Even the lowliest food kiosk (as they call them in the U.K.) is always, almost, a restaurant...
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I did a three-year stint as a chef’s assistant/prep cook at the River Cafe in Brooklyn back in the early nineteen eighties, when New American Cuisine was new. This was only a few years after bombing out at running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, in Staten Island, to which this blog is dedicated. The concession stand at our movie palace had been my particular pride and joy: all-beef (Sabrett’s) hot dogs with dijon mustard on homemade miniature Italian breads; Haagen Dazs ice cream back when it was Haagen Dazs — tiny cups delivered by some guy in a station wagon, Klondike bars to satisfy the kiddie ice cream crowd, fresh popped corn with real butter, and every candy bar available, including frozen Snickers. People didn’t just grab food on the way to the movie; they ate dinner, sometimes standing near the mahogany pillars that framed the glassed-in auditorium, as if eating were somehow more important than what was on screen. 

I’ve always felt there was a connection between our stand and the high-end River Cafe where, a few years later, as a walk-in hire, I learned to make Boudin aux Fruits de la Mer, and a certain vegetable terrine (the delicate chicken breast mousse held vegetables in a heavenly suspension). There was a chocolate terrine that required ten pounds of chocolate and ninety egg-yolks, and other wonders, created or approved by our chef, Larry Forgione.

What was served at our concession stand had been as important to me, in its time, as the opulent items we offered well-heeled diners on the Cafe’s barge, facing sunset Manhattan. So the other day, avoiding all the bad news that’s fit (or unfit) to print in the NY Times, I turned my eye to the obituaries (often the only non-threatening text, and generally better written than other stories). 

LOUIS OSTEEN, 77, SOUTHERN CHEF WHO ELEVATED CUISINE, IS DEAD.

Good, I thought, something from the food world. I was only half right. Quality obits always start, like good resumes, in the present; and so followed a description of an Inn on Pawley’s Island, SC Osteen made his name at, the grill in Charlston he opened and a name restaurant just down the street, a mention of his elevation of local Southern cuisine, and a seminal cookbook he published. The James Beard Award crowned his career. Then, as is true for all classic obituaries, approximately four paragraphs after the resume, the writer turns his attention to Osteen’s roots: born in 1941, in Anderson, SC, not to a family of cooks as you might suppose, but to a family of small town movie theater owners and operators!  

Chef though Osteen was to become, his first job was, actually, in the family drive-in theater. “I was 10 years old,” he told The Daily Meal, so “...took pride in cooking and serving popcorn, hotdogs and hamburgers...I wanted to make the best concession food I could.”

Wow, could I get my head around that; it’s what I always wanted for us at the St. George. Our concession stand had the highest per capita sales of any movie theater stand in the five boroughs of New York City, in our theater year, 1976.

Good food is good food, whether it’s served at a concession stand or in a white tablecloth restaurant. If you look at the list of eateries Osteen worked at or ran, a number of them turn out to be snack stands, places where he perfected recipes like his chili-pickled shrimp. 

I’ve always thought of restaurants as intrinsically theatrical: the props (perishable) are the food, the cooks and the waiters are actors and/or stagehands, and the diner is the audience. The drama is: will the diner (patron) get the desired food in a timely manner, served in an appealing (or romantic or even orgasmic) way? It doesn’t always work out the way you intend; don’t ask me about the intrinsic flaw in the chocolate-covered raisins we sold at the theater... I’m sure Osteen had some tragic restaurant food stories of his own to relate to friends in the late hours. At the River Cafe, a kitchen run in the French manner, the “cold pantry” was the cooking station where desserts and salads came from. All the sauces for cold things were kept there, and one sad afternoon, the pantryman had the misfortune to serve the garlic/basil cream sauce on the chocolate terrine — mistaking it for the sweet creamy (green) pistachio sauce.

That’s what I mean about drama, and it can happen behind the “line,” in the kitchen or out on the floor in the dining room, or in a theater in the dark, while munching. Masks of Comedy and Tragedy appear largely over the prosceniums of theaters, but could bless the kitchen or concession-stand door as well. 

