In 1976, Robert Endres, the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall (as you may recall from a previous blog post) walked through the red-and-gold doors of the St. George Theatre, in Staten Island, and into my life. The theater we were, at the time, trying by the skin of our teeth to run was already in a lot of fiscal trouble; Bob must have known that, but apparently he didn’t care, as he kept on showing up, running spotlights, taking shifts in the projection booth. The questions that follow shine a little more light on this man and his life, a life lived in and around the world we call “the movies.”

What caused you to wander into the St. George Theatre that day in 1976, and introduce yourself to us?
This gets weird. I dreamed about a theater one night, I was coming up behind the stage-house, I swear I am not making this up. And in those days, when I was first in NYC, I was going to all the boroughs. So one day I got off the ferry, and I was walking up the hill, and I came up behind the stage-house of the St. George, and I’m thinking, “That’s it!  That’s the theater that was in my dream!” I know that sounds weird, but it’s happened a couple of times...I’ve dreamt of other theaters. Anyhow, the minute I saw it, I thought, “I’ve got to look into this more!” So I walked around to the front. I don’t think the theater was even open when I came up that time. I used to come out to Staten Island, because it was the closest thing in New York to Illinois, and I’d get homesick for Illinois. So one time, the St. George was open, and I walked in the door.

If you happened to read the blog post for April 14 (“Projectionist”), then you already know that Bob got his start at the age of nine, in Streator, Illinois, peeking through the projection port — the hole through which the movie shines onto the screen. Because of his height, he had to balance on the backs of several theater seats. Not able to see well enough, he crept around the corner and continued spying on the fascinating world of projection through the keyhole to the booth, until apprehended by the manager, who, remarkably, let him come inside. At age twelve Bob was learning to thread film in that booth — his beloved Majestic Theater — which still stands. Bob made his way slowly at first, operating 16 mm. He received a degree in Radio/Television (Communications) and joined the projectionists’ union. He worked local booths, then got that lucky break in New York City, at Radio City Music Hall, where he remained for 25 years, as Head Projectionist. These days, he does projection for Dolby Laboratories in Manhattan, only a few blocks away from the music hall.

Did Movies always fascinate you as a kid?
Yeah, I think it was one of the first toys I had...my uncle was a salesman and had a sixteen mm silent projector. He gave that projector to me and it was one of my favorite things. And of course growing up at that point, there wasn’t television. Movies were our main form of entertainment in Streater.

How often did you go to the movies?
Oh probably at least once a week...We had three theaters in town:  the big house was the MGM house, it was a Paramount Publix theater, so they got top top films. The independent house in town had made a deal with Warner Brothers—they played Warners exclusively along with Fox and some B pictures. The big house, because it had been owned by Paramount, obviously played all the Paramount films first run. The third house, the one that I got caught peeking through the keyhole in, was only open on Saturdays and Sundays and played B Westerns and monogram pictures, which I loved. I am always amazed at monogram pictures because they were so tacky, and yet they filled a role which sit-coms on TV were to fill in later years. So almost every Saturday I’d go to the Y in the morning, and have lunch at a hamburger place downtown, and then go to a matinee at the Majestic. Then if my parents were going to a movie in the evening on Saturday and Sunday, I’d go with them as well.

There was always more than just a movie...right?  A short subject, a cartoon...?
Not so much at the Majestic, which was a grindhouse, it played cowboy movies and the like, reel-to-reel. The big house did have cartoons, and newsreels and short subjects.

A lost time...
Yes, the whole concept. Today, people might be annoyed. Audiences are so used to coming in and just having the feature and trailers. I wonder how they’d react if someone put on something ahead of the feature? Would it just be in the way?

How often do you go to the movies — not as part of your job, of course?
Not so much these days. I find even with the art houses one of the things that, curiously, bothers me, is people talking. Not just kids in theaters making noise.... These days, as a senior citizen, I find my fellow senior citizens doing the same thing at movies — ”Hey look at that!” I remember going to The Sound of Music on a reserved seat basis in San Francisco once with my friend after a technical conference. Two ladies in the row in front of us...“Oh isn’t she sweet?” You want to smack ‘em!  I have no patience for that.

