More than forty years ago, when I was involved in helping to run the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in its declining years, we joked about “just closing down the auditorium and putting everything into the candy stand.” Late at night as we gathered around that very stand — our unofficial hearth — we imagined setting out tables in the lobby, putting velvet drapes over the glass that separated that lobby from the movie screen, and upping the menu to include salads, burgers, grilled cheese, what have you. Maybe a liquor license some day, when we could afford to bribe the necessary officials. Reasons for these fantasies included such thrills as getting rid of the projectionist’s salary, a whopping $13.75/hour ($60.84 in current dollars), never having to worry about filling all those seats again, and saying fini to Warner Bros. and Fox and the other film distributors, with their percentages that made it impossible to turn a profit. Besides, people kept coming in during the last show, passing up the box office and asking if they could just buy dinner. Our seat-of-the-pants operation in a destitute neighborhood happened to have better comestibles than most of the local restaurants: Sabrett’s all-beef hot dogs on freshly-baked Italian rolls, fresh popped corn with Odell’s real clarified butter, Haagen Dazs when nobody else had the stuff, and, of course, as many ways to stoke a sugar high as you could hope for (until I came to NYC, this Midwesterner had never seen a Jordan Almond or a Charleston Chew, and didn’t know from frozen Snickers). We had it all, including, at the time, the highest per capita concession sales in the five boroughs of New York City. Our patrons consumed, per capita, roughly $1.38, a little higher than Times Square. By today’s standards, that would be $6.07, which is relatively off-the-charts today, excluding theaters with wine and beer offerings. 

Though we hardly knew it at the time, we’d stumbled onto a basic truth that is now revolutionizing the business of movie exhibition: the concession tail was already beginning to wag the exhibition dog. It hadn’t always been that way. 

Once upon a time, movie theaters had no concession stands at all; but there is some essential connection between movie-watching and munching. The storefront Nickelodeons of the teens and early nineteen twenties were often flanked at street level by candy shops and outside popcorn vendors; folks snuck these goodies in under their coats — verboten these days -- though people still do it. In the twenties, when big palaces rose like elegant domed mushrooms all across the continent, their very opulence made theater owners reluctant to sell food. Then came the Depression. If I’m a theater manager in 1932, I’m wondering why, since people sneak food in anyhow, I’m not the one selling it to them? Popcorn happens to be an extremely cheap product, and the price, even with obscene mark-up, was affordable (10 cents a bag) even then. Candy came along for the ride, and suddenly a theater was more than a place to see a show. It was where you indulged the guilty pleasure of food in the dark. 

Jump over the great time hurdle of the millennium, and what do I find? Well, AMC isn’t exactly proposing to darken all of its 11,000 screens and go into the restaurant business, but since 2015, it can’t help noticing concession sales are rising, even as ticket sales are falling off. (The fact that dine-in and booze are offered alongside traditional concession has, of course, everything to do with it, but there’s more).  Since 2002, ticket prices have increased more than 50%, while ticket sales have fallen more than 20%. According to Variety, we’ve been “net-flix-ized,”  Movie Pass, a subscription service founded on this principle, may go bankrupt before it succeeds, but it’s burgeoning database of accounts leaves no doubt that people want to go out to movies, if they can do it on the cheap. Anyhow, slashing ticket sales means, what else, charging more for the popcorn and Good ‘n Plenties.  

In 2014, AMC saw ticket sales drop more than $80 million in a year; but during that same period, overall revenues only dropped fifty million. At the same time,concession revenue rose dramatically to help make up the shortfall. Higher prices? — yes, but the patron who got in cheaper probably spent some of the difference on extra edibles.

So you may have even more elbow room at the local movie house than you had a few years ago, but that Snickers and giant bucket of popcorn you just bought probably set you back more than you expected. Well, you got in on subscription, didn’t you? 

Afterthought:
I’m thinking about a lot of people who loved our hot dogs way back when and could have been early subscribers: 
The jazzman, who showed up in a spangled suit and ordered a “yellow dog” (with mustard) once a week, but never went in to see the movie. 
Certain neighborhood families, who preferred our concession stand to Burger King..
And tiny old Dr. Oppenheimer (probably in her early nineties at that point) who liked to stand outside the box office (she barely came up to the sill) and talk with me about the Law of Entropy, and other heady stuff, all the time munching on a Sabrett’s with extra mustard.

