on the stage in our benighted movie palace. He was a walking pharmacy that night, having required some coaxing to get him down from the dark warren of backstage dressing rooms. If the stage had been raked, he might well have fallen plumb into our aromatic orchestra pit (where certain drunken patrons had a habit of pissing when not observed).

The St. George had been built with a classically-raked orchestra section aided by unobscured sight-lines, thanks to its cantilevered balcony, so a flat stage was all it required. However, some time in the late seventies or early eighties a misguided building owner poured a great deal of concrete into the orchestra floor, in effect flattening it for a roller rink that was never to be, and eliminating the viewing angle in that Eugene Derosa–built palace. Ever sat on a flat floor and tried to see to the back of a flat stage? The current  SGT ownership has dealt heroically with the erased orchestra rake by erecting small platform elevations (mini–bleachers) throughout the ground floor; but it ain’t the same. Sound seems to get trapped under the balcony overhang, for one thing. This audience member always heads for the never-altered balcony at the St. George, where acoustics are pristine.

Another solution might be to set the stage at a rake. But then you’d have to deal with all those actor–and–dancer complaints.  Mandy Gonzalez who played Elphaba in Wicked, at the Gershwin from January, 2010, to March, 2011, remarked, “You have to be ready, not only to sing an incredible score, but to do it in a dress that weighs 15 lbs., on a raked stage, running up and down stairs, carrying a heavy broom, going through trap doors, and flying!!” Carole Shelley, who played Madame Morrible in Wicked, left the show because her back just wouldn’t take it. In The Actor and the Alexander Technique, Kelly McEvenue, an Alexander instructor, notes, “...I have dealt with many complaints from actors coping with the effects of a raked stage.  Most actors counterbalance the rake by leaning back...they tend to lock the knees....” (p. 142).

Rumors of actors taking curtain calls that ended with them on their heads are not uncommon, and backing offstage is definitely not recommended. Before Bette Midler (“The Showgirl Must Go On”)  replaced Celine Dion at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas several years ago, Dion advised her to “have them fix the stage,” by which Dion was referring to a steeply-raked affair, designed to enhance the view from the balcony. A new stage was built and delivered. The showgirl will only go on so long as she’s able to stand (how, otherwise, can she dance?). 

Until recently I thought the only kind of rake was in the angle of ground-floor theater seats. Oh yeah, I’ve been to the Metropolitan Opera, seen the diva sing her way up a series of treacherous tectonic plates, but in most theaters it never occurred to me that actors on what looks like level ground might actually be running uphill! Isn’t it a little bit like our misguided use of the words “sunrise” and “sunset?” The sun doesn’t actually move — we do! People on stage are walking, singing, dancing on a flat surface — or are they?

I stood a couple of times downstage at the St. George, to make an announcement about broken film or some other irritating movie interruption. I’m glad it was on the level. And equally glad that Chaka Khan, Buzzy Linhardt, The Brooklyn Bridge, The Paper Bag Players, Mrs Rosemary’s children’s dance troupe, an Evangelical revival replete with thrown-down crutches, Curtis High School at graduation time, and Sly Stone, all had firm ground to stand on. The world’s a stage, isn’t it?

What do the movies Animal Crackers, Blazing Saddles, Deadpool,  Annie Hall, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, and Space Balls  have in common? No, we didn’t run them at the St. George Theatre in 1976 (for those who have come to realize that this blog’s true north, metaphorically speaking is that theater which I helped to run in that year). The common thread that binds these films is the flaunting of a broadly–accepted rule. Their directors broke — at some point in each movie’s plot — clean through what has been called “the Fourth Wall.”  You may have heard of it, the invisible barrier separating  us, the watchers, from them, the actors/characters, who carry on blithely, as if we weren’t there. In traditional theater, it’s sometimes delineated by a theater’s proscenium arch. The wall is a little like the “willing suspension of disbelief” that makes it possible to read, say, a novel. (You’re not in your life anymore, but living somebody else’s). In film, that most dream–like of fictions, the moviegoer, as a long–ago teacher of mine once observed, “...sits in the dark, forgetting the rent, a toothache, even a lost love.” If this is so in the mere act of watching a movie, it is doubly so in a movie palace, like the St. George, where every on–screen character is two stories tall.  

