Suffice to say that, as a white middle-class child in Eisenhower’s America, I was about as safe as a person could get, but I didn’t know it, and that’s what counts. 
 
One Saturday afternoon at the Mt. Lookout Theatre in Cincinnati where I grew up, I ducked under the seat in front of me. There had  been other bouts of movie hiding, but this particular moment a flying saucer sliced off the dome of the Capitol Building ( Earth Versus the Flying Saucers), and I just couldn’t take it. 
 
I wasn’t alone. The grown-ups often seemed a little jumpy, despite mammoth steaks on the grill and cars with tail fins. Ordinary people had begun building fallout shelters in their backyards. At school we ducked under school desks during drills, so why not hide on the floor of the theater where I went each Saturday?
 
Fast forward to 1976, when, as a young adult, I helped run The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. I was grown-up, but still afraid. The fall of Saigon that finally ended the bloody war in Vietnam was only a year behind us; the recession was slowly winding down, New York City’s near-bankruptcy was still fresh in everybody’s memory, and the Cold War was hardly over. Watergate had sent a president into exile, reminding me of the Goya etching I’d seen at the Met in Manhattan, The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters.
 
We ran plenty of scary stuff the year we worked as theater operators; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) comes immediately to mind. Based on a presumably true story of a mentally-disturbed man, Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, Tobe Hooper’s early slasher film did fairly well in our single-screen palace. As a theater operator, I had plenty of opportunity to observe its effects on the audience: concession sales were heroic, a sign that people felt the need to get up and move out of the darkened auditorium for a moment, nervously grabbing another popcorn or seeking the comfort of Snickers, standing outside the glass that separated lobby from theater, for a few moments of rest. You could see but not hear the movie from there. Those who stayed put in the auditorium were a little bit jittery, jiggling around and poking each other. As for myself, I sat through the better part of the movie one afternoon, shading my eyes at intervals and pulling my long hair tight over my ears. 
 
Ever wonder why people pay to ride fast dangerous rides? Roller coasters are hardly for the faint-of-heart, in the literal sense. They increase heart rate and trigger fight-or-flight responses involving adrenaline and cortisol; but as long as your heart can take it, you may get a dopamine/endorphin rush, fun, if your particular physiology is set to run that way. Horror and/or slasher movies are one cheap-and-safe (think virtual) way of getting those same roller coaster highs, without being hung upside down high in the air.  
 
One movie that did draw all the thrill-seekers out and into our baroque cave of wonders was The Exorcist, the only movie we ran in our theater year that sold out the house (four times, to be exact). I remember it well, counting out $13,000 in receipts on the old piano in the office. The fact that we had to turn most of that money in to Warner and his brothers, is, perhaps, the thing that makes my memory of the movie truly horrifying. As for what happens on screen, call me an oddball, but I’ve never found Exorcist particularly scary! I was not raised in any church, and priests, even ones who act nobly, leave me cold; that and I have difficulty with suspending my disbelief, when it comes to “possession.” Here, for your perusal is an excellent treatment of why The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time according to one watcher. Others don’t agree, putting the original Exorcist at the bottoms of long “Exorcism Movie” lists (if you wait long enough, everything becomes a genre!).
 
Other “scary” movies we ran: Carrie (yes, thoroughly frightening, but also objectionable from a feminist perspective); Embryo (too improbable — a scientist figures out how to turn a fetus into a full-grown miniature human); The Devil Within Her and Burnt Offerings (both about possession), and Don’t Open the Window, (aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, depending on which country you see it in). That’s a movie with more aliases than the average con artist.  
 
Interestingly enough, I find One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which reveals the horrors of a psych ward, the scariest movie we ran that whole year! (It figures prominently in my meditations on the act of crying at the movies). Crying, cringing in fear, how close? 
 
Afterthought: 
Here’s a little something on movies that reflect our fear of the Internet; that’s something we could never have imagined in the more brutal, hardly virtual 1970s.

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 impresario 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 2,672-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, in case you didn’t know). 
 
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 much-loved 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 the blog 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.

​
 
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 2,672-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 nineteen 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 at the core of 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 to a theater, see my blog post that deals with that topic). How ironic that the VIPs are currently sitting where the winos once did, in all their fragrant glory! 
 