Afterthoughts:
1. The Osteen Twin, a two-screen theater in Anderson, is what most local folk remember of this family’s small chain. P.C. Osteen, the chef’s grandfather, started the whole she-bang in 1918, with Vaudeville and movies. His four sons took over and expanded the theater business. Harry, the dominant son (chef’s uncle) and the official family historian, carried it into the next generation, with the cooperation of his three brothers.  

For a sense of the life of a small-town theater impresario, here’s a chunk of Uncle Harry’s obit from a 2008 edition of the Anderson Independent Mail: 

Harry Osteen Sr. died on July 10, 2008, at the age of 93. He is being remembered as an important part of the Anderson community.
The Osteen family name was synonymous with the movie theater business in Anderson for the better part of the 20th century, and Harry Osteen was part of that tradition.
He and his wife of 69 years, Verna, also were involved in the Meals on Wheels program in Anderson for decades and were active in Anderson Senior Follies, Outreach Entertainers and ballroom dancing instruction.
The family business into which Osteen entered started when his father P.C. Osteen in 1918 bought one of the downtown theaters that cropped up in the late 1800s. P.C. Osteen bought, sold, and built a series of theaters around Anderson showing movies, putting on vaudeville shows, and helping to introduce a new form of entertainment to a small town.
Harry Osteen along with his brothers Percy, Bill, and Albert carried on the family tradition in the Electric City by opening a series of movie houses between 1946 and 1974.
In 1995, he was awarded the state’s Order of the Palmetto.
In 1996, he received the Service to Mankind Award presented by the Anderson Sertoma Club.
In 2004, he was honored by the Orphan Film Symposium conducted at the University of South Carolina. 

2. Louis Osteen didn’t embark on his restaurant career without, briefly, trying to open some theaters in Atlanta with a couple of friends. It didn’t pan out exactly; boy do I get that!

Once upon a time — in 1976 — if you wanted to go out to the movies, you looked in the “paper” to find out what was showing where, and when. In my area, that would have been The New York Times, New York Post, Daily News, Village Voice, Soho Weekly News or Staten Island Advance (pronounced AD-vance in these parts). You either subscribed to or grabbed a copy of the paper of your choice at the news stand, and flipped straight to the movie page, with its strip ads in lurid black and white. To the prospective patron, it was information, but to the theater owner/exhibitor, it was essential advertising. In fact, that was about it for advertising. Oh there was the marquee, carefully set by an usher on a rickety ladder in fragile cast-aluminum letters, every Tuesday night: Lady Sings the Blues, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, whatever. We kept our theater’s marquee lit long past the last show, in case somebody should drive by. Beyond the marquee, there was the answering machine, a high-tech device we’d almost pawned jewelry to buy, for around seven hundred dollars. The machine, which sat right next to the phone in the ticket booth, somehow performed as a kind of miraculous receptionist, telling the caller, at any time of the day or night, what was showing and when, at The St. George Theatre, our exquisite nearly-empty 2,672-seat movie palace. 

You have reached the St. George Theatre at 25 Hyatt Street, located in beautiful downtown St. George, a block and a half from the ferries, in lower, lower Manhattan. Notice we chose not to mention that we were actually located in Staten Island, the fifth borough, or perhaps the sixth — after New Jersey — in a very big city. (We really were so close to the ferries, we felt we could claim the city that famously never sleeps, Manhattan, as our locale).

Such a novelty was this answering machine, people with no intention of going to a movie any time in the future would call it anyhow, just to listen to what it had to say. Trained initially as a DJ, my husband had (still has) a golden voice and a gift for comedy, which built him a kind of podcast audience of theater and non-theater goers. 

The only reliable way to reach local moviegoers was The Staten Island Advance, which was fully capable of forgetting to run our daily ad, either through negligence or (we sometimes suspected) scorn. If indeed the ad was somehow dropped, you were sunk. Ah, the world before Google, Fandango, apps.

