I drove by the St. George Theatre last week and, wonder of wonders, the old marquee is really on its way out.  The current management has been saying they’re going to replace it, and, by gum, they’ve done it. Not a moment too soon:  that marquee has been leaking—which is to say rusting—since way before I had a hand in running the place as a movie palace, back in 1976. In those days it actually looked like a marquee, with neon illuminated script, “St George,” above a series of parallel back-lit tracks, where cast aluminum letters could be carefully (and perilously) hung, to spell out whatever second- or third-run fare we were offering that week. Since cast aluminum is fragile (breaking if dropped to the pavement) we were frequently reduced to finding creative ways to spell things (such as upside-down M’s for W’s). I understand the new post-millennial marquee will be LED, which saddens me, but then who wants to teeter on a folding ladder on a steeply-slanted sidewalk leading downhill to New York Harbor?

Long after we showed the last reel of Carrie, back in ’77, a parking lot magnate acquired the place for live shows. To our horror, he treated the marquee like a kind of cake, frosting it in ornate plaster and stucco, embedding a tiny neon script “St. George” in the center. No doubt, he was trying to circumvent the leakage problem, but to no avail. When it rained, water still ran out from under the plaster, freezing often enough, and increasing the risks of walking under the overhang (I was sure the whole thing, rusted badly under its heavy load, would fall on me or some other innocent pedestrian, so I walked in the street for many years). So, kudos to management, who’ve won a five million dollar plus grant to do a variety of things interior and exterior. Meanwhile, to celebrate the removal of all that hideous plaster, I’m dedicating the remainder of this blog post to theater marquees and their multiple uses. Mostly, these ornate overhangs have served to advertise what’s showing, but there have been and continue to be creative uses for these gigantic illuminated message boards.

The most intriguing alternative use is as literary devices in novels and in movies themselves! To quote from a "novelization" of a cult film:

"Continuing to the end of the block, Marty found himself in front of the Essex Theater, a movie house which he had never seen before but felt he knew intimately. According to his mother and father — especially when a few drinks loosened their lips—the Essex was the local petting parlor during the early and mid-1950s. There, in the balcony or deep recesses of the back row, many warm and wonderful relationships were spawned. Occasionally, people even went there to see a movie, although oldtimers like Mom and Dad never reminisced about what was on the screen. Now it advertised in large red letters: CATTLE QUEEN OF MONTANA, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reegan. Beneath the marquee floated a banner that read AIR CONDITIONED."
—From Back to the Future by George Gipe (quote, page 83)

In Back to the Future, Cattle Queen of Montana was part of the theater’s past, but Orgy American Style would indicate its transformation, by 1985, into a 24-hour porn house. When Marty travels beyond his own adolescence, into the future, the same theater features Jaws 19 (Spielberg referencing Spielberg), in the unfathomable year of 2015.

The New York Times  noted in 1995, “When film characters go to the movies, or even pass a movie theater, the title on the marquee usually embodies a message. It can be a subtle commentary, a foreshadowing or merely an act of whimsy.” Think Woody Allen in Annie Hall, The Purple Rose of Cairo or Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Beyond plot devices and outright advertising, marquees can serve as blank slates for self-expression. For example, this summer in Milwaukee, Dan Carpenter proposed to Kat (last name not listed) using the device of the Riverside Theatre’s otherwise blank marquee. The couple had, apparently, had one of their first dates at the Riverside, an old movie/Vaudeville house of some 2500 seats, these days a working live theater which remarkably still boasts its original  3-manual 13-rank Wurlitzer organ.

Perhaps what started me off on this riff about marquees is an interesting article I read in The New York Times this past Sunday about a treasured Brooklyn movie house. the Pavilion, originally the single-screen Sanders that’s in the process of being revitalized to become the new Nitehawk Cinema (the original Nitehawk is in Williamsburg).  Now as you may know, I am originally a poet, so when I read that the Nitehawk folks had hired some Brooklyn poets to keep the marquee active during renovation, by writing Brooklyn movie haikus, I was intrigued.

