Reading HuffPost the other day on the question-of-questions that looms over the movie theater business — will it survive? — I was reminded of Mark Twain, who was supposed to have quipped once, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” 1897, Twain was in London, recovering from an illness, and rumors back home were rife. In actuality, he told the reporter, “...I have even heard on good authority that I was dead,” concluding “...The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Odd and wonderful — the incorrect quote, especially in its phrasing, was an exaggeration! 
 
Speaking of overstatements, is the time-honored practice of exhibiting and watching movies in actual theaters really gonzo?
 
Calling on my ancient experience of theater management, I’ll hazard that, if movie exhibition could survive the seventies, with its lean product and encroaching new technology (home video!) then the likes of streaming and a pandemic probably won’t kill it off. We spent just one year, April 1976 to March, 1977, trying to keep a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, alive and gleaming, its doors open, its popcorn popping. By “we,” I mean myself, my husband and a group of dedicated investors/staffers, all insanely in love with a red and gold six-story anachronism.   
 
Spring of 1977, the end of our adventure, was probably the darkest season of my entire life. We’d washed out, and first wash-outs hurt in a primal way. Dean and I were head-over-heels in debt, pursued by the likes of Warner Brothers, United Artists, Paramount; you name a distributor, we owed them money. I asked Dean the other day his opinion of the possible coming demise of the movie business. Dean thinks in conversations, past and present. From his amazing memory, he called up a conversation he’d had in ’77, a few days after our departure from under the marquee. 
 
Our sometime booking agent had called him at home to offer condolences. Rick probably felt a little guilty; we’d been his side-hustle (a direct conflict with his regular job, booking theaters for the mogul, Ted Mann), so he’d had to quit us. His departure had been a considerable nail in the coffin of our demise. If it had been hard for Rick to get us film in a product–lean year, it was nearly impossible for us to do it alone. Born and raised in Flatbush (Brooklyn), Rick loved our movie palace--reminded him of his boyhood palace, Loew’s Kings, at that point, already dark and in danger of demolition.  
 
Here’s the conversation, direct from Dean’s archive, which is to say his memory:
 
Rick: Hey buddy boy! [He always called Dean “Buddy boy”]. Don’t be down. Gotta tell ya, I mean this is true, movie exhibition just might be a dyin’ business. I mean, looks like my boss (a major mogul of the day) might even hafta close a few screens, or sell ‘em off.  Product...new releases look thin for the summer, and then, of course, there’s this new disease...video, something called BetaMax. 
 
Dean: Yeah, I know... 
 
We knew about the advent of videotape for home use; a management staff member/investor had actually suggested we might sell videotapes from the lobby! theorizing that if you can’t beat’em, join’em..
 
Rick: I mean, what are there right now? Ten, maybe twelve thousand screens nationwide?  I’m bettin’ that in five years, seven or eight max, that’ll be like half. An’ don’t buy off on this multi-screen thing, or cuttin’ theaters in half or even thirds...it’s a short-sighted attempt to stay viable, ain’t gonna work.
 
Rick was partially right. “Twinning” and otherwise subdividing existing theaters, for the most part, didn’t work. However, that multi-screen fad he’d derided so roundly had already caught on with a vengeance, changing exhibition forever. Started, arguably, by Stan Durwood in Kansas City in 1963 the “Twin” phenomenon was full-blast by 1976. Only ten years after Rick’s chat with Dean, there’d be something like eighteen thousand screens across the U.S., with more opening every month. Twinning became multiplexing, and that morphed into megaplexing.  
 
And in the following 30 years, the total screens in America, including drive-ins, would more than double — almost 41,000 screens coast-to-coast, heading into present times. 
 
“Well,” Dean concludes. “Rick’s probably no longer in the business — but of course, neither are we.”
 
All this is by way of saying, that nothing ever completely dies, it just changes into something else. Or becomes a niche-audience thing; think drive-ins! 
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Rich Gelfond, CEO/Imax, observes, “I know it’s popular to say the world is forever changed, but I don’t think that 100 years of history gets changed in five months. Just like people have kitchens in their houses, they like going to restaurants. Just because people have a streaming service, I think they’re still going to want to go to the movies.”  This from the Huffpost piece I read, which you shouldn’t miss. 

