Every theater is supposed to have some kind of ghost--that’s supposedly why the solitary “ghost light,” a single bulb on a stand, is left lit in the middle of the stage after closing time — to appease the spirits that call the place their home. Roxy (S.L. Rothafel), the original genius behind Radio City Music Hall, apparently still attends certain opening nights there, with an elegant lady on his arm. The ghost of Howard Hughes has been seen floating around what was his old office in the Pantages Theatre in L.A. 

At the St. George Theatre, the 2672-seat movie palace I had a part in operating back in 1976, we didn’t exactly have an identifiable ghost. Nonetheless certain people were reluctant to go alone backstage, including and especially an usher whose name was Leroy. Part of his job was to raise and lower the house lights, which could only be done by climbing the stairs to the stage and going into the flickering dark to access the lighting board, on the wall behind our giant curved grape-soda-stained screen. Just being backstage was spooky enough: through the movie screen you could see the audience, but not the movie itself. To further complicate things, if you stand behind a movie screen, the audience can’t see you.

Leroy didn’t want any part of it. Being a ghost in his own right — the unseen figure behind the screen — probably terrified him almost as much as the possibility of encountering some spectre or another from the seven-story fly loft, with its heavy-hanging chains of curtains.

Was it during Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Exorcist? — Dean dispatched Leroy backstage, to be ready with the house lights, in preparation for the credits to roll. Suzy, a first-rate tease, overheard the reluctantly accepted order and couldn’t resist. She tailed Leroy down the right-side aisle and up the stage steps, keeping a detective’s distance. No breathing to give her away, a light step on the stage boards.

“Leroy....Leeeeeeroy!” Seconds before the movie’s end, she stepped from the shadows. The bright orange beam of her flashlight below her chin made her face float from the darkness. Leroy’s scream — perfectly audible to the audience — and the sound of his running feet backstage gave some patrons pause. It was Suzy who actually raised the house lights, and Dean who assured them, “It was for dramatic effect!”

Who knows if by that time Leroy had encountered Shakespeare’s The Tempest at Curtis High School, where he was a freshman, but Prospero’s famous lines have just the right chill in them:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind....

It’s the end of the play (within-the-play) — or is it the movie? If flesh and blood actors disappear, cinematic spirits seem to actually melt as the house lights go on. What is it all but an insubstantial pageant, as you rise from your seat and head up the aisle, popcorn cup in hand? And the “great globe” is--what else? — a double entendre, Shakespeare’s way of doffing his cap to that famous theater he was part owner of, whose original ghosts probably hang out backstage at the new theater by that same name, built on the same spot. 

​As for the St. George Theatre, still standing, not a movie house anymore but a working live theater, it’s Leroy, his feet beating a path down the steps, stage left, who haunts the place for me.

Ever wonder where your local movie palace got its illustrious name? Orpheum, Roxy, Ritz, Bijou, Palladium — nothing plain vanilla about these monikers. Having had a hand once in running a movie palace, Staten Island’s St. George Theatre to be exact, I never gave the name a moment’s thought; as glorious as “St. George” (with its evocations of dragon-slaying) sounds, it’s just the (rather interesting) name of my funky New York neighborhood. The St. George Theatre opened its doors in 1929, but in Manhattan, six miles across the harbor from Staten Island, S.L. Rothafel had already made a big foot print in the wet clay of movie palace history two years earlier, 1927, when he opened his famous Roxy--on 50th between 6th and 7th Aves — probably the most sumptuous of grand palaces ever built in this town or most towns for that matter:  the foyer alone would accommodate 4,000, with seating in the auditorium for just under 6,000, and an usher staff of 59, including several rankings, as in a traditional military unit. Cole Porter said it all about the smartness of those ushers:
​
“You’re romance,
You’re the steppes of Russia,
You’re the pants on a Roxy usher...”
(from You’re the Top).