Once a patron was, somehow, against all odds, standing in our lobby waiting to buy an actual ticket, that chunked cheerily out of the AutomaTicket machine, she/he was subject to more controlled forms of advertising. Posters, rented from National Screen Service, came in two sizes: two sheets (41” x 54”) and the smaller one sheets (27” x 41”). The two sheets fit exactly our filigreed glass poster cases, and, with the assistance of a small “Coming Soon” or “Starts Wednesday,” gave the movie-goer an idea of the immediate future on our big screen. Trailers or coming attractions before the main feature, also came from NSS, who delivered them, scratched though they inevitably were, for a fee. In a fit of extravagance, we continued to rent the trailer for Gone With the Wind, with no intention whatsoever of showing the movie; we just longed to see it on our giant stained screen, if only because its gaudy grandeur seemed to match ours; and the trailer was as close as we could come. 

An experiment of ours to boost popcorn sales involved giant fans installed in the heat/AC room, and a popcorn warmer, which wafted the scent of fresh-pop directly into the auditorium. This was, perhaps, our most successful advertising scheme, nearly doubling concession sales, and proof positive that subliminal advertising works. Pity there wasn’t a ticket-selling equivalent...

We weren’t the only theater operators to toy with renegade advertising techniques. Comments after theater entries on the Cinema Treasures site can often be really entertaining. In a recent visit, I happened on the following comment, dating to 2012 (the ellipses “...” indicate excerptions):

Hi, my name is Jerry Littenberg…

From the late 50s throughout the 60s I managed the then-called Teaneck Theatre...operated by the Skouros Theatre Corporation of W. 48th St. in NYC.

This was my first theater as a manager. I was the assistant manager at the Fox theater in Hackensack when the Teaneck manager died suddenly, and my district manager, Curtis Mees appointed me the new manager to this cute theater with 1000 seats, and great air conditioning...

I had the opportunity to change policy at the Teaneck, from second run double feature after Hackensack to single feature...when the opportunity arose for us to pick a French film to play at the Teaneck... So And God Created Woman with the French kitten Brigitte Bardot ended up at the Teaneck, with lines around the corner, coughing up $2.50 each to see the sexy Bardot in her early years.

...this one was a huge hit: My grosses were so high that my bosses had to telephone me to confirm them. Its success was due, in part, to the Catholic church’s dislike of the movie, which the Vatican openly condemned. To advertise the movie, I made two banners that said “Condemned by the Catholic Church — Theater manager gives it FOUR STARS!”, and hung them from the marquee. The Diocese of Teaneck called me to assure me how displeased they were at my advertising methods, so I altered the sign so it would read : “condemned by you know who”… The phones lit up the next day!...

Jerry was onto something back in 1956, when the Bardot movie came out; call it reverse advertising if you like. In that year, the (Catholic) National Legion of Decency condemned fifteen films, with the Bardot movie at the top of the list. Reverse advertising wouldn’t have worked for us twenty years later. In 1976, the Legion condemned only five movies: Carrie, J.D.’s Revenge, The Omen, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Taxi Driver. The only one of these we didn’t show was The Outlaw Josey Wales. Sex, nudity, what you will, had by that time become the norm. 

Afterthoughts:
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1. The National Legion of Decency dropped its “C” rating (“condemned”) in 1978, trading it in for the big “O” (“morally offensive”). In recent history, Turner Classic Movies, seeming to take a feather from the aforementioned  theater manager’s cap, initiated a festival of "Movies Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency." 

2. Speaking of advertising, Doris Day — from my hometown, Cincinnati — died last week. She never liked the last name “Day,” but she stuck with it; at 17, she changed to that surname to boost her singing career — also because DORIS KAPPELHOFF wouldn’t fit on a local theater marquee.

3. How TV continues to mortally wound film-going with product advertisement is a depressing subject I’ve decided to sideline here. Suffice to say, at $25 a screen per week (15 second ad), it’s a bargain for advertisers, but the magic, for us, is gone.  Arrive late if you can!

“...thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.” ―Roger Ebert

As pipsqueak theater operators at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I operated with a team of young entrepreneurs in 1976, we took what crumbs our booking agent dropped to us from the Mann Theaters table of available movie product. Our agent was a Mann employee, and we were his side-hustle. One of the crumbs happened to be the 1976 film, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, starring the improbable duo of country singer Kris Kristofferson, and British actor Sarah Miles, the latter obviously desperate for work.

