Every Wednesday at the St. George Theatre, a new feature — sometimes two — arrived at the box office. The usher on matinee duty lugged the film reels in heavy hexagonal cans, two at a time, up to the booth. There our projectionist loaded the first two onto our ancient Century projectors. “Carbon arc” projection was not exactly high tech in 1976, but it was all we could afford. The St. George was a dollar-fifty movie house (second or third-run) — no fancy xenon bulb projectors for us. The light that shone through the film as it passed the gate in the projector came from an arc similar to the ones welders use, an actual fire that burned expensive rods of carbon in a primitive fire. And the show began. 
 
Blazing Saddles, Taxi Driver, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Exorcist: the films we booked had one thing in common. They’d all been around at least a year, in most cases two. And even if we’d had the advance money to put down on a first-run feature, we’d have lost out in a bidding war to the new strip-mall theaters offering a choice of two or even three screens. There was precious little new film to be had in 1976 and ’77, certainly not enough to fill 2,672 seats all at once.
 
Still, every Wednesday was a new chance at success, our movie booking fantasies reinforced by the heady notion that if we could just sell out a live show once or twice we’d break even for the whole year! Just across the harbor in Manhattan, impresarios like Sid Bernstein were making a living booking rock bands in auditoriums not half so elegant as the St. George’s, with its gilded statuary and brocade house curtain. There were five of us in the “management” team, all breathless and in our twenties, with the kind of energy that dared the odds. The St. George was a magic cave, and we believed in magic.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Speaking of our projectors, Bob Endres, a good friend and a visiting projectionist in the seventies, recalls, "The lamps you had when I was there were made by Ashcraft. I’m reasonably sure the projector “mech heads” (the actual projector itself) were made by Century. In the photo the big unit on the projector base is the Ashcraft lamphouse, and the unit directly in front of it is a Century “mech” or picture head. Below it is the Century sound head, although at the St. George you had an RCA sound system so the sound heads were probably RCA. If Abbott Theatre Supply in Manhattan was your equipment and booth supplier that would make sense since they sold Ashcraft and Century and RCA exclusively in this area. 
 
2.  Paul Plonski, these days an aeronautical engineer, but in 1976 a St. George Theatre staffer, recalls:
When you mention, ‘The usher on matinee duty lugged the film reels in heavy hexagonal cans, two at a time, up to the booth,’ I was one of those ushers. I remember picking up those hexagonal cans in the lobby of the theater ... not quite in the lobby ... but in front of the ticket booth on the main entrance. There were probably four or more cans on a given day. Grabbing on to two of them, I found, to my surprise, they were much heavier than eye might perceive. My memories take me into the main lobby, the palms of my hands burning from the narrow metal grips of the handles, taking a short break and proceeding up to the mezzanine level. Once there, another short break, then up to the balcony. On the balcony, there was a magnificent view of the theater ... amazing ... totally amazing to be looking down on the theater below and its magnificent beauty, the orchestra pit, the historical stage, the chandelier above, how powerful it felt to be looking down from above on a theater with such a rich entertainment history. The journey continued, upwards, ascending through the balcony, until I was at the very last seat, again looking down at the stage floor below, how small everything looked. Turning about, a narrow door, very narrow, so narrow most patrons would not realize its existence. I squeaked through the narrow door, with two film cans, one in each hand, a set of stairs, steeper and narrower than the stairs leading to the semi-nonexistent door itself. The film cans would bounce off the sides of the walls as I ascended to the projectionist booth above. At last, arriving at the technical perch of the theater, it seemed as though I were atop of the world. There were little openings looking down upon the theater below, once again making everything below look so small. It never lost its magnificence ... it still has not, every week new cans... Starts Wednesday!!! —Paulie

In 1976, there were movies that were right for a movie palace in an urban setting — and then there were the movies we wanted to show. Romantic entrepreneurs, we should have passed on The Man Who Would Be King, John Huston’s adaptation of a story by Rudyard Kipling starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine was wrong, wrong, wrong in a neighborhood that craved Taxi Driver, Shaft, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We booked it anyway, an expensive mistake that cost us a nearly empty auditorium for a week — but gave me an afternoon.

In that year of trying to keep the St. George Theatre’s doors open, I seldom watched a whole movie. I caught glimpses of whatever was on screen, as I passed from my office to the restroom, the candy stand or the manager’s office. As I walked back and forth, I felt I had seen the movie, especially if it wasn’t very good. When it was good, I lingered for stretches by the concession stand with a small buttered popcorn.

The Man Who Would Be King was the exception. It was lush, a tale of two adventurers in search of treasure. The tones of the movie are reddish gold, they matched the theater itself, the brocade and gilded statuary, especially when the light from the film shone on all that gold leaf. The characters in Kipling’s story are eventually undone by their own greed and a hunger for power, something I could barely imagine, struggling as I was to pay our rent on the theater and our house. 

