What did a nickel buy at the movies once upon a time? In 1905 in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, it bought a ticket to whatever was showing at the  nickelodeon, a flea-bag experience with in many cases bare wooden benches and genuine fleas. By the time I came along in the 1950’s, a nickel at the local stadium-constructed theater bought a small Snickers or a box of Good n’ Plenties; but I’ve leaped over a chunk of time here. Let’s step backward and pause at 1929, the height of the movie palace era: a bag of popcorn cost exactly 5 cents (the equivalent of 62 cents today). A movie ticket in ’29 cost  35 cents, seven times what it had cost in 1905 at the Nickelodeon, (that’ s $4.32 in today’s money). As of 2019, the average cost of a small popcorn is $6.09, yet a movie ticket costs $9.01. 

What gives? Why did the humble bag of corn outstrip inflation so completely, while the price of a ticket only just doubled? Ironically, the movie palace offered glamorous powder rooms, magnificent chandeliers, marble staircases, infant care, an army of uniformed ushers — so much more for so much less — while 2019 movie theaters, even the best of them, feature nary a potted palm. (You can get booze, sandwiches and other delights delivered to your reclining chair, but that is no substitute for elegance or screen-size, subjects of another blog post).

True confession: I was a movie palace operator in 1976, when a group of us tried valiantly to keep the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace in Staten Island near the ferryboats, open for business. Cost of our popcorn then? seventy-five cents  —  and tickets? — a buck fifty for adults. (These are straight out of memory, so not adjusted for inflation). We were a third-run house, but even at premier houses, the deal was about the same: most of the money to be made in ‘76 was from concession sales, which is true today, There’s a reason why concession sales dominate now as they began to then: Hollywood movie studios take upwards of 70% of the opening weekend box office receipts.

Now whatever happens to a theater operator, you gotta have popcorn, and if you want to sell it, it better be fresh-popped. To this day, despite practically living off the corn at the St. George (supplemented with egg salad from home) I astonish myself by continuing to crave the ritual grain; but I won’t buy it, if I don’t see a popper, and if there isn’t at least a slight lingering grassy smell in the lobby, Devoid of popcorn, I’ll shrug and walk into the theater, feeling somewhat naked. 

Popcorn has numerous subtile functions:

• It’s a ritual object intrinsic to the ceremony of moviegoing. I always try to preserve a third of the box or bucket until the movie starts; what a waste to consume all of the magic food during trailers — or these days, worse — ads.

• For the theater operator, it can be a form of currency: we used to give it away when the film broke and while the film (that collective dream moviegoers were having) was being repaired.  What the modern equivalent of that is in our digital projection age, I have no idea.

• A more devious use of popcorn is as subliminal advertising, as popcorn’s major mode of communication is olfactory. If you want more people to show up at concession for the more expensive sodas (35 cents for a small), then pop some fresh corn. This is how you can tell a lot of theaters have gone to hell, such as one of our regular haunts, the Loews/AMC Lincoln Square at 68th and Broadway in Manhattan. Walked in there the other day for Imagine, and not only was nobody in line to buy anything edible, there was no discernible smell of anything, and all the concessionaires were asleep at the counter, like figures in an enchanted castle.   

Returning briefly to the ritual eating of popcorn in theaters, there is something comforting about reaching into the bag or bucket at various filmic moments: the main character, a woman, hasn’t yet realized there’s a stranger in her house; or it’s a comedy and the main character’s a dweeb you nonetheless identify with, who’s just embarrassed all of us. There is also the melting witch, and the flying saucer that just sliced off the top of the Capitol.   

Who knew popcorn could be so versatile!

Afterthought:
At the St. George, our popcorn was, compared to other theaters, relatively cheap. We didn’t actually own our own stand, having, like share-croppers, sold it off to a concession company in Rochester for a loan we had already used up; which is to say we had no true sources of revenue. The running joke among management staff was, “Let’s close down the screen and just sell popcorn," but that would have completely eviscerated whatever cash-flow we had...

