Empty theater auditoriums — like empty churches — are wonderful places to be alone. In 1976, while I was involved in running a 2672-seat movie palace (the St. George Theatre in Staten Island), I used to drop out of time occasionally — especially if I was worried about how to pay a film distributor — by claiming one of several thousand empty seats and hunkering down into the musty velvet of the seat-back. Sans movie, our screen wasn’t much to look at, especially with that grape soda stain that made a sad diagonal down the lower left quadrant. So I gazed at the dome. You could get lost looking up at all that concentric gilded plaster, the heavy dark star of the main chandelier, which hadn’t been fully bulbed in who-knew-how-many years. It’s one thing to drop out and gaze up when there’s nothing on screen, but it’s really sad if you’re a theater operator, the movie’s on, and nobody’s home. 

On Memorial Day in 1976, the auditorium of our rented theater was about as vacant as it would be for a long time. Taxi Driver was on screen, almost first-run, but, despite the fact that it had generated some pretty decent numbers the previous five days, hardly anyone was there to watch it. Holidays are miserable days in the movie business, starting and ending with Christmas, but also including Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Easter Sunday, and the 4th of July. We gathered around the concession stand to chew the fat, trying to forget the fact that the projectionist was pulling down almost fourteen dollars an hour (equivalent to around $75 in today’s money) for showing a movie to an almost vacant house. 

It was on one or another of these holidays — I can’t remember which movie we’d managed to pry loose from one of the distributors--that absolutely nobody showed up for a matinee. Carbons to run our antique projectors were costing us a small fortune, but we needed to keep on time, in case someone showed up in the middle of an advertised showing. The solution?  Dean went to the candy stand and called the booth, ordering the projectionist to run the movie — without benefit of the crucial spark the carbon creates that lights the film. Accordingly, the film, including the audio, was still running, literally spooling onto the take-up reel, but through a darkened projector.

Halfway through the movie, a man strode into the lobby and paid for a ticket, then stopped at the candy stand to buy a small popcorn. Over his shoulder, I could see the screen blossom. Dean had called the booth already,  “Light it up!” He’d ordered Gabe, the projectionist. As our solitary patron made his way toward the auditorium doors, the movie was clearly on screen.

I like sitting in a vacant auditorium, but our patron got nervous. Twenty minutes after he sat down, he appeared at the candy stand.

“Can I see the manager?” he asked.

“Speaking,” said Dean, who had sent most of the staff, including the concession staffer, home early.

“Can I have my buck fifty back?”

“Why?”

“Well, cuz there’s nobody else in there...”

“So?

“I mean, it’s, like well...spooky. There’s nobody else in there.”

“I can give you a pass. You could come back later.”

“Well...okay, you think anybody will be there...later?”

“Hopefully,” said Dean, who scrawled a pass on the back of a concession reconciliation form. Then he reached for the phone.  As the patron wandered out into what was left of the day, Dean spoke to the booth, “Gabe, pull the carbon.”

“Why?” Gabe wondered.

“The guy left!”
           
At certain moments I wonder, Should we have?

It’s alarming how many movies I don’t remember that we ran at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 1976, a 2672-seat movie palace I had a hand in keeping alive for about a year. I remember Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, The Exorcist, Carrie and ten or fifteen other notable films. These movies I either watched part or all of, if I could spare the time from my job as the bookkeeper of our failing enterprise. Most of these movies were one or two years old when we got our hands on them, scuffed and scratched prints of flicks our patrons had either missed the first time around or didn’t mind seeing again. I’ve cited some classics we ran in previous blog posts, but until I recently resumed the painful process of scrolling through microfilms of The Staten Island Advance circa 1976, looking for the movie ads we ran that year, I had nearly forgotten (or blocked) a number of titles. Don’t Open the Window (originally Non Si Devi Profanare il Sonno del Morti, roughly “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie”, an Italian thriller), Cops and Robbers, Mother, Jugs and Speed — the low-budget list is lengthy. I have absolutely no memory of: Death Machines, The Legend of Bigfoot, Food of the Gods (based on H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel) or At the Earth’s Core (from a work by  Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914). Did we really spend precious projector carbons on the likes of The Giant Spider Invasion, a 1975 release that apparently features huge spiders descending on the town of Merrill, Wisconsin? It says a lot about 1975 in the film business that this release was one of that year’s top grossers. 

