Is there such a thing as a summer movie? Perhaps only Hollywood knows for sure. At the St. George Theatre in the summer of 1976, we ran Jaws, a great summer movie that was, by that time, only a little antique. It had come out the summer before, which made it perfect for us, a “buck fifty” second- or third-run movie palace on the verge of extinction. We painted the portico of the theater red and blue to welcome the great white shark, found enough J’s A’s and W’s from our dwindling stock of aluminum marquee letters, and popped corn, waiting for the audiences to stream in. But as I recall, the shark yawned at our box office receipts. What were we thinking? It was only May 12, not summer yet! Forty years later, one more summer of my life all but gone — at least the part that counts,  pre-Labor Day — I’m preoccupied with the idea that the words “summer” and “movie” belong together, to say nothing of “summer at the movies,” a signature American past-time. I’ve been walking around asking people I know (and some I just met) “What do ‘summer’ and ‘movie’ have to do with each other?”

Over a glass of wine on the porch, my next-door neighbor,  Karen, waxed nostalgic right away. She thinks 1982 sounds about right.

“If you say ‘summer movie’ I think ‘beach movies,’ but I wouldn’t  mind watching those in winter when my feet are cold. Anyhow, me and my two friends, Theresa and Dawn, made it to the drive-in in my parents’ ‘72 Gran Torino Ford wagon, green with the brown panelling. The hood had plenty of space for all three of us to lean back on the windshield, like a recliner...Honestly? I don’t remember what we saw. First Blood? E.T.?  I just remember the glory of basking, it was about independence...”

Never to be out-done, Dean poured a little more pinot blanc and picked up on the drive-in theme: 

“If you had a dime in Ohio, in the summer of 1961, you could go to the movies. This in spite of the fact that you were fifteen and too old to pay for a 35-cent child’s ticket at the Deer Park Cinema. The Montgomery Drive-In was the answer, All Shows, All Times, All Cars: $1.20 a Carload.  Our evening began at the Quentin K. Stanley Funeral Home, where, if we were lucky and there was no funeral, Quentin’s eldest could commandeer the older seldom-used hearse. For a buck twenty at least a dozen of us could pack in, sardine-style, cokes, snacks, lawn chairs, the whole enchilada (we didn’t know what an enchilada was in those days, but if we had, we’d have brought ‘em). Typically, the Montgomery showed three films: something family-oriented like King of Kings, followed by the one we came to see, The Absent Minded Professor or West Side Story. Then, if the hearse wasn’t due back before midnight, we’d stay for the creepy third title, like House on Haunted Hill or Pit and the Pendulum, or even The Blob. Such fare made the 25-minute ride back to Deer Park in the tufted interior of the hearse, weirder than the trip out.

For me, summer means getting on the bus and meeting my best friend downtown for a quick grilled-cheese sandwich in the Arcade under the Carew Tower, then catching something racy at one of the big palaces, the Albee or the RKO International 70. Her mother didn’t care what she saw, and my mother’s only prohibitions had to do with violence. I’d been forbidden to see Psycho in 1960 when it came out, but she had no problem with Albert Finney and Susannah York tumbling into the bushes after consuming the most erotic chicken dinner ever recorded in Tom Jones. The year was 1963, and I was fifteen, just old enough for Cleopatra, starring Burton and Taylor, whose love affair off-screen was only hinted at under all that make-up. 

Four years earlier, we’d gone to the Oakley Drive-In — acting as inadvertent chaperones for my friend’s divorcee mother on dates with her rodeo cowboy fiancé. I was in fourth grade then, and my mother —more interested in what I was seeing in the front seat of that long-ago Chevy than what was on screen — called these Saturday nights off. It’s interesting that Dean recalls the third movie at his (Montgomery) Drive-In as typically a horror flick. My memory of the Oakley's 1 A.M. (third) movie, which I made sure to stay awake for, was that you learned grown-up things. Suddenly, Last Summer,  On the Beach, Black Orpheus: serious fare, when everyone else was asleep.

My sister Judy lives these days in a retirement community in Philadelphia. Of her Cincinnati childhood at the movies, she says “There were matinees at the Ambassador and the Twentieth Century on Wednesdays in summer!” To which I replied, “Wednesday matinees went on all year, but you just didn’t know about them because you were in school.” We former movie-theater operators know a thing or two.

