SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE reads the marquee of the NiteHawk in Brooklyn, a cinema closed since March. Yes, on the other side. In the world movies unfailingly depict, the one we left behind in March: of close-crowded bars and packed elevators, of handshakes and hugs, where you don’t flinch when somebody’s dog touches the back of your leg while you’re waiting to cross at the light. A world where masked people don’t have your best interests at heart, a world with movie theaters, where people pay to sit with strangers in the dark. Imagine that! 

There’s been much said recently about the total demise of the movie exhibition business, but maybe the reverse is true. Look what’s happening at drive-in theaters, almost defunct, now thriving! So you think streaming has taken over? The Mahoning Drive-In in Lehighton, Pa., an “...old-fashioned 1948 single-screen outdoor theater showcasing vintage films in a nostalgic setting,” keeps selling out. In advance. Wow! People are crazy to go somewhere, see something.

Memories die hard: here’s a glimpse of a time (1976) at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat palace. People not only sat together in our cavernous movie palace without any social distance, but sometimes even conceived children in the remotest parts of its balcony or just plain hid, hoping we’d close the place and leave them alone, under a widening dome. It was the end of summer, traditional high time for theater attendance. 

Labor Day at the St. George Theater: 1976, a Monday, the sixth of September. The Omen was on-screen, a banner day preceded by a banner weekend, great numbers, almost boffo socko (big box office) we talked about opening the balcony. At concession, Paulie was barely keeping up with orders for popcorn, Coke, Charleston Chews, kosher hotdogs on homemade Italian rolls, and Haagan-Dazs ice-cream (new that year in Staten Island). Great crowds of people strode into the lobby, ten and twenty at a stretch, family groupings, filling the gap between lunch and a picnic to mark the end of summer. I was on box office, happy to deal with a continual rush a patrons.
 
Occult or horror films always did well. The Exorcist, then three years old, had played to a packed house for us in July, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre had pulled good numbers. "Boffo Socko," the term our booking agent was fond of using to describe a box office hit (see also “boff,” “boffola,” “whammo” and “socko” by itself) is “slanguage” invented by or at least swirling around the showbiz mag, Variety. We spoke this dialect with pride, even going so far as to name two puppies we’d adopted “Boffo” and “Socko.” 

By Labor Day, we’d been theater operators for exactly five months. Even though we’d lost money hand over fist the first two months, we’d begun to break even, so we thought we knew what we were doing. It seemed we always would be standing in the lobby tearing tickets, looking forward to another week, and that’s how I’d like to think of us. 

In retrospect, it had been cheeky to show The Omen, an occult film featuring a malevolent child — ”the antichrist” — whose sign is 666 — on, of all things, the 6th of September.  More than a few numerologists might be tempted to blame the sudden and precipitous decline in our box office sales that followed the day after Labor Day, on our choice of product. But that most ironically named American holiday, the day that ends the summer, had been the real culprit: the beginning of every new business and school year, the end of the movie theater operator’s season, a fact we had yet to learn. 

As we round the bend into August of this malignant year, theater operators with empty auditoriums instinctively fear September, always till now the turn of the year, when vacations end, and business and school begin. But this is a year like no other... and here’s my theory.

While we’re all waiting for a vaccine, Hollywood has been holding back the summer block busters, no fools they. People aren’t ready to come out yet. Tenet, the new Nolan movie, awaits, and an awful lot of folks are either working from home or living on unemployment, so September doesn’t mean the beginning or end of anything, really. Let the drive-ins have their day, and niche theaters, happy to show “classics” like Jaws or Jurassic Park or even The Omen. Just as, in the 1930’s, movie houses, especially palaces, gave people escape from the Depression, the Nitehawk at any time of year, will find its grateful audience once again. What’s that line from Field of Dreams?  “If you build it, they will come...”