​That was Dijon mustard, BTW.

I have a friend who suffers from Anosmia — the inability to perceive smells. She speaks sadly about her loss of sea-smells at the beach, and, among so many things, regrets losing earthy scents in fall, as leaves decay. Her loss, thankfully, is beginning to reverse itself, and I’m glad for that. I’m also grateful to her for reminding me how important smell actually is:  perhaps the oldest path to memory. Her reflections on smelling sent me, in my waking dream, directly into the lobby of the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I helped to run in 1976 for one tragicomic year. Air conditioning, of the kind that old theaters cranked up on a July day actually has a smell, you know — or is it that it magnifies the resident smells of a lobby? The decades-old whiff of hot oil and the grassy fragrance of corn is part of it. The slight decay of aging wool carpet is another thing that lingers in old theaters, and, if it really is true that the human nose can distinguish trillions of scents (controversial) then plaster and aging velvet probably boost the olfactory movie palace experience a little bit too. I swear you could blindfold me and lead me into the lobby of any old palace, the (formerly Loew’s) Kings in Brooklyn, for example. Despite the new carpeting, and recent renovations, I’d know it for an old theater, even if you plugged my ears. 

Although smoking at the St. George in our time was relegated to the last seven rows on the left, the crisp funk of recent cigarette smoke, layered over decades of accumulated tar that had already coated the plaster angels, resulted in a kind of of dry rub. Hey, we all smoked back then, even if we didn’t actually light up.  

How is it then, that I’m nostalgic about smoking? But for one brief puff of a Marlboro on the playground (followed by a gritty spate of coughing), I never smoked a cigarette in my life. But with the exception of primary and secondary school classrooms and cafeterias, there was virtually no place in 1950’s America where smoking didn’t happen. It seemed, ironically, as natural as breathing itself! It prevailed in the armed forces (cigarettes were part of C rations from WWII to Vietnam), at home (Mom and Pop and all their friends), on buses, in lobbies, at restaurants, in (yes!) hospitals, on airplanes (cigarettes were passed out for free) and certainly beneath the copious dome of the local movie palace, its chandelier dimly visible through the haze. The presence of a dome made movie palaces particularly smoke-friendly. 

​By the time (April, 1976), we took over the St. George, the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning that cigarette smoking is hazardous to health was twelve years old, and new research in the early seventies was pointing a finger at second-hand smoke. Some people were choosing not to be smokers, and those people didn’t want to sit next to people who were, hence our struggles to limit smoking to the last seven rows on the left. (And the airlines’ struggles, which lasted decades).   

According to Quora, (Michael J. McFadden), “Smoking in movie theaters was VERY commonly allowed up into the 70s (often in a balcony or "loge" area, though sometimes throughout) and even in a fair number of theaters through the 80s and into the 90s. Without the media fanfare and the creation of fear of ‘secondhand smoke’ most people didn't care about it enough to complain...” to which Walt Cody was moved  to reminisce, “In New York City, I believe [the ban was not in place] ...until the very late 1980s, say, 1988. I do recall that the first movie I went to following the ban was a subtitled French film in which all the characters smoked. LOL. Made you want to light up every time THEY did.” 

Of course we never sold cigarettes, but you can be assured a "ciggie" machine had graced our theater’s lobby only a few years before. There’s something else to be nostalgic for: putting a quarter into the cigarette machine for your daddy, then pushing the button under “Parliament” and hearing the thunk as a pack of cigarettes (and often matches) slid down into the tray. But getting back to the St. George in 1976, a lesson about the all-pervasiveness of cigarette smoking over time was waiting in the lobby for us to discover.

By the time we took over, the lobby chandeliers hung like dark armored shapes above the corridor, each ringed by a set of (burned out) electric candles. Late in our first month, a hard-working member of our team figured out how to crank the chandeliers down for bulbing. Voila! What I’d assumed all along were plates of copper sheeting at the center of each chandelier were actually panes of colored glass, revealing more electric candles inside. Over the period of a very long night, this comrade scrubbed patiently, dipping the glass panels in a solution of ammonia and soap, and, by daybreak, transforming them from opaque seemingly faux-copper to fully-transparent glass. What had hidden their beauty? Forty-plus years of cigarette smoke! Standing beneath their now blinding light, I wondered what the insides of the lungs of all those smokers looked like.

