I’ve been having epic dreams lately... They’re B movies, involving large landscapes:  the grandeur of the palisades along the Hudson River, but I’m on foot on the highway and people are firing from the bushes; or we’re in a ruined temple, my own Raiders of the Lost Ark, or climbing a pyramid in a jungle. Covid dreams, a friend calls them. Okay, and also artifacts of a fifties/sixties childhood: Ben Hur, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia. Big screen movies with big landscapes and an element of desperation or bravado. Or both.
 
I wake exhausted, but somehow rested.  In the end, we always tough it out; I say “we,” because it’s usually a band of hard workers I’m trekking with — like the staff of the theater I used to run back in the seventies — a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George, that was, for the year we occupied it, always on the verge of collapse.

In my Covid dreams, we could be up to our collarbones in mud on some riverbank or clinging to a sheer rock face. When I wake, I think, “Well that was hard,” but I feel cleansed, knowing my unconscious has had to work all night to come to terms with this moment in history — the madness, the masks, news of the dead. You need an epic dream-scape to cope with all this mess... So what else is there to do but create and star in a movie!!!?

I probably don’t have to tell you, especially if you’ve followed this blog over the years, that palaces like the  St. George were built for big-screen adventures, even the relatively silly ones,  like sword-and-sandal romps through Ancient Rome (Quo Vadis?), or lesser westerns. 

Which brings me to a treasured old-school epic I watched the first time at the St. George, sitting in the balcony with a large popcorn; I was the only person in the balcony that day and practically the only watcher in the whole house, given how bad the feature was doing for us. It was John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King....only a year old and making the rounds of second-run houses.

Movies can be time-bombs. Recently, I watched the Huston epic for the third time in my life, on Netflix. 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, once again 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.  
 
Though it was largely filmed in Morocco, I was, in short order, 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 an aging 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 a masonic symbol 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 our 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 (they did in the movie) back to our normal lives; which is to say we never had the exit plan every good soldier of fortune should have. (In case you somehow haven’t watched The Man Who Would Be King, I will only say the rope bridge and what happens there is worth the whole film).  
 
Dated and unapologeticly macho, not to mention Eurocentric, it’s nonetheless a brilliant movie; Huston 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.
 
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  identify with them! – that's what happens when characters are that well drawn). 
 
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 me  better than forty years to discover the misplaced adventurer in myself? It was almost worth personal bankruptcy, to see that movie in a real palace.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. An earlier version of this post hails from 2015, and elicited a few comments. Here’s Clifford Browder, 5/6/15, recalling his own childhood:  
I grew up on British movies of the 1930s — yes, way back then — that glorified the Empire and those who fought for it. I never thought about the native peoples and their point of view, but those movies didn't want you to. It wasn't about politics; I and boys like me just wanted to be immersed in an exotic world with lots of adventure, casts of thousands, etc., and the "good guys" always win. Your movie is of a later date, obviously, and more critical. But those old movies — often Technicolor epics by Alexander Korda — were fun. But they wouldn't fly today.

2. And Beth Gorrie, same day:  
A gentle reflection on the magic of your movie palace & that mad, quirky movie. What do you suppose is the basis for the timeless appeal of a film like Casablanca & its broad audience? Can't be just romance. Bromance?  

We were eating fried eggs on the porch, listening to a playlist of song covers by Nat King Cole. “Love is a Many Splendored Thing...” thanks to the requisite devices we all carry, it didn’t take long to find a film with exactly that name (William Holden, Jennifer Jones, 1955). The song, by Alfred Newman, won a Best Original Music Score Oscar that year. Ah, the fifties (and early sixties): “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “The Days of Wine and Roses,” anything by Mancini. Violins. Those fiddles were fading by the time I was grown, despite the fact that “Let It Be” won Best Original Song Score in 1970 (with the help of a laid-in violin or two). The world was changing and movie music reflected those changes.

In New York, where, for one unforgettable mid-seventies year, a team of us ran a movie palace, movie music had mostly lost its romantic edge. The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre  in Staten Island was our home in 1976. Dean and I mused over our Sunday eggs: what music did we remember emanating from our grand mostly–empty theater auditorium?

