10:30 on a weekday night at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island The 9:30 showing of Cooley High was heading into its final reel. To save money, my husband (and partner in our 2,672-seat movie palace enterprise) had told Diane, on concession , to close down and head for home. There was nobody in the box office and, alas, there were scant patrons in the auditorium; Leroy stood guard at the usher’s ticket station. 

Leroy was short and slender, but he styled himself big. Sporting his signature strut (modeled on the boxer Mike Tyson), he made his way toward Dean. “...Woman at the door wants a hotdog, wants two actually an’ a small corn...I told her the movie’s almost over, but she don’t care. Says all she wants is dinner. Candy stand closed, right?”

The stand was more or less functional, the coffee and popcorn still warm. “No problem, let her come on in,” Dean replied. He’d fix up the dogs and corn himself.

This kind of thing happened all the time in a neighborhood where dinner and a movie could translate into just dinner, if we were willing. Whole families sometimes came in and asked to order food for take-out. We did have the highest per capita stand in all five boroughs, which is to say our average patron spent a buck fifty on a ticket and about the same on food. That’s a lot when you consider that a Big Mac in 1976 cost 65 cents. 

The national average on concession per movie patron was just under 90 cents. Those who couldn’t afford the movie just asked if they could buy dinner. The woman in question became a regular, always showing up towards the end of the last showing, as if to say, “All I want is food.” Who could blame her? Sabrett’s all beef ball-park hotdogs on homemade Italian rolls that had arrived fresh that morning, dijon mustard. Fresh popped corn with clarified butter, fresh coffee, and, if you could afford dessert, Haagen-Daaz ice cream, first of its kind in NYC, delivered weekly by a skinny guy in a station wagon.

Then there was the jazz dude, a retired side-man who used to show up in spangled (sequin) suits, each with a matching hat. I assumed these were his show outfits: one in Kelly green, one purple, one scarlet, one gold, one silver. He paid for the movie, but never sat down, ordering himself a hot dog (“yellow dog” he called it — with mustard) and a small Coke. Then he stationed himself just outside the concession stand, where, through the glass, he could see — but not hear — the movie.

Paullie, whose regular beat was concession, studied the dude’s speech patterns and continuous rolling monologue, till he could repeat it exactly. “I had the wimmins’, lots an’ lotsa wimmens...” A list would ensue including but not limited to Shirley, Georgia, Geneva, and Lorraine. “He really makes that hot dog last,” Paullie reported one night. “Eighty bites, on average!” A concessionaire has to keep alert somehow...  

I was selling tickets one June night, when I heard a woman’s voice and thought I might have encountered a ghost; no one appeared to be standing there. Then a head peaked over the edge of the marble box office sill, and I realized that a tiny old woman, leaning for support on a market cart and thanks to her height, almost invisible, was trying to get my attention. Her name, I would later learn, was Dr. Oppenheim. She lived in an apartment right around the corner, and I became quite friendly with her over a period of several months. But that night we had yet to introduce ourselves. “I really only want one of your famous hot dogs!” she exclaimed. “Is that alright?”

“Of course!” I said, then waved her past Leroy, watching her shuffle slowly behind the market cart, a make-shift version of a wheeled walker. She emerged a few minutes later with her hot dog, and stopped again in front of my ticket window.

“Terrific!” she said. “People are talking about these out on the street, and I figured I don’t need to sit through The Dragon Dies Hard to get one.” 

So began a wonderful dialogue between the two of us, which lasted deep into the fall of 1976.  She was a retired family doctor, living alone, frail, but mentally vigorous, a lover of poetry, opera, and philosophy. Two of these three are passions of mine.

A little after Dr. Oppenheim stopped coming, driven away, I suspected, by the chill winds of November, we tried to put dinner and a movie together, under the guise of a dinner/movie special. You could clip our ad from the local paper and, for $4.95 including admission, you could choose from a pre-fix menu at a struggling local  restaurant just opened down the street. The menu included a credible burger, greasy fries and other items, some less disappointing than others. Our partnership was brief — Chubby, whose restaurant it was, went out of business after Thanksgiving. That’s how it always has been in St. George, Staten Island — things come, things go. 

Afterthought:
I’m not as old as Dr. Oppenheim was in 1976, when I knew her (I miss that estimable lady)...I’m certainly not leaning for support on a market cart; but if there were a hotdog as good as ours for sale in the neighborhood (those buns were hand-made Italian breads!) with or without a movie, I’d be in line.

The Mahoning Drive-In Theatre in Lehighton, Pennsylvania has a count-down clock. Currently, it’s reading 9 days and change, time melting away until 8:30 PM April 29, next Friday, when hoards of people will drive up with camping gear, grills, and what have you. At that moment, The Wizard of Oz, followed by Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — always the Mahoning’s openers — will hit the big screen, signaling the season is afoot. So here’s to spring! And to drive-ins, which, if anything, have survived admirably during Covid when the rest of the movie exhibition game is in such peril. 
 
