The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.  
Time, May 14, 2015

In 1976, while a group of us struggled to keep the doors of a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, open, we feared all the while that movie-going as an American social activity was going, going... Gone? But we would never have blamed attention span. There were understandable reasons for our fear of the movies’ demise, back in the seventies: low box office revenue, empty seats. Our cantilevered balcony was almost permanently closed, the home of random kids who snuck up there, hoping to do some drugs, do each other, or just go unnoticed until we’d closed down and left for the day. Movies that drew an audience in our troubled urban neighborhood were hard to find and difficult to book, and the distributors of those flicks typically took two-thirds of the meager receipts. However, what was actually done-for in the mid-seventies wasn’t movies per se; it was single-screen theaters, especially palaces. We learned that lesson the hard way, losing money hand-over-fist and closing just shy of the one-year anniversary of our opening.
 
A lot of things have come and gone since I sat behind the bars of a box office or shoveled popcorn into buckets: VCRs, for one thing, and video stores for another. Network television, the snake that seduced our audiences away, has been flattened in its turn, by streaming services and cable networks.  
Are the movies themselves really wasted this time? A group of directors, producers, actors and etc. in Sunday, June 23’s New York Times seem to think so, or at least they’re very confused. The fault, according to actor Kumail Nanjiani lies in YouTube and other platforms, since teens and slightly older young adults usually can’t devote time to a two-hour narrative in a communal setting. Implicit is the suggestion that platforms deliver in bite-size morsels millennials are used to. Or does low movie attendance (the average American sees a movie in a theater four times a year) have to do with content itself? 

When I was a Girl Scout, we made fun of the Brownies, the (then) youngest members of GSUSA. We fourth graders in green uniforms accused our peers who were not paying attention of having a short “Brownie Interest Span,” a phrase we’d picked up from our troop leader who’d received it in G.S. training. It really meant, “She’s just like a Brownie — can’t follow the plot of a long story, can’t take directions, can’t even sit still.”

So what makes a number of us adults, these days, less attentive than a goldfish? It isn’t attention span we’ve got to worry about, but (Brownie) interest span. Robert McKee, a prominent teacher of screenwriting, reflects on interest, “...story has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.” He also credits “empathy” for getting us to pay attention. 

How many narratives have you watched lately which stir feelings of empathy? Even when trying to find something to binge-watch at home these days, my husband and I go through ten or fifteen serialized narratives before we find one that can make me forget I’m in the bedroom watching on a flat screen.
Attention span or interest span? What about the fact that the CDC, in a 2015 report, notes Americans (adults as well as children) with ADHD are increasingly more numerous, rising from 7.8 percent in 2003 to 9.5 in 2007 and 11 percent in 2011. As a former tutor of learning disabled children, and an unofficial (never diagnosed) member of the ADD community, I can say that all of us — attentionally challenged and otherwise — share the problem of too many things vying for our attention. For some of us, it is harder than it is for others, to cope with a fragmented, high-pressure world, that makes too many demands on attention; and if you’re not interested?  Well then... 

Going into the lobby of a movie theater, paying for a ticket, buying a popcorn and surrendering to a mutually-shared dream in the dark (when it’s a well-crafted movie) is  an excellent way to train the muscle of attention, or the elastic band of interest span, that needs to be stretched by stories that juice empathy. 

In the future, will all movies go directly from Sundance to streaming? Will binge-watching a story in small segments on an iphone or laptop replace the pleasures of watching a screen larger than the poster cases in the lobby of the St. George Theatre?

“If I had grown up watching YouTube, I don’t know if I would like movies,” Kumail Nanjiani admits. But we aren’t goldfish; and Americans still go out to specific movies, or theaters, like one of my beloved haunts, the United Palace of Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan. Roughly once a month, it shows a big-screen wonder, like Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, or (coming soon) The Matrix.

Paul Feig, in the NYTimes piece that sent me off on this chase, gave my tear ducts a workout by evoking that great moment in Lawrence of Arabia when a tiny dot on the horizon slowly becomes a man on a camel. It takes at least a minute, perhaps a minute and a half. That’s one of my favorite moments ever in film; you need a wide, wide screen to show it. As a director, Paul observes, “there are moments when you want to do a cool shot like that, but you go, When people end up watching this on their phone, they’re not going to see anything.” Being forced to think that way is, I think, very much the tail wagging the dog. Fortunately, there are movies like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight still coming out, and how about the one that almost won the Oscar that same year (2016), La La Land? Dunkirk was built for a large screen too, so it ain’t over, not yet, and maybe never will be. We are, after all, human beings, whose DNA came from storytelling around the campfire’s flame. Campfire, cave: what else is a darkened theater?  
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Try this interesting read on big screen movies. 

