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. If you’re a stranger to this blog, you may not know that, for one year, 1976, I was involved in running the St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace that stands to this day. Built for Vaudeville, the St. George, like many of its sister palaces, made its livelihood from the movies.
 
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 arch over the stage the very first virtual entertainment 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 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.
 
\What 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, Pink Martini, and K.D. Laing all have in common? At one time or another, they all stood beneath the soaring gold-leaf proscenium arch of the St. George Theatre.
 
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.
 
But prosceniums, like the idea of theater itself, had humble beginnings, as in one definition:
 
"Entrance of a tent," from Latin proscaenium, from Greek proskenion: pro "in front" + skene "stage, tent, booth" (think “scene”). 
 
Some tent flap!

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 Albee in Cincinnati, where my grandparents finally set down roots.  The Rivoli  in Toledo, 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.  
 
An interested reader posted a question based on his reading of that post, and a 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 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!
 
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, which, in a way, I had: like being Alice as she stepped through the Looking Glass. 
 
P.S. Thanks again, Bob! 

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), Hawaii Five-O 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 had numerous projectionists disposed 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 something a lot more glamorous than a catwalk. From all appearances it’s a lot more solid than the one I remember at the St. George — bet there are no TVs.
 
Afterthought:
 Most movie palace domes, I recently learned, are even more provisional than the St. George Theatre’s, if you peek beyond the plaster, just lathe! A catwalk, it turns out, is fairly special after all.

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. Both featured bodies, after all...
 
The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace, was on the “buck fifty” circuit in the year we ran it, which usually guaranteed the movie patron two movies for one “low low” price. There was always an “A” feature, for which we paid at least a modest percentage of tickets sold, and a “B” which cost a flat fee. Among a number of pairings, we ran:
 
The Devil Within Her and Embryo  (for marquee value, I love this combo)
The Man Who Would Be King chased by 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 “buy one, get one free” marketing concept, 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. (actually modest by today’s Pandemic figures...) 
 
But the Depression wasn’t a health-created crisis; it was more absolute, with little hope for an upward spiral. 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. 
 
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 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 extravaganza” — 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 John Wayne, and westerns, were so over, possibly even more intolerably so to our urban mostly teen and largely Black audience than a re-hash 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, generally, a third 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 the theater 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, showing 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: 
Hang in there! If you’re afraid still to go to an indoor movie, just remember spring is here, and drive-ins are in a renaissance! This summer for sure I’m off to the Mahoning in Pennsylvania, to catch at least a double feature!