In 1976, there were movies that were right for a movie palace in an urban setting — and then there were the movies we wanted to show. Romantic entrepreneurs, we should have passed on The Man Who Would Be King.  John Huston’s adaptation of a story by Rudyard Kipling starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine was wrong, wrong, wrong in a neighborhood that craved Taxi Driver, Shaft and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We booked it anyway, an expensive mistake that cost us a nearly empty auditorium for a week — but gave me an afternoon.

In that year of trying to keep the St. George Theatre’s doors open, I seldom watched a whole movie. I caught glimpses of whatever was on screen, as I passed from my office to the restroom, the candy stand or the manager’s office. As I walked back and forth, I felt I had seen the movie, especially if it wasn’t very good. When it was good, I lingered for stretches by the concession stand with a small buttered popcorn.

The Man Who Would Be King was the exception. It was lush, a tale of two adventurers in search of treasure. The tones of the movie are reddish gold, they matched the theater itself, the brocade and gilded statuary, especially when the light from the film shone on all that gold leaf. The characters in Kipling’s story are eventually undone by their own greed and a hunger for power, something I could barely imagine, struggling as I was to pay our rent on the theater and our house.

Two people bought tickets for the show. Counting me, that made three of us in a 2672-seat theater. I settled into my perch in the empty balcony. I would never sit there again or feel that free again, as we slipped, one week at a time, through what was to be a disastrous year. But in my memory of that afternoon, I am completely happy. I ate my popcorn right down to the grannies at the bottom of the box. The Man Who Would Be King was the movie for that moment in my life, filled with the right blend of desperation and bravado.

Every Wednesday at the St. George Theatre, a new feature — sometimes two — arrived at the box office. The usher on matinee on duty lugged the film reels in heavy hexagonal cans, two at a time, up to the booth. There our projectionist loaded the first two onto our ancient Century projectors. “Carbon arc” projection was not exactly high tech in 1976, but they were all we could afford. The St. George was a dollar-fifty movie house (second or third-run) — no fancy xenon bulb projectors for us. The light that shone through the film as it passed the gate in the projector came from an arc similar to the ones welders use, an actual fire that burned expensive rods of carbon in a primitive fire. And the show began.

Blazing Saddles, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Taxi Driver, Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Exorcist, The Omen: the films we booked had one thing in common. They’d all been around at least a year, in most cases two. And even if we’d had the advance money to put down on a first-run feature, we’d have lost out in a bidding war to the new strip-mall theaters offering a choice of two or even three screens. There was precious little new film to be had in 1976 and ’77, and nobody could imagine filling all of our 2672 seats.

Still, every Wednesday was a new chance at success, our movie booking fantasies reinforced by the heady notion that if we could just sell out a live show once or twice we’d break even for the whole year! Just across the harbor in Manhattan, impresarios like Sid Bernstein and Ron Delsener were making a living booking rock bands in auditoriums not half so elegant as the St. George’s, with its gilded statuary and brocade house curtain. There were five of us in the “management” team, all of us breathless and in our twenties, with the kind of energy that dared the odds. The St. George was a magic cave, and we believed in magic.

Bob Endres, our former projectionist, adds, "The lamps you had when I was there were made by Ashcraft. I’m reasonably sure the projector “mech heads” (the actual projector itself) were made by Century. In the photo the big unit on the projector base is the Ashcraft lamphouse, and the unit directly in front of it is a Century “mech” or picture head. Below it is the Century sound head, although at the St. George you had an RCA sound system so the sound heads were probably RCA. If Abbott Theatre Supply in Manhattan was your equipment and booth supplier that would make sense since they sold Ashcraft and Century and RCA exclusively in this area. 

This year the League of Historic American Theatres’ (LHAT) annual conference was in New York City. That was fortunate for me, because I live in one of the city’s five boroughs, Staten Island. It’s been nearly 40 years since I lost my shirt trying to save the St. George Theatre there. I was in a category apart from the successful theater entrepreneurs listed in the program, and wanted to tell them about the book I’m about to publish, Starts Wednesday: Coming of Age in a Movie Palace, a memoir. 

The new theater partisans I met during LHAT's historic theater tour (the “ramble”) were older and wiser than I was when my friends and I signed on the dotted line to lease a 2672-seat theater in New York City, expecting to support ourselves from the enterprise! In most cases, the people I met at the conference were less aspiring entrepreneurs than volunteers who had kept their day jobs, even if they did raid the 401K to keep the local Rialto from becoming a Red Lobster. The Rialto, BTW, is these days a not-for-profit, eligible for grant money and tax abatements. As my husband (a former partner in our long-ago misadventure) is quick to point out, “We were a not-for-profit — we just didn’t know it!”

In Harlem we toured the newly refurbished Apollo Theatre and met Billy Mitchell, “Mr. Apollo,” who fell into a job there at age 15 and stayed through the comings and goings of James Brown, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and other famous talents. If he hadn’t come to 125th Street that day in 1965, on an errand to borrow money from his Aunt Essie, and ended up getting coffee for the manager of the Apollo, well then who knows?

At the second stop on the tour, the sumptuously gilded United Palace of Cultural Arts (originally the Loew’s 175th Street Theater, one of the five original New York “Wonder Theaters”), we walked in through the stage door, past a row of African drums — as important to that venue and to the communities of Washington Heights and Inwood as the United Church that calls the theater its home on Sundays.

We walked the Lincoln Center campus, with its 18-plus major arts institutions, and learned first hand what a 1.5 billion dollar restoration might feel like. On request, our tour guide, a professional singer, tested the acoustics for us in a vacant Alice Tully Hall.

The lobby of Radio City Music Hall was filled with anvil cases and equipment, a major load-in for a talent show to come. Management apologized, but it was our pleasure to watch as a giant lighting grid, in the form of an arc, flashed into being on stage, while we listened to a history of the place and learned, to our astonishment, that the six thousand and thirteen seat theater actually makes money!

The last time I was privileged to tour Radio City was in 1976. Meanwhile at home in Staten Island, we were going bankrupt trying to keep the doors of the St. George Theatre open. But the head projectionist at Radio City, at that time a friend of ours, made us forget our troubles for an afternoon, whisking us from the projection booth to the original manager (Roxy)’s private apartment, and then for a quick tour of that city-within-a-city, backstage.

Now, almost 40 years later, the current manager tells us they’re making money?  I wasn’t sitting on my hands — I burst into hysterical applause!     

Welcome! I am author Victoria Hallerman, and I look forward to sharing posts about topics related to my new memoir, Starts Wednesday: Coming of Age in a Movie Palace. Look for blog posts related to the preservation and reviving of wonderful old movie palaces and theaters, among other topics. Please check back shortly!