Just now I’m not thinking about architects, but about the impresarios who got the whole era of movie palaces up and running. Sid Grauman  comes to mind.  Marcus Loew (“We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.”) and Samuel Roxy Rothafel ("Don't give the people what they want — give them something better.") are up there in the impressarial ranks, as well. Working alongside the architects and designers — the Lamb brothers, Rapp & Rapp, John Eberson, and so on — it was the impresarios who made sure the cathedrals of entertainment were always more than a sum of their sumptuous parts. Loew, Rothafel, and the gang were the PT Barnums of a movement that changed the way cities and towns looked, each with its Grand, or Ritz or Bijou, and the way people spent their dollars and time.

And, speaking of how a person spends her time, If it hadn’t been for a certain Solomon Brill, our local small-time impresario, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now. Brill — and Eugene DeRosa, a NYC theater architect — opened the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 1929, better than four decades before I signed on to help run the 2672-seat Spanish baroque movie palace they completed only a few weeks after the Wall Street crash that started the Great Depression. Without Brill, no St. George Theatre, without that theater, I’d be writing about something else--and countless residents of Staten Island would be the poorer for never having grown up in wonder, under that fine golden dome, cuddling to the likes of Bogart and Bacall, watching and listening to visiting divas from the Metropolitan Opera, getting lost in Cinerama, or hiding under their seats for The Exorcist or Earth Versus the Flying Saucers.

If Brill is a minor character but still an impresario, there were hundreds like him across the U.S. Google any movie palace, surviving or otherwise, and you’ve got a fair chance of digging up the dreamer, the guy who wished he could have joined a circus. Or had his own circus. Case in point: Al Ringling, a circus man if ever there was one, went on, at the end of a successful career, to build the exquisite 830-seat  Al Ringling Theatre as a gift to his hometown, Baraboo, Wisconsin. In 1915, when this  Rapp & Rapp French palace went up, the town that housed it contained fewer than a thousand residents (to fill the theater required better than 80% local attendance!). The Ringling has operated more or less steadily since then, with some time-outs to undo various bad renovations.

But what about the big timers? Sid Grauman had impresario blood flowing in his veins from the get-go. He and his dad, David Grauman had headed for Dawson City, a Klondike gold-rush in the Yukon, looking for gold (it may have been entertainment gold they were really after). Young Sid sold newspapers, which were scarce in Dawson, and was surprised that a shopowner paid fifty dollars for one of them. He then charged other people for the privilege of reading it to them; clearly people were willing to pay a little more for entertainment! The father-and-son team subsequently went into the theater business, with uneven results for a number of years, this early phase ending in San Franciso. It was the earthquake of 1906 that actually made their fortunes, reducing the Unique Theatre, in which most of their hopes ands dreams had at one point resided, to a pile of rubble.

Not to be washed-up is, however, part of the impresario’s creed:  either Sid or the senior Grauman (accounts vary) was able to rescue one of the theater’s projectors from the ruins. Procuring a tent and some pews from a local preacher, they went right back into business on the spot where the Unique had once stood. A sign outside the makeshift theater, which operated for two full years, comforted prospective patrons with the notion that nothing will “...fall on you but canvas if there is another quake." Entrepreneurs? Yes. Impresarios? Definitely!

After building the Imperial and operating the Empress in San Francisco (not to mention some smaller theaters in San Jose) the Graumans went on to build the Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles the movie capital’s first true palace--a lavish Spanish Colonial Revival house often characterized as Churrigueresque — in 1918. Grauman senior wouldn’t live for the opening of his son’s two major creations, The Egyptian, in 1922 and, five years later, Grauman’s Chinese, aka, these days, TCL Chinese Theatre Imax. (What’s in a name? Everything!). Decorated largely by Chinese craftsmen, with giant red pillars and "heavenly dogs" to guard its entrance, it is famous, among so many other things, for its forecourt which features the hand and footprints of well over three hundred stars. But wait, there’s more! Trigger’s (Roy Rogers’ horse's) hoof prints are there too, and an ice skate belonging to Sonja Henie, and John Barrymore’s actual profile (must’ve been messy washing up afterwards). Stories vary about how this all got started, but my favorite version is that Mary Pickford (a partner in the Chinese Theatre, along with Douglas Fairbanks and Howard Schenck) came to visit and accidentally stepped in some fresh concrete. Any ordinary businessman would have had workmen make a new cement square, but an impresario knows just what to do with a movie star’s footprints! (And she was, arguably, the first movie star).