Afterthought:

 1. I didn’t know, until recently, that proper high-end orchestra pits actually have managers! 
 
2. I was, for several years a devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan, as presented by NYGASP (New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players) who, each January back then, presented one or two G&S productions at Symphony Space, itself a former movie theater. The  NYGASP orchestra had to content itself with an eye-level “pit” – not a pit at all really – but an area which had been draped off in black cloth, with a make-shift cloth gate for the maestro to open and close as he appeared. We always sat in the first row. What a great joy it was, the feeling that we were almost in the laps of the violinists! 

Dog Day Afternoon is such a seventies flick; I watched it recently, as I periodically do, revisiting old faves we ran at the St. George Theatre almost half a life-time ago in late April, 1976. As you may know, I was, that year, part of an entrepreneurial group of twenty-somethings trying to keep an aging movie palace alive.
 
Dog Day was the senior half of a strangely-matched double feature we’d booked with Law and Disorder  (an Ernest Borgnine / Carroll O’Connor comedy whose target audience were distinctly an older crowd).  Dog Day was already more than a year old by the time the film canisters arrived in our lobby, but we were a “buck fifty” house ($1.50 for adults, 90 cents for children) — and lucky to get it at all. Starring a heartbreakingly young Al Pacino, it’s the more or less true story of a desperate man, John Wojtowicz (Sonny Wortzik in the film), who tried to rob the Chase Manhattan Bank at 450 Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn, for money to, among other things, buy his lover a sex change operation. Before the story rolls, Sidney Lumet gives us New York City at street level  the way it was then. How did he know we’d be watching from the future? The streets were trash-strewn and desperate: he shows us the sheer grime of it all, the anger and cynicism of ordinary citizens, ready to cheer a man with the audacity to rob a bank. (In the seventies, banks actually housed substantial amounts of cash!)

The desperation was entirely real. What else were we doing in an aged movie palace, if not hiding from the streets? We had a kind of sanctuary. We had at least the illusion of safety — under our pleasure dome and in the cool recesses of the alcoves, the defunct green-tiled water fountain in the lobby, the pink and white-tiled candy stand with its sweet and grassy (popcorn) smells.
Outside people were getting mugged, sometimes right under the marquee. A fist-fight blew up there one afternoon, resulting in one guy knocked out of his Birkenstocks — they remained pointed downhill on the pavement while he flew sideways into the street. He got up, using his teeshirt to staunch the blood, and moved on. Nobody called the cops. 

The need to keep things to yourself was primal, which is why we had grown men from the neighborhood working off the books on weekends — to keep some of the tougher local kids from walking on the backs of the theater’s seats or assaulting each other with broken bottles in our lobby. 
The shops up and down Hyatt Street — the luncheonette, the barbershop next to the theater — were part of another era. I never saw a soul go into the barbershop; it was as if the ninety-year-old barber lived there, periodically flicking dust off his red Naugahyde chairs with a frayed whisk broom. 
Night was another thing altogether, the street deserted, sounds of glass shattering. The bank’s night drop was only two storefronts away. Some nights I just didn’t go, but hid the cash in a locker with spare flashlight batteries. 

Dog Day was one of many movies I watched in snatches. Seeing it a year or two ago for only the second time, I remembered parts of it, and other parts seemed new, which may mean I had never seen them at all. I’d get some popcorn, go in and sit down for a half hour or so, then remember that I needed to figure out how to make payroll and still buy cleaning supplies — and pay the carting company, who, it was rumored, would break somebody’s kneecaps if not paid in a timely fashion. 
That detail from my actual theater-management life fits the tenor of Dog Day nicely — that and another movie we showed that I occasionally revisit, Taxi Driver — about a Vietnam Vet with violent streaks who drives a night taxi and tries to save a prostitute. Desperation was part of the Zeitgeist, which is why I savor my memories of the theater’s cool lobby and sheltering dome. Like a medieval cathedral, it held us:  you could walk in there and drop out of time.

Afterthought:
Thanks to the ravages of Covid, many parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn seem just a little more like the New York City of the seventies that I remember. Since, until the Pandemic, NYC was becoming a playground of the rich, I wonder if this come-down might have in it the seeds of salvation. Will artists and the middle class return?