“We’re saved!  We’re saved! There’s some people here who want to shoot a movie!” I appeared, breathless, from the auditorium of our 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, which I’d been showing to three women who had walked in off the street. Dean, my impresario husband — whose noble enterprise running the theater largely was — perked up immediately. Fantasies of Brian de Palma or Martin Scorsese briefly interrupted his usual despair.  
 
Business was in a nose-dive. It was winter, 1977, and we were involved in a heat war with the landlord. We needed a miracle — perhaps this was it. “Could be thousands of dollars!” I chirped on, enthusiastically. The women appeared from the auditorium. One of them smiled and gave Dean a card. “Are you the manager? We’d like to rent your theater for an afternoon.” Dean sighed then tried to disguise his disappointment. “You’re shooting a spot, right?” 
 
They were — for an upholstery company, it turned out. We settled on around $850. On the appointed day, bin after bin of lighting equipment rolled in. “This is going to cost at least two hundred in electricity,” I mused, glumly. But the inside of the theater had never seemed so luminous; despite myself, I rejoiced. “Is it always this quiet?”, the production coordinator wondered. “Any interior sounds? Banging heat pipes, that kind of thing?” 
 
I chuckled — “Well that won’t be a problem! ” — then I explained about the landlord and the heat.
 
The shoot was a wrap by 4 PM, and we returned to our role as movie palace operators. By 11 PM we’d raked in around $127 in concession and ticket sales. Concession was the greater part of this haul, on account of the hot coffee and fresh warm popcorn that made it possible to watch a movie in an unheated palace. The day’s take was, even in those days, peanuts, but when I added in the $850 (forgetting the probable bump in next month’s electric bill), I could pretend we’d made a grand.
 
The following day, Dean got two phone calls. The first was from Local 306, the projectionists’ union, demanding we add another 6-hour shift, at $13.75 cents an hour, because we had used the booth--even though the projectionist (had he been around) would have been useless. The second call was from Local 1(IATSI). How many stagehands had we employed? We hadn’t, of course, but they had a right. Answering the phone, “You've reached the St. George Theatre, located in beautiful downtown St. George...” Dean pretended to be a kid working the box office. He’d pass the message on — he promised — to the manager.  
 
Afterthoughts:
1. This blog post is the result of a back-and-forth in the comments column of a previous post. I’d like to thank reader Josephine Scherer for reminding me that we ever DID rent the theater for an upholstery commercial.
 
In her first comment, she recalled the projection booth, as it was in 1977, with phenomenal accuracy. In her second, she went on to describe said commercial. Here’s the better part of what she had to say:
 
I remember the St. George well! We used it as a location for a commercial shoot. And what a projection angle! The booth was scary—if I recall correctly, Century SA's on top of RCA 9030 sound heads, with big Ashcraft rotating positive carbon arc lamps... on five-point bases with railroad ties under the back end to get enough tilt-down! Good thing earthquakes don't happen much in New York!!
 
Now for her comments on the long-ago commercial, and a little more besides:
 
...It was for a chain of fabric stores. We had this wonderful actress who could do a bang-on Judy Holliday impression (we had previously used her in a commercial for a Broadway musical). We start tight on her face, as she says: "My boss said I could re-cover all the chairs in here," and goes on to say that the fabric shop had so many great patterns and colors she couldn't choose just one- "...So, I did one of each!" Then we zoom out, and we see it's a huge theatre, with every seat covered differently. Helen, our prop lady, had a ball making all the slip covers! 
 
Sadly, this was around the time your fine upstanding landlord put the vicious dog in the furnace room so you couldn't turn the heat on... So unspeakably sad.

2. After our time as theater operators, the St. George had a few other side hustles: School of Rock and the TV series SMASH in which it played a role as a theater in Boston. 
 
3. No doubt the reason so many L.A. palaces are alive these days is the side hustles they’re able to get, not just commercials, but full-on shoots.