2. I mentioned “cantilevered” balconies, of which the St. George’s balcony is one magnificent example.  Here’s a little more on what that’s all about. 
​  
3. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru mentioned in the NYTimes panel, is an interesting dude:  get a taste here...

Four Operas for Three Dollars! boasts the sign I rescued from the “Sign Room” at the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat movie palace we ran for one year, 1976, in Staten Island, New York. A brave band of young ignorant entrepreneurs, we were trying with all our might to make a combined live house and movie theater out of this Eugene De Rosa architectural gem. Alas, it was all movies for us, with a few exceptions; we never booked anything as elaborate as an opera. The price on the “four operas” sign, even then, seemed ridiculous. However, I’ve done some checking: across the harbor in Manhattan, the New York City Opera — deemed “the People’s Opera” by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia — sold tickets in its inaugural (1943) season for exactly 75 cents. A subway token cost you a dime that year, and a movie ticket around 29 cents. I think I know enough from various sources to conclude that the bargain operas being offered were a small package deal — not a whole production — probably medleys from “Carmen” or “Madam Butterfly” or whatever — including some rising talent from Manhattan.

I was thinking of this sign yesterday, when the New York Philharmonic played on the St. George Theatre’s hallowed stage-boards, not an opera this time, but the brass section of the NYPhil, dispatched on a grant to play for free in the city’s fifth and still least-regarded borough. They usually do these concerts in a park, but our Staten Island mosquitos are heavyweight champs of the world, so someone wisely opted for an indoor concert.

I harbored various fantasies as a theater operator, back in ’76, of what it would be like to hear one of the big-guy orchestras from the other side of New York Harbor, in our sacred space, with its perfect acoustics.
 
I was not disappointed on Sunday, and there were other rewards.We’d been lucky enough to get our hands on six of the free tickets, so brought a slew of friends along, one of whom just celebrated her eighty-first birthday. Despite the fact that she’s lived in Staten Island most of her life, I strongly suspect she hadn’t been under the graceful dome of the St. George in at least forty years, and being in the theater awakened plenty of memories. It’s that way with the old palaces; they’re memory sponges.

​The first thing she wanted to tell me about was the organ, long absent from its “elevator” hidden in the stage. I was glad to hear anything she had to say about that long-absent instrument. I wrote several posts about it, a 3/30 (3 manual/30 rank) Wurlitzer, sold off to a pizza parlor in Texas, in the early seventies, before we came along. We had found the elevator in the stage, so I knew there had been an organ, and researched what became of it; but I have no personal experience of the instrument. Though the organist was let go in 1935, from time to time the theater presented a little musical entertainment before movies, and my friend remembered several of these interludes. From our seats in the upper balcony, she pointed to the exact spot on the stage where the “lift‘ had been, “They darkened all the lights, and then, there he was, [the organist] rising out of all that blackness, sitting on his bench.” He must have been dramatically lit: a follow spot whose beam no doubt descended six stories from the projection booth would have added drama. I know those old carbon-arc spots well, having watched our friend Bob Endres, a projectionist of considerable chops, operate them back in 1976 for one of our modest attempts at live entertainment), probably Chaka Khan, who sang at the St. George in a disco night number when nobody knew her. I asked my friend where the organ pipes had been; as I suspected, they’d inhabited part of the alcove stage right, whose sole resident for some time has been a giant gold Greek goddess. “I’m going to ask some people I know if they remember any more details,” she promised.

Simply sitting in the space seemed to have pierced my friend’s memory in several ways: she had a darker recollection of her times at the St George, a newsreel, towards the end of WWII she’d seen in the theater, back when going to the movies was how you got your news. “Nazi Murder Mills, April 26, 1945;” I googled just enough of the newsreel to find that headline. You can access the actual film under that title, if you’d like; but I can’t bring myself to subject it to an ordinary link. This horrendous (now infamous) footage of the Bergen-Belsen camp, shown just days after it was shot, in American theaters across the continent, reveals the bulldozing of thousands of emaciated bodies. My friend would have been seven. “How could they show this to young children?” she wondered last night. 
I thought of the transfiguring qualities of cinema, the effect of that black-and-white imagery blasted on the St. George’s giant screen. Under the sheltering recess of the theater’s cream and pink dome, my friend learned very quickly that if this could happen to people in Germany, it could happen, as she pointed out, “...even to my family.” She was seven in April, 1945.