What’s the difference between an actor and an impresario? Sid Grauman had a few walk-on parts in movies, but he knew his limitations. Douglas Fairbanks apparently asked him to take the role of a poker-player in Trail of the Gold Rush. Makes sense — he grew up in Alaska’s Yukon. According to Aline Mosby in The Washington Reporter (May 14, 1949), Sid told Fairbanks that he couldn’t act, “...no showman can.” Nonetheless he was pressed into service, with just one word to utter, “pass.” Story goes, after a number of rehearsals, the cards were dealt for the game, and cameras rolled. Grauman’s turn came to speak, but he couldn’t follow the script. Throwing his cards on the table, he declared,“Doug, I can’t pass — I have three aces!”

Some time or another, I’ll write about Roxy Rothafel, Marcus Loew and some other cool dudes with impressarial chops, but it’s not right to ask any of them, least of all Sid Grauman, to share the limelight. This post is dedicated to Grauman, who, after building the Chinese, sold out to Fox West Coast Theaters staying on, for the rest of his life, as Managing Director. He knew when to pass, after all.

Although the orchestra pit of the St. George theatre no longer exists, I remember it distinctly — if not with great fondness. By the time I came along in 1976, to help run our slightly down-at-heels 2672-seat movie palace, the pit was, you might say, “the pits.” Like the far end of a New York City subway platform of that era, the pit frequently stank from efforts certain patrons made to spare themselves a trip to the men’s room. We mopped it regularly, while thinking wistfully about the days when orchestras had actually occupied it. On the very first night the theater was open, December 4, 1929, Arnold Johnson and his Majestic Orchestra held forth: “You have heard him over the radio, now see him in person,” the playbill boasted. Like the St. George, most large theaters built in the teens and twenties had been, at least in part, Vaudeville houses, before movies had a voice, and the tradition of mixing movies with music and live acts — even after the talkies arrived — was slow to fade.

​The farther away we get from the Millennium, the harder it becomes to imagine the life of an original, fully-functioning movie palace, with its armies of ushers, three-rank Wurlitzer pipe organ  on a “lift,” (the Roxy had three Kimball pipe organs), actors, comedians, magicians, singers, dancers, and some kind of bandstand orchestra.

Returning for a moment to maestro Arnold Johnson, he was apparently one of the better-known theater conductors of the 1920s, getting his start as a musician at age 14 on a piano bench in a Chicago Chinese restaurant. After music school and a brief stint in real estate, he went on to form his own band, commanding the airwaves out of Chicago for his program, The Majestic Theater of the Air, aka The Majestic Hour, which aired on CBS Radio from 1928 to 1930, Sunday evenings. Sponsor: Majestic Radios. His orchestra (also apparently sometimes known as the Paramount Hotel Orchestra) traveled occasionally to the better movie houses, to back up performers like Blossom Seeley (“the original Red Hot Mama”) who headlined at the St. George Theatre along with Arnold and his band the night of the grand opening. Arnold was no slouch: his orchestra had played in the famous George White Scandals, and included, among its side men, the young Harold Arlen. 

Larger theaters had permanent orchestras that rivaled classical outfits. In Manhattan, “The Cathedral of the Motion Picture” (aka the Roxy), boasted the Roxy Symphony Orchestra (110 members, conducted by Ernö Rapée), the world’s largest permanent orchestra at that time.

On the West Coast, a 65-piece symphony orchestra conducted by Constantin Bakaleinikoff, celebrated the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre just a little over ninety years ago, May 18, 1927. Born in Russia, Bakaleinikoff had studied at the Moscow Conservatory before fleeing the revolution. With his equally musical brother Mischa, he settled in Los Angeles, conducting the L.A. Philharmonic and taking his baton to the premiere of DeMille’s The King of Kings on the Chinese Theatre’s opening night. Constantin went on to become musical director at Paramount Pictures, and to pursue a composing career that would win him more than one Oscar.

According to Steven J. Ross (Working-class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, 1999), “In no other arena of entertainment were high and low culture so closely intertwined as in the movie palace. Orchestras nearly the size and quality of city symphonies offered an eclectic mix of opera, classical music, ballet scores, popular show tunes, and jazz. Music was a critical part of the show, and during most of the 1920s movie theaters annually employed nearly 20,000 musicians — a third of the nation’s musical work force.” (p. 190).

