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 — for which Gerschwin’s Stairway to Paradise was written; including, among the orchestra’s 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 Erno Rapee,  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 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).
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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 my project and eventually to be published book:  Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace. These days, the VIP seating section of the newly re-born St. George Theatre occupies what was once the orchestra pit, a necessary improvement, since the natural “rake” or slant of the theater’s orchestra section was sadly 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 relieved themselves, in all their fragrant glory!  Such are the life and times of a (former) movie palace.

Afterthought that has nothing to do with orchestra pits:
Yesterday in the local paper’s news feed, a picture of a marquee with its letters re-arranged by wind bore the caption, “Back in the day, before tickets could be ordered over the phone, theater owners had to use letters arranged on tracks to tell the show times,” which of course has nothing to do with orchestra pits, but I couldn’t help giving it as an example of how misinformed people are becoming about theaters of all kinds, their whys and wherefores, before the turn of the twenty-first century. Marquees are advertising! Showtime info was available by phone, yet another blooming anachronism.

Have you been thinking about going to a movie?  As someone who actually went bankrupt running a 2,672-seat movie palace with my husband and some friends long ago, in 1976 — and as a life-long movie-goer — I have found NOT going to a movie one of the hardest strictures of the pandemic, outside of not getting my hair cut and not cozying up in a booth at the Fab Cup local coffee bar. 

Of all the things I miss, movie attendance is high on the list. I long to pay for a movie ticket, then get a giant popcorn and head into a darkened room filled with strangers. Oops! There I said it, that scary word, “strangers.” The very thing I found so seductive before Covid, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark with all kinds of people, now sounds almost unimaginable. Of course, there is social distancing, but I’d still be in an enclosed space with folks, some of whom might be bearers of our current and lingering plague. What makes matters a little trickier for me is that right before Covid rolled in I was diagnosed with a condition that renders me immunosuppressed; that’s another story, involving getting an antibodies test to find out if my shaky immune system actually took the bait. Maybe then, all masked up, I’ll finally see Nomadland on a screen worthy of it.

In March I happened on a post, “I Miss Movie Theaters But I’m Still Afraid to Go,” by Jonmaesha Beltran (The State Press, Arizona State University), and, despite the fact that we all have carte blanche, according to the CDC, as long as we’re fully vaccinated, I don’t feel any different about going to the movies or getting my hair cut, and I noticed that people at the local farmer’s market were still masked, 100 percent, last Saturday, so I’m not alone. I guess we all have to unkink slowly.

Meanwhile, here’s what Jonmaesha (whose partner is apparently named Tom)  had to say in his March post. They were weekly moviegoers until the Pandemic:

“Movie theaters were a place where Tom and I could leave our worlds and be transported into someone else’s for an hour or three. The only thing that mattered was what the director had in store for us on that 72-foot-wide screen. 

But now? The thought of going somewhere nonessential makes me feel uncomfortable and guilty. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I haven’t left my house unless it was for groceries, work or school. It’s always weird to see people continue to act like things are normal. 

Does this describe you?  On the meaning of “normal,” Amen. Otherwise, it’s not me, not exactly, although I was intrigued — by guilt felt at the thought of doing something nonessential.  I assume that guilty feeling originates in the thought of an activity that’s just for fun, that might endanger the health of others. 

Having lived as the equivalent of a cloistered nun for better than a year, fun sounds downright essential! Anyhow, fun or no, it’s not what’s keeping me away. My problem is trust: who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t? Who will sit for the better part of several hours maskless, hand in popcorn, only six feet away and indistinguishable from the bloke who really got his (or her) shots?

Here’s a little more of what Jonmaesha  had to say. It’s really a marvelous post, tip of the hat, and it points up what’s missing when you do battle with the far-from-perfect streaming services – and your own distractibility:

It wasn’t until I watched The Little Things that I started to miss seeing a film in the movie theater. It took me three days to watch a two-hour film with one of my favorite actors. I was on my phone, distracted by other things the entire time. Watching a movie at home differs from watching it in a dimly lit room with a big screen and surround sound speakers, and sometimes filled with strangers. 

From the time you purchase a ticket to exiting the doors, movie theaters are an immersive experience. I miss it. I miss going out to eat before seeing a movie and laughing when I took the leftovers out of my bag during the previews. I miss seeing children dressing as their favorite superhero and hearing their parents cheer over them once a superhero appeared on the screen. I miss hearing people shout, urging others to stay for a teaser hidden in the credits.

And finally,

I miss going to the movies on a Tuesday morning and hearing a white-haired woman repeatedly asking a white-haired man wearing a Vietnam hat what’s happening. I miss wearing those black 3D glasses that used to be cool to wear outside of the movies, ages ago. I miss cheering with a room full of strangers when something good happened. I miss movie hopping and losing track of time. 

So if you miss all or some of that the way I do, let’s all go, first to the lobby of course, for M&M’s, popcorn, whatever, then right into the inner sanctum, and sit down and face a big white screen. Back in 1976 it was as big as a small playing field, but I’l take 72 feet.

Speaking of my year at the St. George Theatre, there were a cool one thousand tattered red velvet seats on the ground floor, under the giant saucer-like chandelier, but, at any given time only one in six of those seats was actually occupied by someone who’d purchased a ticket. This distressed us management folk greatly, because we couldn’t pay the electric bill or the rent. These days, we’d just be socially distanced, and happy to be open at all.