Since, due to scant audiences, the balcony was generally not open, we chose the left-hand side of the orchestra as our smoking section, then struggled to keep smokers corralled there. A number strayed into the general audience when nobody was looking, especially if the smoking section was full, but most stayed put, their smoke trailing upwards beyond the lip of the mezzanine.

Now here’s the core of my nostalgia: before the smoke reached those exulted heights, it passed through the beam of the projector in rich eddies, morphing into a kind of transparent marble. It had always been that way, as far back as I could remember, the smoke, the light.

How could anything so lethal be so beautiful? I remember my daddy’s cigarette smoke the same way: he knew just how to blow smoke-rings. Seated on his lap, I could poke my finger through them! Daddy, he was so Bogie...

Speaking of Bogart, the movies themselves were one reason almost every adult smoked in the nineteen fifties. Before I wax rhapsodic on the glamor of filmic smoking, let’s cut the nostalgia by reminding ourselves that style frequently boils down to economics. “The link between Hollywood and tobacco goes back to the beginning of talking pictures,” Stanton Glantz (Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, the University of California, San Francisco) reminds us. “It was a way to thoroughly embed tobacco use in the social fabric.”

Bogie in To Have and Have Not smoked Chesterfields. What could be sexier? Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracey all smoked “Luckies” (Lucky Strikes) when they smoked on screen, openly promoting them in print media and on radio. 

Product placement was still invisible then; the stars were gods. Even to those of us who never lit up, smoking was sexy. There they were, inhabiting their universe of the giant screen, enveloped in movie smoke, and just below, mere mortals (my parents, other adults, rebellious teens) knocked an ash off a genuine cigarette, sending the smoke of their peculiar incense up to the theater’s dome, by way of the film’s radiant beam.

Afterthought 1 Weed. Of course, there was no designated smoking section at the St. George Theatre for the cigarette of my generation. We all smoked it — me only occasionally, because, despite the payoff, holding smoke in my throat just hurt too much. But, especially for midnight shows, grass was ever-present, making its benign path through the bright beam of Woodstock or a Ken Russell extravaganza, all the while spreading good cheer, smelling vaguely like oregano, and blessedly lighting a fire under candy and popcorn sales. I’m sure there’s a little essence of “Maryjane” in the drapes and carpeting of the St. George, even now.

Afterthought 2 Well, in a way I did smoke, if you count candy cigarettes! My brand was Lucky Stripes, which, alas, left no nasal impressions.

 ,What becomes of unlucky old movie palaces, the ones that didn’t survive to become live working show places? The lucky palaces -- I’m thinking The Atlanta Fox, the Carolina in Greensboro, The United Palace in Manhattan, The Loews (Brookllyn, Flatbush Avenue), Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre in L.A., and others — have mostly morphed into not-for-profit live venues, thanks to some or another local group or single devoted individual. Property values have at least something to do with this process, which is why Manhattan lost most of its great palaces — that ground is just too valuable, and well, what can we say about Manhattan real estate moguls? — “greedy” seems too redundant an adjective.  

Wherever you go, for every theater saved, at least two are probably either gone, or have been grotesquely transformed. Exception: the St. George in Staten Island, which I was privileged to help run as a movie house in 1976. That story has, nonetheless, a little of the “perils of Pauline” about it. My partners and I were the last folks to run it as a movie house, after which it went through a series of careers, including dinner theater, flea market, and church, rescued, at last, by a local dance teacher, who mortgaged her house to save it. It’s a story with an ultimately happy ending. 

But theaters that didn’t survive are often more compelling to write about than ones that did; so this week I’d like to dedicate my post to the Michigan in Detroit, the only movie palace in the world that survives as a parking garage. Demolition may have been preferable, but the office building the theater was attached to wouldn’t have withstood the demolition, thus, ironically, this Rapp and Rapp 4,038-seat beauty was saved, not for its splendor, but because knocking it down would have been beyond expensive, and because the folks in the office building needed a place to park. Detroit is Motor City after all. 

