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, New York), The Palace Theatre (Marion, Ohio), The Palace Theatre (Cleveland, Ohio), The Palace Theatre (Loraine, Ohio) and The Palace Theatre (Louiseville, Kentucky)? No doubt there are other unabashed palaces, so named, still standing;  if there’s one I’ve ignored, please let me know...
 
Afterthought:
It’s not by accident, you know, that “Stairway to Paradise” was written by the brothers Gershwin in the 1920’s, when the first aspect of any movie palace (such as the Roxy) was its grand staircase...
Speaking of the Roxy, wasn’t it Cole Porter in “Your the Top,”who listed among all his superlatives, “You’re the Top/You’re the steppes of Russia/You’re the pants/On a Roxy usher”?

An early version of this blog post originally ran on 7/11/2018. Anyone new to this blog needs to know that I and a small group of friends ran a movie palace, The St. George Theatre, in Staten Island, New York for a single magical year, 1976. This blog is dedicated to that year, and to a book, Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, yet to be published... ​

 
There are, as I dimly recall, 13 steps, very high risers, that lead from the space at the back of the St. George Theatre’s upper balcony to the tiny pair of rooms we used to call “the booth:” a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, two sash windows and a skylight with stairs to the roof. Two hulking carbon arc projectors, circa the 1950’s, brought the image to the screen, a half a football field away, thanks to a spark of fire ignited by the charge between two carbon rods. (They were expensive, these rods, and running out of them was a tragic experience.) The film arrived weekly in steel canisters, each reel containing only around 20 minutes of viewing pleasure, which is to say, three reel changes an hour. That’s how it was in 1976, when I was part of the last effort to run a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque palace as the movie theater it had always been. It was the end of an era. After we left, the St. George went dark, so the booth never did go through the revolution in movie projection that followed the seventies  (resulting in the “platter’ system), let alone digitalization, which has liberated theaters almost entirely from the need to hire projectionists.  
 
The corners of projection booths are strewn these days with the wreckage obsolete equipment: reels, carbons, xenon bulbs, platters. But the booths remain: holes in the theater’s back wall, like carved eye-slits. The booth was once the lonely haunt of a single worker who, in our theater at least, never did get to know the ushers, concession people, or even the manager, except in a passing way. Watch The Projectionist (1971) some time, for a sense of this loneliness; or Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Junior, (1924) an early piece of silent genius, for the dangers of dreaming in the booth. 
 
As for Gabe, our local union projectionist, he smiled his way into the theater lobby, did his shift, and, six hours later, waved absently as he headed for his car and Brooklyn. Most nights we hung out by the candy stand in a state of despair, counting the scant receipts, but Gabe never joined us. He was, to quote Kipling, “the cat who walked by himself.”  
 
For another analogy, if the projection booth were part of a sailing ship, it’d be the “crow’s nest,” highest point of the main mast, where the lookout looked out. That’s how it was on ships, and how it was in theaters too. 
 
The projectionist looked out, if he was any good, watching for the cue-marks on the film to make a smooth change-over. To hear projectionist Keith Madden talk about it on NPR...
 
You had to just completely get into the Zen of it...The cue marks were a sixth of a second in the upper right hand corner. A sixth of a second is about the time it takes you to do kind of a normal blink. So if you had a normal blink, you could have — oh, did I just miss that? (Laughter) And until you learn the film, you wouldn't know. And one of the worst things for a projectionist was to get emotionally involved in the content. In a horror movie, that used to happen to me. Somebody would jump out with an axe, and, oh, you'd miss the cue mark.  
 
You can tell Madden was a good projectionist because his danger was that he might become “emotionally involved in the content.” Our projectionist — Gabe — on the other hand, often had no idea at all what was on screen. Case in point: when we ran Enter the Dragon (1975, a classic Bruce Lee Kung Fu), Gabe laid an egg. He called down to the candy stand —“Hey, I’m sorry man!” — but nobody knew what he was apologizing for. He’d apparently run reel 1, then reel 3. But with minimal plot and maximal punching and kicking, nobody’d noticed, so no harm done. Dean directed him to run reel 2 then reel 4, followed by 5 and 6. The audience left without complaint. 
 
Afterthoughts:  
1. For a really smart treatment of the art of projection, check out the source of the NPR quote. 
 
2. Our friend Robert Endres, the projectionist’s projectionist, was interviewed for a post on May 27, 2015. it is entirely possible that he knows more about projection than anyone else on Earth, though he’d modestly deny that statement, if asked. Check out his view from the booth. Bob, BTW, started out at his local theater in Streator, Illinois, when, as a boy, he was caught peeking through the keyhole at the projectionist’s world.
 
3. A comment from the post’s original comment column:
​Thank you so much for featuring my photograph on your blog. I wanted to mention that this photograph was captured at the Variety Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. 
—Diane Beatty
 
The photograph, as a matter of fact, is what caused me to write the blog post, so, once again, I thank Diane.