Not your average drive-in, the Mahoning is an entirely volunteer operation, owned and managed by a seasoned  projectionist, aided by a crowd of local film buffs. 
 
For a time, its giant screen was dark, because no one could afford the switch to a digital format, and the only way to stay on the current film distribution circuit would have been to drop the cash for the switch, since actual film was going the way of the dinosaurs. So what did this crew of desperadoes do? They took themselves off the current film distribution  circuit altogether, opting for retro, and continuing to run their original 1940's Simplex projectors, while renting whatever older films could still be shown on their screen. 
 
You would think, in the wilds of Pennsylvania, this would doom them, but thanks to social media saavy, the programming decision worked, drawing people from all over the U.S., some of whom camp out to go to one of the Mahoning’s festivals, or see a particular film in its traditional format. And that’s not all the local crew has done. 
 
If you watch At the Drive-In, the documentary that put the Mahoning on the map of great places to go in summertime, you’ll get the full story. I refuse to spoil the narrative of this fine documentary by telling you what happened when Jaws,which they’d rented on film from Hollywood, didn’t arrive on time. You’ll have to watch the film yourself to learn about that.  
 
Meanwhile, a trip to LeHighton  on May 15, (bring your camping gear) could, this season, entitle you to two versions of The Fly, one the original from 1958 and the other from the eighties – almost as distant to us.  Both in 35 mm, of course. And that’s just one weekend...There’s a 4-night Zombie Fest starting May 29, if you’re interested in warm human flesh as a way to mark the transition into summer...

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 in 1976 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, projection 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 would be  approximately $58.00 by today’s standards.

Local 306, the projectionists’ union, 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 — without the TVs.

I have a sixth sense when it comes to identifying buildings that used to be movie theaters. Decommissioned churches are marked by their steeples and stained glass; but theaters that have become warehouses, boutiques, sporting goods stores, even parking garages, have their own traits: broad low porticos, with perhaps a marquee or the remains of it, ticket windows, balcony fire escapes at the back or on the side of the building. One other thing theaters, especially palaces, often exhibit is ornate decorative effects that refer in some way to the theatrical.
 
So it was, one Sunday, as we walked up Broadway in Manhattan, headed for 175th Street and the United Palace of Cultural Arts, that we happened on an interesting building at 165th St. 
 
There, on the East side of the street, was a fascinating structure, 3940 Broadway, with an arched inset depicting in great detail Neptune, god of the sea riding a magnificent oared ship. The facade is a mix of oxide green and teal, set in beige tiles. Decorative work surrounding the arch over the entryway features lyres and comic/tragic faces. Oddly, given all the sea imagery, faces of foxes line many of the windows. Foxes? Of course. We paused to admire what we later identified as Thomas Lamb’s Fox Audubon Theatre, commissioned by none other  than William Fox himself, in 1912, three years before he founded Fox Film Corporation in those bad old days when moguls both built and owned theaters and the movies shown in them. 
 
You may already know that my interest in — and ability to recognize — old theaters comes from the time I spent obsessed with one, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which for one fateful year, 1976, I had a hand in running. The St. George has, like the Audubon Fox, worn a variety of hats (in the case of the St George: flea market, roller rink, church). But the Audubon, functioning now as a multi-use facility under the aegis of Columbia University, is famous or notorious in a whole other respect. 
 
Built with both an auditorium and an upstairs ballroom, it’s where, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was shot, and its life and uses after that event reflect, in part, that notoriousness.
 
There were so many Foxes. Wikipedia lists around ninety theaters, some built by William Fox himself, others joining the chain when Fox West Coast merged with the original Fox Films. The Audubon appears to be the only one of the Foxes known as the site of an assassination, but in the Fox family there have been some pretty interesting alternate uses of houses, ornate and otherwise. 
 
The Kingsport (Tennessee) Fox Theatre a small neighborhood house, celebrated its opening on August 22, 1940. According to local journalist Vince Staten the Fox first featured the film “...Alias the Deacon on screen, starring Bob Burns as a ‘hillbilly deacon who is actually a cardsharp in disguise’... The Fox was the first Kingsport movie theater to show movies on Sunday...” (and was subsequently raided for – what else? — showing movies on Sunday). The theater survived as a single-screen house until 1963 when plans were laid to convert it to some kind of off-premises cafeteria for the new high school. As it was determined that students would not be allowed to leave the school, renovation was subsequently halted, giving a local barber the opportunity to set up shop in the lobby. Eventually, the theater became a country music recording studio, lasting at that trade until the early nineties. Rumor has it these days it’s morphed into a beauty parlor.
 
