What do Logan’s Run, Mother Jugs and Speed, Taxi Driver, Silent Movie and In Search of Noah’s Ark have in common? They’re all movies, of course. The next obvious thing is that they all came out in 1976. But the third (obscure) thing they all have in common is they all played the St. George Theatre, the 2,672-seat movie-palace-on-the-skids I ran, along with some other well-intended idealists, in that very same year. Yes, I wrote the checks for deposits on those movies, as well as other movies that emerged that arguably brilliant film year (All The President’s Men, The Bad News Bears, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, The Omen, Carrie, and J.D.’s Revenge complete the list). Was 1976 really as notable a screen year as 1939? Madworld 1427 thinks so, and I agree. To quote that blogger, “Even the bad films were more interesting than most of the stuff put out today, and chances were taken...no mainstream movie today would be made...about Woody Guthrie (Bound for Glory) or a musical using kids as gangsters (Bugsy Malone)...All the President’s Men would...have ended up on cable.”

Cable....hmmmm. HBO was still a novelty in 1976. As a child I’d seen signs in the lobby of the Ambassador, a neighborhood theater, warning patrons that PAY TV WILL BE THE DEATH OF THE MOVIES! with clipboard petitions to sign, in hopes of keeping cable out of Cincinnati. Theater operators were certainly vulnerable, but, in reality, it was network television which pressured the FCC to regulate “distant television signals,” a freeze-effect that ended in 1972. Four years later, Brontosauruses like the St. George and other theaters on the “buck fifty” circuit, still offered second-, third- or fourth-run movies at reduced rates, though the whole antiquated system would be wiped out soon enough. All the President’s Men, as Madworld suggests, might have gone directly to cable in some other year. This year, as a matter of fact, The Post, a similar movie, could easily have opened on cable. But in 1976, the movies were still the movies, with first-run houses, drive-ins, and buck-fifties to service, and more screens than ever, thanks to burgeoning multiplexes. Every week, six or more film canisters arrived in our lobby, about a tenth of which contained movies that had actually premiered somewhat recently.

I am proud, if puzzled, to announce that arguably the worst movie we showed in 1976, badder even  than Gable and Lombard or The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, is nonetheless listed as one of the ten top-grossing films of that year: In Search of Noah’s Ark. Its release date is variously listed as December, 1976 and January 1977. but I can settle that dispute. It played on our screen from December 22, 1976 to January 5, 1977, thanks to a “four-wall” deal we brokered. In a four-wall, the exhibitor is paid in advance, an excellent thing in our case, because, by that time, we had no heat to offer our long-suffering patrons. The landlord had shut it off. We just sold hot popcorn and lots of coffee and apologized for the fact that you could see your breath in the auditorium.

Better than forty years later, I pity whoever was sitting in our frozen cave, watching a fake documentary purporting to argue that parts of Noah’s Ark had been found on Mt. Ararat. To quote “Unconvincing” from a review on IMDB, “I do not understand how so many people could have climbed the mountain with the sole purpose of finding the ark, and yet not one photograph or piece of video of the ark, exists...”  You were supposed to take it on faith, I guess. As a result of clever marketing, the Noah’s Ark movie grossed $55,730,000 nationwide that year, a respectable haul for Sunn-Schick Pictures out of Utah.

It’s interesting to observe that, from IMDB’s list of top-grossing movies from 1976, we actually ran four of the first ten, including the Noah’s Ark frolic (number 5 at the previously-mentioned $55.73 million),  All the President’s Men (number four at $70.60 million), The Bad News Bears (number eight, a doggie for us but obviously a money-pot nationwide at $42.35 million), and Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie (number nine, $36.15 million), another disappointing source of revenue for us, but a wonderful movie. The silence was awesome in our cavernous auditorium, much of it, alas, the fact that there were hardly any bodies in the seats. Number eleven, Carrie ($33.80 million), almost filled the first floor (our tough urban audience loved blood). Taxi Driver, one of my favorite movies of all time, did well for us, coming  in thirteenth on IMDB’s list, at $28.26 million.

If you think 1976 wasn’t a pivot year for movies, think again. At the 49th Academy Awards, Rocky, a film we never showed, dominated a field of, in my opinion, much better movies. It duked it out for and won “Best Picture,” against Taxi Driver, Network, All the President’s Men and Bound for Glory. With the exception of Bound for Glory, all were later chosen for preservation in the United States National Film Registry (Library of Congress) as “Culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

I’m happy to report that I watched All the President’s Men and Taxi Driver under the sheltering dome of my very own (then) movie palace, the St. George Theatre. The taxi driver himself, Travis Bickle, lives in there for me, an honored ghost, among ghosts.

My favorite double title, glimpsed briefly in downtown Cincinnati where I grew up, was on the marquee of the Royale, Cincinnati’s only porn house:  BOX LUNCH followed by THAR SHE BLOWS. Meanwhile, back home in Staten Island, at the movie palace I was going bankrupt running, our marquee offerings that week 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 pairings, 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 an image for me of 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, twinned 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 lamentable double feature with 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: Double features may have faded in the age of the multiplex,  but, as Siri says, “Here’s something I found”:
Double feature: 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. —Urban Dictionary 
 
Afterthought 2: Towering Inferno and Earthquake were our “Shake and Bake” special, a fave if just to see the letters on the marquee.
 