The general public — those not privy to the few luxurious hotels and cars that used cooling systems early on — often first encountered air-conditioning in movie theaters, which started to widely use the technology in the 1930s. Before the window unit's heyday, Carrier produced a system for theaters that cost between $10,000 and $50,000. It was one of the few things proprietors sprung for during the Great Depression, and theaters were one of the rare places where the hoi polloi could enjoy chilly, artificial air.”    
— Time, from Brief History: Air Conditioning, by Katy Steinmetz
 
I never saw the original Frankenstein, in a theater, but in June 1976, I came close to experiencing what it might have been like to be in that movie, to witness Dr. Frankenstein’s machine — the one that brings the monster, Boris Karloff, to life — first-hand.
 
That was the day we started up the St. George Theatre’s ancient fifteen-foot tall air conditioner, after paying a small ransom to some refrigeration experts, to get it fixed. If the doctor’s machine gave life to a monster, we gave life — or at least air that was breathable — to our own monstrous movie palace, and just in time for the matinee. 
 
You pulled the handle of a switch on the wall. Like everything electrical in the theater, it crackled and shot out sparks, completing a circuit that involved ten or twelve giant (Buss) fuses — each about the size of a cigar. Something in the belly of the beast began to crank, and a noise not unlike that of a jet engine commenced. The whole thing rumbled — the cement room actually shook — then there were two more slaps, and a bang. The compressor was finally  engaged. More wheezing, rumbling, churning, then  a constant thrum. Whew! We had all somehow lived and the theater would be cool by showtime. Amazingly, no one in the auditorium or anywhere outside the little room with the mighty machine, ever heard the unit itself.
 
We knew how important cool air was. Only seven years before, we had been, not operators, but patrons of the very same theater, and our motivation to go to summer movies had had everything to do with staying cool. In 1970, fewer than 36% of all American households had air conditioning. Arriving in New York City in 1969 with one fan — which broke after a single torrid week — we kept cool by riding the Staten Island Ferry, but then what was there to do?  
 
From the marquee of the St. George Theater — then run by our predecessors, the Fabian chain — hung a delightful banner, with fake white icicles for tassels, and the frosted words AIR CONDITIONED in blue on a white ground. You could stand outside and feel the blasts of cool air coming from the lobby. That first time, we bought tickets to The Sterile Cuckoo, starring what now seems like an impossibly young Liza Minelli; it was a dreadful movie, but did it matter?  We were cool and in the dark, better than our basement apartment, where a piece of paper dropped and not picked up immediately often as not adhered itself to the floor in a permanent way.
 
Later in 1976, when we took over the St. George Theatre, we found the blue and white banner I’d seen hanging from the marquee, as well as an older one, from the 1930’s that read REFRIGERATED. With Depression-era audiences, many of whom had never been in an air-cooled room, theater operators had to  get right to the point. 
 
Who, in any of the audiences that attended the St. George, from its opening in 1929 through our brief year of 1976, knew that the cool air came from something as terrifying as Dr. Frankenstein’s device? Or — and this is the other thing the system reminded me of — the machine in Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi film, Metropolis It exploded: our air conditioner, thankfully never did. 

Afterthoughts:
1. Central AC is so ubiquitous today, it’s hard for most people to recall going places just to get cool. As a child I went to the drug store, stood in the magazine rack area and read comic books till they kicked me out. At home we had AC, but not in the upstairs bedrooms, except the Master BR. I don’t disapprove of my parents’ miserliness. The planet would be in better shape if central AC weren’t so ordinary... 

2. Several readers responded to this post in 2015, when I originally offered it; here’s what Michael Carman had to say:
My mother, who was born in 1918, used to tell the story of how she was "saved" — almost literally — by such air conditioning. It was the summer of 1938, the day was a boiler, and she was sailboating with friends on a lake somewhere in the vicinity of New York City. She had always been subject to heat prostration, even blacking out in the sun before she realized what was happening. She'd have no memory of what happened during the blackout. (I know this is possible; I inherited this tendency, and it's happened to me too.) But she was always a trooper, as well, and hated to leave any job unfinished. So when she had helped her friends pull the sailboat up on the beach in the broiling sun, and hoist it onto the trailer hitch of the friends' truck, she waved goodbye, and then...? She didn't remember. Hours later, she "woke up" in a movie theater somewhere in Manhattan, miles away from the beach. Her own little car was parked on the street nearby. She was watching a Gene Autry movie — a theatrical choice she would never have made. She had no memory of her drive to the theatre — no idea how she got there. But her subconscious knew that some NYC theaters, unlike her own home, had air conditioning! Saved!
​
Imagine driving unconscious anywhere, but especially Manhattan!