But here’s what gave me goosebumps: And though the haikus fit flawlessly on the Pavilion’s marquee, Pisarra [Drew Pisarra, one of the poets] said the theater does not always have the letters needed to produce all of the poems, which requires some literary logistics to ensure there are enough As, Bs, and Cs.  

Just like the old days! -- when we had to spell out WW and the Dixie Dance Kings, as (upside-down M, upside-down M) & the Dix Dnc Kngs. We had run out of “i’s” and “w’s.”. Fortunately, this cryptic message was on the uphill side, which, fewer people read. The downhill side, visible to people walking up the hill from the ferry, was okay.

Afterthought #1: Paulie, a staffer who often changed the marquee letters on Tuesday nights, suggested we simply put See Other Side on the uphill face of the marquee, but he was voted down.

Afterthought #2: Dean, my husband and long-ago partner at the St. George Theatre, recalls driving to the Pavilion Theater in Brooklyn (the Sanders in those days), on a mission to procure two gigantic red plastic J’s, two A’s, two W’s and one S (for the anticipated arrival of JAWS the following week). These letters were twice the size of our old-school aluminum letters; the theater manager, who was selling them for ten dollars apiece, couldn’t furnish a second S, which had “gone missing.” He told Dean, “We had an usher named Sam, I think he swiped it to put on his bedroom wall.”

Correction: An earlier version of this blog post mistakenly identified the quoted text from Back to the Future as a novel that preceded the film. It was, actually, a "novelization" after the script.      Mea Culpa.  

The world is divided on many topics, among them: whether you have a moral obligation to leave the toilet seat up or down, how to eat a slice of pizza, and whether MacArthur Park is a valid song or (unintentional?) kitsch. Once world opinion was divided on liking/not liking Jerry Lewis; a majority of the French are adoring fans!

Americans? Not so much. But now that Lewis is gone, I suspect the passionate anti-Lewis folks will quiet down and remember him as  the ultimate Catskill comic, who played the doofus skinny marink to Dean Martin’s suave guy. Brilliant! In the years that followed WWII, lots of guys identified with Martin, though they feared they were really more like the inept character Lewis personified. After Lewis and Martin split, Jerry went on to do all manner of things. Whether or not he really invented video assist (still used by directors today) is controversial,  but he was a notable filmmaker, writing, producing, and directing many of his own films (The Bellboy, The Nutty Professor, The Ladies’ Man), eventually garnering the attention of French film critics. If you’re curious, read an obituary. Variety and the Los Angeles Times both gave lavish treatments. The Lewis obit in The New York Times almost qualifies as a posthumous resumé. But it’s flawed, failing to mention an interesting sideline in Lewis‘ career that nearly drove him into bankruptcy: he actually went into business as the owner of a chain of movie theaters. I wrote about this little-known career fiasco myself two years ago, and I offer it here once again, in tribute. As one reader, Brian, commented recently on reading the original post, “In that picture, Jerry Lewis looks like he's ready to vomit. Perhaps in that moment he had a vision into the future and ultimate fate of Jerry Lewis Cinemas...”   

Read all about it here:

You Too Can (or could once) Own a Jerry Lewis Cinema (12/15/2015)
The one in Canton, CT is a post office. The St. Louis franchise morphed into Cathedral of the Crossroads, and the Niagara Falls venue has been split between OTB (Off Track Betting) and a pizzeria. Jerry Lewis Cinemas as a franchise concept were a horrible failure, with perhaps 200 of these small (less than 300-seat) cinemas open nationwide at their peak in the mid-seventies. While we were going broke running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theater, in Staten Island, only twenty minutes away another would-be entrepreneur was struggling to keep the doors of the local Jerry Lewis franchise on Forest Avenue open and in operation. We had more in common with this unfortunate theater operator than we might have been willing to admit.
 