Our visitors from the New York Phil played on. They honored D-Day with Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis,” and Meacham’s “American Patrol.” They played an arrangement of Gershwin’s “Blue Lullaby.” That’s the second time I’ve heard Gershwin rising to the recesses of the dome. The first time, was almost fifty years ago, in 1976; a friend played “Rhapsody in Blue” from an upright piano we hauled center stage. It was late in our theater year, and our contentious landlord had seen fit to cut off our heat; it was so cold you could see the pianist’s breath, just above the keys. These and other flashes of light or fragments of sound are my own memories, decades younger than my friend’s, but keeping company with hers, in the plaster recesses of a theater I am grateful to say still stands. 
  
Afterthoughts:
1: Philip Smith, the conductor, a 37-year veteran of the Philharmonic, made the Sunday concert at the St. George into a lesson in brasses, playing along at intervals with the 3 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 percussionists, solitary tuba and equally solitary euphonium that comprised the group, quite enough to make the dome ring as if heaven itself were opening! 

2. My friend’s memories of the camp footage were underscored by her distant memory of having just escaped Denmark, her father’s land of birth, on one of the last liners to sail before WWII broke out. Subsequent ships, tankers, liners and otherwise, were targets for German torpedoes. So those bulldozed victims must have had additional meaning for her...

3. I mentioned the architect of the St. George Theatre early in this post; here’s a little something about him (also the architect of the more famous Apollo Theatre). 

It’s easy 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 afternoon at the Mt. Lookout Theatre in Cincinnati where I grew up, I ducked under the seat-back in front of me one Saturday afternoon. There had  been other bouts of movie hiding, but this particular moment was when a flying saucer sliced off the dome of the Capitol Building, in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and I just couldn’t take it. I wasn’t alone. The grown-ups — back in that gilded decade — always 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, to spend my free ticket?

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, but New York City’s near-bankruptcy was still fresh in everybody’s memor; 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.” 

Grown-ups don’t hide under seats, but there are other ways to avoid the assault on your  eyes and ears (and nervous system) that sitting in the dark watching a movie with strangers offers. 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 as well as many movies 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 first-wave 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 last week’s post about crying at the movies). Crying, cringing in fear, how close? 

Afterthought: 
1. On last week’s emotional reaction to movies (crying) I’ve had a few comments back from readers. One is from Betsy Baltzer, an old friend, who recalls crying at Casablanca (at the exact scene you might expect, when the more or less homeless French drown out the Nazis by singing La Marseillaise). Betsy had a friend who was kicked out of a local neighborhood theater for crying at the end of West Side Story. The end? Why? It’s all pretty much over by then.
 
2. 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.

When was the last time you cried in the dark at a movie theater?  Were you with somebody else? Were you alone?  I can clearly remember crying at the St. George, the 2,672-seat movie palace I helped run back in 1976. Most of the time, I was crying because I couldn’t figure out how to pay the private carting service, or didn’t know where I was going to get a deposit for the next movie, but occasionally I cried as the result of actually watching a film. I know I cried at Taxi Driver (when Travis takes his date to a porno movie), Dog Day Afternoon (when the cops remove Sal’s body from the car). And of course there’s always One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in that scene where the Chief smothers the lobotomized McMurphy with a pillow. The death of a first-rate brain is more compelling to me than any amputation. When Danny falls to his death while singing “The Son of God Goes Forth to War,” in John Huston’s 1975 movie based on Kipling’s novel, The Man Who Would Be King, I lose it every time, running through whatever tissues happen to be in my pocket. I was in the St. George’s balcony in May of ’76 the first time I saw this epic, which I’m sure has something to do with later crying episodes. We were soldiers of fortune too, in our theater adventure.

In the almost sixty years our theater was a movie palace, its red velvet cushions must have absorbed countless gallons of tears; still it’s interesting that, if you google “movies that make you cry” or “tear jerkers,” even on the IMDB site, you’ll find hardly any movies that engendered this reaction in audiences prior to 1980. It’s as if the tear ducts of previous decades remained stubbornly dry. Well we know this isn’t true: think of 1946 and It’s a Wonderful Life!

I wish we could have showed my favorite good cry, Casablanca, at the St. George, but in 1976 in a tough urban ‘hood, the flirtations and idealism of WWII seemed almost extraterrestrial. I regularly bawl my eyes out at home whenever we let ourselves into Casablanca’s warm bath of love, cigarette smoke, and political resistance.