Once I was in L.A. for a conference — we could get tickets — first-run 70mm reserve seating at the Beverly Hills. I wanted to see the theater and the booth as much as I wanted to see the movie so I ended up in the booth. I remember asking one of the operators, “How’s the movie?” and he goes, “They pay us to run ‘em, not to watch ‘em!”

The booth has to be one of the worst places to watch a movie...
Yes, it is. Today we sat down in the second row [Dean and I went to a screening in Dolby’s screening room with Bob, before doing the interview]. It’s the first time I’ve been that close to a screen in twenty years!  I don’t get down to the front of the house at all. These days I have noise-canceling headphones for booth noise. It used to be the sprocket noise and the projectors...now the projectors have gotten quiet, but the fans are noisy.

Here’s a topic change: have any favorite movies?
Well back in college it was Sergei Eisenstein...he created a whole new vocabulary. But my all-time favorite now is Cinema Paradiso, for obvious reasons. They released the full cut of the movie, and the operator downstairs says, “You’ve gotta see this!” But I have to admit I like Harvey Weinstein’s cut the best, the original.... The parallels between that and my life are such that...well. Miramax actually had a screening just for projectionists in Manhattan when the film opened, you know.

How much do you appreciate, then as opposed to now — the aesthetics — the old palaces as opposed to theaters these days?
I will always have a warm spot in my heart for them [sigh].

That’s what you were doing walking up the hill and into the St. George that day in 1976?
Yes. They represent an era that may be gone, they represent showmanship. I don’t want to romanticize: some of them weren’t the best for projection. A lot of them were built as Vaudeville houses, and they were very good for that purpose, and even when they had a stage show, it was a great theatrical concept, but as for projection and sound, some of them were terrible. Even at Radio City I had some acoustical problems — may have been fixed since they refurbished it in 2000. But if you sat in a certain row in the orchestra at Radio City at one point and turned your head, you could hear two sound tracks, one from the screen and one from the back of the theater. I know people who are really distracted by that. It certainly bothered me when I was a kid and sat there, when I was in high school—that echo. Fortunately, if you sat under the first mezzanine or any of the mezzanines you wouldn’t hear it. But the back wall above the third mezzanine is curved, it focuses sound towards the center of the house. 

Originally there was acoustically transparent wallpaper that let the sound through, sound absorbing material, but it fell down. And then in ‘79 when we changed formats, they replaced all the wallpaper — it looked exactly like the original, but it was printed on cloth, rather than acoustically transparent material. It sealed up the sound absorbing panels, and the echo was greater. So, even though it was praised for being exactly the same as the old wall treatment, you had an even worse problem. Radio City was actually built as a Vaudeville house.

Did you ever fear the theater concept would be lost?
I still do. Every development has come about because of some crisis. Widescreen was a reaction to television. Automation was about efficiency. Multiplexes changed the experience from going to see a particular movie to “What are we going to see?” Everything’s available on-line. Now we have rocking seats, and dine-in theaters.

S.H. Fabian, movie theater entrepreneur of another era (whose Staten Island Flagship Theater, the St. George originally, was) will have the last say here — well, almost the last. Those of you who want to keep on, can pick up the rest of the interview below, which poses some more technical questions. The rest of us will walk back to Bob’s office, the upstairs Dolby projection booth, to look around, and read this manifesto, pinned to the wall under his clock. Please note that it was probably written some time in the 1950’s:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
An Exhibitor’s Credo
"We have unbounded confidence in the future of the motion picture industry. Nothing has appeared upon the technical horizon to suggest that the motion picture theatre has lost its primacy. It is still the indispensable setting for the finest presentation of motion pictures.

The theatre communicates an aura which is not present in any non-theatrical place of entertainment. There is a magic in sitting in a theatre seat which is the exclusive power of theatre architecture, decor and the proscenium arch. These elements embody the glamour which persuades millions around the world to go out to a movie. 

And as long as this allure pervades the theatre, it will remain the supreme edifice for entertainment.

S.H. Fabian,
President, Stanley Warner Corporation"
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Fabian, come to think of it, never imagined Netflix, HBO or, of course, the Internet, without which, no blog?)