2. Speaking of change, if you’re wondering what Betamax was, or even if you actually remember the Betamax/VHS wars, check it out. It’s the only major battle SONY ever lost.

Ever want to warn somebody in a movie? I mean warn the character, like Wendy in The Shining about to be chopped by her husband? Or Pam and friends in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who should definitely have aborted the trip to the farmstead after picking up a psychotic hitchhiker. You’re the audience, munching nervously away on popcorn grannies; you can only watch while the hapless victim ends up in, say, a garbage disposal. 

This happens to me: I’m super-sensitive to movie character vulnerability. In Jaws, I wanted to warn Chrissa not to go for that moonlight swim. She did, of course, so I busied myself behind the popcorn warmer, while she was devoured by the inevitable white shark (one of Spielberg’s faulty mechanical models, of course, though it seemed real enough to me). 
 
I’d been watching from my perch at the concession stand in the lobby of the St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, that a group of us were busting our chops to run in 1976. We showed a lot of duck-under-your-seat movies in our theater year: the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw, but also The Exorcist. There was no character to warn in that movie, since the priest, played by Max Von Sydow, voluntarily jumps out the window, taking the demon with him. Is it worse to have nobody to warn?

In my childhood, at Cincinnati’s Mt. Lookout Theatre, a small Deco-themed house I frequented in third and fourth grades, I wanted to warn dozens of people about the flying saucers that eventually sliced through the Capitol dome in Washington D.C. (Right now it’s the senators and congresspeople I want to warn, and not about saucers...). Earth finally triumphed over the imagined aliens in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, but my impulse to duck under the seat remained.  

I suppose it’s the Pandemic that’s bringing these movie crisis moments to the small cinema of my pre-frontal cortex. I’ve been having what I call “Covid dreams” lately. I’m in a theater, all the seats full. Nobody’s wearing a mask. That used to be a joyous thing, a packed theater (we only packed the St. George once); but it just doesn’t feel normal anymore. This sense of wrongness is so all-pervading, that when I watch a movie or show that features the old ways — people clustered happily in a dark bar, or high-fiving each other on some playground, or, God forbid, making love, I get that uneasy feeling. If they’re riding cheek-to-jowl on a crowded train, or tackling each other in football, I want to scream, “keep apart! Six feet at least!!!”

Will there be Covid movies when this is all over? Covid novels? Shakespeare lived through several plagues, but set no plays in plague time, though he used the pestilence metaphorically, or as a plot-hinge (Romeo and Juliet). It may be enough simply to have survived Covid. My favorite thing to watch recently on Brit Box is the old BBC series, Foyle’s War. Foyle and his buds are all chummed up together having a double malt whisky in a pub or sitting around the detective’s desk fingering the murder weapon; or they’re right next to each other in that gorgeous car, a highly-polished 1938 Wolseley. They’re not wearing masks, of course, but somehow it’s alright, because, perhaps, the enemy is other than disease. What they’re fighting is beyond even the Germans, it’s human greed, against a backdrop of unexploded bombs and rickety air-raid shelters. People are still murdering each other or stealing each other's rations and selling them on the black market, but Foyle is calm; he straightens it all out somehow, and he’s not even wearing a mask...

If we all have to be wearing one, I long for the other kind... Not the mask I wear to the farmer’s market, that covers my nose and mouth, and makes it really challenging to breathe, but the kind Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, or even long-ago Zorro are wearing. They’re hiding their identities against the forces of greed and evil. They’re sexy. 

Who was that masked man? Pass the popcorn!  

Afterthoughts:
1. We ran a little-known flick  at the St. George, that actually included a warning to one or more of its characters in the title:  Don’t Open the Window. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3NDBSh-gdw] I read through the plot summary recently, looking for some evidence of a window, but never found one.  Who knows?  The film had a strange career, traveling under several aliases: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. It’s a cult film for zombie flick fans. 

