As someone who has survived the rigors of movie-palace management — at a time, the seventies, when such opulent theaters were in sharp economic decline — I applaud any palace (there are hundreds, fortunately) still standing. How did they get that way? The torturous path towards survival for any mammoth theater — including the 2672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, where I served for a year — likely involves numerous attempts at rental, some of which have nothing to do with actual  exhibition. In the single year we ran the St. George, we rented it out for a mixed bag of discos, local high school graduations, several dance recitals, an evangelical revival, a four-wall showing of a forgettable documentary, and one television commercial for upholstery. In the waning years of the seventies, after we were gone, the ground floor (orchestra) seats were removed and the natural rake of the floor leveled, in a mistaken attempt to outfit the theater as a roller rink (never happened). A dinner theater also flopped, and a flea market lasted one summer — at which I bought a picture frame,  while lamenting what had happened to our dream. Such is the life of a grand and ornate space in an age that lacks big vision.

Right now I’d like to shift my carbon arc spotlight for a few paragraphs to the Tower Theatre in L.A., which, like the St. George, underwent major ground floor renovations in the service of space rental, with unfortunate and lasting results.

Designed by S. Charles Lee, who would go on to have a lively career designing West Coast theaters, the French/Spanish/Moorish Tower was, in addition to being his first, wired for sound (Vitaphone) before any other palace in L.A. — and the site of the first-ever showing of The Jazz Singer, which ushered in the age of sound in movies. Known at times in its cinema career as The Newsreel, and The Music Hall, It returned to life as The Tower only to cease operation as a movie theater in the nineteen eighties and lose its main-floor seats in preparation for a new career as a swap-meet. (Like that flea market I recall at the St. George! Deja-vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra). In most locales, the theater might simply have been torn down, but L.A. is a “company town:” location shooting can keep a house alive, for a while, at any rate. In 1992, Warner’s Mambo Kings, needed a floating wooden dance floor, and so it goes, they constructed one. Other movies, including: The Omega Man, Fight Club, Mulholland Drive, Coyote Ugly, Last Action Hero, The Prestige, Last Action Heroes, and Transformers have  rented The Tower for location shooting, between 1971 and the present.

But even in L.A. where location rentals are more than just occasional, a gorgeous movie palace with a polished floor where seating ought to be is a tragic flaw. It’s always odd to see a soaring ornate dome over a floor (think the Brooklyn Paramount, until recently home of the Brooklyn Kings basketball team, where the goals at either end always made me think I was having a hoop dream.) Or in Detroit at the once-4000-seat Michigan Theatre, these days a parking garage with a dome so magnificent and heart-breaking it seems like a sacred Paleolithic cave. But returning to the Tower, it seems to be out of time and luck — and currently out of action, slated, I’m told, to become retail space soon. If so, the floor killed it.

Beyond total demolition, nothing is more infuriating than bad alterations to a beautiful and original space. As you may know, in 1976 I was part of a team of young idealists bent on saving a local movie palace, the 2672-seat St. George Theatre, in Staten Island, where I still live. I’m grateful that, forty-plus years after we ran that theater, the only untenable alteration has been the leveling of the orchestra’s “rake” — the slant that allows a seated patron at the back to see above the heads of people in subsequent rows. In the late seventies, movie palaces were meeting their dates with the wrecker’s ball the way French aristocrats had, several centuries before, met theirs with the guillotine, so we residents of St. George are lucky to say we still have a theater at all. Current management has gotten around the leveled-rake problem by building various elevated platforms on the ground floor; someday perhaps a billionaire with a big heart will come along and spend a wad restoring that floor’s slant. Until then, the ornate plaster, portraits of bullfighters, stained-glass chandeliers, tiered velvet, and mahogany pillars are, thankfully, just as Nestor Castro originally designed them, no alterations. The same cannot be said for every movie palace. Here’s a purloined bit of Ben M. Hall’s movie palace bible, The Best Remaining Seats, to illustrate:

Today [Hall was writing in 1961] the golden age of the movie palace has given way to an age of brass...

The movies, which got their start in storefront ‘theatres,’ have come full circle. The few new houses being built today are storefronts too, places with seats and a screen and little else. Granted they are cooler, cleaner, smell better and cost more to get into than the pioneer nickelodeons; they are also drab, antiseptic and earth-bound....