The interview continues here:

Can you talk about how projection has changed in your lifetime, technologically?  
I always think I’m going to be thrown out as a heretic, but I like digital. I think we’re kind of in the early stages as when sound came in, but with advancements in technology, digital will exceed film. There is so much I do like about it. It’s steady I don’t have side motion, I don’t have weave, I don’t have scratches on the print, I don’t have dirt on the print. That picture we saw today will look exactly the same 142 screenings from now, and I like that.

One thing that intrigues me: we did a lot of split screen here, digital and film, and there are differences. Film does better on dark scenes with a bonfire. On the other hand, bright scenes? Digital can blow you away — look sharper and brighter. We’re closing that gap and I often wonder, if you took the two systems to an island where people had never seen movies and asked the people which one looks better, I would think, if they didn’t have the expectation of film or the prejudice, then who knows? Sometimes we grow into liking the flaws: like a vinyl LP with clicks and pops. You learn to listen through the surface noise to the music. I was talking to a friend in San Francisco — about the Blu-Ray he saw of Casablanca — it bothers him, such a good transfer, it looks like it was made yesterday.

Starting with film and sprocket holes, what one single improvement or change in movie exhibition is the most important?
Well, there was Cinerama. I saw This Is Cinerama when I was fourteen years old, not knowing what to expect, although I’d read about it. Not ever having experienced it, then sitting in the third row of a theater where the screen actually came out even with us on the sides, and that transition to the full Cinerama screen and stereophonic sound, which no one had heard since Fantasia. Fantasia, by the way, came out in 1940 and was the first film to feature stereophonic sound in some select locations. Disney hoped to expand it, but it took an enormous amount of equipment, and the coming of WWII took away the ability to manufacture it, as supplies went to military applications instead. So we had to wait for that, but it blew me away when I first experienced it. That’s the era:  we came from Cinerama to CinemaScope to VistaVision to Todd-AO, all those processes. But, as far as projection was concerned, none of them, as game changers, were equal to the Xenon Lamp.

Such a small thing...
Yes, but it made automation possible, and it put many of us out of a job — not necessarily a good thing.

The projectionist didn’t have those reel changeovers to make...
Right. Because of the big platter, you didn’t have reels anymore, so no change-over errors. And Xenon lamps are preferable, I think, to carbon arc, because carbons can drift as they’re burning if you don’t stay on top of it...  Xenon gave you a constant focus. There are people who still complain, “Oh Xenon isn’t carbon arc...” as they do about nitrate film, and in that way they’re right, nitrate film is silver-based, so it has a much higher contrast ratio. So you have these people—we talked about this before—who resist these changes.

But the real game changer—talk about paradigm shifts—is from analogue to digital. It’s got to be the biggest transition, because the applications are so broad, you can do so much more in digital with files than with a photographic system.

Amateur archaeologists that we were, and brief as our stay was, we never ran out of things to discover in our movie palace. A half-level beneath the St. George Theatre stage, a group of us discovered a cramped area Dean likened to the “under-gun deck” of a frigate ship. Low-ceilinged, crowded, musty,  and full of junk, it seemed to be some kind of pit. "Over here," a friend called, gesturing with a flashlight. I could just make out the word ELEVATOR and a set of what appeared to be controls, below which lay a hydraulic mechanism riveted to the floor. An elevator? To where? Hell? 

“It’s not very deep,” Dean observed.  “There’s only one way, and that’s up! 

But nothing is stored down here,” he pointed out, “that anyone would want on-stage. What’s it for?” 

Having just read a little way into the movie palace enthusiast’s scouting manual, The Best Remaining Seats, I thought I had the answer, “It’s for the organ,” I said.

The St. George had once had a pipe organ, a 3/30 (3 manual, 30 rank) Wurlitzer which, like other organs of the era, rose from the depths on an elevated platform, stage right (left, as you face the proscenium). I recalled hearing something about a sale a few years back, when the owner of the building — our landlord with whom we’d already begun to have issues--got quick cash for a number of items — lamps, rugs and what-not. The Wurlitzer (1929 cost: $25,000.00) was probably the last to go. Silent since 1935 — when its last full-time organist, Andy Anderson, was fired to trim theater expenses — its new destination, according to local sources, had been Pipe Organ Pizza (see the menu above) in Memorial City, Houston, Texas, where it entertained pizza-eating patrons for at least a decade.