We were a buck-fifty, second-run house. They were a buck seventy-five. We booked The Sunshine Boys if I remember, for what was supposed to be an exclusive second run, and they got their hands on exactly the same product. In newspaper parlance you could say they “scooped” us, but it didn’t really matter, because there was no way we could cover our overhead, even if every soul who sat in their cracker-box seats had come over to our tough super-urban St. George neighborhood. As rivals we were both failing, and for many of the same reasons. For much of the rest of the year we were in business they continued to run Airport 1975, trying to work off a huge advance.
 
What exactly were the Jerry Lewis Cinemas anyhow?  How did the comic star whose name is most associated with Dean Martin or with Muscular Dystrophy telethons nearly go bankrupt himself with a chain of movie theater franchises?
 
“If you can press a button and meet our investment requirements, you can own one or a chain of Jerry Lewis Cinemas...” began the full-page October 8, 1969 ad in Variety. 
 
Seven years later, as we prepared to open our own movie house, we could have taken a lesson from this already failing business model. By the mid-seventies, a number of Jerry Lewis franchisees — including, probably, the poor guy on Forest Avenue — had already discovered what we in turn would learn. Of all the businesses on earth to jump into feet first, movie theater operation, with (in the seventies) its dearth of available product, wars with movie distributors, and hidden costs, might be second only to restaurant ownership in difficulty of management. The typical Jerry Lewis theater owner was a movie-goer, not someone who had grown up tearing ticket stubs or popping popcorn. To quote Cinelog, “...the most glaring flaw was the very concept that anyone could own a theatre and operate it with minimal effort. As with far too many ‘get rich’ schemes, all of the [operators] had been ‘blinded’ by their fantasies and failed to consider the practical realities of running a successful business, let alone a business as unique as a movie theatre.”
 
Near as I can tell, our local Jerry Lewis Cinema went out of business around 1980. It is rumored (verification unavailable) that they were turned off by Con Ed for non-payment of their electric, something that nearly happened to us on several occasions. 
 
By that time, Jerry Lewis and his partner in the venture, National Cinemas Corporation had filed for bankruptcy, though Lewis saved himself by making a movie with the ironic title, Hardly Working. He is said to have greatly regretted his decision to found this ill-starred chain, and the feeling, amongst former managers and their families, seems to have been the only thing that was mutual.
 
To quote Cinelog once again, “...one particular individual [a former franchisee]...relayed that, even thirty plus years after the fact, Lewis’ yearly telethon appearance never fails to anger him.” It hadn’t been Lewis’ intention to fail. He made several mistakes, not the least of which was to establish a chain which booked only G and PG movies at a time when R ratings were the norm. But in the larger sense, he made the same mistake we made at our failing movie palace: he thought you didn’t have to have any direct experience to run a movie theater. Perhaps, as a performer, he assumed that the movie exhibition business was no big deal. He assumed, as we did in a completely different theater setting, that you can jump into the water and then learn how to swim.
 
Afterthought: I liked Martin and Lewis, but avoided Jerry Lewis films like the plague, when I was young. Lewis was old hat, I thought. Now, having read enough about people standing in the rain in Paris for tickets to Docteur Jerry et Mr. Love (aka The Nutty Professor), I’m intrigued. It’s a take-off on Dr. Jekyll apparently, and that makes sense to me now. Wasn’t he half of something once, with Dean Martin?