The seventies were a brooding time at best. Jaws, which we ran in early May of ‘76, had won an Oscar in ’74. Its score was later ranked as the sixth-greatest by the American Film Institute. The theme, an alternating pattern of two notes  became a classic piece of suspense music. Its composer, John Williams, described the theme as "grinding away at you, just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable.” 

That shark theme really did penetrate beyond the glass-enclosed auditorium. I could hear it (and see the swimmer about to be pulled down into the water) from as far away as the concession stand. It also found its way into everyday culture; humming it (duh dah duh dah...) was a way of indicating danger, especially in New York City, where being mugged had come to seem almost normal.

No wonder we ran the trailer for Gone With the Wind over and over, even though we had no intention whatsoever of showing the movie to our action-obsessed audience. Not so secretly, we craved the kind of movie whose music wraps its violins around you and pulls you in. Could’ve run a Casablanca trailer, come to think of it. “As Time Goes By,” was the kind of song I needed at that point, to curl up inside of. It might have helped me deal with how to pay the film distributors and the landlord.

Of the more than a hundred movies we ran, only the shark and those tubular bells from The Exorcist  come to mind as music that penetrated my consciousness, although we did run a number of movies with sound tracks worth noting:
• “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” R&B, Freddie Perren and Chrstine Yarian’s song from the 1975 flick, Cooley High, obscure then, but a cult film now. It’s a throwback to romantic themes, melodic and teary.

• Jack Nitzsche’s score for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  won an Oscar in ’76. Speaking of on-edge music, the dominant sound has to do with a bow drawn across a saw; it’s up there with tubular bells and shark music.

• Composer Jerry Goldsmith’s “Avi Satani” also won an Academy Award for The Omen in ‘76. It’s a lovely if unsettling piece of music. As late as it came along in our desperate year, I don’t remember it well. Was I in my office trying to pay the carting company so they wouldn’t break anybody’s legs backwards? Probably.

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in a class by itself. Much of the music from that movie is an amalgam by local Texas talent never brought together into anything as formal as a sound-track. People have tried. Visit this link if you’re curious.

As a movie exhibition year, 1976 was between two music worlds. Movies with heroic themes came along afterward: post–‘Nam, post–Watergate, and beyond the recession that, among other things, had nearly bankrupted New York City. Is this why the movies I remember loving used music less as a theme and more, the way Hitchcock had in Psycho, as an effect? From Psycho’s brilliant tearing violins — in the shower scene — to the tubular bells of The Exorcist isn’t very far in movie music time.

Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Chariots of Fire, Fame, even All That Jazz (despite its dark vein) followed in the late seventies and eighties, offering music with a kind of resolve, that might, after all, reach movie-goers standing outside an auditorium and draw them through the doors. Alas, by that time, those doors were in multiplex labyrinths, not single-screen palaces. After we left the movie business, the music changed, in more ways than one; or, to quote Irving Berlin, “The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.” 

Afterthoughts:

​1. If you liked that last link, here’s an older version of Berlin’s 1927 classic. 

2. Speaking of songs in what’s been called The American Songbook, here’s one for the scary time we’re passing through; heard it the other day. It’s a Depression-era song, that sustained a lot of folks in WWII... 

, Who, at this murky historical moment, wants to sit for several hours munching popcorn in the dark with strangers? Even if the Quad in Manhattan were open right now, I wouldn’t want to go there, despite my career as a veteran movie-goer and former movie palace operator, at the St .George Theatre, in 1976. Time to think outside the box, the theater box, that is, which brings me to the subject of drive-ins.

Last fall I stumbled on a wonderful documentary about a group of die-hards in Mahoning, Pennsylvania, a completely dedicated group of movie enthusiasts who revived a beloved drive-in with genuine elbow-grease. Reminded me of 1976 and the St. George, except these guys succeeded! By the time I was aware of the Mahoning, they were closing out their season, so I contented myself with writing a rah-rah blog post, which focuses on the film vs. digital controversy at the heart of the Mahoning’s story. I’d wait for spring.

Well, April 24, they had planned to open for the season with their ritual first-night double feature: The Wizard of Oz followed by Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, lovingly projected in 35 mm, just the way God intended.  Of course you know what happened. 