You could say “well, it was a living...” It wasn’t. In this year, the fortieth anniversary of our ill-fated adventure, I’m pausing at the bottom of each column (take notice!) to salute each movie we ran, week by week. Whether giant spiders, kung fu, or Godzilla, each of these productions has its own entry in IMDB, and involved at least one producer and director, several gaffers and stunt people, various other techies and a cast, human or otherwise. 

Although I kept a personal journal of comings and goings at the theater in 1976 — the lightbulb salesman, the slightly daft old jazzman who used to wear his spangly sideman outfits to the Wednesday matinee, the dramas and conflicts of ushers and candy stand staff — I find myself with only a sporadic record of what we were actually showing from week to week. Our anemic weekly grosses, with the exception of a few stellar films, were, overall, too depressing to document. 

Mondays and Tuesdays during that mad theater year, I could taste the despair and the hope all at once, as I waited for the week to start with the arrival of the film canisters on Wednesday morning.  Tuesday was almost always the end of a disappointing run, but Tuesday also meant hope, especially if we’d somehow managed to get our booking agent to cough up a gem. Forty years ago this week, we gratefully received Taxi Driver, in its second showing. We were sure it would bring throngs of patrons under the marquee, and it did. 

Taxi Driver had already won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, with its hot (then young) director, Martin Scorsese, and its prime cast (Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks and others), many of whom were just starting out. It was a film that would go on to garner innumerable honors, selected, finally, by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry and consistently rated in the top 500, 100, or whatever greatest movies of all time, and so on.  I’m wondering this week how the hell we got our hands on that print the year it won Cannes? It certainly doesn’t belong in our sad bibliography, a list of films that includes Godzilla vs. Megalon or In Search of Noah’s Ark. It had to have been second-run. We were a buck fifty house, and you couldn’t get a first-run film without putting down a substantial deposit. I do remember being impressed that we had it, sitting down and watching the movie all the way through, when I probably should have been in the back office writing checks to the carting company that towed away our dirty popcorn cups. 

It’s a strange experience researching, in back issues of the local paper, forgotten details of your own life. As I fast-forward through Macy’s ads for bell bottoms and absurdly cheap offerings for eggs and milk at long-defunct grocery stores, I get excited waiting for the movie page to drift into my field of vision. What font did we use that week — was St. George Theatre in script or block letters? What classic or turkey or obscure-indie-destined-to-become-a-cult-film will offer itself to me across time for a dollar fifty?  Through the whole process, I find myself rooting for those ghosts of my past, our old team, a group of desperado twenty-something entrepreneurs. Maybe this time they’ll succeed...?

Old movie palaces, if they’re aren’t so unlucky as to be torn down, often find other work while still retaining some, if not all, of their glory. The Michigan Theatre in Detroit has to be the world’s most glam parking garage, while the Brooklyn Paramount is a basketball court so elegant one can hardly imagine following the squeaky back and forth of the Long Island University Blackbirds and their rivals. Innumerable palaces (The United Palace in Manhattan, The Lane Theatre aka Crossroads Church in Staten Island, have morphed — temporarily, permanently, or part-time — into houses of worship, with, in most cases, the stage serving as an altar. The St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat marvel which I had a hand in running back in 1976 — did some part-time church duty, in addition to serving briefly as a flea market and, rumor has it, almost becoming a roller rink. I thought until recently I’d examined all the possible reincarnations of palaces, but then my sister, a theater lover who lives in Philadelphia, lost interest in coming to New York live productions; and the change had something to do with a movie palace that’s morphed into something else.