Here are some of the great comments from readers of this original Jerry Lewis blog post:

For a man who taught film @USC and invented the instant playback for directors, he was very naive about film distribution. My first real job was in a theater and I learned quickly that it's about entertaining your paying customers. —Charles Winfield

i think they were probably doomed with g and pg movies, as pg-13 didn't arrive until 1984. —Brett Adams

In that picture, Jerry Lewis looks like he's ready to vomit. Perhaps in that moment he had a vision into the future and ultimate fate of Jerry Lewis Cinemas... —Brian

My family owned a franchise in St. Louis. Maybe the one that's now the Cathedral of the Crossroads. I remember seeing Monty Python's Flying Circus there when I was in Kindergarten. So, not a total loss for me. —Brian S

The first movie I saw at my local Jerry Lewis Cinema in 1973 was the R-rated SAVE THE TIGER. —Donald Farmer     (I failed to catch the irony in this comment earlier:  the franchisee was breaking the rules of Jerry Lewis Cinema management, by running an R.  But who could blame the poor character?)

What do Americans from the lower 48 do in the middle of August?  When I was growing up in the Midwest in the early fifties, well-off folk went to Michigan, a word which, in summer, automatically evokes blueness and stillness. The really wealthy, it was rumored, went to Europe. Some families had an Airstream on “the lake,” wherever that might be, and the rest of us stayed home.

“Staycations” may not have been a word in the (Urban) Dictionary yet, but many people took them just the same, ending up often enough on a hot August Saturday, in some or another movie theater. That might have been a stadium-style theater, if it was in the neighborhood, or a full-blown movie palace with a cantilevered balcony, if it was “downtown.”

The summer movie was a substitute for being “away.” Two decades later, in 1976, my husband and I and a group of friends found ourselves running a 2,672-seat palace in St. George, Staten Island. Yes, we did show Jaws, that summer-est of all movies, released the previous year, in June. Why is it I remember the trailer and not the movie? Probably because I never sat down and watched the whole thing, start to finish, but did watch that evocative scene where the young woman is swimming in the moonlight and, well, you know the rest. The St. George was — and is — a proper movie palace, with a fully cantilevered balcony. Families had, since its opening as a mixed Vaudeville/movie house, enjoyed summer fare of some kind or another.

In that first summer, Romance, a movie starring the simmering Greta Garbo, Raffles, a Ronald Colman to-catch-a-thief sort of flick, and the irrepressible Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, were all released, all of them premiering at the St. George. As early as 1930, Hollywood had a handle on the notion that people wanted to go into the dark, get cool (movie theaters were among the first public places to receive the blessing of air conditioning) — and watch lighter fare. No surfing movies back then, no block-buster thrillers, but comedy, thievery and romance, easily metabolized by an audience who had nothing but electric fans awaiting them at home.

A decade later, in 1940, Errol Flynn swashbuckled his way across better than forty-thousand summer screens in The Seahawk. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney gave the teen popcorn crowd something to moon over, with Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (why not a debutante?), and Gable, Tracey, Colbert and Lamarr in Boom Town helped people who weren’t on vacation get lost in a fantasy of oil speculations and romance. Notice what wasn’t released in summer that year: The Philadelphia Story, Rebecca, Northwest Passage, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator (heavy duty, academy-award-winning in many cases, and not-for-summer-primetime viewing).

Summer movies by 1950 included such fare as Annie Get Your Gun (Busby Berkeley, George Sidney, music by Berlin), Broken Arrow, starring James Stewart in a Technicolor western, and Father of the Bride, in which Spencer Tracey gets the honor of walking a nubile Liz Taylor down the aisle (released in June, of course!).

1960 gives us a sea-change. There’s The Apartment, a frothy racy drama about New York executives sharing a “pad,” (Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred McMurray), and Oceans Eleven, the rat-pack involved in robbing casinos, but what’s new in the summer of 1960? Psycho! — the movie my mother wouldn’t let me see, because of that shower scene. Well, there is the spooky motel...but, for 1960 especially, it’s pretty heavy duty.