As for the dwindling number of genuine movie palaces that still open their doors, the going is getting tough. A few have had their faces lifted by uninspired interior decorators whose idea of cosmetic surgery is to smother every vestige of ornament, from proscenium to projection boot, in bolts of neutral-colored fiberglass. The graceful French curve of the New York Paramount’s marquee has been supplanted by a frosted-glass trapezoid with plastic letters. [Theater demolished].  An escalator now runs right up the middle of the Capitol’s famous white marble stairs [demolished as well]....in Hollywood, the foliated-gold interior of the Pantages Theatre resembles a yard-goods department, and its seating has been drastically reduced...

If Hall thought theaters were “earth-bound” then, what would he make of the UA Stadium 16 across from Home Depot? “Drab, antiseptic and earth-bound” interiors became, alas, the norm, a trend accelerated as multi-plexes  multiplied. (The AMC Parkway Twin, Stan Durwood’s brainchild for adding a second screen without employing additional staff, opened in Kansas City in 1963).

By the nineteen seventies, the extravagant Zeitgeist that had called forth movie palaces — and moguls like Pentages and Grumman and Roxy Rothafel — had melted away. Speaking of Roxy, the theater that bore his name in New York City was a glorious pile of rubble in 1960, the year before Hall published The Best Remaining Seats. In that same year the Pantages in Hollywood was drastically modernized, something that Hall was obviously still taking stock of as he completed his book.

It’s all about alterations this week: I’d like to focus my carbon-arc spotlight on the Pantages, L.A.‘s last-built movie palace, not only because it has had such an interesting life in terms of restoration, but in a general tribute to Los Angeles, a city with a theater-preservation mission. A tip of the hat as well to the Theatre Historical Society of America, whose conclave meets in L.A. next week, and whose founder, as a matter of fact, was Ben M. Hall.

Greek-born Alexander Pantages, arguably the Roxy of the West and a Vaudeville impresario of considerable chops, commenced the building of the theater that still bears his name in the late twenties, but soon sold out to Fox West Coast Theatres. Pantages, had spent a chunk of his fortune defending himself in a sensational rape trial, but that’s another story, for, perhaps, another blog post.

Marion Davies — in the talkie, “The Floradora Girl” — and “The Rose Garden Idea” — a Franchon & Marco stage revue, opened the Pantages, possibly the grandest of the grand Deco theaters, on June 4, 1930. Here’s a description from Cinema Treasures that’s too opulent not to quote at length:

“The grand lobby is a magnificent poly-chromatic fan-vaulted space, that is 110 feet wide and 60 feet deep. It is decorated in a zigzag geometric design in gold and henna shades. At each end is a 20 foot wide stairway, lined with vaguely Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian styled statues, one of which depicts in an Art Deco style, a camera crew filming.”

Dig that! Gotta love those Egyptian/Babylonian camera folk...

​And the entry goes on, “The entire area was illuminated by three huge Moderne frosted glass chandeliers hanging from three star-shaped domes. Beneath the grand lobby are the rest rooms and lounges. The ladies lounge and powder room is decorated in black patent leather walls and hung with beveled diametric shaped mirrors and a silver leaf ceiling...”

What exactly happened to this theatre that got Ben M. Hall so upset in 1961?

Accounts differ, but everyone agrees that Howard Hughes bought the Pantages in 1949 and operated it, largely unaltered, from 1950 – 59. His offices were upstairs in the building that adjoins; his ghost is rumored to hang out up there. The first-ever televised Academy Awards took place in 1953 on this theater’s magnificent 180 foot wide stage, beneath a double blue-sky ceiling; ceremonies continued there through the fifties.

By 1960 — America’s decade of Danish Modern — elaborate interiors were hardly in style. In anticipation of an exclusive 70 mm roadshow release of Spartacus, Universal Pictures, who had booked the theater, urged a modernization, which would include, among other things, reducing seating capacity to 1, 512 (from 2,812). Accordingly, both the side seating sections of the orchestra and rear seating of the balcony were actually curtained off! A large concession stand was built in the center of the grand lobby, and the three frosted-glass chandeliers were removed from their individual star-shaped domes. The marble and bronze zig-zags and other wonders of the lobby were cloaked in some sort of covering, and a drop ceiling, of all things, was installed. All this to showcase Spartacus, and the West Coast runs of Cleopatra, Tora, Tora, Tora and other wonders. “Entrance and exit doors are off-white Formica,” boasts The Modern Theatre, May 1, 1960. Who could ask for more?

