When you run a  single-screen movie theater, you see whatever’s on the screen, most of the time in passing, in small bits. So it was with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie I was happy not to see all of, since I had a hard enough time sleeping at night. The year was 1976, the theater, the St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island I was involved in trying to keep open. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were seeing the grand old place — dusty red velvet, gilded plaster goddesses and all  — to the end of its movie-exhibition career. The St. George was a sinking ship at that point, but while the ship was going down, a lot of singularly powerful movies washed across our stained screen. We showed mostly second or third-run, a number of movies that have since either become cult classics, or, in some cases, Taxi Driver, for example, have found their way into the Library of Congress. 
 
I watched the Academy Awards in March, 1977 with a deal of remorse. By that time we were out of business, the St. George shuttered, the dream over. But on our small screen at home, there were more than a few of the sixty-three movies we had run, competing for gold statues. Two of my favorites for the year, All the President’s Men (Hoffman and Redford as Woodward and Bernstein, a post-Watergate cocktail), and Taxi Driver (DeNiro as the infamous war vet, Travis Bickle), were up against Rocky (which won, launching Sylvester Stallone’s career). Bound for Glory (a romantic but not entirely accurate biopic on the life and times of folksinger Woody Guthrie), and Network (the ultimate condemnation of the corporate establishment and television) were the other contenders. Of these five, only Bound for Glory would not eventually find its way to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." That selection really means something, that, twenty or thirty years after the fact, so many Oscar contenders from a single year would have such lasting power. (If you look to the following year’s Oscars, movies nominated were Annie Hall — winner, The Goodbye Girl, Star Wars, The Turning Point and Julia. Only two of these, Annie Hall and Star Wars, were in the decades to come, deemed culturally significant enough for the Library to set aside.
 
1976 had been a pivotal year: in Hollywood, in the movie exhibition end of things, and in America. Vietnam was over and so was Watergate; as the recession tailed off, working class heroes everywhere needed to believe in a rags-to-riches story, and Rocky, the best picture winner, would do well enough. Hollywood released 148 films in 1976, more than in previous years, but since movie screens were proliferating virally, lowly “buck fifty” exhibitors, like ourselves, were hard-pressed to get our desperate little hands on anything new, or nearly new. Yet we occasionally did. From IMDB’s list of the ten most popular movies of 1976, we ran the top three and two more besides (see asterisks):
 
1. Taxi Driver*
2. All the President’s Men*
3. Carrie*
4. Rocky
5. A Star is Born
6. King Kong
7. Logan’s Run*
8. The Omen*
9. The Enforcer
10. Network
 
Our booking agent, while he lasted, had some chops.
 
Memories are fragmentary: I recall only bits and pieces of Carrie, which, as a feminist, I had a lot of objections to. Besides, it was February and too cold in the auditorium, since the landlord had turned the heat off, in what would finally be a successful campaign to close us down. 

Sad as this was, the warm months had been a sweet time. I’d relished every beloved frame of All the President’s Men, Watergate still fresh in memory. As for Taxi Driver, I watched it obsessively over and over again, burning the popcorn bag down to its grannies. It wasn’t just my crush on De Niro; Scorcese really had seventies New York down cold. Times Square, especially the porn district, where at least once I’d gone to borrow carbons for our aging projectors, was right there on our screen, gritty and dangerous and, of course, never boring. 
 
Afterthoughts: 
1:  De Niro actually took a few shifts as an NYC cabbie, just to get the feel of the role. What if I'd hailed  him?
2: I mentioned that some of the movies we ran at the St. George became cult classics:  Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes to mind first. Cooley High, The Omen, and the absurdly misnamed Don’t Open the Window (aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) have their own followings. The Dragon Dies Hard, a posthumous tribute to Bruce Lee, goes without saying.

It has been almost fifty years since I met the man I went broke running a movie palace with. New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati: What’s New Pussycat was on-screen — a blur— it was raining. We talked until midnight, the first of many amazing conversations. Four years later we left together for New York City, where we settled into Staten Island, and, ten years after our first date, tried our luck at running the St. George Theatre. What was it about movies in the century of their supremacy? Indoors, outdoors, film demanded a specialized viewing space.
 
My mother, who grew up with the movies, remembered seeing her first silents projected on a bed sheet in a vacant lot in Toledo, Ohio. Oddly, the first drive-in involved a bed sheet: Richard Hollingshead, who invented this variation on movie-going, was said to have had an obese mother who wanted to go to the movies. Accordingly, he put a 1928 projector on the hood of his car, settled her in the front seat, and tied a sheet between two trees. Five years later, he opened the first drive-in in Camden, New Jersey, charging 25 cents a head to watch movies under the stars, with the slogan, “The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” Shankweiler's Drive-In Theater, opened a year later in Orefields, Pennsylvania, followed by the Drive-In Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Texas, and the Pico at Pico and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles.   
 
With RCA’s invention of car speakers in 1941, the novelty of outdoor viewing  became a commonplace (before that time, speakers on towers near the screen blasted cars in the front row). By the time I was in fourth grade (1958), there were better than 4000 open-air theaters in the U.S. That year, in the back seat of my best friend’s mother’s boyfriend’s Buick Elektra (what tail fins!), I waited until 1 A.M. to watch the “adult” films (The Long Hot Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Vertigo), while everybody else slept. Management programmed family fare for early in the evening, then showed the arty flicks after most people had either left or gone to sleep.
 