What kinds of things are over-the-top? Vodoo Doughnuts, especially “Smoky Campfire Connoli.” Also everything that ever fell out of the cake decorator’s drawer is nothing if not over the top. Yummy — or revolting? Your tastes for excess will dictate. Ball gowns worn at the Diamond Ball or the Royal Wedding also come to mind. So do movie palaces, those cathedrals of excess that the movies in their infancy, combined with Vaudeville, caused to spring up all over the continental U.S., like so many glorious fast-growing mushrooms. The most outrageous example of one such theater in my neck-of-the-woods is the United Palace in upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights), a Thomas-Lamb-designed combination of “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco,” according to The New York Times,which also called it a “kitchen-sink masterpiece.” What else would you expect of one of the five Loew's “wonder theaters”? 

Inevitably, what defines a theater as a  “movie palace” is its size (arguably 1,500 or more seats) and its spare-no-expense excessiveness. Decor may take the form of blended styles, such as my own beloved St. George Theatre — Spanish/Italian Baroque, 2, 672 seats — which, in 1976, I had the privilege of helping to run, in the twilight of its movie theater career. From its admittedly garish paintings of bullfighters and senoritas in the main lobby, to the unidentified Greek goddesses that flank its stage, left and right, the St. George is, like the United Palace, a mish-mash, which can, admittedly, be either eclectic or just plain too much. There are probably people who sit inside the marvelous gilded cave of the St. George’s auditorium, or even the Spanish Gothic (Moorish?) Theater at Ace Hotel in L.A. and think, “this is too too much.” I am not one of those people, as you may have discovered.

Webster has “over-the-top” as “extremely or excessively flamboyant or outrageous...” Being a lover of well-executed excess, I prefer that definition to one I found in the Cambridge Dictionary, “...too extreme and not suitable, or demanding too much attention or effort, especially in an uncontrolled way.”

Well, either way you slice it, what is a movie palace if not "flamboyant" (Webster’s) and  “demanding of attention” (Cambridge)?  And yet, only the movies, those luscious waking communal dreams — the spawn of Edison, Muybridge and Vaudeville — could dare to produce interiors that featured electric-star ceilings and giant shrouded statuary. Nothing, you see, could compete for an audience’s attention with the likes of  Garbo or Valentino, or the young Charlie Chaplin; or later, when sound arrived, with Bogart, Bergman, Gable, Hepburn projected on a giant single screen.

It’s probably impossible to say which, of thousands of movie palaces, most of which were built in the already-flamboyant 1920’s, is the most over-the-top. Loew’s Kings, on Flatbush Avenue? The previously-mentioned United Palace on 175th  Street in Manhattan? But how could you not consider almost all of Graumann’s theaters, especially the Chinese and the Egyptian? The Pantages? The Uptown in Chicago? 

Because it’s so easy to flash to major urban areas, I’d like to give the spotlight to a “Moorish/Mediterranean” treasure, the Akron Civic Theatre (2,592 seats) in Akron, Ohio.  None other than Marcus Loew himself (“we sell tickets to theaters, not movies”) chose Akron as the site of one of his “special” theaters, an atmospheric, to be designed by the esteemed John Eberson, master of that style of theater architecture. Before Loew happened on the scene, a local dance-hall entrepreneur had begun a theater on the site, but his pockets were empty. Loew bought the half-begun effort at a Sheriff’s sale and began to build. 

On its opening night in 1929, Loew’s Akron, as the theater was to be called for a long while, offered audiences a Moorish castle, from whose courtyard the patron can to this day gaze upward at “a twinkling star-lit sky and intermittent clouds moving across the horizon.” Now what can be more over-the-top than a Moorish Castle with stars and clouds in its courtyard, Italian marble statuary, and a staircase which is said to contain echoes of the staircase at the Paris Opera House (which Loew apparently admired)? 

Why Akron? In the early 20th century this industrial city was the “rubber capital of the world,” which meant a lot in the nineteen twenties, when “horseless carriages” were all the rage; Marcus Loew was an entrepreneur who knew a burgeoning middle-class market when he saw one. Akron (from the Greek for “elevation”) was on fire population-wise in 1910, continuing to the twenties with an increase of 201.8%, which meant double the number of patrons standing in line to gaze at electric stars, catch a little Vaudeville, and watch a movie.  

Like all but a few movie palaces, Loew’s Akron fell on hard times in the seventies and beyond, when movie palaces seemed about as useful to most folks as yesterday’s ball gowns. It was rescued by a lot of determined local citizens, but I’m saving that story for an upcoming blog post on how movie palaces that are still here managed to survive into the new century. It’s a “perils of Pauline” kind of story.

Afterthought:
I’d like to thank Val Renner, Associate Director of Programming at the Akron Civic Theatre for getting back to me so quickly, when I’d discovered I wanted to profile the Civic. Should you happen to be driving across upper Ohio it’d be worth a detour to visit the Akron Civic Center and find yourself in a Moorish garden, complete with twinkling stars and drifting clouds...