To my knowledge, the only movie we showed at the St. George that flaunts the fourth wall is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. It achieved fourth–wall demolition many times, most notably in its ending, when the characters brawl their way out of their own set, spilling over into the set of a Busby Berkeley–style top hat movie, disrupting a cafeteria full of actors on break and ending up on the streets of Burbank. That the set’s wall is literally knocked over is half the fun.

Annie Hall came out late in 1977, after we’d left our temple of dreams, so I never had the privilege of watching it in the St. George’s cavernous dark, taking in Alvy’s (Woody Allen’s) confessions about Annie. Another movie I really wish I’d seen at the SGT, also a Woody Allen flick, The Purple Rose of Cairo, actually features a character coming clean through the movie screen in a fictional New Jersey theater, to have an affair with a movie–watcher. Is that a double breaching of the wall? The movie within the movie?  (See also last week’s post, “Location, Location,” for Purple Rose in another context).

If you stretch the definition of fourth–wall penetration just a little bit, you could say that, in the year we spent at the St. George, we woke the audience up from their collective dream a few times accidentally, when the sound head on a projector began “motor-boating” (The Exorcist) or when screams from behind the screen revealed pranks staff members were playing on one another (Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Could this qualify as performance art?

Assaults on and/or addresses to the audience have been going on a long time. Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought of the fourth wall as, more or less, a scrim, a flimsy one at that, with actors sitting in the laps of audience members, running the aisles, handing props to watchers and addressing the entire audience with an eye to advancing the plot. 

It is my lady. O, it is my love! (Romeo is telling us)
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?

(Juliet has no clue, we do.)
 
Fast forward to Matthew Broderick’s asides in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), so numerous they affect a kind of conspiracy between this truant teen and the audience. Fight Club is virtually narrated by the Edward Norton character. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan addresses us early and often, usually in a highly ironic tone: “Look, I know you’re not following what I’m saying anyway, right? That’s okay, that doesn’t matter. The real question is this — was all this legal? Absolutely fucking not. But we were making more money than we knew what to do with.” Without these confidences, I don’t think I could have stayed in my seat for the whole debauch.

You may have been almost grown–up when Hamlet or Ferris Bueller or some other character addressed you directly, but animated characters (Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes) had been talking to you all along. Bugs Bunny chaws on his carrot, twinkles at the metaphorical camera and confesses, “I’m a stinker.”  “It's wabbit season,” Elmer Fudd informs us, putting a gloved finger over his lips, “and I’m hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!”

I wish we’d run cartoons at the St. George, but they cost money, and we were always broke. There might have been some solace in watching Road Runner, whose forward momentum always got him over the cliff. Stylistically, we more resembled Wile E. Coyote, and you know what happens to him.

I’ll give the last word to Porky Pig, speaking directly to all of us:

“That’s all folks!” 

Afterthought:  There are many lists of fourth-wall breaking movies, but here’s the one that got me started. Check it out!

I was walking down to the ferry (in Staten Island, where I live) a few years ago, when I spied a bunch of star wagons, you know, the giant vans that, with their large black cables crossing the sidewalk and trailer–park steps up to small dressing rooms, signify that a movie or some kind of show is on location. The location in this case happened to be my once–and–future hometown movie palace, the St. George Theatre, which, as you probably know, I was involved in running back in 1976, all 2,672 seats of it.  These days, the SGT is dedicated almost entirely to live performances. But as a lovely red–and–gold temple to all things show–biz, it has served as a location for a couple of shows, most recently Spielberg’s  SMASH, a TV send-up of the rise of a fictional Broadway star. More distantly, parts of School of Rock, the Jack Black/Linklater indie from 2003, used the SGT as a location. I woke up this morning thinking about theaters as locations and settings. How many older halls have been saved — from becoming warehouses or parking lots — by their very theater–ness? Who knows but what School of Rock may have kept the St. George going just long enough to keep it from being torn down? Like the newly–restored (Loew’s) Kings on Flatbush in the neighboring NYC  borough of Brooklyn, the St. George was dark, more or less, for about thirty years.