I’ve touched on the Michigan in previous blog posts. Its Wurlitzer, interestingly enough, was rescued in 1955, by one Fred Hermes, a theater and organ aficionado, who built his own mini-theater in the basement rec-room of his Racine home, where for better than half a century he gave concerts to all manner of travelers, on the Michigan’s 2500-pipe instrument. They marveled at the chandeliers, velvet and pilasters, but when Fred hit the keyboard, jaws routinely dropped. He was quite the showman, from the age of 7, a self-styled organ scholar, who purchased his first instrument — a pump organ his piano teacher owned — and hauled it home in his little red wagon. These tales of Fred, subject of an earlier blog post, are sadly past tense now, since he died over the winter, aged 92.  What will become of his Bijou who can say.  

While the Wurlitzer may once again be in limbo, it certainly had a good run, from 1955 through 2017, protected from the MIchigan’s slow sad descent into what you might call Movie Palace Hades, as the world’s fanciest parking garage. Dan Austin of historicdetroit.org, wrote a wonderful treatment of the Michigan’s sad story; I’m cribbing heavily from him, but giving credit all the way (what’s in quotes belongs to him, with the exception of quotations directly from newspapers):

"...entering, you pass into another world. Your spirit rises and soars along the climbing pillars and mirrored walls that ascend five stories to the dome of the great lobby. It becomes gay and light under the warm coloring that plays across the heavily carved and ornamental walls as myriads of unseen lights steal out from mysteriously hidden coves to illume the interior with romantic sundown colors.” Abandoning hard reportage to wax poetical, the Detroit Free Press praised the Michigan on the day of its opening, coincidentally the day Rudolf Valentino died at the age of 31 of peritonitis. The Michigan’s owner, John H. Kunsky, a savvy showman, nonetheless kept Valentino’s last movie, The Son of the Sheik,at his smaller Adams Theatre, thereby hoping for — and getting — twice the ticket sales. The Michigan opened with the even-then-obscure You Never Know Women (Florence Vidor, Lowell Sherman), but it being the theater’s day of birth, sold out. 

Built at the corner of Bagley and Cass avenues, at a cost of more than $3.5 million ($42.4 million today, when adjusted for inflation), the 4,038-seat French Renaissance style Michigan was a Rapp and Rapp house — their third largest — connected with the Michigan Building Office Tower, which would save it from the wrecker’s ball exactly fifty years later, a highly-unusual story in the annals of movie palace demolition. But back to the 1920’s.

"It is not merely a theatre for Detroit,” Kunsky told The Detroiter in August 1926. “It is a theatre for the whole world...designed to be the great showplace of the middle west.” And so it was, at least for that part of the midwest, a routinely packed house, filling almost all those seats five times a day, with singers, dancers, and a movie. Entertainers — jugglers and that sort of thing, not to mention a piano player — kept people in the lobbies from getting restless.

From its 1000-square-foot lobby, filled with original art, “as much a museum as a movie theater,” to its grand staircase, women’s cosmetics lounges and men’s lounges for “retiring,” it was every inch a movie palace. A “...large replica of a fifth-century Roman sculpture depicting a horse and chariot stood [on the mezzanine]... ushers often had to shoo the kids who climbed into the ‘driver’s seat.’ This horse and chariot, a replica of a sculpture in the Sala Della Biga (the Hall of the Chariot) at the Vatican, is believed to have been the largest sculpture in any U.S. movie palace."

Kunsky was forced out of business early in the Depression, and his flagship ended up part of United Detroit Theaters. It’s a story for anyone who shudders while playing Monopoly — check it out. After sound was installed, UDT dispensed with music at the Michigan altogether (no more Detroit Symphony). Enter, two decades later, Fred of Racine, who happily carried off the Wurlitzer (this time not in his little red wagon). 

Attendance was on the decline by then: urban flight, TV, all that jazz. On March 1, 1967, for $1.5 million (roughly $9.7 million today), United Detroit Theaters sold the Michigan and its office tower. The new owners weren’t show biz folk. Four days later, after a double billing of The Spy With a Cold Nose(Laurence Harvey) and A Thousand Clowns (Jason Robards), the theater closed.