How did the wicked witch end up melting in The Wizard of Oz? (It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie; the answer to the above question appears in “afterthoughts,” at the end of this post). Wizard was big in my 1950’s childhood, so big I saw it about twelve times, and almost always at one or another of Cincinnati’s movie palaces: the Albee, the Twentieth Century, or the RKO downtown. Some movies demand a decently big screen and Wizard is one of those. You want to really see Margaret Hamilton melt and look carefully for the fabled trapdoor she’s supposed to disappear into (I never manage to see it, but I always look).

Back in June, a friend sent me a card of the 1939 fab four:  Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (which is to say, the scarecrow, Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion) skipping arm in arm down the yellow brick road on their way to Oz. Why do I still want somebody – anybody from the movie I saw so many times growing up — to still be around? Now it all really does seem like a dream: Kansas in stormy black and white (actually dyed sepia), and Oz in vibrant Technicolor, a process invented  back in 1917, though seldom used till Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind came out. By then, the Depression not quite over but waning, and the scent of war in the air, it was time for those ruby slippers. The slippers are, as a matter of fact, silver in the book, but Samuel Goldwyn was paying for all the Technicolor, and he wanted those shoes to dazzle. Eighty years later, with the last munchkin, Jerry Maren, dead at 98, the whole speaking cast of that great movie is completely over the rainbow, with no more lollipops for the guild to present. 

But wait! Eighty years! — an anniversary! Eighty years since 16-year-old Judy Garland as Dorothy, a little girl in gingham wearing red sparkly shoes, belted out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in wide release. That wide release probably included the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, which many years later I was to have a hand in running — but I digress — The Wizard has the show today. 

Early releases of Wizard are interesting to muse over. On June 5, 1939, sneak previews in Santa Barbara, Pomona and San Luis Obispo, Ca. helped Director Victor Fleming figure out what to cut (the movie ran two hours, and 90 minutes was the max in those days). Amazing note: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” almost got the hatchet, which, beyond robbing the world of a great song sung by a great young voice, would also have stolen away an Academy Award from the production.

Three August “test screenings” (August 11, in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Cape Cod Massachusetts,and August 12 at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin) gauged audience response to the now 101-minute movie. Of these three unofficial premier sites, only Oconomowoc (Strand demolished in 1960) celebrates with frequency the 1939 screenings. There’s actually a plaque on the site where the Strand Theatre once stood, “This commemorates the World Premier of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz,shown here in downtown Oconomowoc, at the Strand Theatre on August 12, 1939.”  Well not exactly the world premier, even if you count trial screenings, since Cape Cod and Kenosha beat the Strand by a day. Admission to the original 1939 evening showing, BTW, at the Strand was 40 cents for adults and 10 cents for children. Each anniversary of the movie’s release (including this year’s 80th) finds citizens of Oconomowoc gathered to watch Dorothy and friends on a temporary outdoor screen near the demolition site of the 500-seat theater. No regrets about the Strand’s untimely death?
On August 15, 1939, at  the then 12-year-old Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in L.A., The Wizard of Oz was officially born to its viewing public. Munchkins and other cast members in formal dress were in attendance. [but already on a train bound for New York City were Judy Garland and her side-kick-of-the-era, Mickey Rooney, ready with a live entertainment for the stage of NYC’s Capitol Theatre, where Oz would open to the East Coast on August 17th. 
 
Alas, there is little that remains, even of descriptions of the Capitol at 1645 Broadway. What is it about NYC and its theaters? For that matter, its train stations, concert halls and other wonders have constantly to be saved from demolition — and, like the Capitol, are often not. According to Cinema Treasures, the theater had better than four thousand seats, and, at one time, had been managed by none other than S.L. Rothafel himself. It was a Thomas Lamb theater, but what exists of it pictorially these days can be found mostly in sites like Pinterest: crowds packed under the Capitol’s marquee and a handful of yellowed flyers and programs. 
  
Yet there it was: while Hitler was fifteen days shy of invading Poland, and the Depression wasn’t really over, people waited in line, on Broadway and under a lot of other marquees, to forget a world that must have seemed to be falling apart. Perhaps we need a little Oz these days too?  
 