Afterthoughts:
1. Get aholda this. 
2. In some localities, such as Chester County, Pa., home of The Colonial Theater, which I featured a few weeks ago they premiered their re-opening with BlobFest.  The Colonial has kept on going, apparently, since early July, clean, socially-distanced, all that good stuff, and people are showing up for movies.

Had your second cup of coffee yet?  Well then, in twenty seconds or less, can you name the four “characters” in the short cartoon, “Let’s All Go to the Lobby?” The clip is a “snipe” actually — more on that later.

If you grew up any time in the latter half of the twentieth century, you remember this one-minute piece of animation well: four food items, a candy bar or box of chewing gum, a large box of popcorn, a small box of the same, and, bringing up the rear, a soda in a paper cup. They’re all singing and walking leftwards, in a companionable way. A six-frame, one-minute teaser designed to induce movie theater audiences to head for the snack-stand, this cartoon has a long history; it’s actually listed as a “film” in Wikipedia. I think that’s stretching the category of “Films Set in a Movie Theater,” but never mind.

​Though “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” has been riffed off many times, featuring such substitute characters as a hotdog that Homer Simpson decapitates with one bite, the classic original was directed by one Dave Fleisher for Filmack, way back in 1957. That would be about right; fifty-seven was the year I found myself entitled to unlimited popcorn, candy and Coke at the Mt. Lookout Theatre, a Deco treasure of a place near where I grew up, in Cincinnati. I was nine, and, lucky me, my sister worked concession at the theater, when she wasn’t sitting in the chrome-embellished ticket booth outside. Either way, I didn’t  have to pay a thing for my popcorn, so Fleisher’s walking food characters sent me instantly for refills. It was the year of The Incredible Shrinking Man; after all those trips to the lobby, I was hardly shrinking.

Nineteen years later, all grown up, or so I believed, and living in New York,  I signed on to a project my husband had undertaken, running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island.  Of course we ran “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” especially when we featured an INTERMISSION — that single word in gold on a blue background, another “snipe.”  

What’s a snipe, you ask?  Well basically it’s advertising intended for the big screen in which the theater may choose to promote: food, itself, a local business, an event or whatever. Long before "Let’s All Go..." became iconic, Filmack, the larger of two companies that made its name selling snipes, featured simpler animated snacks, as well as season’s greetings, stylized note cards welcoming patrons to a particular theater, rules and regs, such as SMOKING IN THE LEFT FRONT SECTION ONLY (or these days, TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE). Snipes that feature local advertisers appeared most often at drive-ins.
 
Since most snipes involve some kind of animation, cartoonists short of cash, including, apparently, a young Walt Disney himself, have been known to turn their design attentions to snipe creation for a quick buck. That’s what Dave Fleisher was up to when he made popcorn and soda take a walk.
I myself once inadvertently designed a snipe, for the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati.  My father had set himself up in business as the owner of a used car dealership, Hallerman-Reeker (Mr. Reeker was, briefly, his partner). In 7th grade at the time, and supporting aspirations as an artist, I found myself tapped to design a single-frame ad for the dealership, 

The ad featured my father’s and Len Reeker’s smiling faces on either side, next to their respective names. It would be a decade before I met Dean, who was to become both my partner — for life and at the St. George Theatre; still, he recalls going to the drive-in that summer and seeing the ad, which only ran for a few weeks. My design, had been transformed into an orange-toned snipe. Daddy lost his shirt in the dealership, which didn’t make it to Christmas. That was something I would come to experience myself, several decades later in the theater business.

Speaking of the St. George, while it existed under our management, we ran trailers, and the occasional snipe, having inherited a drawerful of one-minute films: STARTS WEDNESDAY, STARTS FRIDAY, COMING SOON, INTERMISSION and what have you. Of course, there was always “Let’s All Go To the Lobby,” which we hardly needed to show. Though we lost money hand-over-fist at the box office (who could fill 2,672 seats for one movie by 1976?), our concession per capita was enormous, tied with the big Broadway houses in Manhattan, causing us to joke that closing the auditorium and opening a cafe might have been, well, a wiser business model. 

