There were better than twenty of them once: alabaster torchere lamps with massive wrought-iron bases that stood in the lobby of our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, built as a combined Vaudeville and movie house in 1929. By the time we arrived in 1976, there was just one lamp, its tripartite base missing a crucial leg, and its rose alabaster shade — like a wounded opulent flower, missing a chunk of scalloped lip. Clearly, the only reason that solitary lamp had survived was its imperfections. The building’s then owner had sold off the other torcheres, along with the Wurlitzer organ, which went to a pizza palace in the southwest. Missing as well were the tufted red velvet stools and chaises from both powder rooms, and a number of elegant benches that once lined the lobby. What remained was largely what couldn’t be easily carted away: the swirled carpeting, the red and gold stained-glass EXIT signs, and  four doors that spelled out FIRE HOSE in the same delicate leaded glass. The formal (city-block-sized) house curtain, with its two-foot high gold tassels that hung in the fly loft backstage was probably too big to move. 

The St. George in 1976 was like a desperate aging beauty pawning her pearls and broaches — or being forced to pawn them. But one of the blessings of being in New York’s--until recently “forgotten borough,” Staten Island, is that time moves more slowly in what was then a backwater, than it does in most of the rest of the world. Manhattan's famed palaces were virtually gone by 1976 — the real estate was just too valuable. Only a few, such as the Loews 175th Street, in Washington Heights, one of the original “Wonder Theaters,” remained — thanks to Reverend Ike — functioning solely as a  church for three decades. In Brooklyn, by 1976 the Paramount had turned into a basketball court the home court for Blackbirds basketball (Long Island University), and Loews Kings was about to become an unofficial shelter for the homeless. Friends of my own original home theater, the Albee, in Cincinnati, Ohio, were fighting a battle that year for that grand, almost three-thousand-seat house that they would lose, when a wrecker’s ball finally pierced the dome of my childhood--all for the building of a Westin Hotel. In Manchester England the remarkable Hulme Hippodrome, exquisite as a Persian palace, would serve as a bingo hall, before closing in 1988. Finally, in Detroit, the 4,038-seat Michigan Theatre, after two or three incarnations as a club and rock venue, became — ironic, given the nature of Detroit’s major industry — what else? — a parking garage. 

Remarkably, the St. George survives to this day, having lost only lamps, furniture, stained glass and that gorgeous red-and-gold formal house curtain — a victim of a suspicious fire in the late 1970’s. How did it get so lucky? The ground it stood on was neither terribly valuable, nor entirely worthless. The office building it shares space with remained occupied, and the street it stands on, Hyatt, despite the economic woes of the neighborhood, was never boarded up. Like a grand dame forced to work for minimum wage, The St. George Theatre did stints as a flea market, a dinner theater and, some say, a roller rink. Regrettably, to support one or more of these make-overs, the orchestra floor was leveled--an alteration which it will take some time and bucks to correct. That it will be corrected in time, I have no doubt, because the lady is working for better than minimum wage these days!

Theaters in other cities and towns have survived, through luck, perseverance of a person or group [such as MIFA highlighted in last week’s blog post about the Victory Theatre in Holyoke, Mass.], or benevolent building owners. To see the Detroit Theater’s dome as the roof of a parking garage is to witness a kind of death of the spirit. Better the wrecker’s ball than this! As for lamps and sofas, they can be replaced.

This and all previous and subsequent blog posts on this site are based on my experience running a movie palace, The St. George Theatre, in St. George, Staten Island, in 1976, the subject of a forthcoming book, Starts Wednesday. Have you been enjoying what you've been reading on this blog? We value your feedback and questions! 

           

 

Mushrooms are growing from the floorboards of the stage. The eagle at the apex of the the proscenium has a mold “diaper” that’s growing slowly. What’s left of the movie screen is torn into ribbons, and a solitary chair with chrome armrests faces the empty rubble-strewn seats. The victory of the Victory is that it has survived and, despite the “swimming pool” of sludge in the basement, beneath the stage, that has to be pumped out at intervals, this classic presentation house — dedicated to the Allied victory of 1918 in “The World War” — is on its way back. Kudos to the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts (MIFA), who currently own the theater and have worked patiently ever since to drum up continual interest and funding for the twenty-eight-million-dollar restoration project. And thanks to After the Final Curtain and Abandoned America for giving me and artist Robin Locke Monda the opportunity to walk through this returning Art Deco showplace during an on-site photography workshop on June 28, 2015 led by Matt Lambros, Matthew Christopher, and Rob Rea. 