2. Who wears a mask? Besides the aforementioned heroes, there are:  Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Leatherface, the Phantom of the Opera, etc. In fact, you can buy a Lecter Covid mask, if you want to make some kind of statement. And, BTW, Leatherface (actor Dan Yeager), from Texas Chainsaw, encourages you to wear yours (not his). Here’s his take: People bitching it’s hard to breathe in a mask. Try chasing some punk who comes on your property while breathing chainsaw smoke and with a bad leg, all while wearing a mask and a leather apron. I’ll grant you you’re not going to be able to scale any chainlink fences, but that’s why you have a chainsaw. It ain’t easy, but you’re no p---y. Wear your mask, killer.
Hey Leatherface: you talkin' to me?

I just pre-registered for a ticket to watch a movie from the deck of my very own boat. That’s right, a pop-up drive-in theater on the water. I don’t have a boat, but it doesn’t matter, because Floating Cinema will rent one to me and my friends for an evening in mid-September. Ain’t free enterprise amazing? Here we are, bereft of theaters to sit down in, but that doesn’t stop us from going in search of screens to watch. As an ex-movie palace operator (the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, New York, 1976), I can attest to the obsession with watching a big screen, in the company of strangers; but in these Covid days, we all have to keep six or more feet apart from those strangers. 

Not surprisingly, the drive-in theater business, long on the skids, is making an amazing comeback, thanks to Covid.  Pop-up drive-ins, such as one occupying the parking lot of the Bel Aire Diner in Queens, are all the rage. You can buy a Pulp Fiction Slider and fries, then return to your car and eat it while watching a movie from the lot, keeping the diner in business and satisfying your and your family’s  need to just get out of the house. Kal Dellaportas, one of the principals in the enterprise, was thinking, “How can we bring people in, without bringing people in?”A friend just told me about one such operation at a mall in Dayton, Ohio. The place is mostly dark these days, but there’s a screen, with cars lined up in front, courtesy of some enterprising folks. In this case, local food vendors in trucks just sorta showed up.  

Drive-ins and social distancing have been linked since the get-go. A New Jersey-ite, Richard Hollingshead invented the drive-in movie theater in 1933, apparently because his generously proportioned mother was shy about going out in public; she didn’t fit easily into a traditional theater seat, so he made it possible for her to stay in her automotive shell for the whole show! It caught on, though. Who else besides a shy woman might want some social distance?  Drive-ins, for decades, afforded couples the privacy they longed for, especially before bucket seats made erotic experiment tricky. Later on when those couples had children — noisy, hard to keep in their seats — the local drive-in, which charged by the carload, reduced the price of admission, but also the need to shush squirmers. By the nineteen fifties the landscape of the  lower 48 was seeded with over four thousand outdoor movie screens, and the fad caught on elsewhere, even as far away as India. 

What I’m wondering is if the resurgence will disappear after we finally wrestle this pandemic to the ground?  Or will people’s social habits have altered so completely, that clustering in cars (and, yes, boats) will be the new norm? I’m sure the proprietors of original working drive-ins, such as The Electric Dusk Drive-In in L.A., screening The Great Lebowski this coming weekend, and the Mahoning in Lehighton, Pennsylvania (Reel Rumble Weekend, on the 14th and 15th, with “all-out wrestling under the stars...and a tag-team of classic films to follow...”  will do just fine, buoyed up by all the additional attention they’ve been getting. We will come back to life as it was, slowly and over time, having learned a lot. Meanwhile, the drive-in theater business will have gotten fat and healthy. Add to that, perhaps, the boat-in business.  

Why not?

Afterthoughts:
1. For more on the history of drive ins.
2. Beyond Cinema isn’t the only event organizer to come up with the idea of float-in movies. A “Cinéma sur l’Eau” — or cinema on the water — is coming to the Seine River in Paris this weekend. Individuals, too, are increasingly flocking to the waterways, buying boats in lieu of their usual summer plans, which are now tabled as a result of COVID-19.3.  For what it’s worth, Walmart has gotten into the drive-in game  What does this tell you about how lucrative that game could be? 

My mother, born in 1908, survived the 1918 “Spanish Influenza,” as it was then called. She didn’t want to talk about it though. When, as a child, I asked, she simply changed the subject. This was rare for her, direct conversationalist that she was. The topic she chose was the movies; Mother claimed to have grown up along with “the whole movie business.”

“I was your age when the movies were born. I remember going to picture shows before there were theaters.” 