Meanwhile, let’s all go to the lobbies of our imaginations, and snack on memories of theaters we’ve known. I don’t know about you, but when I watch a movie on the bedroom screen, and I see people standing or sitting close together, I want to warn them about keeping a safe distance. It’s a kind of pathology, but it will end, and then we’ll all go out and sit down together in the dark. It’s in our DNA.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Dave Fleisher had a very interesting and difficult life. Although Wikipedia cautions that the above link lacks citations, Fleisher’s life story is well worth reading. Nice guy, rose pretty high and, though he didn’t quite finish last, he needed his commission from the walking food minute. 
 
2. I’ve searched all over for the origins of the word, “snipe” in a theatrical context. If anybody knows, I’d love to know...

...we’ve been drawn into the darkness for longer than we’ve been drawn to mountains. The hand stencils on cave walls in Western Spain have been dated to about 65,000 years ago. That’s 20,000 years or so before Homo sapiens is thought to have reached that region. So these are Neanderthal handprints. The idea of us being drawn into the darkness is an ancient longing. There’s also some of the most amazing, eerily present findings from European caves from the last Ice Age. A bone flute made from the wing bone of a griffon vulture was found deep in a limestone cave. The thought of that flute being played in that cave with ice filling the landscape around it, I don’t know about you, but it sets my spine shivering.

Robert McFarlane, author of a book I want to read, Underland, has walked and crawled his way into and around a lot of dark enclosed places. Writer, teacher, mountain climber, spelunker, informal folklorist, and general burrower, he knows a thing about the dark insides of things. That flute: is it evidence, like painted moving gazelles and bison, of early theater?

How exactly are theaters like caves?  Well, both Lascaux — which has been called a paleolithic cathedral — and the St. George Theatre, a movie palace I helped run in 1976, lack windows, allowing for instant surrender to the darkness.

You can get lost in a 2,678-seat movie palace: we knew it, and the younger patrons who didn’t want to go home after the movie was over, knew it too. The balcony and loge were off limits — we hardly ever sold enough tickets to populate even the orchestra. But kids of a certain age — boys who are thirteen, fourteen — like to test limits. Exit doors in the balcony led to fire escapes. Although we weren’t using the balcony, the FDNY had forbidden us to chain these doors shut. So one kid would buy a ticket and sneak upstairs to let his friends, who had climbed the fire escape, in for free. For the most part, they’d hang in the upper part of the house 'til closing time, even bringing their own concession: beer and KFC. Pot-smoke drifted to the dome. On Friday and Saturday nights after the midnight show, you could hear them breathing up there, waiting for us to close and go home.
 
Addressing them directly was the best way to flush them out. Sam, the floor manager, who knew all the kids’ families, would stand center stage and call them by name, “You up there Randall? Won’t be pretty if I hafta come getcha...”  “Obi, hear me now. Don’t make me tell yo  mama...” 

Exit doors on unoiled hinges groaned, followed by the rapid slap of sneakers flying down the fire escape.

What did they want? How many Snickers bars can one adolescent boy consume? Or was it a night in the shadows back stage they were after? 

The theater is a magic — even a sacred — space. It was for all of us, our Luray Caverns, our Altamira, the screen, a cave-wall waiting for the splash of pigmented light. Tired as I was at the end of a theater day, it was hard to go home, so who could fault a boy? 

Afterthoughts:

1. Last week I went searching for a movie palace that was open, and, somewhat miraculously, I found one, in Phoenixville, Pa., the Colonial, which also happens to be the Blob’s home theater; yes, that blob! Hope BlobFest went well, in its virtual incarnation...
2. The larger older small-town theaters, like the Colonial, have lots of room to offer, when the pandemic finally wanes: palaces and stadium theaters can easily afford a six-foot separation between patrons. Just a thought.

