The Fourth of July makes me think of domes. What is a dome after all, if not an evocation of open sky? And fireworks against a sky are what the 4th is about. Fireworks are people-made stars... Grand Central in NYC makes me giddy each time I walk under its electric constellations. I remember a moment that dates back to my twenties, when, having survived a car trip up the FDR drive on New Year’s Eve Day, with a man so drunk I feared for my life, I spilled out of his Volvo and into Grand Central, and, after a brief passage emerged at last, under its comforting vaulted ceiling. Admittedly, I was drunk too, and in that moment, delighted just to be alive. The dome of the 2,672-seat movie palace I worked in a few years after that, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, sends me into transports of an entirely different order. 
 
There is, even at the height of the afternoon, no natural light in that beloved old Spanish Baroque Vaudeville  and cinema palace. Theaters, movie or otherwise, don’t often feature natural light the way other domed structures often do. Part of the wonder of Grand Central and other public spaces is the afternoon light flooding in from the sides. “...holes in the grillwork of the south windows throw spots of sun on the terminal floor, moving under commuters' quick feet in a predictable pattern, day after day, year after year,” Corey Kilgannon observed in “Darkness at Noon.” 
 
Theaters have their own light, a whole history of its as a matter of fact. Oddly and interestingly, the very first (Greek) theaters used natural light the way a modern lighting director or projectionist uses artificial, as an integral part of the show. Those first comedies and tragedies took place in the open air, at the top of the day. The sun, far from being a hindrance, was frequently used like a spotlight, with mirrors to enhance certain dramatic effects. Greek amphitheaters were “in the round,” built with the time of day in mind. A few centuries later, the Romans made a business of the whole thing, extending the possibilities for performance in settings like the Coliseum, to night, with the addition of torches, candles and lanterns. Better than a thousand years later, if you’d attended a performance at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, you’d have thought you were living in Greece. The Globe was a three-story open-air amphitheater, dependent on sunlight and good weather.
 
Not until something called Blackfriars appeared did Elizabethan theater move inside, with sixteenth-century “artificial lighting.” In addition to torches and lanterns, there were novelties — “dimmers” (on candles) and colored filters that had found their way across the Channel from Italy. In the seventeen hundreds, the kerosene lantern arrived, and lighting became stagecraft. Oil lamps and limelight (a spotlight made by heating a piece of lime with a flame of oxygen and hydrogen) followed. Then gaslight, and finally in 1881, London’s Savoy Theatre (home of Gilbert & Sullivan) installed incandescent lighting. Theaters had morphed gradually into domed windowless halls. Not only did natural light interfere with the waking dream of the play, but that great theater mystery (sometimes called a science), acoustics,seemed to fare better in rounded seamless spaces. 
 
Seated in the mezzanine of the St. George Theatre several years ago for a K.D. Lang  concert, I had plenty of time to study the recessed dome, its edges where they meet the ceiling, pinched back like a skillfully-wrought upside-down pie crust. Grottoes left and right of the stage, containing matching goddesses draped in maroon velvet, and the heavily gilded proscenium, with hardly a square foot of unadorned wall space, gave me plenty to look at; the theater is fascinating as an ancient cave, its walls adorned with gazelles and bison. Or, it’s an iced cake of gilt plaster and drapery that warms to any voice, especially the unaffected sweetness of Lang’s a cappella mezzo-soprano. That voice penetrated every niche and all the crenellations of the great dome, reminding me of one cold February night in 1976, when a friend of mine who was helping run the theater and happened to have a natural operatic soprano voice, stood center stage without benefit of a mic and belted out “Amazing Grace.” It has been nearly a half century, but it could have been yesterday; I believe the voices that have sung under the dome are caught and held there, keeping each other company for as long as the building lasts. 
 
May sunlight never enter there.   
 
Afterthoughts: 
1. How could I not mention atmospheric theaters in a post that deals with artificial light in domed spaces? The ultimate turning inside-out of a dome, is when the ceiling IS the sky! John Eberson, that genius of turning architecture inside-out, designed and built over a hundred of these wonders, beginning with the 2,800-seat Majestic in Dallas, Texas. The Paramount in Anderson, Indiana gives a video tour worth taking, and don’t miss the Avalon in Chicago, via Matt Lambros whose work documenting movie palaces in all states and conditions never fails to move, astonish and delight me. 
An earlier post on atmospherics tells more.

2. On a completely unrelated but fascinating topic, don’t miss the 22nd Annual Blobfest taking place July 9-11 at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pa. Because The Blob was originally filmed, in part, at this theater in 1958, management has seen fit in recent years to honor The Blob’s Phoenixville roots, by sponsoring a festival that re-enacts certain emblematic moments in this epic horror film. The theme for Blobfest 2021 is the “House of Harris” in honor of the producer of The Blob, Jack H. Harris. Blobfest 2021: House of Harris will feature these Harris films: The Blob (1958), Dinosaurus! (1960), Equinox (1970), and 4D Man (1959). The festival will also feature the Vincent Price horror classic, The Last Man on Earth (1964). The Blob will screen on all 3 days of the virtual presentation. The fest will be virtual again this year, which allows Blob fans from anywhere in the world to be there, buy goodies and generally have an oozing good time! 

