“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 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, 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.

As for 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, swallows it whole, and here we are again, watching tiny screens — it’s an endless loop of technology.
​
Afterthought:
During my theater management year, we ran Silent Movie, a film by Mel Brooks in which nobody actually speaks, except, once, a mime...It may have been the only silent our twenties movie palace ever presented...

Richard Schickel, the late movie critic, viewed the experience of moviegoing as carefully as he did movies themselves. He’d begun at age five, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and went on to see — or so he boasted — 22,590 movies. I have no clue how many movies I’ve seen in my long lifetime. I know that, in the year I ran a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, I saw 71 features.
 
Well, not exactly "saw", because, as a theater operator and would–be entrepreneur, I didn’t spend all that much time sitting down in the dark, staring at the screen. I took them in, sometimes standing transfixed behind the mahogany–framed glass in the lobby, other times glimpsing a giant spider or naked torso, on the way to my office or the concession stand. Other people were inside, in the dark, forgetting the meager balance in their checking account or a toothache or a lost love, what Schickel calls “...consolations... for some temporary trouble.”
 
Before I signed on to run a dream palace, I’d had twenty-six years of sitting in the dark as a patron, starting aged two with Tea for Two, which my sister dragged me to at the Twentieth Century in Cincinnati, my natal digs. 
 
Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I galloped through an eclectic mix:  Three Coins in a Fountain, Ben Hur, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, Alfie, Two for the Road, Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, to name a few features I remember. Never saw Psycho. My mother believed sex in movies was okay for a young teen to watch, but not violence (oh, how right she was).
 
Accordingly, she let me attend steamy Tom Jones when it came out in 1963 (Albert Finney), and, that same year, Cleopatra, complete with Taylor and Burton, hardly able take their hands off each other. I came of age at Cincinnati’s downtown palaces, the Albee, the International 70, in the company of equally horny girlfriends, some of whom didn’t have their mothers’ permission. There was freedom in the dark.
 
It seems plausible that I saw at least seven hundred movies in early–to–mid childhood, the 1950’s, judging from titles that spring from lists I’ve read. There were 199 American films released in 1955, and, a child of seven, I saw at least half of those. Once the curtain had risen, and you’d settled in with Good n’ Plenties and the all–important popcorn, your afternoon was covered. You could see two features or just stay and watch the whole thing over again, including — in the early days — Movietone News, the “wascally wabbit” (Bugs Bunny), Coming Attractions and Selected Short Subjects.
 
My (and everyone’s) theater attendance went down in the sixties, or did it just become more selective? Only 130 American films were released in1963, way down from the yearly two-hundred-plus release lists of the mid-fifties. By 1963, I’d become the ad hoc TV Guide in my parents’ household, the person who knew every second of prime time, even As the World Turns and Search for Tomorrow – the soaps – most weekday afternoons.. TV ruled. Theater operators had to compete with the likes of Ben Casey, Mr. Ed, aka “the talking horse,” and The Lucy Show; but they also lost out to their own product in different settings.
 
In 1961 TWA began showing in-flight movies in first-class, via a Bell and Howell projector aimed at a tiny screen (By Love Possessed, Lana Turner). I didn’t know anybody who flew first class, but in September of that same year, Saturday Night at the Movies premiered on NBC, with How to Marry a Millionaire (Monroe, Grable and Bacall), and the curtain that separated movies and TV was torn forever.
 
By the time 1976 came around, a movie palace like ours had to compete not just with the “vast wasteland” of television but with consumers’ willingness to wait for movies to come to TV. The Fox Plaza Twin on Hylan Blvd. (eventually to morph into the UA 15 on Forest Ave.) didn’t have to fill 2,672 seats and could offer a choice of screenings. 
 
Before the pandemic, the last movie I saw at a single-screen theater, The Lion — at New York’s Paris — reminded me of certain formalities long gone — what, for instance, it was like to watch a curtain rise on a movie. The theater’s interior isn’t movie palace level; it has stadium seating and was done in subdued grey velvet, compared by one patron to “...the fancy cinema on an old ocean liner.”
 
If movie theater attendance nationwide is to survive at all, in what we all hope will be the post-pandemic era, it will have to offer more than a seat facing a screen, even if that seat is capable of reclining, while offering serious food and drink. Meanwhile, you can still go to L.A. for a classic movie-going experience, or, in lieu of The Paris, you can go to Paris itself, where
mom-and-pop cinemas seem to be surviving on air.
 
When the last movie house goes dark, we’ll have lost something both public and achingly private. As Richard Schickel reminds us about going out to the movies, “We go to see them, much of the time, in search of something else — the comforting darkness of the theater, the play of light and shadow on the screen, the consolations they offer for some temporary trouble,” he wrote. “A lot of the time we don’t give a hoot what’s playing. We are at a public event for private reasons, [my emphasis] which we don’t always recognize until later, if at all. It is the occasion, the atmosphere, that we crave.”

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. 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. It was rescued at last by a local dance teacher, who mortgaged her house to save it — a tip of the hat to Mrs. Rosemary. 
But theaters that didn’t survive are often more compelling to write about than ones that did; so 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 organ, 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 in 2018, aged 92. But his basement “Bijou” is still intact, the Michigan organ in the process of being restored by Fred’s son.  
That Wurlitzer has had, so far, 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); it being the theater’s day of birth, this obscure flick 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 show house 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.
            
Afterthought 1: 
Here’s an interesting bit from Huff Post, a long time ago. At the time it seemed as though the parking garage might have yet one more afterlife...

Afterthought 2: 
A great YouTube video of the Detroit Fox theater organ still apparently in use.

When was the last time you cried in the dark at a movie theater?  Did you ever? If you did, 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 too were soldiers of fortune, 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. Of course this isn’t true: think of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).
 
I wish we could have shown my favorite 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 at the Gramercy, 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 for crying; 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 dating the man who would become my husband (and, for a brief time, my partner in running a movie palace) in 1968 when that movie first came out. At intervals of roughly ten years, Dean and I have watched Audrey Hepburn’s and Albert Finney’s characters duke it out, and I can credit these visitations for keeping us under the same roof for more than half a century. The couple  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. 
 
There are more recent good-cry movies. 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.
 
Returning to movies of the past, I revisited, several years ago, Lawrence of Arabia 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 Mel Brooks’ 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 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 I discovered, 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. 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, though I’m a New Yorker, I happened to be trapped out of town. 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.