This conversation took place around 1957; I would have been nine years old. A real movie nut, I immediately lost all interest in the subject of flu. How could I not? I was an enthusiastic attendee on Saturday afternoons of anything that was showing at the 20th Century a few blocks from home, on Oakley Square, a small Deco palace. But my favorite theaters were downtown, and my favorite of favorites was the RKO Albee. It styled itself as Cincinnati’s Versailles, with its own Hall of Mirrors. The Albee was where the family went, all dressed up, on Sunday afternoons to eat Swtizer’s licorice and popcorn with real butter and lose ourselves on a raft in the Atlantic with Thor Heyerdahl, or, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, struggling for survival against the giant squid. 

“There weren’t always theaters,” Mother observed, warming to her topic. “I was your age, and a lot of people had never even seen a movie; but I was lucky. We lived in Toledo then, and on hot summer nights, word would come that a picture show was happening downtown.” 

We’d call that a “pop-up” now — what goes around comes around...

“So,” Mother continued, “We’d get on the streetcar and go to a particular corner where a man was taking money and passing out tickets. You’d sit on a chair or a wooden bench in a vacant lot where he and his friends had hung two sheets on a bare wall. The sun went down and the movie came on. Someone was selling punk...” 

“Some kinda candy?” I guessed.  

“No. It’s a thing you burn, it has a wick, like a candle.  It keeps the mosquitoes off.”  

She made it seem like an adventure, and it had been, in a time before even radio, when the only other techno wonder was “Stereoscope” slides borrowed from the public library. So you got on the street car, a thing that ran on tracks with electric wires overhead, and went downtown to sit in a vacant lot swatting at mosquitoes? That, I now realize, would have been about 1915. In New York City. The Strand, arguably the first movie palace, already stood at Broadway and 47th Streets; but it took awhile for such refinements to reach the Midwest. By 1919, Toledo had a movie palace, but Mother was gone. My grandparents moved just about every other year – so poor, and Gramp always out of work. They settled in Cincinnati where Mother could go to the Palace, built in 1919. She’d have to wait until 1927, when she was almost grown up, to see Clara Bow, “the It Girl,” at the RKO Albee, with its Hall of Mirrors and the world’s largest hand-loomed Austrian carpet. 

Mother was off topic, no mention of the Spanish Flu. So the issue was dropped, and, of course, it’s too late to ask her now. All she said of the pandemic was, “A lot of people got sick and some of them died.”
Will people 20 years in the future, if I'm still alive, ask me about the Covid years? Will I think briefly of the friend I lost a few months ago and change the subject?
 
As for Mother, one death she did mention as important was Rudolph Valentino’s, in 1926, seven years after the pandemic. It was, coincidentally, the same year her mother died. Is that double loss perhaps why she cried so hard? 100,000 people lined up at Campbell’s Funeral Home in New York City to mourn him, many of them in hysterics, and my mother mourned too. If she had had the money,  perhaps she’d have gotten on a train bound for New York.

I’ll never know what life — or lives — the Influenza may have claimed, that Mother didn’t want to talk about. Why not change the subject to the movies? — in vacant lots, at downtown palaces. What would the 20th century have been without them? They were how the world survived its first global war, the pandemic and, eventually, the Great Depression, not to mention WWII and its horrors. 

My mother died in 1985, after I’d gone bust trying to run a movie palace in Staten Island, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre. She never criticized me for an unwise investment of either time or money. 

“What’s it like?” she asked once.  “Is there a velvet curtain and how big is the chandelier?” 

“Huge,” I assured her, “and the curtain has tassels that are half my height.” “Do you ever show any of the old movies...the silents?”

We wouldn’t have dared. In 1976, action was the thing our audience craved, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon. Desperate once, we’d booked Marty Feldman in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, a spoof, which had bombed completely.
 
“Well what about Blood and Sand?” Mother mused. It starred Rosa Rosanova, and of course Valentino. "Now there’s a movie if you could get it.”  

Afterthoughts:
1. If you’ve never read Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, I recommend it. She lost both her parents to the “Spanish” Influenza.
​
2. Brooks’ Silent Movie is a wonder. The only person to speak in all of its one hour and 27 minutes is the mime, Marcel Marceau.