This is where I’m going: froth endures as summer fare — always will — but terror, like the cheap thrill of rollercoasters enters the summer psyche in the sixties. Sometimes it’s mixed with sea-water, as in Jaws (1975) the movie that changed forever the way Hollywood thinks about summer, or it takes place in outer space, where you can’t scream because nobody will hear you (The Alien, 1979, directed by Ridley Scott, with a young Sigourney Weaver on board), but edge-of-the-seat thrills, especially after Jaws, are the summer thing, the stuff that keeps you from freezing to death in an over-air-conditioned theater. Jaws stole a piece of America’s summer heart, perhaps forever.

The summer of our theater year, 1976, as I mentioned we ran Jaws, then only a year old. We subsequently ran: Don’t Open the Window, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Superdragon and The Dragon Dies Hard (starring the deceased Bruce Lee), Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Torso (a double feature), Death Machines, Godzilla vs. Megalon, The Exorcist, The Food of the Gods (H.G. Wells), and The Omen. These comprised our own hand-picked festival of mostly second-hand movies for summer watching, with only a few incidental comedies and the occasional midnight stoner movie (Yellow Submarine, Woodstock) mixed in for contrast. The Omen was the only official 1976 summer release on the whole list. The remaining accumulation of sci-fi monsters, chainsaw-wielding terrorist, mechanical shark, unhinged fleet driver, possessed little girl, and so on, were enough to keep whoever wandered into the St. George slightly on the edge of one of our ragged velvet seats, gnawing happily on popcorn.
 
Afterthought:
This summer headlined, as recently as last week in Variety  as “the summer from hell” for Hollywood and for American movie theater operators — movie-biz folks’ own private horror extravaganza. Game of Thrones, the threat of digital streaming, an over-reliance on sequels, Chinese investors, all have been blamed for disastrously-low box office. Read about it, if you can stand to. Movie palaces, some of them, are surviving, even doing well, as live venues. But what will become of the movies?

Cruising East Forsythe Street in Jacksonville, it’s hard to miss Florida in giant neon script letters, above an elegant well-preserved marquee. I’ve done this before — hit a town for the first time, and sought out its core (and hopefully restored) movie palace, happy to stumble on whatever the place has to offer on a Saturday morning. This particular Saturday, it was Ballet Arts a Jacksonville dance outfit, having its recital and raising a little money from the sale of teeshirts. A deliciously diverse corps of adolescent ballerinas in blue costumes — on a background of white snowflakes (Snow! in Jacksonville?) leaped energetically onstage. Out in the lobby, younger costumed children ate pizza on the steps near the concession stand, waiting their turn to perform. Touching, inspiring, but, as is true in old movie palaces all over America, these ballerinas wouldn’t have had any place to leap if it hadn’t been for the efforts of a determined group of people — the city council, elements of the state legislature, and the Arts Assembly, assisted by a HUD grant — who saved The Florida from almost certain demolition, situated as it was in a deserted downtown. But one man is who ultimately brought it all together — you’ll hear about him soon. This blog, as you probably know, is dedicated to saved, almost-saved and demolished movie palaces and theaters everywhere. Why do I care? I was involved in helping to keep one theater, The St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace five blocks from where I live, in Staten Island, alive back in 1976, several decades before there were people ready and with the bucks to save it. 

But back to the Florida, which has quite a story of its own. Jake Godbold, the mayor of Jacksonville from 1979 to 1987, is on record as being proud of two things he managed to accomplish in a little less than a decade of mayorality: he saved Jacksonville’s train terminal and he saved the exquisite 1978-seat Florida Theatre, a “Mediterranean” confection that features terracotta tiles, and multiple back-lit balconies in its warmly-sconced lobby.

​How exactly did Jack Godbold manage to save the Florida, and what made him want to do it? Like Rosemary Cappozola of Staten Island, who loved  the St. George Theatre, her own hometown movie palace, enough to mortgage her house, buy the imperiled theater and save it, Jake Goldbold loved the Florida as only a home-grown Jacksonvillian could. It was the arrival of Elvis Presley in 1956 — whose controversial hip gyrations had already scandalized a local Baptist congregation and caused a Juvenile Court Judge to threaten Presley with arrest warrants — that sealed Godbold’s love for the place. He and his future wife were teenagers then, and in the audience when Elvis gave a slightly-restrained performance, at the urging of the judge and the Baptist preacher, whose congregation actually had prayed for Elvis.  

