When I was young in summer, there was nothing to do. Well, not nothing. You could run down the block for a quick game of kickball (unless it was too hot and there was nobody to play with). Alternatively, you could scrounge forty-five cents from the depleted ceramic pig on your dresser and walk ten hot blocks to one of the big theaters on Oakley Square, the Ambassador or the Twentieth Century. They were palaces, but so far away. But the best was to get on the bus with your glamorous teenaged sister, if she’d let you come along, bound for the Mt. Lookout Theatre (now known as the Redmoor Event Center) where she worked box office or, alternately, concession stand. This was the sweetest option, because, as kid sister, you got in for free with a free popcorn to boot. You could watch Earth Versus the Flying Saucers all day if you wanted to; the shadows of the saucers over the Capitol Building never got old. Another weekend, it might be Forbidden Planet or even Moby Dick — that great moment where Ahab’s corpse (Gregory Peck or his stunt double) is tied to the whale and seems to be waving. It’s no surprise that, by the time I was 25, and living in Staten Island, a borough of New York City, I’d fallen in love with a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, enough to sign a lease on the place.

All summer that year, kids shuffled into our cool marble lobby, some of them barely able to see over the lip of the box office sill, and shoved 90 cents under the bars in exchange for a ticket. 90 cents was twice what I’d paid in 1956, but then the price of eggs had jumped from 45 cents to around 85 cents by that time.

The obedient Midwestern middle-class child and teenager I had been would never have tried to pull a fast one in the lobby of any local theater, but the kids of St. George were street-smart New Yorkers, many of them from struggling families. Probably didn’t have allowances or piggy banks, come to think of it — or sisters who worked in a theater. It was hot, so they came. They wanted to see The Omen or Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Exorcist — or they just wanted to get lost in the dark.

The line between CHILD and ADULT had been firmly established at 12, but rules are made to be tested and broken if possible.

Slouching towards the box office window, a tallish thirteen-year-old shoves a dollar bill under the bars, muttering sotto voce, “one child...”

“Quick!”  Brenda intones, her hoop earrings flashing, “What year were you born?”

“...uh, uh, 1963?” the hustler stammers.

“One adult then,” Brenda concludes, pausing for the interviewee to produce two extra quarters and shove them over the sill, before she hits the button to eject a single red (adult) ticket.

Sometimes a customer would simply shrug and slide off towards the street, but most times he (it was hardly ever a she) actually had the change. No popcorn then, unless he could find a friend inside to glom off of.

There were other subterfuges. One clever guy actually walked backwards into the theater when patrons from the previous showing were exiting, but we nailed him. In a previous blog post, an old theater colleague recalls some kids who performed in the lobby hoping for a free pass. And then there were the kids who tried the exit doors upstairs, which, by law, had to be left unlocked. They had no handles on the outside, but if you were clever.... Let’s not forget the gang approach: five or six boys pooled their cash to buy one 90-cent ticket. The young ticket purchaser would then sneak up to the balcony and open the exit doors, letting in the co-conspirators. It almost never worked: the light from outside or the noisy door gave them away.

It’s a crime to sneak into a movie theater. Technically, the kid described in the first example, who lied about his age, was committing larceny (theft of services), at least in certain states. And the exit-door pryers can be charged as burglars. 

The price of a movie ticket has outpaced inflation, so, these days, even grown-ups are trying to slide in sideways. One couple in Indiana flirted with jail time, double dipping at a multiplex. If you try this, don’t wear white. Meanwhile, a clip on YouTube demonstrates how two moviegoers can pass as one. It got a couple of million hits. It’s a prank I find it hard to watch, as a former desperado exhibitor.

The kids in our lobby were just plain poor; we would never have considered calling the cops or pressing charges. We needed all the customers we could get, honest or otherwise. Besides, at least a tenth of them knew Leroy, our youngest usher, who, I suspected, helped more than a few pass for free. “Yo Leroy, lemme slide” — I’d hear. Never caught him, but one summer Saturday, we opened the door at 11:45 for the noon double feature. I found another manager counting a group of people gathered around the concession stand. “Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen...” 