The movie was depressingly bad. Roger Ebert’s notion that only bad movies are truly depressing fits Sailor like a trim pair of bellbottoms; Vincent Canby said as much in The New York Times,“There is a beguilement to Sailor,...that of sitting through a movie in a state of irascible unconvincedness while being more than half seduced.” Half-seduction, as I can attest, is far worse than no seduction at all. Based loosely on impressions of a classic Japanese novel by Yukio Mishima, the movie could put you to sleep in five minutes (it did have that effect on a number of patrons, who wandered out of the dark wanting their money back). This, despite the fact that Mishima’s novel had been quietly terrifying; I recalled not being able to sleep after having read it.

All the dreary, improbable or disappointing movies we ran could be summed up as a waste of carbon-arc light, film stock, and the poor moviegoer’s buck fifty (or ninety cents, if underage). Canby knew what he was talking about when it came to seduction: when properly executed, it is I believe, what makes a movie worth going to.

A brilliant movie will deliver anywhere. Seduced in the back of a Chevy or a Paris hotel suite is still seduced. But the opposite isn’t true; movies that fail to deliver can still be softened by elegant surroundings, or another round of popcorn. So it was with the bad movies that we ran in 1976.
There was, at least, a gleaming dome to look up at. The brightest moment I recall from Sailor is the intermission (we actually scheduled one, as if we knew somehow that people would need a break). Out into the lobby they came, eager for popcorn, never expecting the real drama of the night about to take place under our three newly-polished chandeliers.

We were, at the time, using our uninhabited mezzanine to house four very young puppies, who’d been born under a bush in our yard. The dogs had the run of the mezzanine, which was fine, we thought; they were afraid of the stairs. During Sailor’s Saturday night intermission, a woman munching on popcorn, while sitting on the stairs to the mezz, proved she could reach C above high C with a blood-stopping scream. Further shrieks. In under a minute, the whole lobby emptied out onto the street. Then word went round, and screams turned to guffaws. Something wet had indeed entered her ear: the tongue of a curious puppy! Boffo, as we already called her, had braved the stairs to make her debut. We’d named Boffo after the old Variety term “Boffo Socco” — which means “outstanding box office”. Though Sailor was hardly boffo or even boffola, the show went on, with a much-awakened audience. BTW, the puppy would turn out to “have legs,” another Variety term signifying that she would last — eleven more years. She was a showbiz dog if there ever was one! 

In Search of Noah’s Ark was a fake documentary which, after several decades, developed a kind of cult following as kitsch, relieving it not at all of its burden of badness. Who could believe that splinters of Noah’s actual ark, like purported fragments of the true cross, had been found on Mt. Ararat? Busloads of evangelicals could, and did believe this: a seduction for a specific audience, but nothing much for the rest of us.

Gable and Lombard was the pits, as Roger Ebert himself testified, “They had more than love — they had FUN!  Yes, and they did more than make love, too — they made movies, but you'd hardly guess it from this one.” Gable and Lombard is one of those movies where casting decisions saved thousands at the expense of believability. The result was a child-like actor (James Brolin) playing in Daddy’s (Clark Gable’s) shoes. Jill Clayburgh was only a little less objectionable as Carol Lombard. Nothing happens, no seduction. 

For all the bad movies, we also showed a lot of good ones, including some real surprises, flicks I’d expected would be bad and then was surprised to catch myself stopping and sitting down to watch. So  it went with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the title, I thought at first, said it all. And the trailer, those women running from Leatherface in his mask, seemed to convince me it was all just blood and gore. With a bad movie you see the trailer, and oftener than not you’re sure you know what the movie’s going to be; like fast food (finger-lickin’ good), the sign says it all. What made Chainsaw worth watching, once the real movie arrived on screen? The cinematography, for one thing. Tobe Hooper had been a documentary cameraman. The film was violent, but, at the same time, in its cynical way, it had something to say about violence. The first sizzling frames drew me in. Instead of going back to my office to sort unpaid bills, I grabbed a popcorn and sat down front. I generally avoid bloody movies, but, as is true with much of Hitchcock (think the shower scene in Psycho), I couldn’t take my eyes off what was happening. 