“There was nothing spectacular about the final curtain...” the Detroit Free Press wrote the next morning. “The last scene flashed on the big screen … the house lights brightened … the audience shuffled across the rich red carpet … and that was that.”

All of this seems achingly familiar to an old movie palace operator, who watched the St. George slide from movies to flea market, to dark and shuttered. But our theater would survive, sitting as it does on ground that was of questionable value for a long time. As for the Michigan, it  was spared for a while, saved first by Nicholas George, a local movie entrepreneur, then by Sam Gladous, a supper club guy, who leveled the rake and installed a kitchen. The theater fell at last into the hands of Steven Glantz, a rock promoter, who gave the lady what you might call some rough trade. This part of the story reminds me of what happened to the Academy of Music in Manhattan, transformed to impresario Ron Delsener’s Palladium, where drug deals and worse made an elegant house into a dive and then a demolition site. 

We’re up to 1973.  Add on three years of graffiti and worse, and, by 1977, the gig, for the Michigan, was up. Having dodged, once again, the fate of complete demolition, it became at last the world’s most ornate parking garage. “Today, the sight of cars parked under grimy though still gorgeous plaster details draws tourists, photographers and gawkers in disbelief.” Only in Detroit! The Michigan lost its mezzanine, once reserved for black-tie, to one of three levels of available parking.

Anybody who knows the story of America’s movie palaces, from their inception to the current time, knows that the seventies were a dark, dark time. In ‘76, my friends and I struggled mightily to keep the St. George lit and open, the same year the Michigan ended its career as any kind of performance house. Coast to coast, for a long time, palaces fell.

Meanwhile in Racine, until very recently, Fred Hermes played on. 
            
Afterthought 1: Here’s an interesting bit from Huff Post, over four years old. Who knows whether the parking garage will have yet one more afterlife?
 
Afterthought 2: A great YouTube video of the Detroit Fox theater organ still apparently in use.

There are 9 Starlite drive-in theaters in the continental U.S. of A, in towns as various as: Amelia, OH, Bloomington, IN, Witchita, KN, Litchfield, MA, Cadet, MO, Christiansburg, VA, Richland Center, WI, Neligh, NB, and the oddly named Maria Stein, O.  Amazingly, all of them are open now for business. Where once there were 3775 “ozoners” in the USA (1954) only 381 (2018) are open; but, hey, that is something, because, while traditional movie theaters are having a time of it lately, drive-ins are on the way back (they were down to around 200 in the 1990’s). Remember that clunky speaker on a post that served as the only source of audio for the image on your local outdoor theater’s big screen? These days, an FM radio is all you need. Those white posts in the ground? They’re relics of the previous age, but they do serve to help the driver park. 

I recently explored the Starlite in Amelia, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, where I grew up. I Feel Pretty and Deadpool 2 were sharing the signboard (always a double feature at the Starlite, $8.75 for adults). Ours was a daylight tour, with a friend who knows his way around the countryside. Next time I’m in southern Ohio, I hope to take in a movie by star light, at the Starlite, which is open six nights a week in the warm season. Just a note on Amelia itself (I love obscure details that trace things back to their names): the town, population 4, 801, was named for Amelia Bowdoin, a popular 19th century tollgate operator, on the Ohio Turnpike, whose house still stands close to where it was when it was a tollhouse. (Nobody charges for driving State Route 125 anymore.) 

The last movie I attended in the open air was in 1969, Candy, onscreen at Cincinnati’s Oakley Drive-In. There were some other racier features if you stayed long enough. A month later I was gone, heading North and East to NYC, where I settled in Staten Island and, seven years later, became one of the managers of a local 2,672-seat  movie palace, the St. George Theatre, just a block and a half from the Staten Island Ferry, as our state-of-the-art 1976 telephone answering machine used to tell callers. 