I began this treatment of movie palace orchestras with a sad reflection on the vanished orchestra pit at the St. George, the movie palace which soars over Starts Wednesday. These days, the VIP seating section occupies what was once the orchestra pit, a necessary improvement, since the natural “rake” or slant of the theater’s orchestra section was eradicated years ago to create a level floor. The auditorium needs all the floor space available, to make up for that tragic alteration. (For a fuller understanding of what losing the rake really means, see my blog post that deals with that topic).Anyhow, how ironic that the VIPs are currently sitting where the winos once did, in all their fragrant glory!  Such are the life and times of a (former) movie palace.

In the glam 1920’s — when all things Egyptian were hot — Howard Carter and the ill-fated Lord Carnarvon, digging around in the Valley of the Kings since 1909, uncovered the gleaming and still-intact tomb of King Tutankhamun, on November 26,1922, to be exact). But Sid Grauman and his partner were just a little bit ahead of the archaeologists: the month before, October 18, 1922, they opened America’s first Egyptian-style movie palace, still standing on Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, which was — superficially at least — more opulent than Tut’s tomb. It was the first of its kind, entirely reflective of what is now recognized architecturally as “Egyptian Revival Style.” Having helped to run a movie palace in 1976, Staten Island’s St. George Theatre, a then 2672-seat Spanish/Italian Baroque-style confection, (architect, Eugene DeRosa, designer Nestor Castro), I know more than a little bit about the imaginations of movie palace architects and designers, who stretched building style like taffy, to suit the fantasies of movie patrons.

​Case in point: the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, one of the original “Wonder Theaters,” has been described as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco,” by David W. Dunlap of the New York Times. (The United Palace is a Thomas W. Lamb theatre, BTW). Returning to Grauman’s Egyptian (architects: Meyer & Holler), it started life on the drawing board as an “Hispanic-themed” design, before the architects were persuaded to alter their plans. Egypt and all things Egyptian were such a craze by then, the design simply had to be changed. All that remains of the original hispanic casting, some roof pans above the main entrance, were used, even though they’re not consistent with the sight-lines of an Egyptian-styled building.

Grauman was, of course, onto something; and though he went on to open his Chinese Theatre, more famous, perhaps, than his Egyptian, Egyptomania, as it was once called, saw the opening of the Bush Egyptian Theatre in San Diego, a year later, followed by, among others, Peery’s Egyptian in Ogden, Utah in 1924, and an Egyptian in Coos Bay, Oregon in 1925. There were approximately a hundred Egyptian style theaters when it was all over with, including two more in Utah, a state which seems to have really gotten into Egyptomania. There were theaters all over the U.S. and Canada, including ones in: Bala Cynwyd (Pennsylvania), Concord (New Hampshire), Boise (Idaho), Quebec (Canada), Delta (Colorado), and DeKalb (llinois). These builders rode the curve of the fascination with all things Egyptian, until around 1929. The style — considered a subset of atmospheric theaters — peaked at that point, perhaps because its opulence was tinged with a bit of the macabre (The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon managed somehow to die a little more than four months after opening Tut’s tomb, while shaving the top of an infected mosquito bite, fueling stories of the “mummy’s curse.”). Lord Carnarvon, happened, by the way, to own Highclere Castle, the setting for the recent television series, Downton Abbey (think Lady Mary in an Egyptian-themed flapper dress!).

Egyptian style blossomed in the 1920‘s, but had its roots firmly planted in the 19th century, influencing a lot more than movie palace design style. Think: Art Nouveau (all those tendrils), and Verdi’s Aida, of course! — and even (arguably) the Washington Monument, which is, after all, an obelisk. And speaking of those, there are three original ones (all authentically Egyptian), sometimes called “Cleopatra’s Needles,” in Paris, London and New York City, all erected in the 19th century.

Just how Egyptian is Grauman’s theater? Here I’d like to shamelessly excerpt (with a tip of the hat to https://losangelestheatres.blogspot.com, who quotes Cezar Del Valle) — so that’s two hat-tips, one to https://losangelestheatres.blogspot.com and the other to Del Valle. Here goes:

"Cezar Del Valle notes in another Theatre Talks blog post that a month before the opening, the Egyptian was already inspiring religious fervor. He excerpts an article from the September 9, 1922 issue of the newspaper Holly Leaves reporting on a talk at the Krotona Institute on ‘Temples and religions of Egypt during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut’ by Captain Stuart Corbett, a ‘noted Egyptologist’:

Grauman’s Hollywood Theatre may not last a century but its art was old when the pyramids were built. The careful attention given to detail may be traced in the hieroglyphics on the walls. The reproduction of the cartouche from the royal scarab, bearing the inscription, 'O Let not my Heart bear Witness against me,' is wonderfully exact in detail.”