Elvis had appeared in Jacksonville the year before. His “suggestive” movements had, apparently, driven the audience wild, causing some overwrought teen girls to try to rip his clothes off. This time, the presence of Judge Marion Gooding in the audience — the judge who had issued the famous warnings against lewd body movements — kept a rein on things. In a meeting with the judge prior to performance, Elvis was told he could move his hips side-to-side but not back and forth. On-stage, Elvis apparently restrained himself in this way, teasing the audience by wiggling only a raised finger when he wanted to move his hips front to back, and advising the audience to “drive carefully on your way home and don’t let anybody pass you.” Gooding was satisfied that nobody had tried to rip Elvis‘ clothes off, and the Florida only smoldered with teen passions, rather than burning to the ground. 

It was this moment in time, which actually got a write-up in Life (“A Town All Worked Up,” August 27, 1956) that set Godbold’s feet in the direction of saving the Florida, which, like so many movie palaces in the seventies and eighties, was threatened with demolition.

I’m thinking now what single event would make me want to save my beloved hometown theater, the Albee in Cincinnati?  Elvis, to my knowledge, never appeared there. But what I feed off fifty years later is a long series of childhood Saturdays, a sweet growing-up time, underneath a regal dome with popcorn and Switzer’s Licorice. The unfortunate Albee was not saved. In 1977, despite the tireless efforts of Save-the-Albee Cincinnatians, the theater that had opened fifty years earlier with Clara Bow in “Get Your Man!” closed with a wrecking crew. Eight hundred miles away, I cried for two theaters: the Albee — a pile of rubble and dreams — and the St. George — which only a year before I’d gone broke trying to save. 

Two years after that, in 1979, Jake Godbold took his seat as Mayor of Jacksonville, and the Florida, only half of its 1900 seats still functional, closed a year later. Sometimes only one determined person is all it takes to save a theater — Rosemary Cappozola of local St. George Theatre fame is one example. Another is one Helen Casey, who saw Casablanca first run at The Victory in Holyoke, MA, and spent several decades seeing that rubble-strewn theater safely into the hands of the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts. Often, when theaters are saved, whole communities are turned around, because theaters are anchors of fiscal  wellness and much-needed community centers, in troubled neighborhoods. Think The Florida, all those dancers sitting on the marble steps next to the theater’s concession stand, eating pizza, waiting to perform. Without that lobby and stage where would they have been on that particular Saturday afternoon?

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, Versailles, the Doge’s domicile — are for princes and their kin.
 
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 actually 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,”( or “scratch houses”) 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” at this point listed as standing and operational: The Palace Theatre (Albany, N.Y.), The Palace Theatre (Waterbury, Ct.), The Connor Palace  (Cleveland, O.), The Loraine Palace Theatre (Loraine, O.) and The Louisville Palace Theatre (Louiseville, Ky.)? These are just a sampling: is there a movie palace you've dwelt in, however temporarily?
 
After-thought:
It might interest you to know that “palace” in English comes from the French, “Palais,” a house for kings or nobles, which took its cue from  the Latin, “Palatine,” the name of the most noble of ancient Rome’s exceedingly noble seven hills. The Palatine hill was where Caesar had his house, which kept going through renos until it became (you guessed it) a palace. Nearly two thousand years later, Jay Sarno, a latter-day theatrical entrepreneur and real estate developer, built Caesar’s Palace a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, determined to out-Caesar the Caesars. When A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum premiered there in 1966, United Artists ran a chariot race to celebrate, and ushers dressed as Praetorian guards, proving what exactly? Perhaps that the American fascination with all things over-the-top is a big part of what we’ll leave behind.