 
By the time I arrived in S.I., the one local drive-in the prosaically entitled Staten Island Drive-In, had been gone four years, its land subsumed for building the K-Mart Mall. It had opened in 1948, causing a ban on night flights from several local airfields. There were, of course, no drive-ins in Manhattan; but two other outdoor theaters, the Whitestone Drive-In in the Bronx (1949) and the International Airport Drive-In, in Queens, also fell victim to their own property values. The Whitestone morphed into a multiplex, but the Airport alas, became nothing more than a parking lot. Such was the fate of outdoor exhibition sites in the sixties and seventies, the result of suburban sprawl -- that also claimed the Oakley back home. It lasted until 2005. On visits to Cincy, I’d roam around the abandoned site of my movie-watching youth, searching for memories I might have accidentally discarded. It was, for a while, a field of posts in tall grass, facing a torn screen. But even that reminiscence is no longer possible, the site repurpsed for a dog spa and an assisted living facility. You have to go to the countryside surrounding Cincinnati to watch a movie from the front or backseat of your car, these days. 

What a peculiarly American institution drive-ins are! According to Drive-Ins.com, and other sources, Richard Hollingshead is the granddaddy of the business. His compelling motive for building Park-In Theatres, in Camden, NJ was, apparently, to help his tall mother watch movies in the private comfort of the family car. He tested the concept in his driveway, nailing a screen to trees, putting a radio behind the screen, and placing a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car. When he had everything figured out, he applied for a patent, then opened Park-In, charging 25 cents per car and 25 cents per person, with no group paying more than one dollar. 

Variations on this pricing model — per carload — were popular at many drive-ins through the sixties and seventies, resulting in some interesting narratives about packing vehicles. My husband Dean recalls going to the Montgomery Drive-In,  ($1.20 a carload) another suburban Cincinnati theater, in the  Staley Funeral Parlor’s family-owned hearse — the secondary one they only used when there were two funerals. The Staley brothers could pack around fifteen into the old wagon, especially fun when Horrors of the Black Museum or something starring Vincent Price flashed on screen. 

While Dean was hangin’ in the back of the hearse, I had my own adventures at the Oakley, which involved my best friend’s divorcee mother, dating an ex-rodeo cowboy, Harvey, whom she kept at bay in the front seat, right in front of us kids. And this comment just in from a reader of Jalopy Journal: Once we took a school bus to carload night. They weren't going to let us in and called the cops when we refused to get out of the lane. The cops said that they had to let us in. The next week there was a sign that said no bus loads. I’m surprised the Montgomery didn’t ban hearses!

​Tom Purcell, a nationally-syndicated Pittsburgh Tribune-Review humor columnist, recalls the time his family left the drive-in without remembering to do a head-count, inadvertently leaving his four-year-old sister Mary behind. Check it out. No helicopter parents in those days!  

The database at Drive-Ins.com is well worth perusing. A fly-by of the list of drive-ins past and present yields some great names. My favorite, “Field of Dreams,” are two linked theaters, both in my home state, Tiffin and Liberty Center, OH. Should you find yourself in Tiffin, go to a movie and give a donation to restore their neon sign.

What does it take to start up a drive-in? Well, land, and a screen — not even projection these days — but some kind of building for popping popcorn and grilling dogs.Or, you can go more primitive than that...Ever heard of the guerrilla drive-in movement? In Santa Cruz, CA where it all started, guerrilla theaters are pop up, and the screen surface might just be a blank billboard or the pylon on a highway. Do it yourself.   

My husband, Dean, was, as you may know, one of my partners in movie palace management, and no wonder, given that, at the age of ten, he and his friends up and down the block in Deer Park Ohio, started a kind-of drive-in (you could call it guerrilla) that took viewers by the bike-load. Dean and the crew made their own movies (Big T. Productions), popped their own corn, and sold Kool-Aid in soda bottles, aided by a bottle-capping apparatus somebody’s mom had. It was a living! 

​Afterthought 1  Although Hollingshead is the official patent-holding inventor of the drive-in, an early (hybrid) version, opened in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1915, accommodating seven hundred people in an auditorium, and an additional 40-plus cars. It had a performance stage as well. Opened with Bags of Gold (Siegmund Lubin) and closed a year later.

Afterthought 2  I owe my tour of Starlite Drive-In and other theaters in Claremont County (upcoming in a post of the future) to my old friend, Thom Moon, originally from Dayton, Ohio, now living in Cincinnati. You may recall his story in a previous post about the Victory (Victoria ) Theatre in Dayton. Among other things, it’s a father/son story...