Are people actively going out to the movies — anymore? again? As a former movie palace operator (the St. George Theatre, 1976), I can’t help wanting to know. Certain theaters, I’m relieved to say, seem to be drawing regular audiences, at least in New York City. So what do moviegoers, emerging like prairie dogs from their tunneled lives, seem to be fixated on right now? 

The year 1969 is getting a lot of attention.

I grew up in the sixties. It’s easy to go all nostalgic, forgetting the rate at which boys my age were coming home feet first from ‘Nam. But if I let go of that sad fact for a second, I can remember the first time I heard Abbey Road on a friend’s turntable (“because the world is round...”), the drift of pot smoke through the projector’s beam at the Esquire Cinema on Ludlow in Cincinnati, where we’d gone to watch Elvira Madigan or revisit Knife in the Water. Other nights, there was Two for the Road or A Man and a Woman, if you wanted all pretty, no violence.

 I was surprised to read in the Sunday New York Times that not only are New Yorkers going out to the movies again, but the late sixties are actually hot. 
       
Glynnis MacNicol, who wrote the Times article, admits she’s been to La Piscine, a 1969 French psychodrama/swimming pool flick starring Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, four times! So, apparently, have a lot of other people. Film Forum has held it over since May. It has, apparently, become the go-to of the summer for that theater. The earlier Times’ review, “Pretty Rich People Behaving Poorly.” seems to sum up what’s got people coming back. Without giving away what happens. these characters behave fairly darkly. Don’t miss the trailer, if you want a taste: Romy’s tits were admirable and Alain’s navel not to be beat. 

In other words, a little voyeurism, a dash of sadism, may be just what we need on summer vacation from the pandemic. Who can resist a splash?

Going from the ridiculous to the sublime, friends turned me on to another movie, Summer of Soul, a documentary that came to The Nitehawk in Brooklyn a few months ago. It was also filmed in 1969, the only thing it has in common with La Piscene. I was in New York City that summer, when the Harlem Cultural Festival, preserved by this documentary’s footage, took place. Headlining Sly Stone, Fifth Dimension, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and I could go on and on, the festival drew standing room only crowds. I had just moved to New York City that summer from Ohio. Being white and ignorant, I had no clue  this series of events was actually taking place just a subway ride away, when Woodstock — which we couldn’t get to on account of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Thruway — had gotten all the media attention. Mostly white twenty-somethings, some naked, many in an altered state, trumped a well-behaved 99-percent-Black crowd, apparently. The Harlem footage languished in its canisters, in a garage for fifty years. Rescued finally, intercut with interviews from surviving audience members and performers, and released this year, it reminds us that Black lives do matter. And that there was life, a lot of it, before the pandemic, and will be again. 

Afterthought:
How can I close without a brief reflection on the St. George Theatre in 1969? One torrid afternoon, not long after arriving in New York, we were patrons in what would be, just seven years later (and briefly) our theater. We bought tickets not because we wanted to see the movie, but to get cool; we had no air conditioning in our garden apartment. Although The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minelli, was a bit of a doggie, unwatchable by today’s standards, we could sit in the dark and recover from the unbearable heat of our first New York summer. 1969. The world hadn’t grown up quite yet. Was Liza Minelli ever that young? Was I? 

 Even with a turkey that you know will fold
you may be stranded out in the cold,
still you wouldn’t change it for a sack of gold,
Let’s go on with the show,
Let’s go on with the show.
—Irving Berlin, There’s No Business Like Show Business, from Annie Get Your Gun
 
I woke up humming these lines.“What show?” I wondered, and should we go on with? My reverie is at least partly the St. George Theatre, a glorious red and gold movie palace which, with a group of well-intended friends, I ran briefly, in 1976. That’s what this blog is all about. 
 
But if Irving Berlin’s words penetrated to my sleeping mind, well, there had to be something more epic going on. The world is in trouble right now I reminded myself, and the current production we’re all involved in is a probable “turkey,” to borrow show-biz slang from Variety for something that has no “legs,” and is about to close. That would indeed leave us all “stranded,” though not necessarily in the cold (Sicily last week comes to mind, where temps reached 48.8 Celsius, which is 119.84 Fahrenheit, the highest ever recorded in Europe). 
 