Eventually the pizza joint itself became an object of reverie, evoking this nostalgic query on a website of historic interest to Houstonians: Does anyone remember the pipe organ pizza at memorial city mall? It had the huge pipe organ and the 20's and 30's theme inside with pictures of all the old movie stars on the walls. 

It becomes impossible to trace the whereabouts of our Wurlitzer at this point. Like an aging Chevy in a junkyard, it may have been sold for parts, cannibalized to keep several other pipe organs going, a sad ending, far from home. 

With the theater’s exquisite acoustics, I can only imagine what all those pipes would have done to the place.

To placate myself, I’m going to Suffern New York soon, to the Lafayette Theater, to take in a flick and listen to Wurlitzer Opus 2095 installed there by the American Theater Organ Society.  Although it isn’t the original  house organ (removed in 1933 to accommodate an “air cooling system”), the organ currently residing in the Lafayette has a venerable history. It began its travels from its original home, the Lawler Theatre in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to the Rainbow Roller Rink in South Deerfield, Mass. Then it journeyed  on to a New York City Duplex owned by a noted theater historian, Ben M. Hall (the author, coincidentally of the previously-mentioned and much-revered tome, The Best Remaining Seats). It remained at his home until his death some three years later, passing at that point safely into the hands of the American Theater Organ Society. Traveling briefly to California, ostensibly to become part of a museum on the estate of Harold Lloyd, it returned back to New York City after that deal fell through. There you may have heard it if you went to the Carnegie Hall Cinema during its decade there. When the Cinema was twinned, it enjoyed a few years in storage, but came out of retirement in 1992, to what may be its permanent home in the newly restored Lafayette Theatre — where it has entertained weekend audiences ever since. Such are the life and travels of a theater organ lucky enough not to be cannibalized. Hats off to the American Theater Organ Society!

Dog Day Afternoon is such a seventies flick. Watched it the other night on I-Tunes. As part of a strangely-matched double feature we booked with Law and Disorder (an Ernest Borgnine / Carroll O’Connor comedy), Dog Day was the third major movie we ran at the St. George Theatre almost half a life-time ago in late April, 1976. Dog Day was over a year old, but we were a “buck fifty” house ($1.50 for adults, 90 cents for children) — and lucky to get it, however many other theaters had already shown it. Starring a heartbreakingly young Al Pacino, it’s the more or less true story of a desperate man, John Wojtowicz (Sonny Wortzik in the film), who tried to rob the Chase Manhattan Bank at 450 Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn, for money to, among other things, buy his lover a sex change operation. Before the story rolls, Sidney Lumet gives us New York City at street level the way it was then. How did he know we’d be watching from the future? The streets were trash-strewn and desperate: he shows us the sheer grime of it all, the anger and cynicism of ordinary citizens, ready to cheer a man with the audacity to rob a bank.

The desperation was entirely real. What else were we doing in an aged movie palace, if not hiding from the streets? We had a kind of sanctuary. We had at least the illusion of safety — under our pleasure dome and in the cool recesses of the alcoves, the defunct green-tiled water fountain in the lobby, the pink and white-tiled candy stand with its sweet and grassy (popcorn) smells.

Outside people were getting mugged, sometimes right under the marquee. A fist-fight blew up there one afternoon, resulting in one guy knocked out of his Birkenstocks — they remained pointed downhill on the pavement while he flew sideways into the street. He got up, using his teeshirt to staunch the blood, and moved on. Nobody called the cops.

Many people didn’t seem to trust cops. The need to keep things to yourself was primal, which is why we had grown men from the neighborhood working off the books on weekends — to keep some of the tougher local kids from walking on the backs of the theater’s seats or assaulting each other with broken bottles in our lobby.

The shops up and down Hyatt Street — the luncheonette, the barbershop next to the theater — were part of another era too. I never saw a soul go into the barbershop; it was as if the ninety-year-old barber lived there, periodically flicking dust off his red naugahyde chairs with a frayed whisk broom.