Pacific Theatres to the rescue. In 1967, they bought the Pantages and took down those pesky curtains, so the auditorium space was, once again, fully visible. Pacific ran it as a movie theater until that fateful year, 1977, when so many palaces went dark (The Loews Kings in NYC (shuttered), my own hometown palace, Cincinnati’s Albee (torn down)}. Again, the Pantages was more fortunate. Waiting in its copious wings, were the Nederlander people, who saw the theater’s potential for live performances and restored the place to its former glory. Out with modernization! Unfortunately, Ben M. Hall, murdered in New York City in 1971, never lived to see certain "earth-bound” decorative effects expunged from this classic movie palace.

Since I began this post by quoting Hall’s The Best Remaining Seats, I’d like to end with a riff on that phrase. I bought my copy of the book in 1976, when we ran the St. George. Dean, my partner in that venture, to whom I just read this post, has something to add. Here’s a little story in his words:

We were showing The Exorcist (the only movie we presented as theater operators that ever sold out the house). Dafan (one of our ushers) came down the main staircase two steps at a time. Clearly he was excited.

“People are everywhere tryin’ to find a place to sit. And the balcony’s open!” (A miracle — we usually only sold enough tickets to populate the front part of the orchestra).

I paused. I’d been dying to use a certain phrase since the day we opened in April.  “Tell them,” I said, “that the best remaining seats are in the upper balcony,  direct them there.” 

“Wha... What kind of seats?” Dafan asked.

“Never mind.” I sighed.  “Just tell ‘em to go upstairs and sit down.”

Well, it wasn’t the Roxy...but the St. George was still standing, all red and gold, its chandeliers in place. And, for once, it was full.
 
Note: The Theatre Historical Society Conclave Tour in Los Angeles which I sincerely wish I could attend this year, apparently has a few openings in its two-day package. The whole thing starts next week. Sign up if you’re on or near that other coast...or feel like traveling!
            

“I don’t think,” film mogul William Fox remarked in the mid nineteen-twenties, “that there will ever be the much-dreamed-of talking pictures on a large scale. To have conversation would strain the eyesight and the sense of hearing at once, taking away the restfulness one gets from viewing pictures alone.” As Ben M. Hall, in The Best Remaining Seats, observes with a deal of irony, “Look who’s talking!” By the time Fox made this remark, the Warner Brothers had already taken the plunge with Vitaphone, a Bell lab wonder of synchronized sound, that consisted of a turntable which took twelve or sixteen-inch discs timed (more or less) to match the lip movements of actors on screen. So many technologies had already preceded Vitaphone (the Phonokinema, Phonofilm, Web’s Electrical Pictures, the Kinetophone, the New Kinetophone, the Cameraphone) it’s hard to keep track. Fox, the naysayer, was soon to join the parade with “Movietone,” based on a German invention, Tri-Ergon (sound on film). When his adaptation of this process was complete, Movietone became the granddaddy of movies as the world eventually came to know them, with a “stripe” of sound consisting of variously-dense lines along one side of film. This was better than Vitaphone, more exact, but, for a time, Vitaphone would be the expensive process theater operators dug deep into their pockets to absorb the cost of, just in time to offer their patrons the first spoken (movie) words, “Wait a minute — wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet!” — Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Actually, the first “talkie” had already aired in New York (August, 1926), Don Juan, a romantic adventure (most kisses in film history — 127 actually!) starring John Barrymore. It was technically the first feature-length film to utilize Vitaphone (with synchronized musical score and sound effects) though it has no spoken dialogue. The talking picture Rubicon had yet to be crossed.