One of the most obvious alternate uses of a closed-down theater is as the location for a movie or show, but in most communities, star wagons aren’t all that common. As you might expect, L.A. is a glowing exception (and I mean “glowing” literally. If you don’t believe me, check out the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation). The Los Angeles Theatre, an S. Charles Lee French Baroque wonder with a six–storey gilded lobby, has appeared in a number of movies. That lobby was, for example, tricked out to pass as a casino in the Justin Timberlake/Amanda Seyfried 2011 sci-fi title, In Time. In Location Filming in Los Angeles, Harry Medved notes, “These downtown L.A. theaters...can double as live theaters, nightclubs, casinos, hotel lobbies or music halls...” The fact that they’re not active movie houses anymore actually makes them highly desirable. In The Big Lebowski, the “Fountain Theatre” where the Dude’s landlord performs is actually the Palace on South Broadway. Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore)’s loft is located above that downtown theater.

But what about movies whose plots actually involve theaters, many of which were shot on location in theaters?  In what theater was The Purple Rose of Cairo filmed?  The movie takes place in New Jersey in the 1930’s, involving a character who is fond of losing herself at the movies and a leading man who literally comes through the screen to fall in love with her (subject, BTW, of an upcoming blog post I’m planning on the concept of “the fourth wall” separating actor from audience). A Brooklynite, Woody Allen chose one of his favorite boyhood movie houses, an unpretentious place still in operation as a cinema, the Kent, on Coney Island Avenue in Midwood. Allen recalls, “You could be watching the most delicate love scene, the most poignant moments, and you’d hear the freight trains go by.... The whole theater would rumble. But I didn’t mind it.” Atmosphere.

How about The Last Picture Show (1971)? Archer City, Texas  is author Larry McMurtry’s hometown. After traveling all over Texas, the director, Peter Bogdanovich, and McMurtry settled on, no surprise, what was left of The Royal Theater in Archer, carefully reconstructing its facade. Here’s the process, in the director’s own words, “...The ticket booth and the general entranceway were still there, but we had to fix them up so that they looked functional. The actual theater, the interior, was a burned-out shell.... For the sequences inside the movie theater, we took the company to another town called Olney, which still had a functioning little movie house.” (Silent Screens: the Decline and Transformation of the American Movie Theater, 2000, Michael Putnam).

Buster Keaton made, arguably, the first movie set in a theater, The Play House, a silent short about a stagehand with big dreams. It’s a treasure, starring Keaton in multiple roles, but I have failed to identify any actual theater used as a location. Perhaps we can simply credit the theater of Keaton’s fertile imagination!

Ever watch Footlight Parade? It’s a drama based on the life of a showman responsible for booking “prologues” (live shows) for movie theaters in the early thirties. In this pre-code Busby Berkeley/Lloyd Bacon fantasy, a troupe of tireless dancers is bussed from movie palace to movie palace, with minutes to spare, changing costumes in the bus as they go. All of those theater marquees were built on the back lot, and the giveaway is that there are no actual film titles on those marquees. Oh well!

Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, my favorite of all movie theater movies, was filmed in his native northern Sicily. The setting for the village square itself was Piazzo Umberto I in Palazzo Adriano, which is apparently little changed since 1988. For obvious reasons having to do with the plot, the cinema itself was a set constructed purely for the film and dismantled afterwards. Amazingly this multiple (13, including an Oscar and a Golden Globe) award-winner was at first a box office flop.

There are other movies that showcase theaters. I am a fan of the indie The Projectionist, to give one example. I just found this description of its composite theater interiors: “The film's main setting, a once-lush Times Square movie house, was composited with the façade of an Upper West Side cinema and the projection booth of an Asbury Park theater donated by the Walter Reade Organization in return for the courtesy of a first look. (An early scene in the cinema interior was filmed in the screening room of a midtown film laboratory.)”

