It has been almost fifty years since I met the man I went broke running a movie palace with. New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati: What’s New Pussycat was on-screen — a blur— it was raining. We talked until midnight, the first of many amazing conversations. Four years later we left together for New York City, where we settled into Staten Island, and, ten years after our first date, tried our luck at running the St. George Theatre. What was it about movies in the century of their supremacy? Indoors, outdoors, film demanded a specialized viewing space.

My mother, who grew up with the movies, remembered seeing her first silents projected on a bed sheet in a vacant lot in Toledo, Ohio. Oddly, the first drive-in involved a bed sheet:  Richard Hollingshead, who invented this variation on movie-going, was said to have had an obese mother who wanted to go to the movies. Accordingly, he put a 1928 projector on the hood of his car, settled her in the front seat, and tied a sheet between two trees. Five years later, he opened the first drive-in in Camden, New Jersey, charging 25 cents a head to watch movies under the stars, with the slogan, "The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” Shankweiler's Drive-In Theater, opened a year later in Orefields, Pennsylvania, followed by the Drive-In Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Texas, and the Pico at Pico and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles.   

With RCA’s invention of car speakers in 1941, the novelty of outdoor viewing  became a commonplace (before that time, speakers on towers near the screen blasted cars in the front row).  By the time I was in fourth grade (1958), there were better than 4000 open-air theaters in the U.S. That year, in the back seat of my best friend’s mother’s boyfriend’s Buick Elektra, I waited until 1 A.M. to watch the “adult” films (The Long Hot Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Vertigo), while everybody else slept. Management programmed family fare for early in the evening, then showed the arty flicks after most people had either left or gone to sleep.

Time for a trivia question: What caused the decline, in the 1960’s, of drive-in movie theaters? Answer:  shopping malls; land was just too valuable. Take the previously mentioned Pico, at the corner of Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles.  It survived as a drive-in until 1947, after which the Picwood, an indoor theater rose on that spot. Today at that same corner the Landmarks Theater in the Westside Pavilion, a shopping plaza, boasts twelve screens with a wine bar and reserved stadium seating.  Indoor or outdoor, it’s been all about movies at that street corner for better than 80 years. In Staten Island, where I live, Fabian Theaters, the same chain that originally owned and operated our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, also owned NYC’s first drive-in on Staten Island, in 1948, which closed in the 1960’s, to make way for Staten Island’s first shopping mall.

Sometimes drive-ins just closed, their screens blank as tombstones until somebody bought the land. As of 2008 in Cincinnati, the Oakley Drive-In’s screen still stood, in a field of weeds. Dean and I had planned to visit that hallowed spot on the last day of 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. But, alas, the best we can do when that night comes around will be to wander the grounds of the newly-built Barrington of Oakley, a retirement community which stands on the spot. 

If you, dear reader, get the wanderlust, bear in mind that there may be as few as 338 active drive-ins left in the U.S.A, as of this writing. Two years ago, there were around four hundred, but the advent of digital movie projection has cut the ranks of these mom-and-pop businesses (it costs around $70,000.00 to convert to digital projection). One of the surviving locations, thankfully, appears to be the second such theater to open, the historic Shankweiler’s, in Oresfield, Pennsylvania, mentioned earlier in this piece. You’ll pay nine dollars per adult, six for every child under twelve.

I remember when drive-ins charged by the carload, a dollar twenty. If only I’d known Dean when he and his buddies hung out at the Oakley’s rival, the Montgomery Drive-In. One of his friends had a dad who was a mortician. Just how many teenagers can you pack into a hearse?  

I once helped run a theater that contained, beneath its gilded proscenium, a single viewing screen arguably the size of a small playing field. What a wonder, that there ever were such behemoths, that single-screen houses had, until the 1970‘s, been the norm, or that people ever gathered together in the dark to watch a one-and-a-half-story tall Katherine Hepburn kiss an equally mammoth Spencer Tracey. The New York Times recently featured an image of a fan laughing while presumably watching Comedy Central on a cell phone. Screen size may be irrelevant these days, but it was once a subject of conversation, as when, in 1976, MGM finally released Gone With the Wind to television — first to HBO and, in November, to network television (NBC). It became, and remains, the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network, watched — in relative miniature — by 65 percent of television viewers. I watched on a portable Sony Trinitron at a lunch counter in Florida, as Rhett carried Scarlet up what seemed, at the time, like a dollhouse staircase.

By then TV had been eroding the habit of movie-going for a couple of decades, a back-and-forth struggle. In 1963, the fledgling American Multi Cinema (AMC) Theatres — originally Durwood Theatres owned by Stanley H. Durwood — opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in Kansas City presumably to cut overhead, but also to steal back some of the viewing audience, by offering a choice of titles. Viewers — used to their Zeniths, Sonys  and Motorolas — didn’t seem to care about the relative smallness of these screens, and the trend caught on. A very American crisis ensued:  by 1976, there were actually too many screens for the product that Hollywood offered; a sudden 7.5 percent decline in movie theater attendance sent the movie business into a panic.

The average single-screen movie theater operator — most often located in a crumbling downtown area — couldn’t hope to compete for scarce film offerings.

We were that operator. Our unofficial anthem during the dark winter of 1977 — a parody of an American Airlines ad then running on TV — went something like this:  “With our big screen to the north and our snack-stand to the south, we’re the St. George Theatre, living from hand to mouth.”