Afterthoughts:
1. The wicked witch “melts” because witches and water don’t mix. Dorothy has doused the witch with water to keep her from setting fire to the scarecrow. According to one source, Hamilton “...was standing on a trap door and was supposed to disappear down into it quickly when the smoke (followed by fire) puffed up, but during the second take of that scene, the fire came too early and her costume started burning. She suffered second and third degree burns and was unable to work for a month. When she came back, she refused to do any more work with fire.” Can’t say as I blame her.
 
2. As of the 24 May, 2018 with the passing of the last living Munchkin, Jerry Maren at 98, (who portrayed one of the three representatives of the Lollipop Guild), it can now be said that every actor who received an on-screen credit or spoke dialogue in The Wizard of Ozis dead.
 
3. I’d like to imagine that The St. George Theatre, which I ran for a year in 1976, premiered The Wizard of Oz after it left the Capitol; seems logical, as, 37 years before we showed up, the St. George was a first-run house, the biggest and most ornate theater on the island.

4. From a New Yorker cartoon: little girl sits with her mother watching The Wizard of Oz on television. Caption: “But why does she want to go back to Kansas, where everything is in black and white?”  

5. The Wizard of Oz has been officially tapped as the most influential film ever made, by a group of Italian researchers who analyzed 47,000 films across 26 genres. Runners up in that contest include: Star Wars, Psycho, King Kong (1933), and 2001: A Space Odyssey. A list of the top twenty is contained in the link above. Their definition of “influential” has a lot to do with outstripping other movies in how much a film has inspired and been referenced in the film industry. Interesting list.  

For the victims of the recent Dayton shooting 

To me Dayton was always that sleepy town forty-five minutes north of Cincinnati, where I was born. Dayton: hometown of the Wright Brothers and at one time the point of origin for practically every cash register in the world, a mid-size heartland city with its own suburbs, and the hometown of my husband’s college roommate, Thom. Dayton has also been the home of at least five splendid movie houses — like the 2,672-seat St. George in Staten Island that I helped to run, and the perpetual subject of this blog. Dayton’s Victory (these days the “Victoria”), like the St. George, still stands, in the midst of the revitalization of a once-dark downtown, and only half a mile from the “Oregon” district where the recent shooting took place.
 
About a year ago, our friend Thom, mentioned above, contributed to this blog a wonderful reminiscence of Dayton’s Victory Theatre, remembered from his childhood. I offer it up now, refreshed, to remind myself that this is how we survive facelessness, the savagery of lone shooters with military-style automatic weapons. If movie palaces are worth anything, the ones that are still standing, they remind us of what community used to feel like;  may it  feel that way again.

Movies were always social occasions when we were growing up: the family outing at Cinerama on a Sunday, or a date at some or another opulent palace, or even just a matinee with friends. I knew the social importance of movies when we took over the St. George Theatre that brief year, 1976, when palaces were disappearing as quickly as fireflies at the end of a summer night. Thom was with us for part of the St. George adventure, as, among other things, our “standpipe operator.” The St. George must’ve seemed to him just a little bit like the Victory.

Growing up in Wright Brothers territory, no wonder Thom gobbled up everything he could read on aviation! Eight years old in 1957, and sick with the flu, he finished in two days The Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh’s personal account of his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection that year. 

My Dad came home from work and Mom told him I had read Lindbergh’s book. He didn't  believe it at first...so he quizzed me and I "passed." 

Thom, who has always had a photographic memory, was whip-smart. Later, at the St. George Theatre, he studied for a single night, then aced the really difficult Standpipe Operator’s Test, allowing our ragtag crew to stay in business as failing theater operators.

Impressed as his dad had been with Thom’s reading, father and son were not really close.

It wasn't that my dad was distant. It's just that his interests and my interests did not mesh in any way. He loved...to fish, go mushroom hunting and blackberrying and work on the yard. I couldn't sit still in a boat for hours on end and not be completely bored; I've never liked getting dirty...and yard work to me is fruitless...why waste time?

Thom’s dad was a print specialist in an ad agency downtown, a detail man, whose front lawn never had a blade of grass out of place. He was also an old-style Congregationalist. 