My long-time friend, Robert Endres, who featured prominently in last week’s blogpost, was for many years the Head Projectionist at Radio City Music Hall. I made his acquaintance in 1976, when he strode into the lobby of the St. George Theatre and asked me, through the bars of the box office, if I knew the manager. That was the beginning of a great friendship, but I digress. Bob apparently has a Beta copy of Rockette, (a television special from the seventies starring Ann-Margret , Beverly Sills, Ben Vereen, Gregory Peck and others) that was filmed largely at Radio City. If we can find a working Beta deck, he says we can borrow it. And so, the show goes on.

My mother grew up with the movies. Born in 1908, she spent some of the earliest days of her childhood in Toledo, Ohio, where, one summer, she was privileged to see silent flicks projected on a bed sheet hung on a brick wall, in a deserted lot. The audience sat on wooden benches and kept the mosquitoes at bay with sticks of what she called “punk.” Well did she recall the first movie palaces, including and especially the  the Albee in Cincinnati, where my grandparents finally set down roots. The Rivoli, in Toledo, apparently a splendid Deco confection, opened in 1920, after her family had left, but somehow she remembered it, perhaps from a visit there.

It’s a long way from bed sheet projection in a vacant lot to the original silver screens of the 1920’s. And another leap to the Cinemascope-era screens I grew up watching. By the time I took a hand in helping to run a movie palace, in 1976 — the St. George Theatre in Staten Island — screens had evolved beyond the wildest dreams of the earliest moviegoers. To get a sense of what the St. George’s screen was like, here’s a nip from an earlier Starts Wednesday blogpost, What’s Behind the Screen?:

It was a real kick to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. That’s because the screen, a huge piece of heavy white material stretched on a giant frame over thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, was perforated, with tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual silver embedded in their surfaces.  

Last week an interested reader posted a question based on his reading of that post, and an interesting conversation has ensued.  First, here’s the question:

Victoria: maybe you can help me answer a question. From behind the screen of a movie palace, to what extent might one also see the film image in reverse? I'm particularly interested in the pre-sound era, which I know predates you, but hoping you or a reader may know!   —Peter
 
As in the past, I’ve put Peter’s question to my friend and ultimate projection guru, Robert Endres. He’s an old friend, with whom my husband and I have reunited, thanks to a mutual dentist.  Bob served for many years as the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall. We met him originally when he strode into the lobby of the St. George Theatre — which we were struggling to keep afloat — and volunteered to take free projection shifts, unheard-of in those days. 

Here’s an excerpt from Bob’s reply:
In answer to your reader’s question about seeing the image in reverse from behind the screen: It depends on the screen material. If in the silent days the screen was basically a bed sheet, the image in reverse from behind would be quite visible. However as the technology progressed the screen could be a silver painted wall or material with a silver coating thus the term “silver screen”...carbon arc lamps weren’t really very bright in the early days and by having a highly reflective surface the image would appear brighter. The disadvantage to “high gain” silver screens was that the light was reflected back at the projector so if you were off to the side the screen would display a “hot spot”...the silver screen worked pretty well viewed from the front but probably didn’t transmit that much light through the “Picture sheet” itself. As the industry evolved at least some of the screens were translucent enough so you could see an image from the back. Several mega pictures carried an orchestra and even had a crew behind the screen to create sound effects for the show (I think one of those was “Birth Of A Nation”). To do that the performers had to be able to see the image from in back of the screen.

I am fascinated that a  sound-effects crew might have been situated behind various silent screens . Reminds me of certain hijinks that went on behind our screen.

If only we’d have thought of creating on-purpose special effects!

Bob’s full reply to Peter makes some fascinating reading; beginning with the comment on 3/31/17, see the comments column.

I’ll close by saying that going behind the St. George’s screen during a movie was an entirely magical experience: the wonder of watching people watch a movie (and knowing that they couldn’t see me), the shadows of the film itself playing on my arms, legs and face...it was as if I’d entered the movie myself, which, in a way, I had: like being Alice as she stepped through the Looking Glass. 
 
P.S.  Thanks again, Bob!