Time for a trivia question: What caused the decline, in the 1960’s, of drive-in movie theaters? Answer:  shopping malls; land was just too valuable. Take the previously mentioned Pico, at the corner of Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles. It survived as a drive-in until 1947, after which the Picwood, an indoor theater rose on that spot. Today at that same corner the Landmarks Theater in the Westside Pavilion, a shopping plaza, boasts twelve screens with a wine bar and reserved stadium seating.  Indoor or outdoor, it’s been all about movies at that street corner for better than 80 years. In Staten Island, where I live, Fabian Theaters, the same chain that originally owned and operated our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, also owned NYC’s first drive-in on Staten Island, in 1948, which closed in the 1960’s, to make way for Staten Island’s first shopping mall.
 
Sometimes drive-ins just closed, their screens blank as tombstones until somebody bought the land. As of 2008 in Cincinnati, the Oakley Drive-In’s screen still stood, in a field of weeds. Dean and I had planned to visit that hallowed spot on the last day of 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. But, alas, the best we could do when that night came around was to wander the grounds of the newly-built Barrington of Oakley, a retirement community which stands on the spot.  
 
If you, dear reader, get the wanderlust, bear in mind that, despite the Pandemic — which spurred the opening of a number of drive-ins — there are roughly 340 such theaters currently operating in the U.S.A. The advent of digital movie projection has cut the ranks of these mom-and-pop businesses, since it costs around $70,000.00 to convert to digital projection. One of the surviving locations, thankfully, appears to be the second such theater to open, the historic Shankweiler’s, in Oresfield, Pennsylvania, mentioned earlier in this piece. You’ll pay nine dollars per adult, six for every child under twelve. The Mahoning, which decided to ignore digital projection, is a prime example of a niche business, specializing in cult festivals  and cutting-edge events. Check it out!
 
I remember when drive-ins charged by the carload, a dollar twenty. If only I’d known Dean when he and his buddies hung out at the Oakley’s rival, the Montgomery Drive-In. One of his friends had a dad who was a mortician. Just how many teenagers can you pack into a hearse?  
 
Afterthought:
1. An earlier version of this post appeared in 2015. Here’s  a comment from Elizabeth Leslie:
You didn't mention the 1940 teenager's favorite entrance to a drive in — at least one person in the trunk. I never did it but I had friends who fought over the privilege of potential suffocation — all to save $2 bucks and be considered really tough!

2.  Drive-ins were often thought of as “passion pits”; one Cincinnati DJ I knew of made up the following fake ad: Make it out to the Make-Out Drive In! No cover, no minimum — no movie! — might as well have been true.

I once helped run a theater that contained, beneath its gilded proscenium, a single viewing screen arguably the size of a small playing field. What a wonder, that there ever were such behemoths, that single-screen houses had, until the 1970‘s, been the norm, or that people ever gathered together in the dark to watch a one-and-a-half-story tall Katherine Hepburn kiss an equally mammoth Spencer Tracey. The New York Times recently featured an image of a fan laughing while watching Comedy Central on a cell phone. Screen size may be irrelevant these days, but it was once a subject of conversation, as when, in 1976, MGM finally released Gone With the Wind to television — first to HBO and, in November, to network television (NBC). It became, and remains, the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network, watched — in relative miniature — by 65 percent of television viewers. I watched on a portable Sony Trinitron at a burger joint in Florida, as Rhett carried Scarlet up what seemed, at the time, like a dollhouse staircase. 
 
By then TV had been eroding the habit of movie-going for a couple of decades, a back-and-forth struggle. In 1963, the fledgling American Multi Cinema (AMC) Theatres — originally Durwood Theatres owned by Stanley H. Durwood — opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in Kansas City presumably to cut overhead, but also to steal back some of the viewing audience, by offering a choice of titles. Viewers — used to their Zeniths, Sonys  and Motorolas — didn’t seem to care about the relative smallness of these screens, and the trend caught on. A very American crisis ensued:  by 1976, there were actually too many screens for the product that Hollywood offered; a sudden 7.5 percent decline in movie theater attendance sent the movie business into a panic.
 
The average single-screen movie theater operator — most often located in a crumbling downtown area — couldn’t hope to compete for scarce film offerings. 
 
We were that operator. Our unofficial anthem during the dark winter of 1977 — a parody of an American Airlines ad then running on TV — went something like this:  “With our big screen to the north and our snack-stand to the south, we’re the St. George Theatre, living from hand to mouth.” 
 
The St. George Theatre ended its days as a movie house with our departure in 1977, the same year Loew’s Kings  in Brooklyn and a number of other great old palaces went dark. Our luminous, if grape soda-stained, screen burned up a few years after we departed, in a backstage fire that would have taken down the house if the theater’s protective asbestos fire curtain hadn’t fallen and stopped the progress of the blaze. The St. George has survived, a home, these days, for live entertainment; but, for the theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.
 
It’s sad that several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur or The Wizard of Oz in widescreen processes such as Cinerama, Cinemascope, VistaVision or Todd-AO. William Paul argues that “Both the architectural screen and the technological screen have changed...in ways that directly affect our perception of the movie image.”  He also notes, “The screen itself might have influenced the development of film style.” [1] 
 
In an age when more and more households don’t own a TV, hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions!  In New York City The United Palace,  thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, has a pristine giant screen. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.;  they have so many restored single screen theaters in that town, you should plan to stay for a year. Check out The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd., and the Vista on Sunset Drive, just for starters. Seattle’s Cinerama Theater is, I’m told, a wonder. 
 
There are scads of single-screen houses listed in Cinema Treasures. How many of them boast a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia (Super Panavision 70) is anybody’s guess, but I remain, as always, optimistic.
                                                                                       —​ # --
[1] Paul, William, 1996, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology and the Motion Picture Screen, 
in The Movies: Texts, Receptions and Exposures, eds. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsburg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 245-6.