In 1976 at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-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. By that 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.
 
“I don’t think,” film mogul William Fox had remarked only a few years before, 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.” In a world that had already seen “fads” like the telephone (radio, motorcar) catch on and explode, Fox should have known better.
 
He came around rather quickly, as a matter of fact. by the time Fox made his strange prediction, the Warner Brothers had already plunged into sound with Vitaphone, a Bell lab wonder of synchronized sound. It consisted of a turntable which took twelve or sixteen-inch discs timed (more or less) to match the lip movements of actors on the 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 get into the action himself with sound:  “Movietone,” based on a German invention, Tri-Ergon (sound on film). When his adaptation of this process was complete, Movietone became the sound track of movies, as the world eventually came to know them, with a “stripe” of audio (variously-dense lines) along one side of each film. This was better than Vitaphone, more exact, but, for a time, Vitaphone was the expensive process theater operators dug deep into their pockets to absorb the cost of, all so their patrons could hear the first spoken (movie) words, “Wait a minute — wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet!” — Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
 
Vaudeville was on the wane by then, and so were some silent film stars. Whoever couldn’t talk without sounding like a squeaky mouse, had an unacceptable accent, or just couldn’t adjust to a different style of acting, was in for early retirement. Clara Bow (the “It Girl”) was one such: when she heard there was a fire at Paramount, she quipped "I hope to Christ it was the sound stages!" A seasoned actor, she nonetheless 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 had been based entirely on action, and never quite recovered after sound came in. The very soul of a physical actor who always did his own often-perilous stunts, he couldn’t adapt. 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 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, by the way, brilliant.
 
Sound was here to stay, and 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, outnumbered for a brief time, by silent theaters – which somehow 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. 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 — assuming, that is, they’d made enough money to live there. Lillian Gish who kept working until six years before her death in 1993, making her last screen appearance in 1987, is an interesting exception. 
 
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 never actually showed one. Its backstage 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).
 
What exactly is a movie, in these post-millennial, post-pandemic days; and how long will movie-going last? When I first entered the projection booth of the St. George, its hulking carbon-arc projectors were already obsolete, though we used them. Perhaps film-going in a general sense has gone the way of carbon arc itself, or perhaps not.
 
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. He jokes that he retired from classic projection just in time.
 
Now think of the kinetoscope at the beginning of the 20th  century, film’s century, a single-viewer device. And then came nickelodeons — those primitive storefront theaters. 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. 
 
In the fifties, TV came along, right there in your living room, smaller but free. It forced 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 had already come to TV by that time. A decade later TV was in every room of every house. 
 
Then it too begins to disappear — or be absorbed. The Internet, that biggest of all fishes, finally ate everything, and here we are again, watching tiny screens. You could almost call them Kinetoscopes!
 
Afterthought:

Actually, the first “talkie” had already aired in New York (August, 1926), by the time Al Jolson spoke up in The Jazz Singer. The overall sound prize goes to Don Juan, a romantic adventure (most kisses in film history, BTW — 127 actually!) that starred 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, so Jolson nails it on a technicality.

"People buy tickets to theatres, not movies." —Marcus Loew
 
Outside the 26th Annual Academy Awards at RKO Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, Calif., 1954.

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.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. A tip of the hat to our friend, master projectionist Bob Endres, who knows the projection booth at the Pantages intimately, having traveled far and wide.

2. And another tip to Alicia Perry who commented when this post first ran (6/23/17):  
“What's even worse than a bad reno is when a single-screen theater is sliced into plexes. That happened to a couple of smaller theaters in coastal Connecticut I used to go to. The sound was wacked and in one auditorium, every middle seat ended up on the right-hand-side aisle...”
To which I say, “Amen.”

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. 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, which had 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 memory, and the Cold War was hardly over. Watergate had sent a president into exile, reminding me of the Goya etching I’d seen at the Met in Manhattan, The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters. 
 
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 or 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! What can beat a mind gone sour?
 
Afterthought: 
Here’s a little something on movies that reflect our fear of the Internet; that’s something we could never have imagined in the more brutal, hardly virtual 1970s.

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).   
 
Smoking in movie theaters was commonly allowed up into the 70s (often in a balcony or "loge" area, though sometimes throughout) and even in a fair number of theaters into the 90s. Most people didn't care about it enough to complain. Some time after the millennium, long after my stint as a movie theater operator, and after smoking had been effectively banned, I went to see Casablanca at a film festival and was suddenly consumed with a nostalgia for smoke-filled rooms!
 
e never sold cigarettes at the St. George, 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 when we first occupied the place.
 
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? [if you watch the clip on YouTube wade through the commercials; it’s a very interesting demonstration of the sexual volatility of smoking]. Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracey all smoked “Luckies” (Lucky Strikes) when they smoked on screen, openly promising 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.