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Great concession,” he observed, “but we’ve only sold eight tickets! “
            

Yesterday on the front porch over a pitcher of iced mint tea, a friend confided to me that she can’t be without at least the possibility of air conditioning in summer. Since you know this is a blog entirely dedicated to movie theaters as they were in the 20th Century, you already suspect that I’m thinking about how deliciously cool air conditioned theaters always have been (think those blue and white REFRIGERATED signs hanging from theater marquees, and those fake icicles!). How important to American culture air conditioned theaters once were, in an era when hardly anyone had more than a fan at home. In fact, this blog wouldn’t exist at all if I hadn’t arrived in New York City in 1969 with a fan that broke down after the first day. So we went looking for movie theaters to get cool in, and found The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace, and fell in love with every gilded niche & cranny of the place. At that time the St. George was still a first-run house, the flagship of the Fabian chain, but seven years later, I’d find myself involved in running that same theater as a mixed-use house, the subject of a book about our adventures at said palace, which is, I promise you, “Coming Soon,” to borrow a little poster-case terminology.

But back to the front porch, where my friend proceeded to tell me why she can’t get very far away from air conditioning.  “I have a tendency to heat prostration,”  she told me.  “My mother had it too. It can cause me to pass out if I’m not careful.” (I checked it out: it’s called Hyperthermia, which is sometimes accompanied by fainting — Heat Syncope — and it can be a killer). But why am I writing about this in a column dedicated to movie theaters?

It could have been 1936, one of the hottest summers on record in the New York region. That would make sense, because my friend was born in 1942, and her mother, in this story, is an unmarried young woman. She’d been with some friends for a weekend, sailing on Long Island Sound, and after helping them haul their heavy wooden  boat out of the water, she got into her broiling car to drive home. Most houses had no AC in those days, and, it goes without saying that almost no cars, except limos,  had it either (Packard introduced it in some models in 1939, but only the rich could afford that kind of thing). Our heroine was sweating so hard she thought she’d melt, and things didn’t improve as she drove toward home. The last thing she remembered was feeling woozy.

She woke up in the dark: John Wayne on screen. But she hated cowboy movies! Where was she, how long had she been here?  It was cool and delicious in what turned out to be the Bronxville Playhouse, a 1116-seat theater in a tiny town close to the Westchester border. How had she gotten there?  bought a ticket?  More importantly, how had she managed to drive and park the car? It’s fourteen miles from Rye Town Beach (possibly the site of that afternoon’s sailing adventure) to the Bronxville Playhouse. These days it would take 24 minutes on the Hutchinson River Parkway to get from that beach to the heart of Bronxville; but the Hutch was incomplete until 1941, so it’s likely she took local roads. A good thing too: parkway speeds would have further tested her guardian angel.

Of all the possibilities for chilling out, her unconscious had chosen the nearest movie theater!  

We have so many ways to get — and stay — cool post-millennium. It’s hard to imagine what it felt like to be an ordinary citizen before AC became omni-present. The Rivoli in New York City was “refrigerated” in 1925. Willis Carrier, whose system had just been installed there, described the first day:

Long before the doors opened, people lined up at the box office—curious about 'cool comfort' as offered by the managers. It was like a World Series crowd waiting for bleacher seats. They were not only curious, but skeptical—all of the women and some of the men had fans—a standard accessory of that day.

The Rivoli, which, BTW, made $100,000 more that summer than the previous — had not been the first theater to experience a profound climate change. In Los Angeles, Sid Grauman's Metropolitan boasted in 1922 that, inside, it was “Cool as a mountaintop — the ice system does it...it’s always fair weather inside.”