Afterthought 3: I never quite get tired of this topic, especially after learning, only recently, how essential those A and B pics were for movie-house survival during the Depression. They had it way harder back then than we did in 1976, a mere recession.

What does a Frank Lloyd Wright house in rural Pennsylvania — a series of horizontal planes over a waterfall — have in common with the Spanish Baroque St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace, in Staten Island?

​The answer recalls a moment I spent one afternoon at the St. George, in 1976, watching a real doggie of a movie, Don’t Open the Window, AKA Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. It was early in my year as a partner in movie palace management, and I was bored. I’d slipped into the auditorium to get away from trying to figure out how to pay the carting bill, so we (my partners and myself) wouldn’t end up getting our legs broken backward for non-payment by the mob-affiliates who collected our garbage. Suffice to say, we were short of cash, and I wanted escape; but the mediocre movie utterly failed to make me forget the balance in the theater’s checkbook. Bored, I gazed up at the intricately-decorated balcony overhang just above my head, which is when it hit me: Nothing’s holding it up!  It was true: nothing was, or at least nothing visible. Somehow, despite my anxiety, the theater was doing a fine job of keeping me from being crushed.

Here’s how.

Built in 1929, the St. George has a “cantilevered” balcony, which is to say a shelf, projecting out from the back wall. The advantages of cantilevers are obvious. Wright enjoyed them for their dramatic effect (check out Taliesins West and East, not to mention the Robie House in Chicago and, of course Pennsylvania’s Falling Water previously mentioned). But when it comes to theater architecture, it’s all about business; you can sell more full-priced seats with unobstructed sight lines. (I love Carnegie Hall, but “partial view” seats are a drag; try dress circle row FF seat 38). Then too, there’d been lots of theater fires in the Victorian and pre-Victorian eras; besides a dearth of available exit doors on each level, regularly-spaced support posts probably didn’t speed evacuation.

A balcony with no visible supports may seem like no big deal now, but when the Lyceum and the New Amsterdam (both Herts & Tallant theaters) opened to the public in 1903, offering Manhattan its first cantilevered balconies, some people were understandably reticent. Accordingly architects and impresarios began demo-ing cantilever strength with “tests.” In 1921 Balaban and Katz weighed down the new 1,500-seat balcony of the Chicago Theatre with 960,000 pounds of sandbags. No less in need of reassurance were the residents of Youngstown, Ohio in 1931,  when the Warner (now the Powers Auditorium) opened, following a sandbag test of its modest 500-person balcony.

Probably the most impressive test of a cantilevered balcony preceded the opening of Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles in 1918 (architect: Woollett). The theater’s 110-foot-wide balcony boasted the world’s first reinforced concrete girder, a necessity, given the shortage of structural steel that followed World War I. Accordingly, 1.5 million pounds of sandbags were loaded on, and the girder hung tough.

The day I sat under the overhang and tried to watch Don’t Open the Window, I’d had an uneasy reminiscence. While sitting there, I’d recalled the story of an unsupported balcony I knew about that hadn’t ended well. The lackluster movie and this unsettling memory sent me back to my office, which was, paradoxically, under the stairs.

The next day in a box office conversation with a knowledgeable friend, I learned that our balcony was actually a wonder of engineering. From then on, I took great pride in boasting to anyone who would listen that ours was one of the largest cantilevered balconies in New York City, which, if not completely accurate, at least has a shot at being true. At an original capacity of more than a thousand seats, the balcony I sat under is arguably one of the largest such overhangs for miles around. As for the oldest cantilevered theater balconies in NYC, the Lyceum (total theater capacity 922) and the New Amsterdam (capacity 1,702) both Broadway houses, duke it out for the prize of being first.

Engineering is our friend — until it isn’t. The thought that had sent me back to my office had been the memory of an apartment building in Cincinnati put up by a school acquaintance who’d started out as an architect, then suddenly styled himself a filmmaker. Reason for his career switch was revealed one night when we were out for a drive, and he pointed out the building in question. “I designed and built that...” he boasted, but his wife, a true queen of sarcasm if ever there was one, who delighted in deflating his balloon ego, reminded him of the (cantilevered) balcony — one of a series facing the street — that had fallen from that building, shearing off two or three others on its way down. Fortunately, no one had been sitting or standing beneath.

Afterthought 1: The first theater in America to feature a  cantilevered balcony is likely to have been the Colonial Theatre (capacity 1,700) in Boston which opened in 1900.

Afterthought 2: Check out this earlier blog post on balconies of all kinds; in it I give the St. George credit for being one of the largest cantilevered balconies “in the world,” which is, in retrospect, fairly unlikely, but shows how much I love the place.

Afterthought 3: The longest cantilever of any kind in the world may be The Busan Cinema Center in Busan, South Korea, with a 163-meter-long roof, containing an 85-meter cantilever portion.