I had hoped drive-ins would be a golden exception to quarantine, but no dice, at least not a month ago. 

Now, it seems, some governors, including ours, have given the go-ahead. Here in New York State Governor Cuomo has designated May 15 for tennis, landscape gardening, and yes, drive-in theaters. Did he know that the owners of an Astoria Queens diner have already jumped the gun, showing movies in their parking lot, while filling carry-out orders? That’s reinventing the drive-in! 

I’ve skulked around the Mahoning’s site, and am happy to find that Pennsylvania’s good to go — soon. The last weekend in May will, it seems, be the new grand opening:  Dorothy, Toto and Willy Wonka will finally stop shifting impatiently from one foot to the other.

As for me, also shifting from foot to foot, I can perhaps temporarily abandon my stockpiles of pasta, Purell and tomato soup. Maybe I’ll see that wide screen in the middle of rural Pennsylvania after all, snuggling with Dean in the safety of my car. Plenty of opportunity to practice social distancing, since the only people we’ll likely see will be in the glass and steel bubbles of their own Subarus, Volvos and Toyotas. 
 
Could this be the year of the drive-in? 

It’s about time. This treasured American institution has somehow never quite disappeared, despite the fact that numbers have dwindled from 2400 sites in 1980 to roughly 338 screens today. 
​
So far, there are around fifty drive-ins planning to open. A friend recently sent me a link to the Dixie in Ohio, who’ll be testing out their orange neon sign this very weekend. In the week that follows, they’ll be showing (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday) Trolls World Tour, The Invisible Man, Dolittle  and The Hunt.

Nine dollars adults, four dollars children.  Let’s go! 

Afterthoughts:  

1. This just in:  According to Timeout, “A newly announced partnership between Tribeca Enterprises, IMAX and AT&T is hoping to increase...[the] number [of open drive-ins] through a summer program that will play a curated selection of films and special events at drive-in theaters and other venues all around the country. The initiative, dubbed Tribeca Drive-in, will launch on June 25.” 

2.  I’ve been writing about drive-ins as a phenomenon for some time. For a history of this very American institution, how they got started, etc., check out my blog post, Movies: Indoors and Out. And if you’re interested in the international community of drive-in theaters, especially in India, don’t miss this blog post: The Movie Starts at Dusk.  

3. Thanks to the Dayton Daily News and far-flung correspondent, Thom Moon, for some wonderful pictures.

This just in from, the United Palace in upper upper Manhattan, formerly Loews 175th St. Theatre:

As an ex-movie palace operator, and a continuing enthusiast of that fine old institution, “the movies,” I really get it why the United Palace of Cultural Arts (one of NYC’s original “Wonder Theaters” looks fondly on its early years of glory, when all 3,400 seats (3,444 back then) were mostly filled with moviegoers, at least on weekends. The United Palace has been doing the gallant thing these last few years, in addition to its live presentations, offering such movies as Lawrence of Arabia on a wide screen, the way they were intended to be seen. And get a load of this: if going to a movie was a bit of an anachronism before lockdown, well,  right now the very future of movie-going, of popcorn in the dark, is imperiled in a way it never has been before. 

Yet beware of what you wish for!  I, for one, am thankful it’s not 1939, when GWTW premiered! If it were, the Great Depression would still be on us like a lead jacket after ten years, with unemployment numbers (initially 25% and remaining above 14% through 1940) that dwarf ours. On the other side of “the pond,” Czechoslovakia would just have ceased to exist. Poland sliced and diced by Hitler, The St. Louis. a ship carrying a cargo of 907 Jewish refugees, would just have been turned away from Florida, forced to return to Europe, and what would become the death camps. 

Which brings me to Gone With the Wind, a movie I loved as a little girl, and still felt a certain yearning for in early adulthood, before coming to terms with its racially- and sexually-disturbing underpinnings. 
In 1976, when my husband and I ran The St. George Theatre, a movie palace in Staten Island, just up the hill from the ferry docks, I still longed for the reds and golds of David O. Selznick’s epic, playing on the gilded statuary of our almost empty theater.  Accordingly, we ran the trailer for GWTW week after week, with no intention of actually showing the movie at all. It would have flopped, in that tough urban zeit, when what our audiences wanted was Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon. So I do sympathize, when the United Palace longs for Hollywood’s golden days... 