As a child I cried at The Wizard of Oz, every single time I saw it on the big screen (that would be at least five times). When Dorothy sees Auntie Em in the Wicked Witch’s crystal ball, so far away, I just can’t help it. I didn’t cry, but hid my eyes when the witch died, mostly out of fear of melting, even if (or maybe because) what was changing from solid to liquid before my eyes was, in the witch’s own words, “all my lovely wickedness...”

Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander was a straight-through cry, made the more poignant by the fact that I had chosen to see it as one of my “after therapy” movies. Being alone in the dark, watching as children begin to understand death, that was what did it. It’s easier, I think, to tear up when nobody you know is sitting next to you;  you can lose yourself among strangers with little or no embarrassment.

There are pure cries and impure cries. 

Impure ones end up making you feel manipulated. Among them, for me: Terms of Endearment, Titanic, and, reaching way back... My big sister, eight years old, burst into tears every time Lassie tried to come home in that 1943 movie. Judy’s tears were so wrenching and convulsive my father was forced to take her out of the Hyde Park Art, our local theater, because she was disturbing other moviegoers. As family legend has it, they tried three times to see the movie from beginning to end. Was it the war? My sister had a rep; she also cried on December 26th for orphaned Christmas trees on a vacant lot. 

Heading up the “pure cry” list for me is one of my favorite rom coms of all time, Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road. Have you ever thought a movie was written with just you in mind? I was involved in a volatile relationship in 1968 when it first came out, same one I’m still involved in. At intervals of roughly ten years, Dean and I have watched this movie, and I can credit it for keeping us under the same roof for a half century. The couple (played by Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn) seemed, when we were in our twenties, intimidatingly grown up, but now that we’re twice their age, I think of them almost as grandchildren!

There are also in-between cries, neither pure, nor impure. Casablanca, I think, falls into this category. Yes, the bad guys singing “Deutschland Uber Alles” — outsung by French expats singing "La Marseillaise"— is exploitative, to say the least; but I surrender to it with a free heart. Then at last, there’s the scene at the airport. What could be more grown-up and more true than Rick’s pronouncement, “I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world.” Whether there was an alternate ending or no, Amen to that. 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri comes to mind; was I crying for or against Mildred, the woman whose daughter was raped and killed, in a town that seemed not to be paying any attention? It’s hard to have a clean cry at a deeply cynical movie.

This past August, I saw Lawrence of Arabia once more on a giant screen – the kind of screen that movie was made to be projected onto – at the United Palace of Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan. Now that is one deep movie, and complicated. Unlike The Man Who Would Be King, Lawrence has survived into this post-colonial era, by refusing to do anything but tell a good story. It’s hardly a tear-jerker, but I did cry at various points, and, at the end, bitterly: because T.E. Lawrence becomes a sell-out, useless. 

Back to the St. George Theatre where, lost in the shadows of a half-empty auditorium, I cried briefly during Silent Movie, possibly because there was nobody in the auditorium, but me and one other person, to witness a movie in which the only spoken word is uttered by a mime (albeit with plenty of music and sound effects). I also knew Mel Brooks was taking us all back to the movies‘ inception, the silents, which the St. George probably showed just a few of, even if it had opened with a talkie (So This is College) in 1929. So in the midst of a rampant comedy, I cried, and the masks of comedy, as well as tragedy were amused. They continue to rule in the shadows of our still-standing St. George, not a movie theater anymore except for brief moments, when the current management offers up a flick on a modest-sized screen. I’m not complaining. The theater still stands, and that is not something to cry about!

Afterthoughts:
1. What drove me to write about crying at the movies is a book called, Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir, by Madelon Sprengnether published by Graywolf Press in 2002. This author is no ordinary movie crier, and the movies that set her off are specific to things that have happened in her life.  Check it out!

2. I’ve written in previous posts about movies we ran, among them Dog Day Afternoon. In this early blog post, I claim to have watched the movie in snatches, which I would now argue with myself about. Well, they were long snatches!

3. Speaking of The Wizard of Oz and Auntie Em, as seen by Dorothy in the witch’s crystal ball, after 9/11/01 I found a new way to cry about that part of the movie. When I see this scene now, I also cry because, as a New Yorker, I was trapped out of town, the week after. No cars were allowed into the city. That dark week, my equivalent to the witch’s crystal ball was the television screen I couldn’t stop watching that contained the city I was exiled from..