It’s the pandemic, baby. It has a box office so big — boffo socko — it has managed to shut down theaters of all kinds (except drive-ins, which it actually enhanced for more or less a year. Broadway is finally back, and I yearn to go to Springsteen or Trouble in Mind or really anything; but, although I’m vaccinated, I’ve got a compromised immune system, so gotta sit it out for what might be a long long time. 
 
Don’t let this stop you though, should you be the possessor of a robust immune system! I cheer your antibodies, and, assuming you’ve been vaccinated, I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with you in the theater of my dreams. That goes for movies too. I’m waiting, remembering what it was like munching popcorn next to a total stranger, never giving a thought to our commonly-breathed air.  
 
Every week I get an email from The United Palace, one of New York’s five original Wonder Theaters, about what they wish they were showing, if they could open their doors normally again. Why wait, guys? Even I could come to a theater that seats 3,400, if you let just four or five hundred of us in!
 
It’d be just like 1976 all over again, when, at the St. George Theatre, we hosted a smattering of people in a space meant for 2,672. Those were terrible numbers! How we longed to sell out. 
 
Afterthoughts:
 
1. Let’s get back to the song that started this meander. Irving Berlin wrote it for a piece of pure show biz hokum, Annie Get Your Gun, and it became an anthem. 
 
2. During the pandemic of 1918, New York City kept its theaters of all kinds open, as a way to raise morale and advise the public about health safety; the city was an interesting exception, since, in other places, theaters closed.

Summer trivia:  what theater was dubbed “The Cathedral of the Motion Picture?” Likely you know the answer, it’s the Roxy, probably one of the five or six most opulent movie palaces ever built. What would the other five be? Grauman’s Chinese? The Pantages? The United Palace, formerly Loews 175th Street (a Wonder Theater)? I’m in dangerous territory, here, like trying to name the ten greatest movies of all time (Casablanca? I daren’t go on). But I digress; why would the Roxy — or any movie palace — be compared to a cathedral? My friend, Clifford Browder, commented a while back on a visit he made to Chartres in France, whose cobalt blue windows have transfixed mortals since the 13th century, when the cathedral was completed. The rose window, he said, seemed suspended in space. Cathedrals are all about light. 

A movie palace is just the opposite of a cathedral really, no natural light at all; in fact daylight would seem like a violation of a theater’s darkness. Movie palaces — like the one I helped to run in 1976, to which this blog is dedicated, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island — aren’t cathedrals at all, but great caves, like Lascaux or Altamira, those paleolithic wonders: lightless, but soaring and filled with imagery. Early humans lived in caves, so no wonder that in the last century, which was always erupting in world wars, we busied ourselves building not cathedrals, but magnificent Caverns of the Motion Picture.

I found this interesting reflection on the transformative experience of movie palaces:
“You went to have an out-of-body, almost spiritual experience, helped along by the temporal displacement of being in an ancient outdoor ruin, or a pagan temple. The movie palaces of the 1920s were going for the vestigial memories of mankind unreeling their imaginations in ritual spaces, what was known as theater to the ancient Greeks but which still had an odor of burnt offerings. It's no accident that the earliest movie theaters, the nickelodeon arcades and bijous, were essentially magical caves.” 

I’m not sure I would credit the nickelodeon arcades with the same magic as a Wonder Theater, but I’m apparently not the only one who reverts to paleo in a movie palace; and I love that bit about ritual space. If my friend Clifford found the rose window of Chartres transfixing, well then, how about a 70mm screen with the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, several stories high and lost in a kiss? That’s why there is no daylight in these almost-sacred spaces.

Here are five filmic caverns you might, sometime, want to get lost in. Since I don’t know where you live, I’ve tried to cover as much of the continental U.S. as I could manage.