In our theater year, 1976, for a mere $2.50 a week, we could run the GWTW trailer just for ourselves, and so we did, going broke while cuddling up in the first row, with a fully-buttered popcorn.  

Trailers are really short films — there’s an art to making them. They’re hors d’oeuvres. If we couldn’t dine out on a classic, we could snack on brief glimpses of it: A spooked horse and a rickety wagon against the backdrop of burning Atlanta, Scarlett and the white portico of Tara, Rhett carrying his flailing wife to bed up an improbably long crimson staircase. As dated as the movie itself, the trailer was a glimpse of what our endangered movie palace had been built to contain.

That full-color trailer was crafted in 1939, just days before the movie’s release. Dark as impending war was, it was still the golden year of movies, when stylized Deco letters swung in from the right and popped over scenes of a promised film. Even though GWTW was one of Hollywood’s first full-length feature films shot entirely in color, its trailer stuck — but for the use of color — with the classic trailer formula:  an establishing shot of name actors, a two-minute-thirty-eight second sound track, and the inevitable baritone announcer, “The most memorable event in the annals of motion pictures...”

​GWTW’s original trailer (or the closest I can come to it, re-cut for the centennial of the Civil War), currently boasts 133, 660 views, while another modern adaptation stands at 1,716,917. I’ve added one to each of these numbers. Remarkable! You don’t have to rent a movie palace to visit Tara anymore.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

And now for the rest of what the United Palace had to say in its recent email:

“While we’ve hit pause on Movies at the Palace, here’s a throwback from yesteryear, when the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre (as we were once known) hosted Gone With the Wind the week of March 28, 1940... That got us thinking about the top five movies we wish we could screen this week... [note that this announcement came out 5/4/20, when the 4th was still with us].

The Longest Yard Featuring one of the greatest 4th quarter comebacks in cinematic history!
Independence Day Because on July 4th we fight back! And we'd pay good money to see Will Smith punch Coronavirus in the face!
All the President's Men Hail to the 4th estate for its relentless pursuit of the truth.
Gremlins Capturing the spirit of "go 4th and multiply". We may see similar results nine months after quarantine.
Deadpool This film breaks the 4th wall so often it feels like lead  actor Ryan Reynolds is actually the director.
Honorable Mention: Spaceballs May the Schwartz be with you. (Or is this not the sci-fi film you were thinking of?)

These flicks are probably streaming somewhere right now, so you can watch them today at home even if you don’t have a 50-ft screen, state-of-the-art projection, and 3,400 seats. But when things return to normal, we’d love to have you back to watch classic movies the way they are meant to be seen: in a movie palace. Until then, keep those phones on silent and enjoy the picture without interruption. Pass the popcorn!” 

Hurrah for the United Palace, which reminds us there will be movie theaters on the other side of this crisis!  Meanwhile, go find yourself something to stream.

Afterthoughts:
1. If you’re a trailer buff, here are a few more from Hollywood’s prime era: THE LAUGHS ARE MONSTROUS! (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), MIGHTIEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIME! (The Charge of the Light Brigade).

2. Now here’s my list:
• Lawrence of Arabia, a movie which should never be seen on a screen less than 50 feet across!
• The Wizard of Oz, which shares its magic birth year of 1939 with GWTW.
• Casablanca, not a big-screen epic, but an epic nonetheless, from a time darker even than ours.
• Dr. Zhivago; it demands a big screen to contain its volatile combination of history and romance.
• Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, never saw it on a big screen, but wish I had.
•The Man Who Would Be King, The Dead, Chinatown, you name it. John Huston was a big-screen thinker.
• The Piano, Jane Campion’s 10th movie. Never seen on a really big screen, but a girl can dream...
• Fanny and Alexander, Bergman’s childhood writ large, interestingly enough was originally conceived for a TV miniseries! That version, totaling 312 minutes was eventually spliced together into a longer version of the film, released first. I’m glad I saw it at the Gramercy on 23rd Street, a tolerably large screen. 

​That’s way more than five. I got carried away! What’s your list?