“I’ve discovered this amazing local theater troupe!” She told me.

I stifled a yawn.

Then she added, “....they do the whole thing in part of the lobby of a defunct movie palace!”

What was left of the yawn vanished. “Just the lobby?” 

Before I knew it, I was on my way to Philly. I couldn’t quite picture how you could get an audience larger than twenty people into the lobby of any movie palace with the possible exception of one of the Wonder Theaters, or some such. They were big enough.

The former lobby of the Sedgewick Theater on Germantown Avenue in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mt. Airy, is the current home of the theater company, Quintessence. Alexander Burns, its Artistic Director, has seen it through six packed seasons so far. A wide range of classic productions (Dr. Faustus, Alice in Wonderland, Mother Courage, you name it) in the round — or you might say “in the oblong”--play out on a platform which can be viewed from stadium risers on one of two sides of what’s left of the back part of the Sedgewick Theater’s copious lobby. Gazing up, as you wait for Shaw’s St. Joan to start, you can wonder at the lobby’s central chandelier suspended from a medallion of decorative grillwork, in a ceiling of red and gold radiating beams — all this still intact behind the lighting grid, just above the stage platform:

In a previous blog post,” All the Theater’s a Stage — Even the Lobby, I reflected on the fact that the St. George Theatre’s lobby was often filled with impromtu and mostly unintentional performances, some by theater patrons, as if the very walls of a theater call up the actor in all of us. But at the Art Deco Sedgewick, while the inner sanctum — the former auditorium — is serving out its sentence as a warehouse, the lobby has become the theater! 

For the Quintessence patron, it’s intriguing to imagine how vast the theater itself must have been. You walk in off the street to a generous enclosed lobby which, according to Mr. Burns, who granted me an hour of his time, was once an open air recess with a ticket kiosk.  As you pass from this created foyer to the portion of former-theater lobby that precedes the performance-space’s velvet curtains, large gold-framed mirrors, better than eight feet in height, frame your passage left and right. A former women’s lounge on the right serves as the company’s dressing room. Silver walls trimmed in gold Deco progressions are broken through with white plaster, having taken some water over the years. But, save for what has been described as “some holes in the skeleton” of the theater, the space seems dry and intact.  

The Sedgewick was built by a prolific Philly theater architect, William Lee, in 1928, as a palace with a stage for live theater.What might have been a twenty-five hundred seat space never apparently saw the building of its own balcony. As a result, the Sedgewick, before being leveled off as a warehouse, held at best 1,600 under a soaring dome.

The warehouse. It’s sealed off from its former lobby by a solid wall, but thanks to the generosity of Quintessence’s House/Company Manager, Mara Burns, we made our way through a long side alley, and arrived at a loading platform which probably once served as an auditorium exit door. Above and to the left, a series of small provisional enclosures forms a village of warehouse storage areas — for vintage clothing, plumbing supplies and the like. Over all this, the proscenium arch, supported by what remains of its Deco-framed box, seems somehow to smile — if ironically — on the space’s current function. The singular most impressive remaining feature of what once was this vast performance space, is the center medallion, its filigreed layers of grillwork echoing the simpler ceiling of the old lobby Quintessence performs in.

In 1976, the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, New York — run by a group of hard-working entrepreneurs of which I was one — had, like all theaters, a “lost and found.” These days, institutions (like NYC’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, otherwise called the MTA) may have a website listing found objects, but when I was a theater operator, hats, scarves, a single red leather glove, the usual thing, found their way into an old candy carton we kept in the back of the box office. People came by and gratefully picked up their lost items. The winter of 1977 would be known for decades to come as one of the coldest on record in the City of New York. A warm hat or scarf, especially if you were poor as many of our patrons were, was immediately lamented. The orphaned red glove previously mentioned spent only one night in the box labeled “Lost and Found.” Perhaps the most unusual found item, a single man’s lace-up work boot — almost new — caused speculation among the staff; how had he managed to hobble out onto the cold street? From behind the bars of the box office, Brenda expressed the wish that he’d  show up and have a try-on, Cinderfella style. The boot was never retrieved. There were some other things nobody claimed: half a bottle of Jim Beam, a hash pipe. I remember a black wool scarf, unusually thick; I wondered whose it was. Since I didn’t have one myself, I was tempted to grab it, but it smelled a little of a man’s cologne, so it remained in the box until spring.