Well I started by quoting Roger Ebert, and I’m thinking of ending with an observation from an old mentor of mine, the structuralist filmmaker, Hollis Frampton. Though his films have no or little narrative, he sincerely loved movies, when their seductive powers worked. Born in the latter days of the Depression, in Wooster, Ohio, he grew up in the dark watching Laura, Rope and whatever else Hollywood had to offer from week to week at the local movie house. A poet, photographer, and, eventually, a filmmaker, he appeared at a pivotal point in my life, and changed my worldview. Over a Bloody Mary at Donohue’s on Lexington near 68th one Wednesday in 1972, he offered me his personal viewing formula: “A movie that works has to make you forget your toothache, the love you just lost, and the balance in your checkbook....” He was right. Four years later I went on to run a movie palace, and can add to his observations, “and if you’re working in the theater where the movie’s showing and you want to sit down...” 

Well that cinches it.

Afterthoughts:
1. Movies I remember sitting down for at the St. George:

• The Man Who Would Be King
• Taxi Driver
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Blazing Saddles
• Smile
• Silent Movie
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest               There were others.

2. You can never read too many good quotes. Who said, “Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.” 

(Answer: Charlie Chaplin)

Year after year, the third of May goes by unnoticed. We pass Cinco de Mayo, heading straight for Mother’s Day, without pausing to reflect on a sequence of events that, on May 3, 1948, quietly changed forever the way Americans cinematically entertain themselves — or even what kinds of buildings they enjoy these entertainments in. What happened on that date in early May (coincidentally in the year I was born) gave a huge boost to television, eventually wiping out the movie palaces, and releasing movie stars and directors from a kind of indentured servitude that only Hollywood could create.  “The studio system” was finally dead. Before the United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (aka the Hollywood Antitrust Case) came down on the government’s side, a kind of barter system often prevailed  when it came to casting movies, as with Gone With the Wind. David O. Selznick, the director, wanted Clark Gable; and he was gonna have him. 

These days, he’d just contact Gable’s agent, but under the old monopolistic studio system, Gable “belonged” to MGM, which didn’t make a practice of loaning out its stars. So a deal was struck, and three years later GWTW opened in Loews theaters nationwide; Loews was MGM’s parent company. Yep, that’s a monopoly alright, when an entity or class of entities has exclusive possession or control of a commodityor service.

Before 1948, theaters that bore the Paramount, Loews, 20th Century Fox, or RKO logo on their marquees showed largely that parent company’s product. If you ran a Fox theater, you took what was given to you, the way a child eats the family meal, and never mind liking broccoli. But it was even worse for the small mom and pop operations: those theaters had to take a “block” of films, including some turkeys, in order to get one or two good titles. Block booking, it was called. 

After 1948, a lot of theater properties went up for sale, and Paramount and its brothers found themselves short capital. The lawsuit had been going on, one way or another, since the 1920’s, with some intermissions (the Depression, WWII) during which the studios argued hardship and got away with it, thanks to an indulgent FDR. In the end, it had been the small producers (Selznick, Disney, Orson Welles, and the like) who’d nagged the Department of Justice into paying more attention. Now that it was over, the studios had to recoup their losses, which they managed, by selling parts of their film libraries to television, and, well, you know the rest. Ninety million people went weekly to the movies in 1948; ten years later, it was 46 million, and TV was king. 

By the time I came along — in league with other brave young entrepreneurs keen on opening the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat movie palace — the studio system was dead. During our theater year and beyond, its remains continued to molder away, like a giant forest tree fallen some decades before. Nobody “owned” stars anymore; the movies they appeared in were sometimes indies, and the stars were basically “free agents” (to borrow a term from baseball). Theater chains, Mann and the like, were separate from film companies; the chains bid for pictures, letting the chaff (The Last Tycoon, for example) fall to us small-time theater operators. We got some good stuff, including second- or third-run classics, some obscure stuff that ought to remain obscure, like Don’t Open the Window, and classic bombs like Gable and Lombard. Not so different from block booking, when you think about it.