The St. George Theatre ended its days as a movie house with our departure in 1977, the same year Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn and a number of other great old palaces went dark. Our luminous — if grape soda-stained screen, burned up a few years after we departed, in a backstage fire that would have taken down the house if the theater’s protective asbestos fire curtain hadn’t fallen and stopped the progress of the blaze. The St. George has survived, a home, these days, for live entertainment; but, for our theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.

It’s sad, but several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, or The King and I in widescreen processes such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision or Todd-AO. William Paul argues that “Both the architectural screen and the technological screen have changed...in ways that directly affect our perception of the movie image.”  He also notes, “The screen itself might have influenced the development of film style.” [1] 

In an age when more and more households don’t even own a TV (the final irony!) hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions!  In New York City, the venerable Paris (with balcony seating!) still boasts a pristine single screen, as does the Ziegfield. They aren’t palaces, but hey. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.:  they have so many restored single screen theaters in that town, you should plan to stay for a year.  Check out The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd., the Vista on Sunset Drive and  perhaps the (sometimes controversial) New Beverly (owner, Quentin Tarantino), just for starters. Seattle’s Cinerama Theater is, I’m told, a wonder. 

There are scads of single-screen houses listed in Cinema Treasures. How many of them boast a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia (Super Panavision 70) is anybody’s guess, but I remain, as always, optimistic.

[1] Paul, William, 1996, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology and the Motion Picture Screen, 
in The Movies: Texts, Receptions and Exposures, eds. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsburg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 245-6.

 

There are several balconies in the St. George Theater, and only one is the real thing.

One of the fake ones is a “Juliet” balcony:  an iron structure that appears before non-functioning stained-glass windows above the theater’s central corridor. Since the paintings along the upper walls of that hall depict bullfighters, senoritas in lace mantillas seem always about to appear on the small faux balcony, hiding perhaps behind small black fans. How many settings in old movie/Vaudeville houses are meant to evoke dramas or fantasies of some kind, before the weary traveler encounters the actual show?  The whole house is a show, inside the auditorium as well, where--at the St. George--large gilded figures, said to be two of the Greek muses (Erato? Terpsichore?) occupy their own capacious theater boxes. Over the years, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to take the advice of Brenda, our long ago box-office ticket seller, to “...‘joy the show!” From the very first night in 1929, (when Blossom Seeley, “the original red-hot mama,” claimed the theater’s new stage while So This is College bloomed on the screen), through the steely-grey light of Myrna Loy and Dick Powell in The Thin Man movies, the muses have stood watch. A sudden burst of Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind ushered in a film age. I like to imagine the two gilded statues watching a 1950‘s take on the ancient world in Ben Hur. Erato, muse of, among other things, erotic poetry, probably felt at home all through the sixties. What might she have made of The Graduate? The Exorcist in 1974 and again in '76, could turn the head of any statue. After that, the theater went dark for a long time, so the muses got to take a nap.

But I digress; it’s balconies I’m here to discuss — not the kind Juliet or Spanish ladies are wont to inhabit, but the actual one, the upstairs of the house, my favorite place to sit in the dark and watch a movie or a show, below the dome and just a little bit closer to heaven.

In my time, the mid-seventies, the St. George had 2672 seats, some 1400 of which were — and still are — suspended in a dramatic descent from very near the bottom edge of the dome, out about a third of the way over the orchestra. It’s a cantilevered balcony — boldly anchored to the back wall without any supports from below, quite an architectural feat (take a posthumous bow, Eugene De Rosa) This balcony is one of the largest of its type in the world. The orchestra below enjoys magnificent sight lines, unobscured by pillars or the like.

From time to time I’ve sat in the balcony and wondered, the way I sometimes do in an airplane, “What is keeping this thing up?” But the magic of the house, like that of a great old cave, is that it suspends reality for the viewer:  I forget that my weight and the weight of all the other people sitting there with me is born aloft in this mysterious way. Many other smaller theaters are built in a “stadium” style, with a balcony at the rear, solidly supported from beneath, fine, but less ambitious and acoustically less ideal.

In our time, 1976-77, the balcony was supposed to be off-limits to the audience. With the exception of The Exorcist and certain live events, there were more than enough seats to be had downstairs. Besides, we had crowd-control problems, involving certain teens who wanted to fight and/or break up costly velvet seats. Despite the "BALC NY CLOSED" sign, a number of crafty kids managed to sneak up the red-carpeted stairs and hide in the shadows, smoking reefer, having a high old time, always hoping to be locked in when we closed up at night. To spend the night in there, with unlimited candy would really be cool. But the acoustics in the St. George are fine enough we could catch them out, give a little warning and  listen for the sudden retreat of sneakers on fire escape stairs.

Here’s something I can only speculate about. Before the mid-sixties, many theaters were segregated, their balconies — or parts of their balconies — designated for black audiences. Some theaters, especially in the South, were off-limits entirely to people of color. My research has never revealed segregation at the St. George; It is probably wishful thinking on my part to hope that Fabian Theaters, which owned and operated the SGT from 1938 through 1974, chose integration. Thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation in public places became illegal nationwide, which is hardly to say that it vanished. At any rate, in 1976 our tiny audience — two or three hundred souls scattered throughout a 1200-seat orchestra--were as diverse as our staff, in other words, just about fifty percent European American and fifty percent people of at least part African descent. Given the memories some might have had of assigned seating, perhaps it’s just as well the balcony was closed?

Footnote:  If anyone has anecdotal information about segregation at the St. George Theater in the decades before the seventies, please write our comments column.