Afterthought 4: Frank Lloyd Wright appears not to have been a fan of traditional theater design. He rejected the “peephole” idea of the proscenium, wanting the audience to be more intimately involved in performance. Although he loved cantilevered construction in general, he doesn’t seem to have been a fan of balconies per se. But he did design several theaters, including the Kalita Humphreys Theater. 
 

Movie theaters today have many screens, but mostly one use. With the exception of dinner-and-a-movie set ups, movie houses --that define themselves as such — don’t generally serve a second purpose. How is it then, that back when most theaters had only one screen, they served their communities in multiple ways? They were babysitting services, places to collect free dish ware, or play bingo, and where you went to watch (not just listen to) the news. Even in 1976, the twilight of the single screen era, while I was briefly a co-manager of a 2,672-seat palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, we were a community gathering place. The movie palaces were built to play that role, which is to say they were not unlike medieval cathedrals, the centers of their communities. In just one year under the St. George’s dome, we managed to present the premier of a local magician  — then only a teenager, a grad student who specialized in Flamenco guitar, and even a one-day evangelical traveling church, complete with shills who threw down their crutches and miraculously walked to the stage to receive God’s grace. A few graduations, children’s theater (The Paper Bag Players), the young Chaka Khan, a fallen-from-grace Sly Stone: all these things we offered up for local consumption. We dreamed of opening a restaurant in the basement, something which actually might have made money. But one community service we never provided, that 1940’s theaters apparently did offer on occasion, was sex education.

No, I’m not referring to self-help sex ed: like the direct physical instruction in the dark some of us got, while dating, or tips from the screen itself, after the Hayes Code (censorship) went south in the sixties.  At the drive-in, I personally learned a thing or two, watching my best friend’s mother, a divorcee, fight off her boyfriend Harvey, an ex-rodeo cowboy, in the front seat. But that’s not the kind of public service I’m talking about theaters offering.

A friend and fellow blogger, Clifford Browder, recently drew my attention to formal sex ed (in those bygone days, “Sex Hygiene”) offered in a small town near where he lived in Illinois, at a local movie theater, when he was still in high school. Here’s Clifford, with a few of my own comments thrown in:

Clifford: When I was a junior in high school in Evanston, Illinois, way back in 1945, we suddenly heard of a movie about sex being shown in Wilmette, the next suburb to the north, with a talk by "Elliot Forbes of the radio," whom we'd never heard of.
          
VH: In 1965, I attended “Senior Health” on the third floor of my high school in Cincinnati, a class not offered a generation earlier. I envy Clifford; how glamorous to get educated in a movie theater! Popcorn might have made those slides of fallopian tubes a lot more entertaining... 
 
Clifford: [The presentation] was being shown to audiences, segregated by sex. Of course we guys all flocked there, and waited in line while the girls came streaming out.
 
VH: Imagine what the boys said to each other while watching the girls emerge, or forget about that, just picture the eye-flashes of the bolder girls, the blushes of some shy ones. We were segregated by sex too, but, as I recall, nobody watched anybody streaming out of room 334.
 
Clifford: Forbes [the lecturer] meant it to be instructional and kept the ribaldry of the kids in check.
 
VH: Confining teens to theater seats when sex is the bill of fare? That kind of crowd control really impresses me!
 
Clifford: There was a movie about a likable girl who got pregnant...Also...a film showing victims of advanced VD displaying their diseased organs. 
 
VH: I just stopped envying Clifford’s education. STD on the same screen where, maybe a month before, you might have seen A weekend at the Waldorf, State Fair or The Bells of St. Mary’s?  And if you’re gonna show me diseased organs forget about the popcorn.
 
Clifford: But then the Wilmette authorities closed the show down, claiming that Forbes had used some risqué language. This I doubt. I think they were yielding to howls of protest from local outraged moralists. Too bad. The only official sex ed I was ever exposed to before college.
 
VH: The Wilmette authorities could well have been reading the fine print of the Hayes Code, which considered the mere mention of many things “perverse”, including venereal disease.
 
Clifford: Thanks to the Internet, I've learned that the sex film in question was Mom and Dad, made in 1944. It played all over the country and grossed millions. And there wasn't just one "Eliot Forbes of the radio" but maybe 35, lecturing simultaneously...
 
Mom and Dad was the brainchild of exploitation filmmaker Kroger Babb, who marketed his projects using a “medicine show” model. The movie has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," despite (because?) it was condemned in 1945 by the National Legion of Decency Yes, that Legion of Decency, those fine folks who brought Hollywood the Hayes Code.

                                                                                     *    *    *
 
Afterthought: I love Clifford’s image of multiple Elliot Forbeses. Wasn’t Forbes in some rough way, a little like Betty Crocker? She was a definite fiction, portrayed by various actresses. But what about Elliot?  Had he been real once? Apparently, he was not the only actor present at each performance; in theaters where the movie ran, two women also posed as “nurses”...No business like show business!

Afterthought 2: The movie was, apparently, shot in only 6 days, but grossed a hundred million dollars over 23 years! Not bad.
 
Thanks to Clifford for his insights and for this blog post inspiration!