An informal survey at Cathedral Village Beauty Salon, staffed by the two Ritas, who agree to be quoted, reveals that a good summer movie should feature excitement and/or the beach; failing these things, it should be scary.  So we end as we began, with that summer movie of all summer movies, Jaws. One of the two Ritas saw it free at a local Philly theater, thanks to the fact that her friend worked there. The theater (don’t know the name) is now, apparently a Dollar Store.

Judy and I both remember, in recent history, our forays to the estimable (and still open for business) Niantic Cinema in Niantic, Ct., a beach town close to a summer house we shared for several decades. You went into Niantic to see a movie when it rained, and you couldn’t go to the beach. I saw John Huston’s The Dead  there, a movie-going experience so profound that that movie lives for me in that modest theater, coming out on a gray day to gaze across the railroad tracks at the even grayer sea.

All for now — enjoy what’s left of August. It’s time to buy tickets to Florence Foster Jenkins, before the summer is over. Off I go.

​What’s the best pair of movie titles you ever saw together on a marquee?  Perhaps my favorite is a porn double title, glimpsed briefly in downtown Cincinnati, where I grew up; it was on the marquee of the Royale, Cincinnati’s only porn house:  BOX LUNCH followed by THAR SHE BLOWS. In our desperate year (1976) running the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, we thankfully never sank so low as to show hard porn — it might have had a negative impact on what was left of the velvet seats in our auditorium. But the double features we struggled to advertise on our marquee (with the dwindling collection of aluminum marquee letters we possessed) could often be funny or wild. Texas Chainsaw Massacre shared marquee and screen space with Torso, for example. The Legend of Bigfoot and The Giant Spider Invasion, left little room in my imagination for anything serene.

Two for the price of one: in my childhood and before that, every theater ran back-to-back movies, not to mention trailers, newsreels and cartoons. In the golden age of the movies (1930’s and 40’s), the palaces were packed daily, and if a house offered a double feature, both were usually first run. There was actually so much product coming out of Hollywood that Sam Goldwyn and his peers had classified new films as A or B, top of the bill or second feature. Casablanca, for example, was conceived and shot as a B feature.
 
But in 1976, the “buck fifty” (second or even third-run) movie house circuit revived the notion of “two for one.” The St. George was just such a house. While we were in charge, an A picture was a first-run film released two or more years earlier, such as Carrie, while a  B picture could be even older, though it had probably been a major attraction to begin with. An A feature cost us a percentage of the house, usually 30 percent. However, a tired old B feature could be had for a flat fifty dollars. Once we tried to book two B pictures from two separate distributors — which would have allowed us to rely on candy sales for a living — but Warner and UA checked with each other and squashed our effort.

For a six-hour projection shift, we usually scheduled three films: A B A (the A picture twice, the B feature once). Other films that we ran together include: The Sunshine Boys and Harry & Tonto, Blazing Saddles and Smile, Lady Sings the Blues and Foxy Brown. Towering Inferno combined with Earthquake became our “Shake and Bake” special. Looking back on all of these, I find it difficult to tell in most cases which was the main feature, revealing how short of product the industry really was, especially on the buck-fifty circuit.

Double features faded away, along with scheduled baseball double-headers, but everything that goes around comes around. In addition to websites that help a movie-goer to exploit the times of various movies shown within a common plex, (AKA “movie-hopping”) thematic festivals featuring horror and kiddie flicks keep viewers in the lobby or near the candy stand. At home, binge-watching (three Mad Men in a row or five episodes of Girls) gives the effect of movie watching, almost.

Dean (my life partner and, in 1976, my entrepreneurial partner) recalls picking up the box office line early one evening at the St. George, when a sarcastic voice at the other end asked, “This Texas Chainsaw and Torso thing, these two movies, is the second one what’s left after the chainsaw?” Giggling followed and the line went dead.

We weren’t in Staten Island in January of ’69, not yet. By June of that year we’d arrived, newlyweds whose apartment had no air conditioner, not even a fan. Out for a drive, we drifted into the movie palace’s chilled red and gold lobby and laid some change on the marble sill for a couple of tickets. Six and a half years after that, in April of 1976, we’d be selling — not buying — tickets at  the St. George’s box office window, as newly-minted theater operators.

​I don’t have to tell you that movies like Gone With the Wind (or The Wizard of Oz — Lawrence of Arabia — Dr. Zhivago)  were made for theaters like The St. George. But, with the exception of The Man Who Would Be King (which flopped miserably), we never ran Gone With the Wind, or any of them.