Quick! What movie palace was a setting for that 1958 classic sci-fi, The Blob?  You’re forgiven if you didn’t know it was The Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pa., still standing and, in these Covid times, making its way slowly (but not inexorably, like the blob) back into business. Here’s a Wikipedia description of the blob’s acting debut at that theater, “the creature enters the Colonial Theater and engulfs and devours the projectionist before oozing into the auditorium. ...screaming people leave the theater in blind panic.”  

The Colonial, like most old movie houses that are still standing, has undergone a couple of narrow escapes, and not from extraterrestrial ooze. It was nearly torn down a couple of times, then saved and lovingly refurbished by local enthusiasts. Same as my own local movie house, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island (New York), which I co-ran in 1976. It’s closed right now, NYC being a more urban setting compared to Chester county, Pa.,  where the Colonial had its “soft” open on July 3. According to the facilities manager,  things went fairly well.  People are still uncertain; some say “...see ya when there’s a vaccine,” but others seem ready for socially-distanced viewing. 

Currently showing: Deadpool, Star Wars: Episode VII — the Force Awakens, and, for kiddies, The Jungle Book. The historic original auditorium seats 658, but state Covid guidelines indicate it can’t contain more than fifty percent capacity, spaced a socially-distant six feet from each other. So you don’t have to wear a mask all the time, as, for example, when you’re munching on popcorn. When you’re coming and going and, of course, in the bathroom, you’ll have to look like a bank-robber, but otherwise you’re free in the dark. Cleaning with a very heavy duty product between screenings. Sounds good, huh?

The Colonial started its theater life as a vaudeville house, in 1903. Then, like so many live theaters, it got the movie bug and, from 1915 to the present, remained a cinema. Jim Breneman, a pipe-organ restorer took it over in the eighties, installing a Kimball organ. His death in 1992 threw everything into question, and the Colonial had to be rescued from the wrecker’s ball, by the community itself, which rose up, saved, refurbished and reopened it. Like other such operations, it’s a not-for-profit, which is why they can risk opening at 50% capacity. At the St. George in the seventies, we were theoretically “for profit,” but hardly more than a quarter full most of the time. We’d have been a great model for Covid re-opening!

Marketing director, Bob Trate, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If [patrons] don’t [follow the rules], they’ll jeopardize not only public health but also the shared sense of escape that comes with seeing a film on the big screen. You just want to go and turn your brain off and watch a movie,” he pointed out, “and not worry about somebody coughing behind you.”

Good as binge-watching Perry Mason can be, or signing up with Disney to finally catch Hamilton, or viewing a Netflix premier, there ain’t nothin’ like sitting in the dark with strangers — as long as they’re at least six feet away. Oh, and if there’s popcorn.

Afterthoughts:
1. Each year at this time, the Colonial hosts a BlobFest to commemorate its role in the iconic Steve McQueen movie. It’s big business for a small town, which usually involves a screening and street fair.  At a given moment (see the movie’s trailer, if you haven’t already) , everyone in the theater gets up and bolts for the street in a “panic.” For obvious reasons, the festival will be virtual this weekend, giving the enterprising theater an opportunity to reach out to a larger Blob audience. Teeshirts available! Oh, and by the way, for those interested in the inner workings of a projection booth, circa 1958, the aforementioned trailer is not to be missed. Wow did that projectionist miss his changeover!

2.  Casting about for things to do during the shut-down, the Colonial, on April 6, ran a “Punny Marquee Title Contest,” and got over 400 submissions. The winner, “The Day the Earth Stayed Home,” was posted on the marquee. 

3. Here, for your perusal, are the rules and regs of movie-going for the future, as cribbed from the Colonial’s site. We’re all gonna hafta get used to this, so read up...