Night was another thing altogether, the street deserted, sounds of glass shattering. The bank’s night drop was only two storefronts away. Some nights I just didn’t go, but hid the cash instead.

Dog Day was one of many movies I watched in snatches. Seeing it a second time, I remembered parts of it, and other parts seemed new, which may mean I had never seen them at all. I’d get some popcorn, go in and sit down for a half hour or so, then remember that I needed to figure out how to make payroll and still buy cleaning supplies — and pay the carting company, who, it was rumored, would break somebody’s kneecaps if not paid in a timely fashion. That detail from my actual theater-management life fits the tenor of Dog Day nicely — that and another movie we showed that I haven’t seen yet again, Taxi Driver — about a Vietnam Vet with violent streaks who drives a night taxi and tries to save a prostitute. Desperation was part of the Zeitgeist. Which is why I savor my memories of the theater’s cool lobby and sheltering dome. Like a medieval cathedral, it held us:  you could walk in there and drop out of time.

 

How much of the experience of a great movie is where you watch that movie? “I can’t write another post on The Man Who Would Be King," I told myself this morning. (See  July 30, 2014).  Oh yes you can!  Because last night, for only the second time in my life, I watched the John Huston movie, and discovered something buried in that movie, last watched in 1976. Movies can be time-bombs. From its bizarre opening scenes in an Indian marketplace — that include, among so many things, a man eating scorpions — the movie/Kipling story carried me from our bedroom and flat-screen TV, to a dusty velvet seat on the left lip of the St. George Theatre’s balcony. 

During the fateful and loaded year when we ran the St. George, King was the first of only a handful of films I would watch from beginning to end, not getting up to check the concession stand or go back to my office and juggle the books. For the duration of the movie, I was transfixed. 

It may have been filmed in Morocco, but I was up to my knees in snow, gazing while two soldiers of fortune (Michael Caine and Sean Connery) make their improbable trek through the Himalayas. En route to a mythical kingdom unseen by Western eyes since Alexander the Great conquered it in 328 B.C., Peachy and Danny are pickpockets, confidence men mustered out of the British Army, looking for gold. Gold is what Peachy (Caine) wants, but Danny actually hopes to be a king somewhere in those mountains beyond Tibet.

A king! I see it all now.  I wasn’t escaping, but identifying! How much more ridiculous than being a king in a mythical kingdom was our plan, impoverished as we were — to refurbish and run at a profit a 2672-seat movie palace? Pick-pockets? Not quite yet. Soldiers of fortune?  Absolutely. 

In the movie, they make it to Kafiristan, train a small army and, thanks to a lucky coincidence having to do with some jewelry Connery is wearing, inherit the kingdom of Alexander the Great.

It was luck that got them over the pass in the mountains, and luck that got us in the front door of that theater. Yes we did train a small army — of cashiers, ushers and concessionaires, and, for a time we wore the crowns of entrepreneurs. We never did build a rope-bridge back to our normal lives (which is to say we never had an exit plan every good soldier of fortune should have). (In case you somehow haven’t watched this exquisite movie, I will only say the rope bridge and what happens there is worth the whole film). 

The Man Who Would Be King is a brilliant movie; Huston had waited several decades to make it, almost casting Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable (but Bogie died, and Gable followed him shortly after that). Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas almost moved into the roles, almost followed by Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton.  Of the three, only the last pair intrigues me.

Regardless of what it meant and means to me, this movie was undoubtedly a terrible choice for our (mostly poor, racially diverse) audiences, a cynical tale about the corruption inherent in armies of occupation (the British Raj certainly was that and a lot else — as when Peachy throws an Indian man carelessly out the door of a moving train, ostensibly for littering the floor with watermelon seeds). Who could like these guys?  (Ah, but you can still identify with them!).

The movie sold hardly any tickets. What were we thinking?  How can I not have known from that day forward we were doomed on our own private trek?  Why has it taken almost forty years to discover the misplaced adventurer in myself? However, it was almost worth personal bankruptcy, to see it in a real movie palace.

A tip of the hat to Matt Lambros on whose marvelous website, After the Final Curtain, I found this excellent quote: "People buy tickets to theatres, not movies." — Marcus Loew