By the time we came along, what the neighborhood wanted was blood and action. A little sex was good, but not romance, and certainly not dated romance that harbored apologies for ante-bellum slavery. Still, late in the season of our crazy theater entrepreneurship, Dean insisted on ordering — and re-ordering — the trailer for GWTW, with no hope of booking the movie itself. When this “Coming Attraction” shone its red/gold light on the first few rows of the orchestra, I could usually find him camped out front row center, with a box of Sno-Caps. Max Steiner’s glorious soundtrack had called us both to watch.
 
Trailers really are short films — there’s an art to making them. They’re hors d’oeuvres. If we couldn’t dine out on a classic, we could snack on brief glimpses of it: A spooked horse and a rickety wagon against the backdrop of burning Atlanta, Scarlett and the white portico of Tara, Rhett carrying his flailing wife to bed up an improbably long crimson staircase. As dated as the movie itself, the trailer was a satisfying glimpse of what our endangered movie palace had been built to contain.

That full-color trailer was crafted in 1939, arguably the golden year of movies, when stylized Deco letters swung in from the right and popped over scenes of a promised film: THE LAUGHS ARE MONSTROUS! (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), MIGHTIEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIME! (The Charge of the Light Brigade), SPECTACULAR! (almost anything not a comedy), in high-contrast black and white. Even though GWTW was one of Hollywood’s first full-length feature films shot entirely in color, its trailer stuck — but for the use of color — with the classic trailer formula:  an establishing shot of name actors, a two-minute-thirty-eight second sound track, and the inevitable baritone announcer, “The most memorable event in the annals of motion pictures...”

GWTW’s original trailer currently boasts 116,384, while a modern adaptation stands this morning at 1,716,917. I’ve added one to each of these numbers. Remarkable! You don’t have to rent a movie palace to visit Tara anymore.

From The Evening Telegram, August 10, 1904, concerning the Sparta Theatre, a 475-seat house in Coney Island Brooklyn:
 
"The first intimation that a blaze existed was given to the audience on the canvas in which the moving pictures were being shown. the machine itself caused the fire as the result of the photographic films coming in contact with the carbon flame.

On the canvas was being shown a picture of Dante’s “Inferno.” . . . At first the audience thought the reflection was part of the picture, but the cry of fire brought them to the realization that the picture was near to being real."
           
I’m fortunate enough never to have been in a theater on fire, and doubly blessed, because I once helped to run a 2672-seat movie palace — the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 1976 — which failed to go up in flames during our movie-house tenancy. The above-referenced Sparta fire started in what would now be called the theater’s projection booth. Although film wasn’t as flammable in 1976 as it was in ’04, at the St. George we were still running carbon arc projectors, which relied on actual fire as light.

What would we have done? The standpipe system was intimidating, and as a core member of the St. George’s hard-scrabble crew of ardent movie palace entrepreneurs, I can attest to the fact that we were only beginning to learn about crowd control. Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming book, Starts Wednesday: A Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, to make my point:

It was a Saturday in May, a matinee. Between movies, the audience packed the lobby, chatting and eating. Gene was on the door tearing tickets, sitting on a tall metal stool. Paullie was in concession, barely keeping up with orders for hot dogs, Charleston Chews and popcorn.

"FIRE!

Who hollered it? We never found out. Gene’s stool sailed in slo-mo, clattering across the foyer. Perhaps three hundred people found themselves on the sidewalk in under twenty seconds. Then someone laughed and folks beneath the marquee all looked at one another. Quickly, amiably, the audience filed back inside to buy popcorn and wait for the second feature.

Part of why I love to tell this story is that is wasn’t a real fire, and, despite the panic, no harm was done. Those are always the best stories from anyone’s life, the disasters that weren’t disasters after all. Fires in theaters have been so common in the past as to have become a well-worn cliche, as in the old (first amendment) saw, “Don’t yell FIRE in a crowded theater” — of which the above is a classic example. 

The Sparta description is only one of many theater fire stories. I’ve cribbed it from The Brooklyn Theatre Index, Volume III, Coney Island, by an esteemed colleague, Cezar Del Valle, who ought to be the theater-history laureate of Brooklyn, if he isn’t already. I attended his excellent lecture on Coney Island theaters last Saturday at the Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn. If, BTW, you happen to be in New York and you’ve never been to that museum, or to Coney Island, then you should go! Make sure it’s a summer night, warm enough to enjoy the board walk, a beer, perhaps a Nathan’s hotdog, some clams, and maybe a quarter of Peruvian roast chicken with a side of Platanos. Before eating, if you’re brave enough, you might  try some involuntary somersaults on Zenobio — where you can observe the harbor upside-down at a terrific height, or buckle yourself into the moebius-strip called the Thunderbolt. It’s all “carny folk” at Coney Island: the barkers (called “talkers” there by them that know), the lady with the Python.