Billed as “The Cathedral of the Motion Picture,” the Roxy boasted such things as “the largest oval rug in the world” and five-story columns of Verde marble. The Roxy’s precision dance troupe, the “Roxyettes,” later morphed into the well-known Rockettes. 

Where else but the Roxy on opening night (March 11, 1927) assuming you could get in, could you see the likes of Harold Lloyd; followed by the Jazz-age mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker and his wife? Or the Marquise de la Falaise de la Coudraye, aka Gloria Swanson? Swanson’s movie, The Love of Sunya, premiered that night. To further quote Ben M. Hall, from the revered pages of his excellent book, The Best Remaining Seats: The Golden Age of the Movie Palace, “At a moment shortly after eight o’clock...the gaudy, enchanted, phony, preposterous, and lovely Golden Age of the Movie Palace reached its Klieg-lit pinnacle. Nothing quite like it was ever to happen again...”

There were numerous Roxies built or renamed after the original one, but none ever equalled the Ur-Roxy, apparently named for its less-than-modest creator, Samuel Lionel Rothafel, whose nickname just happened to be “Roxy.” At the end of opening night, he is reported to have said, looking down into the emptying rotunda, “Take a look at this stupendous theatre. It’s the Roxy, and I’m Roxy. I’d rather be Roxy than John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford.” 

Sadly, his career as a theatre entrepreneur and his life would last one more decade; he'd be done in by the costly opulence he embraced. As for the theater, his glorious confection was torn down rather early in the era of declining movie palaces, 1962, with a return engagement of Gloria Swanson, exquisitely gowned, standing in its ruins, like some goddess descended briefly from Mt. Olympus.

The name “Roxy” lives on, if not in many extant theaters, at least in the annals of Cinema Treasures or the memories of patrons all over America. Cleveland Ohio’s notable burlesque house (first The Family Theatre, then The Orpheum) was renamed The Roxy in 1931, before going to burlesque. The oldest continuously operating movie theater in San Francisco (C.H. Brown,1909, still in operation) reopened in 1933 as The Roxie, with 300 seats, a name which it keeps to this day. Clarksville, Tennessee sports a charming Roxy. Ashland, Pa.’s Roxy is no more, but had a kick-ass marquee. 

What exactly--to reference the Bard--IS in a name? Prestige, ticket sales? Shakespeare would have understood, involved as he was in the bottom line of The Globe Theatre (1599) rebuilt a little less than four hundred years later under the same name, on almost the same spot.  

I think I’ll save “Orpheum,” “Bijou,” and other historic appellations for another couple of episodes. There’s a lot — as it turns out — in a name. 

Only a few blocks north of the Staten Island Ferry, one of New York’s hottest tourist attractions, stands the St. George Theatre, one of several hundred original U.S. movie palaces to survive into the twenty-first century (from a high in the 1920‘s of better than 4,000 such houses). For one glorious year, 1976, I was privileged to help run the 2672-seat St. George, near the ferries in Staten Island, selling movie tickets and popcorn, and welcoming the occasional live act (Sly Stone, Chaka Khan, the Paper Bag Players) to our acoustically-blessed stage. The age of movie palaces was clearly over, but we didn’t know it. By “we” I mean our unpaid “management” staff, of which I was one. We had grown up at the movies, the last generation to do so, and we fought doggedly to keep the flick-of-the-moment on screen, the doors open, the dream alive.

In Cincinnati--where I grew up in the 1950‘s, palaces weren’t just places to see movies. They were, among so many things, babysitting services (your parents dropped you off at the Ambassador on Saturday morning and picked you up in the afternoon). In high school they became a kind of sanctuary to adolescence, like the RKO International 70 (aka the Palace) downtown, with a balcony where, among other things, we could experiment on each others’ curious bodies.

Saturday or Sunday afternoons, the RKO Albee, Cincinnati’s premier downtown house, was, often enough, the place your family went to see a spectacle (Ben Hur, Cinerama), but also to be seen. We weren’t so much going to a single feature, as filling a hunger for something social. We dressed up, just a little, Daddy in a suit and tie, my teenaged sisters in skirts and flats, Mother with her patent-leather pocket book. On Wednesdays in the afternoon, the new feature started; you could be the first to see it if you went then, a crowd that consisted of women and pre-school children, old ladies in hats and gloves, retirees.