...we didn't go to movies. Dad had a strong Protestant belief that movies were the Devil's work (It was strictly forbidden to go to the movies on Sunday, for instance).

In addition to disapproving of flicks, Thom’s dad actually had an aversion to airplanes, having witnessed a disastrous crash at a 1920s air show. Still, he remembered Lindbergh’s flight, as headlines in the Dayton Daily News, and when the movie version of The Spirit starring Jimmy Stewart, came to the Victory’s giant screen, father astonished son by breaking his own rules and suggesting they go downtown to see it!

The Victory had begun as the Turner Opera House, built in 1866. Two years later,  a “firebug” hit town, and destroyed a number of mansions, as well as the elaborate Turner’s, which nonetheless rose from its ashes as the Grand Opera House, in 1871. So it remained until after the WWI Armistice and a flood, morphing finally into the Victory Theatre. At this stage, it was a live house, remaining so for another decade: Houdini performed there in 1925, using — it is said — the theater’s vents for his great escape. With the advent of talkies, the Victory was outfitted for film, and, beginning in the thirties, became a movie palace. Was it the 1,440-seat Victory’s serene past as a home for opera that made it seem more respectable to Thom’s dad than fancier theaters downtown ?

And what happened to those other theaters? The RKO Keith's, whose last picture before demolition would ironically be entitled Once Before I Die, was to fall to wreckers a decade after Thom and his dad had their downtown date. The RKO Colonial, perhaps the showiest of all with its two marble staircases, would undergo demolition in 1965, replaced by a Lutheran church.  Loew's (The Dayton)waited until 1975 to become wreckage, serving ultimately as a parking lot. All of these theaters were showier than the Victory,  but it was ultimately, the old opera house Daytonians wanted to save.

As Fred Bartenstein, a founding member of Save the Victory tells it, “... the Loew’s theater downtown across from the Victory was already being demolished. The wrecking ball was literally out on the sidewalk.” 
 
The greater Dayton community rallied, spurred on by a  local radio D.J., who put out a call to listeners to head downtown. According to Bartenstein, “People were driving by and handing money out of their car windows for donations.” A non-profit was formed, and, by 1989, 14.5 million dollars’ worth of refurbishment turned the Victory into the Victoria, which it remains to this day.

On that special day in 1957 when Thom and his dad went downtown, Jimmy Stewart commanded the Victory’s wide screen. Dinner afterwards at Servis and Buhl, with “heavy silver and white tablecloths,” did not disappoint. Thom’s favorite memory of dinner remains — true for most eight-year-olds — dessert. It was some kind of chocolate thing, and it arrived sporting a tiny parasol. Downtown with Dad for the story of Lindbergh, then dinner, and a chocolate dessert with a parasol? Who could ask for anything more?

Afterthoughts:
1. When that original grassroots (“Save the Victory”) group in the 1970s was having a hard time seeing a future for the historic theater, Fred Bartenstein recalled he used to say, “If we can keep the doors open, if we can make sure that this building is never padlocked for one day, a time will come when everyone in the whole region loves it and it will be one of the jewels in our crown.” Bravo, Fred!

2. On the subject of other violations of his dad’s scruples about movie-going, Thom originally reflected: 
“Well there were a few family visits to Cinerama in Cincinnati. Dad loved the concept — the screen that wrapped around the audience, even though there were the two ‘seams.’ Plus the subjects of the first Cinerama movies made them more travelogues than anything else. So they were ‘educational."

3. The original version of this post started with a reference to Senator Chuck Grassley, who at the time had just condemned three vices he figures people who don’t invest wisely are prey to and should never practice: “...spending every darn penny they have...on booze or women or movies." Now Grassley is from the heartland (Iowa). If movie-going is to him such a wasteful and low kind of activity, then why does he have an entry in IMDB? Seems, as “an actor,” he always plays himself!

4. Another former Daytonian, David Belcher, these days a Hong Kong  correspondent for The New York Times, wrote, in the aftermath of the shooting, a reminiscence that has nothing to do with movie palaces, but everything to do with the “rust belt” factor Dayton and other small cities in the heartland, are suffering from. Check it out.