There is so much elegance still left in this place, the “Grand Dame of the Paper City.” The grand (Brazilian mahogany lined) staircase is strewn these days with fallen plaster, but at the top is an oval room (an “oculus”) so acoustically perfect, that if you stand in the middle your echo comes back to you from two ends at once. Floors of hand-cut Vermont marble, Tiffany windows. The trove of memorabilia in the hallway at the back of the orchestra — signage and candy wrappers of a half-century and a stack of ancient popcorn cups — did come rather suddenly from a signage room upstairs that collapsed into the orchestra, but they make a fascinating still-life.

Ghost-towns fascinate, and this is a ghost of a theater:  an eerie orange light filtering through from the fly loft is not some exotic scrim left over from Vaudeville after all, but a plastic tarp protecting the broken skylight backstage — which explains the damp, and those mushrooms. 

Still, it is easy to imagine a heyday.

The Victory’s biography is typical for a small-town theater of the twenties. Built by the Goldstein Brothers Amusement Company, a Nickelodeon storefront outfit making a bid for big time entertainment, it opened its doors in 1920, complete with a house “Victory” orchestra to accompany film and live (Vaudeville) performances. With 1680 velvet seats — orchestra and balcony — ringing a modest stage, it’s an intimate house. Standing near the orchestra pit, it was easy to imagine voices, perhaps a show tune. When the place reopens, I hope it’s to the strains of “April Showers” or “Crazy Blues” — or some other tune that came out in 1920. After a career of continuous double features, doors closed for good in 1979, a year when so many other great theaters were either demolished or abandoned or — if they were fortunate — transformed into churches.

If only the Victory had become a church, it would have been spared the rot and the vandalism. For me, once a proprietor of an imperiled movie palace (the St. George Theatre in Staten Island) to see the Victory’s condition and to tiptoe carefully over weakened stage boards above a flooded basement is to shiver at what can happen to these places.

The St. George, as it turned out, had its savior, a woman, Rosemary Cappozalo, whose life was dedicated to teaching dance locally in Staten Island, and who mortgaged her house to buy the St. George and make it a working house again. In Holyoke, Rosemary’s counterpart is one Helen Casey. Helen had seen Casablanca at the Victory first run, when she was just fourteen. She remembered the crowds on what is now a desolate street corner, just outside. Commencing in the early 1980‘s, her efforts to save the theater nearly dwindled, then a certain Donald Sanders took up the strain and the fledgling arts nonprofit, MIFA, dedicated to theater, dance and music, finally bought the Victory in 2008 for $1,500 from the town council.

And so it goes, from city to city all across America. If you don’t try to rebuild the town core, if abandon-and-tear-down is the policy, what will remain but franchises and boarded-up storefronts?

“There’s still a lot of people here who went to see the movies...and have a real tactile...” and personal involvement, observed Kathleen Andersen, former director of Holyoke’s Planning Department.  She believes in “creating a downtown people want to visit.”

Beyond that notion, every good show house is a kind of sanctuary, a place where people gather in the dark to share being moved — or scared — or transported — or reduced to giggles. It’s a way to drop out of time. We need these places.

At the Barrow Street Theater, I recently saw The Flick, a Pulitzer-prizewinning play set in a plain-vanilla single-screen movie theater somewhere in Massachusetts. Digital projection is imminent, and poor business makes it probable that the theater won’t last very much longer. The characters work in the theater — they are what the play is all about. The Flick is brilliant, rightly praised by most critics — but for certain details that only someone who has been behind closed doors at a traditional movie theater might notice. Tempted though I am to extrapolate, this blog post will not be not about the play and its minor, if to me, compelling flaws. With its rows of bolted-down theater seats, projection ports and popcorn-strewn aisles, the set made me want to revisit a small-town movie theater that still exists, to explore how it operates, and to investigate how the digital revolution in film projection has affected a small independently-owned house. And so, for my first summer On-the-Road feature, I give you the Niantic Cinemas! — located on Main Street in Niantic, a tiny town in coastal Connecticut.

Suffice it to say I’m a fan of Niantic Cinemas, a local independent theater in coastal Connecticut where I saw so many summer movies. I clearly recall seeing one of the Ghostbusters, not to mention Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing at the Niantic. It was my summer treat in the years when I had a knotty pine cabin nearby, going out afterwards for lobster rolls down the street at Dad’s Restaurant.

With a 2010-Census count of 3,114, Niantic is a small town. The Cinema, which sports a giant mural of Charlie Chaplin above the marquee, is open all year round, but business drops off when the summer crowd — which used to include me — goes home.

Joe Couillard, the current manager, answered the phone, pleased — I could tell — that I wanted to interview him. We were only a sentence in, when he had to interrupt, 

“I’m sorry--will you hang on a second?”

In the background I could just make out a woman’s voice,

“Two adults, one child...”