Often when we went to a movie, we just walked in, sometimes minutes after the feature had started, staying through the next cycle of coming attractions, cartoons and Movietone News then leaving when the film finally reached the point where we’d begun. This seemed perfectly normal. It wasn’t the way it is now — searching for movie times, picking a film. Seeing a movie from beginning to end mattered less than just seeing it.

Alien robots abducted a woman. A man clung, drenched, to a light post, singing. These were events in a world innocent of what we now call “information.” What could be better than a giant whirling steel lid from outer space that sliced through the dome of the Capitol Building in Washington — on a screen as tall as a highway billboard? The giant squid from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea filled that same screen with terrible ink. Movie palaces had to be big and fantastical, to contain these heroic  flights of imagination.

Sixteen years after the turn of the twenty-first century, we still have movie theaters, but screen size is vastly diminished; the viewing space is stripped, raised and lowered curtains are a rarity, and commercials have edged out Elmer Fudd and Bugs. Why so much 3D? Surround Sound? I-Max? It’s as if the purveyors of fantasy are running out of ways to lure us into the dark.

Only a few blocks down the hill from the St. George Theatre, foundations for a giant observation wheel — similar to but bigger than “The London Eye” — were poured, just last weekend. It’s the talk of the neighborhood. I look forward to the New York Wheel’s sweeping views of New York Harbor, but I hope that just a few adventurous families, after riding over land and sea Jules Verne style, will walk up Hyatt Street behind Borough Hall and enter the cavernous St. George Theatre — amazingly still standing and opulent as ever. Even if it’s just to have a look around, to walk in there after riding the new wheel, might be a thrilling opposite, like going under ground after flying. Whatever’s showing inside a movie palace, the palace is the show.

Have you ever smuggled food (or drinks) into a movie theater? 

If you’re a food smuggler and think that’s a rare thing, just Google “sneaking food into movie theaters.” You’ll discover seven entries under that topic on the first search page alone, three of which are how-tos. In 1976 at the 2672-seat palace (the St. George Theatre) I helped run for a year, we didn’t actually inspect people’s backpacks and purses, but we did have the occasional run-in with one or another patron carrying a Bohack’s grocery bag with a loaf of bread sticking out the top or a sackful of Big Macs, clearly branded as such. One of our bouncers (aka “floor managers”) found a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam beneath a balcony seat one night. He was pleased to take it home and add it to his well-stocked bar; I always wondered if he boiled it first, or at least sterilized the bottle.

On a Saturday night in that same year my husband and original partner recalls, that the concession stand intercom rang insistently. Dean grabbed it, between orders for popcorn and soda.

“Get over here,” Brenda barked into the phone from the box office. 

“What is it?”

“Just get over here.” 

​Leaving the candy stand to Paulie, he crossed the swirled thread-bare carpet in four strides, entering the ticket booth from the side door. 

“What’s so important?”

Brenda got right to the point, “This guy, this one here, is tryin’ to take two full-size bottles of Nikolai...you know, cheap Vodka — hands ‘em to his girlfriend right there. She puts ‘em into her purse. Now they want to come in. I say no way Jose...  ‘ My name is Rodney,’ the guy says. Okay, No way Rodney. “ The ticket line was backing up. Dean moved quickly out of the booth and into the lobby, separating Rodney and his girlfriend from the crowd. 

“Yo yo yo,” said Rodney, a tall guy probably in his mid-twenties.  “I do have two bottles, Nikolai, good stuff. Got it for the weekend, passed it on to my girlfriend here for safe keeping, gonna take it home.”

He gestured to his date, not a minute over fifteen. She shrugged, opened her giant shaggy purse, revealing two fifths.