Two people bought tickets for the show. Counting me, that made three of us in a 2,672-seat theater. I settled into my perch in the empty balcony. I would never sit there again or feel that free again, as we slipped, one week at a time, through what was to be a disastrous year. But in my memory of that afternoon, I am completely happy. I ate my popcorn right down to the grannies at the bottom of the box. The Man Who Would Be King was the movie for that moment in my life, filled with the right blend of desperation and bravado. 

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, if 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 when 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 in that borough, 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 a sister 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 the St George Theatre as 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 walking out, 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 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.
 
“We’re doin’ great concession,” he observed, “but so far, we’ve only sold eight tickets!“

This is the week of fireworks, people-made stars. Grand Central in NYC makes me giddy each time I walk under its electric constellations. I remember a moment that dates back to my twenties, when, having survived a car trip up the FDR drive on New Year’s Eve Day, with a man so drunk I feared for my life, I spilled out of his Volvo and into Grand Central, and, after a brief passage emerged at last, under its comforting vaulted ceiling. Admittedly, I was drunk too, and in that moment, delighted just to be alive. 

The dome of the 2,672-seat movie palace I worked in a few years after that, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, sends me into transports of an entirely different order. There is, even at the height of the afternoon, no natural light in that beloved old Spanish Baroque Vaudeville  and cinema palace. 

Theaters, movie or otherwise, don’t often feature natural light the way other domed structures often do. Part of the wonder of Grand Central and other public spaces is the afternoon light flooding in from the sides. “...holes in the grillwork of the south windows throw spots of sun on the terminal floor, moving under commuters' quick feet in a predictable pattern, day after day, year after year,” Corey Kilgannon observed in “Darkness at Noon.”
 
Theaters have their own light, a whole history of it. Oddly and interestingly, the very first (Greek) theaters used natural light the way a modern lighting director or projectionist uses artificial, as an integral part of the show. Those first comedies and tragedies took place in the open air, at the top of the day. The sun, far from being a hindrance, was frequently used like a spotlight, with mirrors to enhance certain dramatic effects. Greek amphitheaters were “in the round,” built with the time of day in mind. A few centuries later, the Romans made a business of the whole thing, extending the possibilities for performance in settings like the Coliseum, to night, with the addition of torches, candles and lanterns. 

Better than a thousand years later, if you’d attended a performance at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, you’d have thought you were living in Greece. The Globe was a three-story open-air amphitheater, dependent on sunlight and good weather.

Not until something called Blackfriars appeared did Elizabethan theater move inside, with sixteenth-century “artificial lighting.” In addition to torches and lanterns, there were novelties — “dimmers” (on candles) and colored filters that had found their way across the Channel from Italy. In the seventeen hundreds, the kerosene lantern arrived, and lighting became stagecraft. 

Oil lamps and Lime Light (a spotlight made by heating a piece of lime with a flame of oxygen and hydrogen) followed. Then gaslight, and finally in 1881, London’s Savoy Theatre (home of Gilbert & Sullivan) installed incandescent lighting. Theaters had morphed gradually into domed windowless halls. Not only did natural light interfere with the waking dream of the play, but that great theater mystery (sometimes called a science), acoustics,seemed to fare better in rounded seamless spaces. 
Seated in the mezzanine of the St. George Theatre a few years ago, I had plenty of time to study the recessed dome, its edges where they meet the ceiling, pinched back like a skillfully-wrought upside-down pie crust. Grottoes left and right of the stage, containing matching goddesses draped in maroon velvet, and the heavily gilded proscenium, with hardly a square foot of unadorned wall space, gave me plenty to look at. The SGT is fascinating as an ancient cave, its walls adorned with gazelles and bison. The theater is an iced cake of gilt plaster and drapery that warms to any voice. One cold February night in 1976, a friend of mine, who was helping run the theater (she happened to have a natural operatic soprano voice), stood center stage without benefit of a mic and belted out “Amazing Grace.” It has been 42 years, but it could have been yesterday; I believe the voices that have spoken or sung under the dome are caught and held there, keeping each other company for as long as the building lasts. 

May sunlight never enter there.   

Afterthought:
​But how could I not mention atmospheric theaters in a post that deals with artificial light in domed spaces? The ultimate turning inside-out of a dome, is when the ceiling IS the sky! John Eberson, that genius of turning architecture inside-out, designed and built over a hundred of these wonders, beginning with the 2,800-seat Majestic in Dallas, Texas. The Paramount in Anderson, Indiana gives a video tour worth taking, and don’t miss the Avalon in Chicago, via Matt Lambros whose work documenting movie palaces in all states and conditions never fails to move, astonish and delight me. 
An earlier post on atmospherics tells more.