​According to the New York Times, large chunks of the U.S. are currently under something called a “heat dome,” a curved lid of high pressure that traps hot air underneath it, causing corn to sweat, dogs to pant more heavily and people to seek dark interior spaces — for example, movie theaters. I wish that right this minute I were in a movie palace under that other cooler kind of dome, preferably with a gorgeous central chandelier, suggestive as they are or were of a visit from a saucerful of extraterrestrials. I can’t help longing for those fake icicles they used to put on movie palace marquees or the refuge they promised from summer heat, all through my childhood.

At the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I helped manage for one magical overwhelming year, 1976, I spent a good deal of off-time sitting in a mostly empty auditorium, under its consolingly magnificent dome. If the Czars of Russia had their winter palace, well we had our summer one. Czar Nicholas had fireplaces, but we had a giant central air conditioner, reminiscent of the 1930’s. As I recall, it was no easy feat getting the thing — almost the size of a city block — up and running: it shuddered and shook, reminding some of us of Frankenstein, when the monster awakes. 

Summer has traditionally been “block-buster” time in the movie business. Epics or big-themed movies with lots of action seem to go well in the dog days. Why is this? The original experience of movie watching in theaters was a first, primitive kind of virtual reality, the ultimate escape: in hot summer the more overwhelming, the better. These days blockbusters are largely special effects driven — think Batman vs. Superman — but in the summer of 1976, titles as various as Futureworld, The Omen, and Silent Movie kept people entertained in the cool dark under one kind of dome or another. With the exception of The Omen, whose reels we somehow got our hands on, other 1976 summer titles went to the first-run houses who could afford to bid for them. Our fare for June, July and August consisted of small bore stuff like Godzilla vs. Megalon, or used titles that had been some other summer’s blockbusters, like Jaws (1974) or even the slightly-antique Deliverance (1972). The Exorcist had never been a summer movie, having enjoyed it’s original release date in December of 1973, but I will always think of it as a summer movie.

This week forty years ago Exorcist became our private blockbuster, the only flick we ever showed that made a clear profit and filled our Spanish Baroque cave practically to the ceiling with people happy to be terrified, in the cool dark, under a soaring dome.

Stay cool this week; air conditioning is too ubiquitous these days to seem transforming, but there are still theaters, and some of them have domes.

Once upon a time, or shall we say “once upon a year” — 1976 — I found myself engaged in the day-to-day operation of a 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, a block and a half from New York Harbor, in Staten Island. In those analogue days, before blog posts, podcasts, Fandango, Twitter, the Net itself, there were hundreds of theaters in the City of New York, but only a few ways to find out what was showing--and when--in any of them. It will surprise more than a few people to learn that newspapers, assisted by the occasional magazine, were the whole informational enchilada for moviegoers, unless you happened to have handy the number for a theater’s box office.

Our local paper was The Staten Island Advance, whose movie page was vital if we wanted anybody at all to show up, buy popcorn and hunker down in our vast cavern of an auditorium. But our relationship with the Advance (commonly referred to on these shores as the “ADD-vance”), was tenuous, at best. The previous operator of the theater had left in the dead of night, owing the paper several hundred dollars; so we often found that our carefully–worded ads, paid for and submitted in plenty of time, appeared on some other page of the paper, far from the listings of other theaters, or were dropped altogether.

To make matters worse, in that pre-branding age, we knew nothing about the importance of visual  consistency, so varied our advertising header from a 1930‘s-style script St. George Theatre to DECO block lettering, and back again. In fact, I think there might have been four or five header variations I tried on from week to week, like cheap party dresses. Each day’s movie times appeared within the ad, along with an offering of free popcorn for the observant patron who clipped the ad and handed it under the bars of the box office window, or, alternatively, presented a torn ticket stub at Chubby’s restaurant on Central Avenue (Casa Barone) for the dinner movie special:  $4.79 for a mediocre hamburger following a third-run movie. Hardly anyone took advantage of these amazing opportunities, but we ran the offerings for several months anyhow, until it occurred to us that we were losing money paying for the extra column inch required to offer the bonanzas. 