Afterthoughts:
1. You can buy 3D movie glasses for as little as 30 cents, but half the fun was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder all duded out in them at a theater. Did you know they were invented in 1922? 

​2. Movie hopping didn’t exist in the mid-seventies, or was greatly limited, as the most screens a theater had was likely two. Our patrons contented themselves with trying to walk into the theater backwards, when the crowd was walking out.

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, the great movie palace entrepreneur, 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. Entirely reflective of what is now recognized architecturally as “Egyptian Revival Style,” it was the first of its kind, but many would follow.
 
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 New York “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 styling, some roof pans above the main entrance, were used, even though they’re not consistent with the sight-lines of an Egyptian-styled building.
 
In that period, my mother, a teenager beginning to grow up into a “flapper,” was going to the library in Toledo, Ohio after school, for books and stereopticon slides of Egyptian tombs.
 
Grauman was onto something; and though he opened 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 Egyptian-styled 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 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. 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."
 
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.

Coming soon...to a theater near you! When out to the movies was where you went  at least once a week, a former actor named Thaddeus Suski coined this catchphrase —  according to my husband and fellow ex-movie-theater-operator. Dean ought to know; his first boss was Thaddeus’s brother. The string of seven words did well for Thaddeus, who built a marketing business on the money he made every time a movie trailer ran those exact words in that particular order, and retired to Santa Barbara a wealthy man. 

Phrase-making can be a lucrative profession; think Don LaFontaine, who, long after Thaddeus Suski died, proclaimed “in a world...” at the beginning of more than 5,000 movie trailers. LaFontaine got rich as well, and famous — in a world of voice-over. BTW, the movie In a World features a fictionalized LaFontaine. An honorable profession, voice-over: the man who introduced Pall Mall Cigarettes on radio and television retired on the catchphrase “...and they are mild,” but that’s another story. 

Coming Soon! An entire roomful of signs bearing this and other hopeful bywords and useful cliches existed on the mezzanine of the movie palace Dean and I were involved in running in 1976, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island. The movie exhibition business in those days needed a sign room to contain them all: Starts Wednesday, Starts Thursday, Starts Friday, New Release! Double Feature! and my favorite, a tasseled banner, Sneak Preview Tonite! It’s hard to think of our time at the theater without reliving the load-in, when the film canisters arrived. The marquee letters went up, and one or another of these plastic or cardboard showcards bearing a Coming Soon variation was replaced in the poster case by the inevitable Now Playing.

It was a time when people came out of their houses and apartments to sit together in a communal trance, in an auditorium large enough to rival Lascaux or the Luray Caverns, and watch Linda Blair’s head swivel three hundred and sixty degrees on her body — and, for a moment, believe it!  
That’s what happens with good storytelling/ moviemaking. It’s called “willing suspension of disbelief.” The poet S.T. Coleridge came up with it, back in 1817, and it more or less means that I throw logic and caution to the winds, in order to enjoy an obvious piece of fiction. Nobody could enjoy a magic show without pretending that the assistant really is sawed in two, and there’s that novel you wish wouldn’t end.

The best demonstration of the fact that willing suspension works at the movies is that an audience watching Casablanca, most of whom are not completely colorblind, are in a world (to borrow LaFontaine’s cliché) that is entirely black and white. I’m happy when Dorothy lands in Oz, and the world blossoms into Technicolor (the 3-strip color process no less, in its first iteration), but at the end, I wake with her in black and white, safe at home in Kansas, and I’m still in the movie’s dream.
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Perhaps my happiest moments at the St. George — talk about being in a world — involved movies so completely satisfying that I was able to forget the overdrawn checkbook I’d left back in my office under the stairs. There was Taxi Driver and its gleaming mean streets of Times Square, that I knew so well having walked through them, desperate myself. There was The Man Who Would Be King (when Sean Connery/(Danny) humming “The Minstrel Boy,” strides to the middle of a rope bridge he knows will soon be cut down, pitching him into a Himalayan chasm). Since the St. George Theatre, in its twilight as a cinema, was itself a kind of chasm for us, its temporary occupants, I can see why this is one of the only movies I watched from beginning to end, my legs tucked up in a cozy seat in the lower balcony. 

I watched The Post two nights ago — I’m ashamed to say I watched it on i-Tunes, but then it belongs to last year’s Oscar picks, and somehow slipped through my cinema fingers in its year. Now you can’t find it in a theater. It’s a riveting movie, and despite the lack of fellow dreamers in the dark and fresh-popped corn, I went to sleep afterwards in a world of dial phones and manual typewriters. The movie awakened in me the desire to watch All the President’s Men again, which, I’m happy to say, we showed on the St. George Theatre’s bigger-than-life grape-soda-stained screen in the year of its release, 1976. 

I’m a little worried about the line between fiction and non-, these days. Are we getting our willing-suspension fix often enough in a world that’s “post-truth,” whatever that actually means?  How can we tell what to suspend, when there isn’t any difference between belief and disbelief?   What's coming soon...or next? And as this pandemic begins to wane, what world, exactly, are we in?