In 1976 at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island which I took a hand in helping to run, we found a Vitaphone handbook in the projection booth, and an old, non-functioning speaker backstage that bore the Vitaphone logo. Our theater had opened in 1929, with So This is College, a (Warner/Vitaphone) talking picture, two years after Jolson spoke and sang.   By this time, every theater operator worth his (her?) salt already knew the Vitaphone Manual front-to-back, enough to program talking short films in place of the less-interesting live acts that used to play between silent features. Vaudeville was on the run, and so were some silent film stars who couldn’t talk without sounding like a squeaky mouse, had unacceptable accents, or simply couldn’t adjust to a different style of acting. Clara Bow (the “It Girl”) was one such: when she heard that there was a fire at Paramount, she quipped "I hope to Christ it was the sound stages!" A seasoned actor, she went on to make 11 talkies before retiring to become a rancher in Nevada.

What exactly was it about sound pictures that so disappointed a number of actors? Beyond wishing the sound stages would go up in flames, Bow  observed, "I hate talkies ... they're stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there's no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me." Harold Lloyd’s career never quite recovered when sound came in; the very soul of a physical actor, he had always done his own stunts. When sound was more or less a fait accompli, Lloyd actually made a film (Welcome Danger) in two versions, one a talking picture and the other a silent.  Charlie Chaplin who wrote and produced most of the movies he starred in, simply refused to accept sound, producing City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue. (His use of sound-effects in both these films was brilliant).

​But despite Chaplin’s sophistication, sound was here to stay; nothing in Hollywood would ever be the same. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight major studios to release its first (part-) talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter.

It would take a while for all of America to follow the new technology: the number of sound cinemas grew from 100 to 800 between 1928 and 1929, but were, for a brief time, vastly outnumbered by silent theaters--which nonetheless grew in number in the same period, from 22,204 to 22,544. For a while, a little way into 1930, Hollywood produced movies in dual versions, silent and talking. Though few in the industry had predicted it (including William Fox, whose early opinion on sound started this blog post), Points West, a Hoot Gibson Western released by Universal in 1929, would be the last purely silent mainstream feature to emerge.

By the time I came of age in the sixties, most of the silent stars had left their handprints and footprints in Grauman’s cement, and, endangered species that they were, had gone off to live in the Hollywood Hills or elsewhere, if they had made enough money, at an ironic remove from official Hollywood. There are interesting exceptions, including Lillian Gish who kept working until six years before her death in 1993, making her last screen appearance in 1987. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about movie palaces as the natural homes of the silents, but it ain’t necessarily so. Our theater, the St. George, was built when silents reigned, but opened in 1929 with a talkie. Its dressing rooms (rubble-strewn and vacant by the time we came along in 1976) housed vaudeville actors a little way into the 30’s, but silents were, as it turned out, never on the bill. Nor were they available at a host of other prominent palaces, including, among others, the gorgeous Atlanta Fox (1929), the Pomona Fox (1931), The Loew’s 175th Street Theatre (1930 — “Times Square entertainment nearer your home!”) (now the United Palace), all of which were completed in the age of sound.

But getting back to the movies themselves, what exactly is a movie, and how long will movie-going last? When I first entered the projection booth of the St. George Theatre, its hulking carbon-arc projectors were already obsolete. Not so long ago, friend Bob Endres, who worked the better part of his adult life as the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, a man I remember for his white-gloved treatment of film, dropped a small disc into a computer at Dolby Sound, where he currently works, and a crisp movie appeared on the screen in their viewing studio. Think of the kinetoscope at the beginning of the 20th  century, film’s century. It was a single-viewer device. And then there were nickelodeons — those primitive storefront theaters. And crowds gathered in vacant lots in places like Toledo, Ohio — my mother remembered sitting on some wooden benches watching flickering images on a bed sheet, batting away the mosquitos. That’s how it all began, followed by movie palaces and hometown theaters. And then TV comes along, right there in your living room, smaller but free. TV forces the movie industry to create smaller theaters with more screens to allow for select crowds and greater choice. (I had the bad luck or poor judgement to try running a movie palace at that juncture!). Movies, by this time, have come to TV. A decade later TV is in every room of every house and then it too begins to disappear! The Internet, that biggest of all fishes, eats it, and here we are again, watching tiny screens. Not so different from the Kinetoscope? 