Before Dean could speak, Brenda, just seventeen but wise in many ways, interjected, “Don’t let him bring that stuff in here!”

“You can leave the Vodka with me or in the box office where it’s safe, and pick it up on your way out,” Dean declared.

“But what if I wanna leave early?” complained Rodney, fumbling for excuses. 

“Then see me early!  It’ll be safe, I promise.”

“But it’s Nikolai, nearly eight dollars a bottle!” Rodney was taking another tack, when a man even taller and older, apparently his friend, appeared from the inner lobby.     

“Yo Rod,” he said, “think it over. Dey won’t even sell me a cuppa ice widout I buy some soda!” 

“A cup of ice?” Dean asked?  “Why?”  (not one of his more brilliant moments)

“Oh never mind,” Rodney spat out over his retreating shoulder, “Wanted to see the movie down at the Paramount anyway,” and they were gone.

By law Rodney and company couldn’t come in with their purchases, though our rivals at the Paramount may have been inclined to look the other way. Most things people smuggle into theaters are legal, if messy: Blimpies, fish balls, fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs. There is no end to the list of items people want to eat in the dark. “We’re saving money,” they tell themselves.

In truth, there are some good economic reasons why you should feel just a tad guilty about that General Tso’s Chicken you brought into the local plex last month. At the St. George, we lost money on every film we showed with the exception of The Exorcist, The Omen, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon, about seven percent of the films we showed over the course of a year. But in a poor neighborhood, at the trough of the seventies recession, local families dined out on our all-beef franks with dijon mustard on homemade Italian bread buns, and our fresh-pop in real butter. As I’ve boasted in previous posts, the St. George in 1976 had the highest per capita concession sales of any theater in the five boroughs of New York City. The often grimy nickels, dimes, quarters and dollars that found their way across our glass candy case were paying off a huge loan we’d taken to stay in business. This made us a tad more desperate than the average theater operator, who typically counts on the profits from the stand to come somewhere close to breaking even.

Why food in theaters? Even the Metropolitan Opera sells smoked salmon sandwiches, plastic flutes of champagne, and Toblerone these days, but it all started at the movies. The palaces didn’t have concession stands for a long, long time. Then popcorn, a snack food with a strange history, changed all that. What is it that’s so satisfying about munching in the dark, while watching the shadow-play of a movie? It’s intimate, almost erotic, your hand delivering small quantities to your mouth as the narrative progresses grain by grain.  

One of the first variations of maize cultivated in Central America, popcorn didn’t burst forth in public until a certain Charles Cretors, a concessionaire from Decatur, Illinois, bought a steam machine to roast peanuts and thought about introducing that most volatile of grains to steam pressure. In 1893, he took his highly mobile popcorn wagon to the Chicago Columbian Exposition, and an industry was born.

In the years leading up to the Great Depression, these wagons became a presence in front of the new and prospering movie palaces. Initially, movie theaters sold no food or beverages. Proud of their shining halls, and longing to seem as refined as the Metropolitan Opera, cinema owners not only didn’t sell food, they cringed at the thought of anybody exposing pristine interiors to food and drink (BTW, they were right, as anyone who has tried to get Coke syrup out of theater carpeting will tell you). 

But the popcorn vendors continued to park outside just beyond the marquee, and movie patrons were smuggling popcorn — and more — in anyhow. So it came to pass: the steam wagons were invited into the lobby, at first as renters (concessionaires). Eventually the stand grew up around a permanently situated popcorn popper, with candy, hot dogs, ice cream, coffee, you name it. The no-longer-wary owners had, by this time, figured out how much money was to be made from the sale of food. So what if the carpets had to be steam-cleaned? 

The next time you smuggle food in, just remember two things: first, the only profit for the theater owner is usually in the food, and second, smuggling started the whole damn thing! 

P.S.  If you haven’t checkout Metrograph and its equivalents nationwide, food and theaters have come a long way together.

P.P.S  For previous concession stand posts, check out: 
"How much is a 35 cent Coke?"
"The Concession Stand"