The Bunkie Louisiana Fox is the kind of storefront I’d spot and instantly know as a former theater, if I passed it by. Hideous though the black and white aluminum siding on its front may be, you can see that the black is disguising what once was a facade/marquee. The de-bunked Bunkie currently serves as, on the right, City Hall Annex/ Court and, on the left, as the local Bunkie library. 
 
These previous two are humble country Foxes, but there are some famous ones.   
 
Arguably, the “Super Foxes,” all palaces built before William Fox’s empire crumbled are: The St Louis Fox (aka “The Fabulous Fox”), The Detroit Fox (aka “The Magnificent Fox”), the tragically demolished San Francisco Fox, and the marvelously resurrected Atlanta Fox. 
 
The St. Louis and Detroit Foxes are said to be “twins,” built in Siamese/Byzantine style, whatever that is, and seating 4,500 people. Here’s a brief description of the lobby of the St. Louis  house, clipped, I freely admit, from Cinema Treasures:
 
In the lobby, a pair of huge golden griffons flanked the grand staircase, and deep red faux marble columns ringed the mezzanine level. From every corner statuary peeked out—including a group of large gilt maharajahs. The cavernous auditorium was spectacular in scope, dramatic in its lighting and swirling decor, and when the Governor of Missouri appeared on its stage on opening night to dedicate it, he was nearly at a loss for words.  
 
Both the SL and the Detroit remained theaters all their days, though they suffered steep declines in the dark times of the seventies.The Detroit, slightly larger, by 500 seats, continued, showing Martial Arts and Blaxploitation films, and was landmarked and revitalized in the eighties. 
 
The Atlanta Fox, was reputedly inspired by a combination of the Alhambra in Spain and Egypt’s Temple of Kharnak. It was begun by the Shriners organization in the late twenties, who were intent on building the most opulent temple possible, then (lack of funds) leased the half-finished structure to William Fox, who finished the job, opening in 1929 with a premier of Steamboat Willie, Disney’s first cartoon starring Mickey Mouse. As is usually the case with movie palace big beauties, the theater was saved by a local group starting in the mid-seventies, and brags that it has the only full-time restoration staff of any current saved theater. 
 
The San Francisco Fox, completed in that fateful year, 1929, is the only one of the four Super Foxes not to survive a wrecker’s ball. At 4,651 seats, it’s a near twin to the (smaller) Los Angeles Theatre, 1932 by S. Charles Lee, who imitated many of its design features. By 1963, the powers that be in SF saw to its demolishment, with a gilded demolition ball. Here is the saddest description you can imagine of its final moments as a standing hall:
 
The steel wrecking ball, painted a lackluster gold for the occasion, crashed through the west wall of the opulent Market Street movie palace at 10:33 a.m. high above some 200 generally disinterested bystanders. Inside, on the abandoned third floor, a wall-length mirror shattered in the cavernous ladies’ lounge. A stained glass sign, made in 1929 by Tiffany’s, swung violently in a corridor lined with faded red satin.
 
When the Fox opened June 28, 1929, at 1350 Market St., it was the largest theater west of Chicago. 
In a general sense, the story of the altered lives of Fox theaters is the story of what became of palaces and smaller neighborhood theaters nationwide, which have managed to stand for second and even third lives.
 
Sometimes they return to their roots, like our own St. George, not a Fox, but grand enough, becoming a mixed house, showing, perhaps, some movies, welcoming magicians, local dance and theatrical troupes, comedians, solitary but still-famous rock musicians, you name it — and even the occasional major act. I even read in last week’s New Yorker, an account by David Sedaris of a reading/book signing — now that he’s back on the road: 

I had forgotten about the ups and downs of life on tour. One night you’re at Symphony Hall and the next in a worn-out, once grand movie theatre that is now overrun by mice. “Can you believe they wanted to tear this place down?” the house manager invariably asks, fondly looking up at a gold plaster cherub with one arm missing.

“Um, yes, as a matter of fact.”

Oh well. I love Sedaris, and so forgive him this lapse in enthusiasm for surviving movie palaces. His descriptions of post-Pandemic squalor in deserted airports, hostile hotels and elsewhere, make a mouse-infested theater seem, well,  almost homey.
 
Afterthought 1:

The Audubon, which, as I noted, contains the now-infamous Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was shot, has had an interesting journey from movie theater and meeting place/union hall to its current incarnation as, among other things, the Shabazz Center. Recognize the name?  Betty Shabazz was Malcolm X’s widow and fought hard to revitalize the building and memorialize her husband. She didn’t live to see the completion of this project, but it did finally come to fruition. 
 
Afterthought 2:
Interestingly enough, the facade of what was once the Audubon Fox, with its amazing depiction of Neptune in the prow of a trireme (ancient Greek ship), shows to better effect, now that it doesn’t have to fight with a marquee and blade sign, which utterly obscured it when it was actually a theater. ​