These were giant theaters, but by the mid-thirties even the lowly Bronxville (originally part of the Metropolitan Playhouses chain) could boast AC. It’s the Bowtie Bronxville Cinemas these days, still on Kraft Avenue across from the train station — a three-screen plex, stripped down by several renovations and changes in management — but still in the biz.

I wonder which of Wayne’s cowboy flix she woke up to?  Could have been King of the Pecos, just out in 1936. In a previous blog post, my husband, who grew up in the fifties, recalls his boyhood fixation on John Wayne. It’s part of a dream, oddly fitting, because he was dreaming that he was in a theater, while my friend’s mother, so long ago, was dreaming in a theater!

​I’ll close by quoting Dean: ​

Every once in a while I find myself walking down a badly-lit street in New York City, some deserted block that’s a throwback to the city I remember from the seventies, when I arrived to take my first walk on the wild side. It was a watch-your-back sort of place then, but the city had lots of dramas, small and large. if you weren’t about to be mugged (most of my friends had been at one time or another), you might find yourself turning the corner and bumping into Al Pacino or Jodie Foster on the set of some tough urban movie. The city may have been going broke, but the Mayor’s Office of Film and Television — these days known as Media and Entertainment — was doing really well. Meanwhile, in my neighborhood, on the gritty edge of Staten Island a few blocks uphill from the ferries, I was — along with a group of like-minded entrepreneurs — going broke, running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre.

It was 1976. A “buck fifty” house (second-run or beyond), we showed about a third of the tough urban NYC movies that had been filmed in the early seventies, enough street action cinema to comprise an entire post-millennium film festival nowadays. (If you happen to be in the city, check out what’s showing at Film Forum until the end of July). Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Cops and Robbers, Law and Disorder; we didn’t show Scorcese’s Mean Streets, wish we had (a New York movie mostly shot in L.A.). We didn’t show Shaft or Superfly, but we did show J.D.’s Revenge and the admittedly Chicago-based Cooley High, both honorable members of the Blaxsploitation subgenre of urban action cinema.

Nostalgia has its benefits — I’m a fan of the genuine article. But if you wait long enough, the wrong kind of nostalgia, like Wisteria out of control in a garden, will spring up around almost any subject. Case in point, NYC in the 1970s: remember the abandoned cars? walking on the Upper West Side after dark (you could sleep on the street there now)? the blind woman on the subway with acid scars on her face, playing the accordion? “Alphabet City,” (the Lower East Side) its homeless sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder?

Ditching the cheap thrill of congratulating myself that I was never mugged, I do remember all these things. I also recall what it felt like to dive into the dark of the almost-empty movie palace I was keeping the books for, and watch Travis Biddle, De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver, cruise what I recognized as my adopted city, just across the harbor. I am nostalgic for the theater, as it was then. But I know that all I felt at the time, other than a sense of wonder at a great movie, was a  feeling of relief, that I wasn’t actually walking those streets at that particular moment. There was also a sense of recognition, and sadness. Just outside our well-lit marble lobby framed in red and gold trim, Hyatt Street, under and beyond our glowing marquee, was no more safe than West End Avenue, only slightly safer than Avenue A. Just two darkened storefronts separated us from the night depository at Citibank, but I took a well-muscled male staff member with me, and at that it was always a heart-thumper.

I’m grateful to Scorcese and Lumet for reminding me via two of the best American movies ever made (Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver) what a great city under siege really looks like. 

And now what’s left? Movie palaces are gone — everywhere, not just in NYC — they were going anyway. We can revisit them now as the resurrected live concert halls they’ve mostly become, and I’m glad for that. As for the streets? New York has, alas, made its Faustian bargain with wealth. Hardly anybody I know can afford to live across the water these days, but everything is well lit and all the shopfronts are occupied. Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, A Most Violent Year (2014), a gritty NYC movie set in 1981, was filmed mostly in Detroit. Movies and literal truth seldom intersect.