Like so many gorgeous old movie palaces, Grauman’s Egyptian skated close to the edge of what might have been demolition, in 1993.  But let’s all serve up a sustained  round of applause for the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation, which carefully steered it in the direction of Historic Cultural Monument status, and saw it through to its current successful ownership.

For a really great treatment of the Egyptian theater mania of the twenties, check out Bruce Handy's January 29, 2008 Vanity Fair article, "Watch Like an Egyptian."

Afterthought: Artifacts from King Tut’s tomb toured the U.S. in the seventies, to rave reviews, reviving once more Tut’s (posthumous) Twentieth Century celebrity status (ironic, given the fact that his legacy in ancient times had been entirely obscured by his successors). “King Tut, Funky Tut,” sang Steve Martin in 1979, keeping the myth — and perhaps the curse? — alive.

A week rarely goes by that doesn’t contain the death of somebody who had something to do with movie theaters. Yesterday’s New York Times carried the following headline in its obit section--the part of the paper I almost always read first to learn things about people I never knew existed. “Richard Basciano Dies at 91; Times Square Sultan of Smut.” With a headline like that, even if I hadn’t gone bust in 1976 running the St. George Theatre, a Staten Island movie palace that had some interesting connections to Times Square and porn, I’d still have plunged in to find out about Basciano, a multimillionaire and former boxer, with a pent house directly above his notorious Show World at 42nd and 8th. Basciano was apparently pretty scummy; anybody whose death is confirmed by his lawyer is likely to be. But I digress. It was on a dark and desperate Saturday night in 1976 (how many of our Saturdays were other than that, always on the brink fiscally and in every other way?); I ran down the hill, barely making the 10 o’clock ferry. On the other side of the harbor, I high-tailed it onto the Number 1 (subway), changing at Chambers for the express that would take me to Times Square.

My mission? Carbons for our movie palace’s hopelessly antiquated projectors. We had almost run out of them. Without carbons, no light, without light, no film. They happened to have a supply of carbons at the New Amsterdam, on 42nd Street, home, in the 1920’s, of the Ziegfield Follies. By then the elegant Art Nouveau palace was a soft porn/slasher establishment and getting seedier by the minute. Like other older theaters on Times Square, it hadn’t been converted to Xenon, the technology that had already mostly replaced Carbon Arc.

At that point, the New Amsterdam had less than ten years to go before total darkness settled in, involving the growth of mushrooms in the floorboards and other horrors. But the night I visited it, the lobby seemed glorious, all green and gold, and full of twining tendrils. Emannuelle 2 (light French porn)  was on-screen, a movie I confess I wouldn’t have minded stopping to see, except that I had to get back to S.I. and rescue our own screen from darkness. Anyhow, this was Times Square (God only knew what the theater’s patrons were doing in the squalid darkness beneath that verdant dome). A few months earlier, two armed guards had, as a matter of fact, been tied up, shot and killed in the New Amsterdam’s office. It was in that very office that the manager gave me the precious box of carbons, which I paid him for, then stashed them into my backpack, and headed back to the subway and ferry — and distant Staten Island. Only recently, preparing this post, did I learn about the two guards. Glad I didn’t know then.

As I passed out through the lobby, the ghosts of — who knows — Fanny Brice? Florenz Ziegfield? Olive Thomas? and maybe even Basil Rathbone gazed sadly down on me and my backpack and a crew of winos huddled in the corner near a drinking fountain. It had been New York’s largest (1702 seats in 1903) and most opulent live house, once. It would slide much further before Disney and crew resurrected it in 1997. If you want to get a glimpse of some of its sorrier days, there’s a trailer of Vanya on 42nd St. (Louis Malle)  which was actually shot at the New Amsterdam before Disney rescued it.

But what does all of this have to do with the death of Richard Basciano, the so-called Sultan of Smut?  Nothing, directly.  Indirectly, however, there is a connection. He owned a chunk of the porn world that once licked at the edges of the New Amsterdam; it radiated out from the sex shops and peep shows. In the early seventies, when Basciano’s Show World opened, there were more than 150 sex shops in Times Square, and he owned a passel of them.