Quentin Tarantino wasn’t always the bad boy director we know; once he worked as an usher in — what else? — an adult movie theater in Southern California. Later he reflected, “...the greatest job a person could ever have was being an usher...you know. You get to go to a movie theater all day long, and then you get to see all the movies for free.” Whatever my periodic objections to all things Tarantino, I agree with him about working in movie theaters, having spent a year myself ( 1976) trying to keep the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat movie palace, open, with something on-screen.
 
You see movies differently when you’re selling tickets or popcorn or just trying to pay the bills; you see them in fits and starts, each time you pass through the lobby; that is, if it’s the kind of lobby the St. George has, with mahogany pillars framing glass, so that the movie is visible, even if it isn’t audible to people standing just outside. Thus I saw the shark in Jaws pull the moonlit swimmer under, but didn’t hear her screams. I ducked behind the popcorn warmer anyway.

Tarantino isn’t the only famous person who got his start while working in a movie theater. Sylvester Stallone, (Rocky, Rambo) had to keep body and soul together somehow while auditioning for parts in NYC back in the seventies. He tried a lot of things, including cleaning lion cages at the Central Park Zoo; he also worked briefly as an usher at the Baronet/Coronet, a Walter Reade theater. I say briefly, as he was fired after about a week, for scalping tickets and selling them privately to late arrivals at several times face value. The last patron he approached happened to be none other than Walter Reade himself, who fired Stallone right there on the pavement. Well, as Shakespeare pointed out, “All the world’s a stage...” 

But even if you never worked at the local movie house, just going there counts for something, in forming the later you. Case in point, Rosemary Clooney, singer, actress, was a native of Maysville Kentucky, a tiny town on the banks of the Ohio River, not too far from Cincinnati. Rosie was a teenager in the nineteen forties, when she got lost in movies at the Russell, Maysville’s movie house, with her best friend, Blanche Mae Chambers. Since segregation was the rule then, Blanche had to head for the balcony, and so did Rosie, who never missed an opportunity to sit with her friend. In 1953, Rosemary returned in triumph to Maysville, a brilliant popular singer and a movie star by that time.  She’d selected the Russell for the world premiere of her first movie The Stars are Singing, with co-star Anna Maria Alberghetti, “a grand affair of Hollywood magnitude.” The Russell was still segregated in 1953, but Rosemary insisted Blanche be seated with her. She and Blanchie Mae remained best friends until Rosie’s death in 2002.

Rosemary Clooney actually made her first stage appearance at the Russell, when she was just three years old. Gazing at the twinkling electric stars in the theater’s ceiling, she sang, “When your hair has turned to silver, I will love you just the same.” Odd lyric for a three-year-old, but you gotta start somewhere!

Afterthoughts:
1. Around the bend of the river from Maysville, and on the Ohio side, is my native Cincinnati, where 17-year-old Rosemary started her career, singing with her sister Betty on WLW Radio; many Cincinnatians consider her one of us, though serious Clooney fans know her quieter roots. In the 1980’s I was privileged to hear her each February at Rainbow and Stars, in New York City, the nightclub then at the top of Rockefeller Center. She’d made an admirable comeback after years of addiction, a girl who hit the road at 17, now a portly but charming older woman with a lot of character and her unmistakable “whiskey” voice. One February, as we were waiting for the down elevator at Rock Center, she emerged from a dressing room in the most ordinary of beige raincoats. We talked briefly. That’s how I’ll remember her, just folks. 

2. The Russell Theatre in Maysville has recently been refurbished and is as open for business as any movie house in the U.S., which is to say, “not now.”  Built in the Spanish Colonial style with a Moorish influence, by a Maysville entrepreneur, the successful grocer, Colonel J. Barbour Russell, it features elements of terra cotta in its facade. “What the Roxy is to New York,” the prosperous grocer boasted in 1929, “The Russell will be to Maysville.”  The Russell is an atmospheric theater, as indicated by the twinkling stars three-year-old Rosemary Clooney sang beneath.