When I arrived in Staten Island, in June, 1969, our local movie palace, the St. George Theatre, was showing something called The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula’s first) with Liza Minelli as a needy unstable teenager who stalks a shy boy — billed somehow as a romantic comedy, though hardly a “popcorn” movie. But that all-important banner with the words AIR CONDITIONED in blue on a white ground, and cartoon icicles amid the gold tassels, had done its work. At that point, we didn’t even own a fan. We went to the movie and emerged a few hours later, depressed but much cooler. 

Seven years after that, in 1976, we actually took a hand at running the St. George. As a theater exhibitor, I quickly discovered two things about summer and the movies: 1.) It was friggin expensive to air condition a 2,672-seat hall (Con Ed bills ran in the thousands even then) and 2.) People don’t want to think very hard in the dark on a hot summer day, the requisite popcorn, icy soda and maybe a frozen Snickers for company.             

When was the summer movie invented? Had it been around my whole life?

There’s no hard and fast rule, but summer movies seem to have hit their stride in the 1950’s. Think  Picnic, Gidget, A Summer Place (both of the last two include Sandra Dee in a prominent role), Suddenly Last Summer, Summertime (a David Lean confection starring Kate Hepburn). By the 1960’s summer movies were a staple of movie palace fare: The Endless Summer (even if you’d never seen a surfboard in your life, who could resist those curls?), Beach Party and the other beach movies it spawned, including Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, The Parent Trap, and that pre-Jaws thriller,The Horror of Party Beach.

Now I’ve done it, gone and mentioned Jaws, which, a decade later, I painted the St. George Theatre’s street-side pillar red and aqua in anticipation of showing. The mechanical shark was a year old by then--the previous summer’s thriller — but that didn’t seem to matter; and we showed it a month too early, the week of May 12, but wasn’t summer just around the corner? Jaws is, of course, much more than a summer movie. As The Guardian notes, “To this day, many consider the template of contemporary blockbuster releases to have been laid down in the summer of 1975 by a movie that redefined the parameters of a “hit” — artistically, demographically, financially.” (Was it really about Watergate?) 

By the seventies, horror was fully acceptable as summer fare, so, as our St. George summer progressed, we could get away with Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Torso in mid-June and The Exorcist  on July 28. (Exorcism and popcorn? Why not?) And by the way, how did the innocence of fifties romantic comedies in summer, followed by beach flirtations in the sixties, give way to chainsaws and possessed little girls by the seventies?

According to The L.A. Times what qualifies as a popcorn movie is ”Any film whose primary mission is to entertain (...thinking, crying or reflecting is just an add-on)... Do they open only in the summer? No, they can land in theaters from January to December, but they must have popcorn soul.” So the genre (romantic comedy, adolescent adventures, gory thriller, sci-fi or super hero) doesn’t matter, so long as it entertains. Pithier fare fares better when seasons change. Case in point: I seldom drink red wine in summer. Counter argument: on August 4  Al Gore will release An Inconvenient Sequel (soak up the conditioned air while ignoring its consequences), and Kathryn Bigelow will revisit the Detroit riots in Detroit.

But the big question, at least the one I care about, is: Does anybody go out to the movies anymore?  Will you? Will I? It’s interesting to return for a moment to The Sterile Cuckoo, that Liza Minelli flick I found so depressing over forty years ago on a hot summer afternoon in the deep shadows of the St. George Theatre, which was frosty-cold when I needed it to be. In the dark, under that fulsome scarlet dome, the leaded-glass chandelier at its core barely visible through a steep-descending beam of light that transformed itself into people and things on the giant screen, it didn’t matter what I was watching. Even now it could be anything: the latest Pirates of the Caribbean, or Alien: Covenant or, when we ran the St. George,  it could have been a 1973 Bruce Lee film with its reels out of order (yes, we did that once). Speaking of that error, nobody in the audience noticed that the reels were in the wrong sequence. Kung Fu is all action! — and besides, they were too busy soaking in the theater’s lovely cavernous dark while getting cool, which is my point.