The sound of change hitting a counter, tickets printing. With a staff of eight, he fills in where necessary.

Joe has been at the Niantic since the nineteen seventies, before the theater was “plexed.” His grandfather knew George Mitchell whose family owned the theater and the supermarket just down the street. And so it was that Joe came to get his projectionist’s license and occupy that most exciting of world’s, the booth.

“I’m a huge movie fan still,” he said, “but converting to digital ruined the magic.”  Gone are the visiting scout troops, come to the booth to watch as two huge carbon arc projectors grind away, and marvel at the whole mechanical process of light and sprockets and darkness. Some sort of giant wheel was used in those days to raise and lower the house lights — which apparently exciting visiting scouts as well.

According to Joe, the Niantic had been a five-hundred seat house — with an auditorium — from its inception in 1950 until the late seventies, when the first plexing carved it into three theaters (five eventually, after a further renovation).

“I remember seeing John Huston’s The Dead in the upstairs theater, the one that was the original theater’s balcony,” I reflected. How is it, that when you see a really life-altering movie, you remember just where you saw it?

“Yes!  You’re right — we did show that movie in the upstairs theater!” Joe replied, pleased to recall being in the booth. The old carbon arc projectors were long gone by then: it was xenon bulbs,and the platter system. That system is gone now too, and even the projectionist is in the techno-junkyard, “You can program all five theaters from one server,” Joe notes a little sadly. 

“We’ve got all new curtains, a new carpet, and we’re thinking about custom seats... [he means seats that recline] but they’re expensive.” Speaking of covering expenses, Joe hates having to run ads before the movie, but these days, it’s what you do to keep the doors open.

Privately I think this is where the magic evaporates:  that movie theaters everywhere have become a little like television, just when TV takes a backseat to YouTube. What’s next?  Will our brains be hard-wired, will a blink summon whatever it is we want to watch?

For now at least, the good news is, that, in a time of disappearing screens, the local privately-owned movie house in Niantic, Ct. seems to be doing just fine.  If you’re driving up I-95 any time soon on your way to Mystic, Providence or points north, why not drop out of time at Exit 74 and make a run into town? Just go east on what will eventually become Pennsylvania Avenue, which dead-ends at Long Island Sound. You’ll see the water, just across the railroad tracks. Turn right on Ct. Route 156, and two blocks later, there’s the cinema, Charlie Chaplin smiling over everything. You can cruise by and check the showtimes without even getting out of the car. I recommend a quick lobster roll down at Dad’s. And whatever movie you choose to see, tell them at the Niantic Cinemas that Starts Wednesday sent you!

Fourth of July, 1976, a Sunday. Like a rich kid’s bathtub, New York Harbor was filled to the brim with boats of all kinds:  tall ships, cabin cruisers, Coast Guard cutters, war ships from several nations, at least one aircraft carrier and a guided missile cruiser. Two hundred years had passed since thirteen of Britain’s American colonies had declared their independence: it was the Bicentennial. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were stateside. President Ford sailed down the Hudson River for The International Naval Review, the air thick with copters.

Did it matter what was showing at our movie palace, just a block and half from the harbor? The streets outside the St. George Theatre were flooded with people, but they were all headed downhill towards the water. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea happened to be the movie we’d just rented from Avco Films, but it would be an expensive waste to burn the carbons and light our projectors. Despite the fact that we had to pay the projectionist for a shift, there was no use showing anything till nightfall.

Entrepreneurs are a desperate species:  under the misguided notion that people on their way to the nation’s party might want some popcorn or a hotdog, we got out the ladder and switched the aluminum letters on the marquee to read “Happy Birthday, America! Concession Stand Open.”  For our trouble we sold about eight dollars worth of food the whole afternoon.

Well why not join the party? The roof of the St. George Theater has an unobstructed view of the harbor. How Dean and I got there is a long scary story I’m saving for the release of the full book, Starts Wednesday: Coming of Age in a Movie Palace — too complicated for the space I have here. Suffice it to say we stayed about an hour on the roof, enjoying the great sweep of the harbor, so thick with vessels you could barely see the water.

Night was coming and we’d decided to burn a few carbons for the evening, in the hopes that somebody, anybody, would buy tickets to watch The Sailor Who Fell From Grace.... A skeleton staff, including other loyal members of management were keeping watch downstairs. As we descended, our audience — a handful of drunken partiers forgetful of fireworks — staggered in to snooze in the dark.

No one had thought to change the marquee letters, and a woman walked up to the box office to inquire “Who’s in Concession Stand Open?”  I helped myself to a Sabrett’s hot dog with dijon mustard on an Italian roll, free dinner.