I can’t say it was a living, running a movie palace in 1976, but it was a great adventure, and a fine decade for film. The studio system could never have produced the rebellious, quirky or gritty films of the seventies like Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, or Logan’s Run, not to mention sleepers like Coolie High and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These were movies we had the privilege of showing, but the year also produced films we never got our hands on, like Network, The Seven Percent Solution, Marathon Man, Breaking Point and Bound for Glory. Not to mention Obsession, which could well have come out of the studio system in its heyday (Roger Ebert called it “a 1940s melodrama out of the ‘CBS Radio Mystery Theater’ by way of a gothic novel...”).

1976 was smack in the middle of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era and it spoke to the rebellious, questioning attitude of that zeitgeist. We in the five boroughs and their surrounds had also survived the near-bankruptcy of New York City (they were talking, after all, about selling off parts of Central Park and certain items stored in the Met’s attic!). By 1976, the recession was on the wane, but we wouldn’t know it till the nineteen eighties. 

In early March, 1977, we were out of the theater, our magnificent dream over. That’s when I finally had time to catch up with movie going: to see Rocky Horror with the rest of humanity, and some of the movies listed above — at other theaters, like the Quad in the Village — that were still open.  
 
Afterthoughts:
1.For an interesting treatment of United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc., check this out. Please forgive the Constitution Center in the link above for its incorrect citing of the date, May 4, 1948. In all other sources, the date is listed as May 3 of that year. 

2.Gone With the Wind, mentioned at the start of this post, had inhabited the St. George’s giant screen, if not when we ran the place.

3.Since television plays a role in this post, here’s a little treatment of technologies, as they have enfolded each other, like so many Russian dolls.

“Just the facts ma’am...”

Whoever remembers Sgt. Friday, the L.A. P.D. (TV) detective, identifies him as the speaker of these words as surely as Bogart, in Casablanca, has been forever tagged with, “Play it again, Sam.” Oddly enough, neither Bogie nor Jack Web — the actor who created Dragnet, and played Sgt. Friday — actually said the oft-quoted words he is tagged with; but these sources are fiction, so lapses are somehow more forgivable. Shakespeare never penned “All that glitters is not gold,” either, (it was “glisters” — The Merchant of Venice) and Cary Grant never said “Judy, Judy, Judy.” 

Journalism is another thing altogether.

The facts, dude; what are they, exactly? In this blog I strive for accuracy – though I may inadvertently stray, for which, preemptively, I apologize. Starts Wednesdayis based on my experiences of movie theater operation in 1976 (specifically at The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island). I check a lot of facts when I write about things beyond the lobby of the St. George. One prime example is the business of our projection booth, and the twin alternating carbon arc projectors that occupied that space, delivering Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, Dog Day Afternoon, and another hundred or so films to our giant grape-soda-stained movie screen daily. Carbon arc projection is a highly technical process, and although I witnessed it, I don’t pretend to be competent enough to write about it unaided. Complex though it was, it was, even in those days, largely anachronistic, if not downright medieval.

The St. George and a handful of older houses, including its sister theater, the Paramount, down the street — and the porn houses on Times Square — still depended, as we did, on boxes of carbon rods. These, when burned, created a spark that kept an image on-screen. More than once we ran out of carbons, generally requiring me or someone else to take the Staten Island Ferry, then the number one train uptown to Times Square, to borrow a box of the precious rods in the porn district. Carbons had to be trimmed as they burned, and were good for only a short period of time. The difference between our fire-driven technology and the tidy long-lasting Xenon bulb, which all newer theaters had switched over to, was like the transition from horse and buggy to horsepower. 

So imagine my surprise when a friend recently sent me an article from The New York Times that clearly needs the loving services of a fact-checker. (Do they exist anymore?)  The headline of the piece gave me trepidations, “How a Movie Projectionist Keeps the Dying Art of Celluloid Alive.” Celluloid, for safety purposes, hasn’t been in use anywhere since around 1951. According to numerous sources, corroborated by my projection expert, Robert Endres, retired head projectionist of Radio City Music Hall,  and currently projection technician for Dolby Sound in NYC, celluloid was phased out in the ‘50’s.