At lunch the other day, a friend and life-long Staten Islander who is an extraordinary storyteller, recalled an experience from her childhood in the balcony of the St. George Theatre. The year was 1948, 28 years before we’d try our luck as theater operators. She was ten years old.

I was with my brothers and sisters for the afternoon at the theater, but, as usual, I ran ahead of them up the stairs to the balcony, where we liked to sit. I always wanted to be first so I could sit near the wall of the balcony and look over to watch the people coming into the theater below. On that particular day, I found a large manila envelope on the floor leaning against the wall. I didn’t want my brothers and sisters to see it, so I set it down on the seat next to me. The movie came on screen, The Search, about a lost boy at the end of the war. I remember being riveted, but I could hardly wait to peek into the package. I did, and the first thing I saw was two books, one with a golden cover. The other was green. There was also in that envelope a slim box, maroon. I put my hand in and opened the box. A gun! A pistol, all black, just like my toy guns, except it was real! I couldn’t wait to get it home — to see if it would fit in my cap-gun holster! I didn’t want anyone, especially my older brother, who was sitting next to me, to see it. He would have taken it away. I knew he wouldn’t care about the books.

The movie was over, we took the bus home. I showed them all the envelope and said, “It’s just books, see?” When we got home, I went to get my holster. But my mother said, “What do you have there?”

“Just a couple of books I found in the movie...”

She took the envelope away and pulled the books out. “You’re too young for these!” she told me. The title I could figure out was, The Golden Hawk, by Frank Yerby. I wasn’t sure what the other one was all about. My mother looked deep into the envelope, “Well, you’re certainly not going to keep this!” she declared.

I burst into tears. “They’re mine!  I found them!”

“Well, you’re not getting them,” and she took all the items and hid them somewhere.

I waited until she left the house, then I searched and searched, until I found them. They were on a high shelf — I had to climb up on a chair and look between some folded blankets. I knew better than to take the gun, but I took the books. My sister was five years older, so I asked if she could read them to me. When she saw the title of the green one, Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living, she said “Yeah!!!!!” I’ll never forget how hard I laughed — till my stomach hurt. That book was graphic. I remember saying about one part, “You mean that happens to Daddy?”

The gun was around the house for a long time. When I got older I noticed that on the barrel  it said “22 caliber.” I thought about the person who left the package — he was probably a man.

Thankfully, there were no bullets.
 
There was at least one gun we knew about, that entered the St. George in our year, 1976; it arrived in in the hands of a very young boy and was carried all the way to the balcony. You’ll have to wait to read that story until the book — for which this blog was founded (Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace) comes to press.

FLASHBACK FORTY YEARS:
Wednesday, May 12, 1976 
Jaws swam on-screen at The St. George Theatre,
"All Seats, All Times, $1.50, children 90 cents."
(Text from the original listing:
Clip this ad and receive FREE popcorn!
Check out our Dinner Movie Special,
Dinner at Casa Barone, Movie at The St. George,
both for only $4.79!}

Our job as filmmakers is to keep making films that play best on that big screen.
—James Cameron speaking at CinemaCon, as quoted in Variety
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The Paramount Screening Room atop the old Gulf & Western Building at Columbus Circle in New York, was an elegant place: John & Yoko, Otto Preminger, and other celebs screened their rough cuts there, back in what is euphemistically called “the day.” Post-millennium, you might know some swanky rooms in New York and L.A., not a few of which, like the Vista on Sunset Drive, are single-screen movie houses in their own right. But have you heard about “Screening Room?”   