While I don’t relish Times Square in its current big-box/touristland reincarnation — and while I occasionally miss the three-card-monte hustlers and other wonders of the Broadway pavement — I’m glad the New Amsterdam, the New Victory (formerly the Theatre Republic), the Lyric, the Lyceum and the Hudson still stand, as active houses. Sadly, the Morosco, Helen Hayes, Bijou, Victoria, and Astor kept their dates with a wrecker’s ball in 1982, to make way for the appallingly mediocre Marriott Marquis Hotel. And speaking of real estate, Show World, the flagship of Basciano’s empire (called “the McDonald’s of the whole sex industry”) is open for business; but the ground it stands on is more valuable than what it currently sells, which means its days are probably numbered. So goes Show Biz.

Every time I hear that Gershwin lyric, I think of the first time I climbed the white marble staircase to the balcony of the RKO Albee Theater in downtown Cincinnati. I must have been six, since the movie we were about to see was Three Coins in the Fountain, a 1954 fantasy about three young Americans in Rome, a city about as remote to a middle-class midwestern child as Mars (which we’d already visited in War of the Worlds). Climbing the Albee’s filigree-lined staircase got us ready to travel: on a raft across the Atlantic, back in time to Ancient Rome, to Africa or into space.

After I’d grown up and moved to New York (1976), it seemed the most natural thing in the world to sign on for duty at our local movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat Eugene DeRosa Spanish Baroque confection, with paintings of bullfighters and lace-clad ladies in the lobby. The lobby of that blessedly still-extant theater leads to one of two elegant pink marble staircases framed in stained glass. Back then we seldom used them, however. It was the Seventies, and movie palaces everywhere were quickly going dark, being demolished, or being converted to other purposes. 

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we opened the St. George Theatre’s balcony: a local high school graduation, a dance recital, children’s theater, an evangelical traveling ministry, replete with shills who dropped their crutches and headed for the stage. And yes, that movie exception of all exceptions, The Exorcist, which packed the place to capacity on two magic weekends. Beyond these instances, our staircases were tied off with ropes (we only had one velvet one) and a dented sign with some of the letters missing that read “Balc ny Cl sed.”  In a good week, we were lucky to sell out half the orchestra, and opening the balcony meant putting on extra staff to keep an eye on sex, drugs and the troubled kid who might show up with a broken bottle.  So much for Paradise.

But in a way it still was, on certain afternoons, my own private heaven, where I could go to escape the agonies of trying to balance the theater’s checkbook, and take in  the likes of John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, in all of its ruby and gold glory, framed by a proscenium arch as grand as any palace in the Himalayas. When I climbed that far balcony staircase, lifting the velvet rope and bypassing the sign, I knew I was safe for a couple of hours, revisiting my increasingly-remote white middle-class childhood, during which things had been paid for by someone else, and the world — all I’d known of it then — had hummed on efficiently.

They don’t build paradise stairways these days, it isn’t part of the zeitgeist. We live, I hate to say it, in a mean-spirited and stingy age, with narrow, mostly unadorned stairwells. But there are still quite a few lovely flights of stairs remaining, elegant enough for the descent of a duchess or the heated ascent of Clark Gable carrying Viven Leigh (a movie we only ran the trailer for).

I’d like to close by mentioning the totally off-the-charts stairs at several surviving movie palaces. The United Palace, on 175th Street in Manhattan, which the New York City Organ Project describes as, “a palatial staircase...that leads to a grandiose, aurora borealis headed by a goddess decoration...” is one such. Not to mention (which means I’m mentioning) the Los Angeles Theatre’s grand staircase, the (Chicago) Uptown Theatre’s, and, in San Francisco, the Fox’s. I could go on and on. In every single one of these settings, one can imagine Gloria Swanson or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or even James Cagney, who, after all, knew how to dance up or down a staircase. 

Speaking of dancing, that’s why the song that started this meditation was written in the first place! 

Afterthought:  “Stairway to Paradise” was written for the 1922 edition of the musical revue of George White's Scandals, which opened on Broadway, August 28 of that year, and closed November 11, running for eighty-nine performances.

Now get a load of this description, apparently in George Gershwin’s own words:
"Two circular staircases surrounded the orchestra on the stage, leading high up into theatrical paradise or the flies, which in everyday language means the ceiling. Mr. White had draped fifty of his most beautiful girls in a black patent leather material which brilliantly reflected the spotlights. A dance was staged in the song and those girls didn't need much coaxing to do their stuff to the accompaniment of [Paul] Whitman's music." (The Gershwins, p. 34).