In addition to the Advance, we were entitled to list what we were showing, for free, in The New York Times “Movie Clock.” In this way, “the gray lady” acknowledged, begrudgingly, that Staten Island was indeed a borough of New York City — implicitly well behind New Jersey. It was a free service, but  the text had to be submitted ten days before publication in the Weekend section. Desperate as we were, we seldom knew what we’d be showing until a few days before the film canisters arrived, so our times were hardly ever posted in the Times.

Post-millennium speed-of-light technology has made this tale an advertising anachronism. On May 15, 2015, The New York Times, imperiled as all newspapers are, announced the cessation of “Movie Clock.”  But the clock itself, with its 1976 full-page and hundreds of listings, had already undergone at least one metamorphosis. In 1914, something called “Notes Written on the Screen” had preceded it, listing just four NYC theaters: the Casino, the Knickerbocker, the Strand and the Vitagraph.

​The  whole of the movie palace era was contained in those years, from 1914 to 1976.  Palaces rose, fell to various wrecker’s balls, were transformed into warehouses and churches. A few were refurbished or preserved, surviving, finally, their obsolescence. Now “Movie Clock” itself is gone, and the Times, like some impossibly ornate palace of newsprint, lingers on into its own twilight.

The movie palace was, arguably, invented in America. Where else would “palace” find itself appended to the synonym for (last century’s original technological obsession), the “moving picture?” (Possible answer, if I wanted to argue with myself: “in England, where they’re called “Picture Palaces”) Movie palaces were ubiquitous by the time I came along, which explains why, in 1976, a hard-nosed crew of us enthusiasts fought so hard to keep the doors of The St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque confection in Staten Island, open for business. It was our birthright, we assumed, to watch movies in elegance on a giant screen.  

There are no real palaces in these United States, with a few exceptions — Vizcaya in Miami? Hearst Castle in California? The former home of the Archdiocese of New York, which now happens to be a hotel?[ The President lives in a house whose only notable attribute is its whiteness. Palaces--Buckingham, Windsor, the Doge’s domicile — are for princes.

Raised in the 1950’s, I thought of our beloved Cincinnati movie palaces — the Grand, the RKO Albee, and, yes, the Palace (later the International 70), with their extravagant smoking and powder rooms, hall of mirrors (reminiscent of Versailles) and soaring domes, as — echoing the Communist rhetoric of our day-- “people’s palaces.”  But in the land of free enterprise, they’d been built to lure the upper crust.

What was the first ever movie palace? Some say the Regent Theater (designed by the estimable Thomas Lamb,) which opened in NYC’s Harlem in 1913, followed almost immediately (1914) by Lamb’s million dollar Strand Theatre on Broadway — back when a million was a million. By 1929 there were already--springing up like so many elegant Chanterelles — roughly 21,000 movie palaces coast to coast. Lamb and his colleagues could hardly keep up.

When the San Francisco Fox opened in June of 1929, newspaper and magazine advertisements proclaimed: "No palace of Prince or Princess, no mansion of millionaire could offer the same pleasure, delight, and relaxation to those who seek surcease from the work-a-day world...You are the monarch while the play is on!"

The whole thing had really started as an attempt to make upscale opera crowds investigate movies, an experience that, prior to 1913, consisted of sitting in “flea pits,” on wooden benches, while ushers waved lighted sticks of citronella (“punk”) to keep the insect population at bay. But as a business-school grad once told me, it’s not the “classes” but the “masses” you want to serve if you’re an entrepreneur, and serve the masses, the moguls and impresarios did, with enthusiasm. 

So, thanks to all this enterprise and the average person’s desire for a little glamor, we still have the palatial (Grauman’s) Egyptian, and Chinese theaters, New York’s United Palace (one of the original “wonder theaters”), and who could ignore five  “Palaces” still at this point listed as standing and operational: The Palace Theatre (Albany, N.Y.), The Palace Theatre (Marion, O.), The Palace Theatre (Cleveland, O.), The Palace Theatre (Loraine, O.) and The Palace Theatre (Louiseville, Ky.)? No doubt there are other unabashed palaces, so named, still open for business;  if there’s one I’ve ignored, please let me know!