I’m on an impresario kick. Last week, I dug deep into the lore of Sid Grauman, one of the grand-daddy impresarios of the movie palace era. The likes of Grauman and Rothafel and Loew (I’m saving the latter two for eventual posts), along with certain select architects, like Thomas Lamb, built the great palaces, sometimes going so deeply into debt they had to sell out before completion. But for every major Impresario (with a capital I), there were small-time guys, like Solomon Brill, the local New York showman who built our beloved St. George Theatre in Staten Island, originally a three-thousand-seat Spanish Baroque hall that opened in 1929, the subject of this blog and eventual book. In 1976, I had a hand in running the St. George as a buck-fifty movie house, exploring its nooks and crannies, including the many-storied (rubble-strewn) dressing rooms that framed the stage, and reflecting on the fact that Solomon Brill had intended the St. George — at least in part — to house and present live (Vaudeville) acts.     

Who was the guy who’d built our theater — this Brill dude? His last name was familiar to me from a gilded Deco building I’d visited in Manhattan at 1619 Broadway, the haunt, in those days, of film agents, composers, and old “Tin Pan Alley” song-pluggers. Wrong Brill. The (still-extant) building had actually grabbed its moniker from another dude, one of its first ground-floor tenants, a men’s clothier whose neon sign had at some point dominated the front of the structure. So if Sol Brill wasn’t that Brill, who exactly was he? Oddly, like the afore-mentioned clothier, he’d started in the rag business, specifically “cloth sponging.” In 1904, tired of his day-job in that racket , Sol Brill opened Brooklyn's first-ever movie theatre, a nickelodeon, the Broadway, in East Williamsburg. Show-biz was for him; he stuck at it. By the time he died in 1932 (New York Times obituary, p. 21), he owned a small chain of 15 theaters in and around New York, including the St. George. Costing the princely sum of $500,000 to construct in the late 1920's (roughly $7,125,000 today), it had been Brill's ultimate creation. But like his big-time Impresario brother, S.L. “Roxy” Rothafel, who ultimately washed out fiscally at the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall, Brill sold one half of his interest in the St. George Theatre to Joseph Kohn, who later sold the theatre to the Fabian chain. Certain of Brill’s debts linked to the 1929 crash and numerous cost overruns are the likely culprits of his deal with Kohn: the old palaces were always money-pits, and Vaudeville was waning.

Brill had been, at least in part, a Vaudeville man: he’d begun the St. George with those live acts in mind. But by 1929, when the theater opened, what was left of the live-performance circuits was mostly in the hands of (rumored ) rum-runner Joe Kennedy — yes that Kennedy, patriarch of the Boston clan -- who, in a hostile buy-out, took over KAO, Keith Albee Orpheum, the last of the Vaudeville circuits, with intentions to convert them entirely to cinema.

Movies were coming into their own, while Vaudeville was taking a few last curtain calls. To see just how one theater’s design changed to accommodate the ascendency and dominance of film, take a walk with me down the center aisle of the St. George. Just 20 feet or so beyond the overhanging balcony, turn your back to the stage and look up to the very rear of the six-story space. Stuck into the upper reaches of the theater is an architectural afterthought: the box-like structure that housed a pair of 35-mm projectors and spotlights aimed at the theater's stage.

On December 4, 1929, the year that would begin the Great Depression, the St. George opened with a "talkie," And So This is College, as it primary offering, made possible by Warner Brothers' pioneering "Vitaphone" audio system. In 1976 we found a Vitaphone handbook in the projection booth, and an old, non-functioning speaker backstage that bore the Vitaphone logo.

Momentarily, live acts — it was true all over America — still supported the featured film offering. On December 4, it was Blossom Seeley, the “Original Red-Hot Mama” with Benny Fields — a Blues man —and Arnold Johnson whose Majestic Orchestra was a real presence on that other hot new medium, Radio.

After Brill’s death, live theater persisted a little way into the 1930’s. To quote from this site's main page:

“Actors Robbed at St. George.” (The Staten Island Advance, December 26, 1933):  “...the robberies must have been committed between 9 and 10 P.M., while...vaudeville was in progress. The thief is believed to have calmly walked in the stage door and entered in turn each of the dressing rooms being used by the artists.” Performers’ wallets, handbags and jewelry were apparently never recovered. These singers and actors may have been the St. George Theatre’s last Vaudeville performers. The following year, 1934, saw the end of live shows with each movie.

Brill had been dead two years by 1934 , Roxy Rothafel had two years to go. On the West Coast, Sid Grauman had, for the most part, retired. The era of movie palaces — you could say — was already over.