“... The full term is “nitro cellulose”, and as you might guess from the ‘nitro’ it’s the same basic material as gun cotton and is of course quite flammable and even explosive. It was phased out with acetate as a base which, while it will burn, is not explosive. That base was in turn succeeded by a polyester  (ester) base which won’t tear or break as easily...”

I knew this, and, intuitively, I know, from reading certain Quentin Tarantino press-releases, that “celluloid” has become an emblematic term, feeding the nostalgia of people who long for a return to real film projection. Still, the misuse of this term has got to be confusing to anyone who wants “the facts,” (sir or ma’am or...). 

The author of the article, James Barron, chronicles the activities of Jesse Locascio, a young man who is learning projection from the ground up, but he gets key facts about projection wrong, completely spoiling the piece for me and, presumably, anyone with any degree of knowledge of the subject.

This segment of the text is more or less right:
For generations, movie theaters had two projectors for each screen. The movies were cut into segments, each about 20 minutes long and each on a separate reel. Every 20 minutes, as the end of one reel approached, the projectionist had to start the next reel on the other projector. 

Then the trouble begins:
There was a reason for the two-projector arrangement: the bulb in the projector had a life span of not much longer than 20 minutes.” [dead wrong! What had to be changed or at least trimmed, were the carbons]. The author then compounds his error, “The projectionist had to install a new bulb [wrong again] every time he...changed a reel. Longer-lasting bulbs were perfected in the 1960s and 1970s, [huh?] and with them reel-like platters big enough for a whole movie to fit on just one. 

I’ll let Wikipedia take it home; good enough in this instance:
The Xenon arc lamp was introduced in Germany in 1957 and in the US in 1963. After film platters became commonplace in the 1970s, Xenon lamps became the most common light source, as they could stay lit for extended periods of time, whereas a carbon rod used for a carbon arc could last for an hour at the most. [underlining mine]. 

Bob Endres notes, “Another error in that story is that projectors contained a ‘bulb’ that burned out every twenty minutes or so, when of course the light source was carbon arc. That concept was apparently beyond the grasp of the author.”

The New York Times may not have any fact checkers left, or perhaps the writer was on deadline. I’m happy to say, I have a projection expert and friend, who saves my bacon all the time when it comes to projection, screen curvature, acoustics and all sorts of tech-heavy subjects. Thanks, Bob. Surely the Times could do as well? Perhaps they need Sgt. Friday to remind them to stick to the facts...  

Afterthoughts:
1. The life span of a xenon bulb was and still is around 3,000 hours, according to film-tech.com 

2. Dragnet was a radio show before it found its way to TV, and the first movie spin-off from a TV series, BTW. See this tcm.com article.  

3. Check out An Ode to the Lost World of the Film Projection Booth, on Wired.com.

4. I’ve written several blog posts about Robert Endres, a good friend and indispensable projection consultant, but here’s a peek at his rather extraordinary life.  
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5. What are the odds, that in one week I would receive two articles on movie-theater-related tech topics, both containing blatant inaccuracies?  This blog post has dealt with only one of them. The other article was passed on to me by a second friend, and concerns theater organs, which I often write about here. The article showcases a 7 manual digital/pipes organ currently being installedin the Castro Theatre in San Francisco; it claims that organ is the world’s biggest. The article’s writer cheekily compares it to the notable 7 manual/33,00-pipes Midmer-Losh being restored in the vastness of Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, and — pulling out all the stops — also to the illustrious (6 manual/ 29,000 pipes) Wanamaker instrument in Philadelphia, which can rightly be called the largest fully-functioning pipe organ in the world. Piling it on, the article deplores the Wanamaker’s light use, claiming it is played for two brief “vignettes” of fifteen minutes each, daily. In actuality, it’s put through its paces six days a week (Monday-Saturday), for two 45-minute recitals, not to mention full-length after-hours concerts, thanks to Friends of the Wanamaker Organ. I can vouch for the 45-minute recitals, having enjoyed at least one such recently, while standing in the (these days, Macy’s) women’s shoe department on the main floor of that iconic, acoustically excellent atrium. If you’re anywhere near Philadelphia, treat yourself!