If your ear hasn’t been to the ground yet, Screening Room is newspeak for something that isn’t a room at all, but a “deluxe” set-top box that will give people--who want to see movies first-run--a perfect reason not to buy any more movie tickets, ever. And the most upsetting news for me is that, as a passionate moviegoer and former theater operator (1976, a 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island), I freely admit I’m part of the problem. We all are. Gradually, over the years from 1976 to 2016, the convenience of my bedroom screen combined with a lack of showmanship, and reduced screen-size at most of the theaters I used to attend, made me, more than I would ever have wanted to admit, susceptible to a diminishing assortment of faux movie experiences, from Blockbuster Video, to DVD’s, and these days Netflix, and Apple TV. I offer the lousy excuse that we’d lost our shirts trying to fill the ocean of empty seats under the St. George Theatre’s gilded dome, and I was temporarily theater-lovelorn. It didn’t help that, one by one, the neighborhood houses all disappeared, replaced by what I used to call “the black hole in space,” a single multiplex adjacent to New York City’s (then) landfill.

On a vacation in Florida some time in the late seventies, I glanced over the counter at a St. Augustine restaurant. The proprietor was watching a Sony Trinitron, it’s rabbit ears aimed out the kitchen window.  Inside this fishbowl, a tiny Clark Gable carried an even punier Vivien Leigh up what I knew from experience must be the grand staircase at Tara. Having always wanted to run Gone With the Wind at our movie palace, I was struck by this dollhouse recreation of a former spectacle.  That Trinitron was probably around seventeen inches, which, compared to the St. George Theatre’s 1,100 square foot screen, was a big come-down for Rhett and Scarlet. Stained with grape soda though the screen at the St. George Theatre may have been, while it existed, the scale was right for movies we showed, like The Man Who Would Be King.

A little more than twenty years ago, Susan Sontag observed:
To see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film. It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls.

Only a few years after her death, you can watch The Grand Budapest Hotel on an even more disrespectful surface: an iPad, a laptop, even a cellphone. How many people are left who have actually seen The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, or a host of other great flicks on an actual movie screen? Now supposing there is no reason whatsoever to leave the living room/bedroom/family room.  Who will?

Here’s how Screening Room will work, if it comes to pass:
1. Cinema maven buys a set-top box for an initial outlay of $150.00.  
2. For a charge of $50.00 and a 48-hour time limit, he/she/they can view first-run movies the same day they come to theater screens.

Now do the math. Considering the average price of a movie ticket in the U.S. in 2015 was $8.43, when you add in concession (popcorn, soda, Snickers) for two people you’re almost to thirty dollars. If they were planning to eat out, factor in transportation costs, and they’re breaking even--saving money, if they have a few friends over who split the bill. It has also been suggested that pirate entrepreneurs might decide to create their own small home theaters, charging admission to parties. 

In 1976 at the St. George, a third-run house, we paid about 33 percent of our ticket sales for the rights to whatever movie(s) we showed on our giant screen. A clever Screening Room entrepreneur has 48 hours (we had a week) but will begin making money after selling only six tickets! We actually never made money: our overhead (monthly nut) was close to the downpayment on a modest house. 

Beyond these economic musings are deeper considerations. How far have we strayed from what some would call the sacred experience of movie-watching?  I’d like to give the last word to Susan Sontag, who begins here by recalling the Lumiere brothers’ film, The Arrival of a Train at LaCiotat Station — at 50 seconds, arguably the first documentary ever made (1896): 

Everything in cinema begins with that moment when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into themselves, just as the public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the train seemed to move toward them...it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people's lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -- and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image...

Don’t buy Screening Room; it’s tempting, I know. Set yourself a goal for the number of movies you’ll pay tickets to see each month. I’ve begun this program in my own life, because I want to be kidnapped (as Sontag reminds us), ...in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.