• Starting on the West Coast, it’s painful to select just one, but I’m going for cave-like interiors, and it seems to me that the Los Angeles Theatre conveys that sense of intimacy mixed with grandeur. Designed by S. Charles Lee and finished in 1931, it was to be the last of the Broadway theaters in Los Angeles, rivaling the Roxy in New York, for its amenities: not only a “screaming” room for petulant babies, but a ladies‘ lounge with sixteen separate “compartments,” each featuring a different type of marble. It also had a prism system that conveyed the image of the on-going movie to patrons not in the auditorium. But why would you stray from that auditorium, with its 65-foot wide proscenium and gold-threaded Louis XIV original house curtain, its ornate “boxes” left and right of the stage? Theaters that feature boxes, which, in movie palaces, are mostly false, give that cave-like feel to a domed space, since caves have recesses. Indeed, the ceiling of the Los Angeles is stamped with a series of recessed medallions to increase that effect.

• Heading East, we can stop for tacos and a movie in San Antonio, Texas, to visit a 1926 Meso American-themed cavern of a movie palace, the Aztec (currently Aztec-on-the-River). Originally a 3000-seat wonder, it was designed by the firm of Meyer & Holler (think Egyptian and Chinese theaters, in L.A.),  and incorporates elements of ancient Aztec design complete with polychromed plasterwork, duplicating murals, massive columns and Mayan-themed temple statuary.

• How can you do a tour of cave-like theater interiors and not include an atmospheric? So we’ll stop off in Akron Ohio (at the turn of the twentieth century, the rubber capital of the world) for a glimpse of night stars in the dome of the Akron Civic Theatre. Those are electric stars, of course. Is it a paradox, a cave with stars?
​
• On the road again, we’ll head for Richmond, Virginia where we might catch a movie and listen to the originally-installed Wurlitzer at the Byrd, a 1,400-seat theater that is still almost exactly as it was on the day of its opening in 1926, quite a boast for a movie palace post-millennium. 

• And that brings us at last to my coast, the East one, where I’m in a quandary, because I know so many theaters to choose from. I think I’ll indulge myself and close with the St. George Theatre itself.  After all, I ran it for a year as a movie theater; and it’s the St. George that got me started writing and thinking about movie palaces in the first place. It is the most cave-like theater I know, an amazingly intimate space, for one that housed originally 2,672 seats. I didn’t fully appreciate that intimacy until I went to hear Gladys Knight at the restored Kings Theatre on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Opulent as that theater most certainly is, it’s more horizontal than vertical, so lacks intimacy. The St. George is “stacked,” with an upper balcony within shouting distance (sans mic) of the stage. The dusky statuary in faux boxes left and right of the stage, the recessed dome, and the depth of the carving in and around that dome give my home theater, still miraculously standing and operating again as a theater, the sense of a great cave, Lascaux perhaps, or even the Luray Caverns! 

Try some theater spelunking of your own some time!
​
Afterthought:  
​Speaking of the south rose window at the back of Chartres that seemed, to my friend, to float in space, isn’t that what a giant illuminated screen in a darkened movie palace does? It’s all about light and darkness.  

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 2021, the average cost of a small popcorn is $6.09, yet a movie ticket costs $9.16. 
 
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 2021 movie theaters, even the best of them, feature nary a potted palm. 
 
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 have dominated in the last decade or so: 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. Despite practically living off the corn at the St. George (supplemented with egg salad from home) I have astonished myself by continuing to crave the ritual grain. That said, I’ve always felt that if I don’t see a popper, and if there isn’t at least a slight lingering grassy smell in the lobby, its time to shrug and walk into the theater, sans corn, feeling somewhat naked. 
 
Over the long history of movie theater operation, popcorn has had 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 the like.
 
• For the theater operator, it has been, at least in the past, a form of currency: we used to give popcorn 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 in 1976), then pop some fresh corn. This was, in the past, how I could tell when a theater had gone to hell, with nobody in line to buy anything edible, no discernible smell of anything, and all the concessionaires asleep at the counter, like figures in an enchanted castle.   
 
Returning briefly to the ritual eating of popcorn in theaters, there continues to be something comforting about reaching into a 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!
 
Afterthoughts:
1. 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...
 
2. Returning to the stats quoted earlier (popcorn, ticket prices), both have flattened since the Pandemic, resembling the prices of 2018 and 2019, as people find their way back into theaters.