“Hey, I don’t need no marquee!” the landlord slid a bill over the marble sill of the box office.

“Huh?”  Dean exclaimed, examining the invoice, labeled "Marquee Tax," “Waddaya mean you don’t need a marquee? It's attached to your building!”

“Yeah, kid, my building don’t need that marquee, but your theater does!” The man, owner of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace we had foolishly rented, clearly had no intention of paying for the prominent (leaking) structure that overhung thirty feet of NYC sidewalk.

This was a minor dispute, one of many, in a relationship that would not end well. The City of New York, we were to learn, charges fees for the “use” of its sidewalks, and some of them are specialized. Restaurants pay a tax for setting out tables and chairs. Theaters pay for “marquee use.” The sum of this particular bill was $550, a lot of money in 1976, but the marquee in question was indeed vital to “our” theater, so we paid it and waded a little more deeply into the muddy river of debt.

I owe the prompt for this blog post to Clifford Browder, a fellow writer and citizen of NYC, and a blogger of some note, who called my attention to Michael Pollak’s “F.Y.I.” column in the Sunday, July 3 New York Times (Metropolitan page).

The first questioner in F.Y.I. observes, “Old movie houses don’t die; they’re repurposed as drugstores, clinics, even houses of worship. Yet the marquees remain, although these canopies no longer serve their original purpose...”

Right you are, questioner, on both points. Old movie houses have a habit of sticking around and are repurposed in myriad ways, as illustrated in a series of blogs I wrote last winter on what became of various old theaters in Staten Island where I live (warehouse, church, lumberyard etc.).  In an even earlier blog post, I examined the metamorphosis of famous theaters, such as the Brooklyn Paramount — currently a basketball court — and Detroit’s Michigan Theatre, which is these days, sadly, a parking garage. The theater I helped to manage in 1976, the St. George, still stands and is actually a working theater, thanks to a local family which has more or less dedicated lives, fortunes, and sacred honors to the cause. But before it was reborn as a live house, the St. George enjoyed various careers as a dinner theater and a flea market, all the time bearing up its old, still leaking marquee.

In our brief tenancy, the marquee, lit from within and sporting typical letter tracks, advertised movies we were showing, Smile, Jaws, Taxi Driver, and such. We struggled each week to come up with the right combo of fragile aluminum letters, many of them broken over the years and always in short supply. After we left the marquee was a dark hanging shape, its neon script “St. George Theatre” broken in several places. A mid-1990’s owner, attempting to refurbish the place for concerts and not knowing what to do about the marquee, took the disastrous step of plastering the whole thing in stucco, with a puny neon "St. George" lit in a little box at the front. 

As Michael Pollak points out in his column, pharmacies, community centers, churches, whoever else takes over an old theater, usually keeps the marquee up and running. He quotes Scott Bringuet, the project coordinator for Ace Sign Company of Springfield, Illinois on the subject of marquees as retro and nostalgia inducing. Ironically, the St. George, is actually in business as a theater, its marquee hardly evocative of its former glory.  

And what’s the use of a marquee you can’t put announcements on? To date, the St. George Theatre's marquee is still plaster-covered, resembling a badly-iced cake. But wait, there’s more (as Ron Popeil of television advertising fame used to say). The current owners, I understand, have for several years planned to replace it. However, a new marquee apparently has to meet with the approval of a city famous for its molasses-in-January slowness.

This blog awaits the day when the current management can advertise Sophia Loren, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, or whoever else happens to be coming soon — to that wonderfully intimate stage in a six-story fantasy palace with perfect acoustics. Until then, as I walk under the badly-frosted overhang, I think about the check I wrote for five hundred and fifty bucks to the City of New York. It was probably part of the usurious bundle of property taxes current owners of cinemas still have to pay in a city that is fast losing movie screens. 

I hate to give any credit to a cheesy landlord, but the city put him up to it.