But I digress. On the subject of theater fires, if you can stand to read about them, there are a number of examples of horrific 19th century conflagrations, dating back to the days of gaslight, a highly volatile way to illuminate a stage, and before fire escapes were part of twentieth-century fire code. The Brooklyn Theatre which burned in 1876, was lit by gaslight and had no fire escapes. The Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, arguably the worst theater fire in U.S. history, took roughly 602 lives — an exact body count was never reached. That house had only a single common exit and virtually no fire-fighting equipment. 

As for the St. George Theatre — the subject of this blog and my upcoming book--our tenancy was plagued by a number of crises involving more-than-occasionally violent audience members and an unfriendly landlord. But I am grateful to say that nothing went up in flames. If, during our year there, a backstage fire had occurred — most theater fires begin in or below the proscenium — well, there was an asbestos theater fire curtain in the fly loft, designed to fall between the audience and the fire, a twentieth-century improvement on theater design, from lessons learned in the 19th. Of course, we also had fire escapes, kept open in our unused balcony during business hours, which served young audience members as a way to sneak in without paying. Such was the life of a mostly-vacant  movie palace in 1976.      

“Near the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s...” — in NYC — is one answer — but you could say, “everywhere.” There’s an Orpheum in Sioux City, Iowa (see above), built in 1927, restored in 1999, home of the Sioux City Symphony. The one in Memphis Tennessee (1928) survived a catastrophic fire and was restored for a chill 4.5 million dollars. The Orpheum in Vancouver, B.C. opened in 1927 with 3000 seats, the biggest theater in Canada. The one in Wichita, Kansas is a treasure of an atmospheric, built by the celebrated Eberson — king of the atmospheric theater architects--to resemble a garden in old Andalusia. 

Most of these are or were movie palaces, like the one I spent 1976 popping popcorn and selling tickets in. My palace, the St. George Theatre, is still standing to this day in Staten Island, New York, just a block and a half uphill from the world’s most famous ferry. But the St. George is no Orpheum, so, for this one blog post, we’ll leave it, in all its Spanish Baroque glory, behind. 

What makes an orpheum and orpheum? All these theaters owe their name to a mythical Greek with a lyre. His music was reputedly so sweet that when his lover, Eurydice, died, he was able to charm Hades, God of the dead, into letting her climb back out of the Underworld with him. If only he hadn’t broken his promise not to look behind at Eurydice as she climbed towards the light! She vanished, of course, a good lesson for all of us, reminding me of what Winston Churchill may or may not have advised, “If you’re going through Hell, keep going.”

Orpheus lost his lady forever, which only made his music the sweeter, another lesson perhaps, about art and suffering. Would’ve made an outstanding movie, and did, as a matter of fact make several.     

The Vaudeville origins of so many movie palaces have everything to do with why theaters bear a reference to Orpheus in their very names. Before there were movie palaces, there were music halls many of which became combined-use facilities. Indeed, music (think theater organs) had a lot to do with claiming the audial attentions of early movie-goers, when silents were silent.  

How many Orpheums (Orpheii?) are there? Of the 50 existing theaters worldwide bearing the name of the Greek hero/semi-god who toted a lyre in and out of Hell, 39 of them are single screen affairs, according to Cinema Treasures, who ought to know.

The Orpheum in Sioux Falls, S.D. — rumored to be haunted by a ghost named “Larry,” — is a single screen theater which, indeed, began its life as a Vaudeville house in 1913. On West Main Street in Ada, Minnesota, the single-screen Orpheum, dating to the early 1920’s, is the treasure of Mr. Harry Rocker, who has apparently owned it for better than three decades. In Galesburg, Illinois, the local Orpheum is a Rapp and Rapp confection. Built in a French Renaissance style, it’s entirely live these days, the home of the Prairie Players Community Theatre, among other groups of performers.

For all his talents, Orpheus didn’t end well — which you may know. After losing Eurydice, he swore off women forever, apparently infuriating the jealous women of Thrace, who tore him limb from limb and threw his lovely head into the river, a head which nonetheless kept singing, as it drifted out to sea. As Churchill apparently didn’t, after all, say, but I’ll quote him anyhow, “Never, ever, ever...give up!”