I was two years old when I saw my first movie: it was 1950. I do not remember anything of Tea for Two, a Doris Day romance, but the title stirs a vague, uncomfortable sensation. Judy, my fifteen–year–old big sister, had to watch me, and she wanted to go to the movies. She and her best friend Madge joined hands across my lap to keep me from wriggling out of the seat between them. I’d had a splendid tantrum at the candy stand: I could smell the popcorn, but I couldn’t have it. The unsympathetic concessionaire was probably my first bureaucrat.

“I simply can’t give such a young child popcorn; she might choke,” she is said to have remarked. Good & Plenty, as a consolation, did not apparently work: I thrashed and cried inconsolably.

As my sister tells it, the moment the movie came on-screen, I was transfixed. Grownups talking, singing and kissing each other? I was rapt! I stayed in my seat and gazed. It was dark and we all gazed together.

At home there was a cabinet with people inside that the grownups called “The Zenith,” with a record player on the left and a radio on the right. The screen was circular, like a fishbowl. There wasn’t much to watch; sometimes there was nothing there at all but what people called “test pattern,” a circle with some lines and a profiled face, the head of an Indian in a feathered bonnet. When the station ran out of programs, you watched this mandala, not in a Buddhist meditative way, but fitfully, hoping something would come on again. 

The movies still reigned. 

Downtown on Fountain Square you could see the new features when they came to town, on Saturday or Sunday for a matinee. We went as a family, we dressed, just a little. White socks and MaryJanes for me, penny loafers for my teenaged sisters. My favorite theater, The RKO Albee, had a balcony, a grand chandelier and marble staircases. It’s easy to see how twenty years later I got caught up with a group of people  all about my age, trying to run a slightly down-at-heels movie palace. We grew up, all of us, under various domes.

My family, like most others, went to the movies together five or six times a month.  Tea for Two wasn’t the only feature I would never have chosen to see. Kon- Tiki, The Lavender Hill Mob, Royal Wedding, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The African Queen: odd bits of these mostly adult films show up in my dreams occasionally, flying saucers here, a car chase there. It was 1951, and I was three, on my way to being four. I couldn’t always say what I was seeing, but I was old enough to eat popcorn without choking and sit in the dark watching a bright beam flood the whiteness of the screen. The light came from over our shoulders, very high up and faraway. It turned into stuff when it met the screen — people or trees or space ships. The line between imagining and actually seeing--the distance between mind and screen — was very, very thin.

One Saturday, my sister, perhaps still feeling guilty for practically tying me into my seat at Tea for Two, took me to a matinee of  Walt Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland at The Twentieth Century. It was a waking nightmare: “Off with her head,” barked the Red Queen. Why were all the playing cards walking? I was afraid, the floor of the theater was falling into blackness, and all I wanted to do was go home. Alice had no control once she drank those little bottles. When the living cards flew off the screen I wanted to cry, but other children seemed to be having fun, so I was ashamed of my terror. To this day, animation chills me — not cartoons like Bugs Bunny or Donald Duck — their stories are silly and short, but figures in an animated movie that seem to live in an imaginary space. Fantasia is one more horror show to me: the sorcerer’s apprentice with all those monstrous self–generating brooms. This was the power of the movies for me: what you saw on the screen was real.

Other pictures I saw that year come back in fragments: leeches in The African Queen, like sticky garden worms. Kon-Tiki gave me distance and the sense of a world outside Ohio. I wanted to go on the raft with Thor Hyerdahl and see that thing called ocean.

​Memory claims that we saw Kon-Tiki at The Albee on Fountain Square, and it could be so, but memory is a kind of fiction. I loved the Albee so much that all the childhood movies I remember really caring about seem to exist there in my mind, under the Albee’s long–ago–demolished dome.

No wonder that a quarter century later, ostensibly all grown up, I’d fall in love with another dome — the one that still graces The St. George Theatre — in Staten Island, where I had come to settle. Along with my friends and co-workers, I’d struggle to do the impossible, to keep a single-screen 2672-seat palace open and profitable in the full-blown age of color TV and multiplexes. It all started with Tea for Two.

Here’s a question, Dear Reader:  What’s the first movie you ever saw and where did you see it?  If you know the answer, let us know in Comments!

We operated a candy stand with a theater attached to it, but it took us a while to figure that out. In 1976, the St. George Theatre concession stand boasted the highest per capita sales in the five boroughs of New York City, including the grind houses on Times Square. Ticket sales? Not so much.

In the concession-stand closet of our lovely old 2672-seat movie palace, we found, on the day we moved in, a large stack of dirty popcorn cups. Why hadn’t the previous exhibitor just thrown them away? This remained a mystery for some time, though it was hardly first on our minds, consumed as we were with running a huge business already heavily in the red. It took only about two months for us to feel how cash poor we really were. How to pay for movies so we could show them? Like Michael Anthony of The Millionaire, that TV fable of our youth, a well-dressed man named Phil showed up in the lobby one afternoon, just as I was pining away for a few thousand to put down on the next week’s double feature. His company — I forget the name now — was headquartered out of upstate NY, and offered us a whopping $10,000 — interest free and instantaneous — for the “temporary” rights to our candy stand. We grabbed for this oar with nary a thought.

Ever heard the song lyric “I owe my soul to the company store”?  The terms were simple: Phil leased the stand until that halcyon day when we would ostensibly have paid off the ten thousand dollar loan. We supposedly split the gross income of the stand 50/50, but while the loan was in effect, our 50% went to pay it off. Phil’s company got the other fifty percent, and he paid for all the candy, cups, popcorn, hotdogs, soda. It was a slippery slope. We’d begin to pay the loan off, then need to borrow more to get film from Warner Brothers or MGM or another one of the big guy distributors. The only real profitable aspect of our aging movie palace was the candy stand, and we’d sold that off to keep movies on-screen.

Here’s a trivia question: A large soft drink in 1976 went for 75 cents; how much did it cost Uncle Phil to put sixteen ounces of Coke, Sprite, Tab or Root Beer in a cup on the counter? Two and a half cents.  It’s like the restaurant business: the profit is in the bar — and in popcorn, of course.

Twice a month, Uncle Phil, as we liked to call him, sent a representative to the theater, to spend a morning counting everything in the concession stand:  each bar of candy, hot dog, bun, or cup of ice cream. Popcorn and soda, however, sold by the ounce in a cup or a bucket, is only quantifiable by counting containers. It was our unspoken rule that staff could have unlimited supplies of popcorn and soda so long as they brought their own personal cups. Paulie’s soda cup, which stood at the ready for him on a low shelf in the stand, sported a giant painted PAULIE. He was fond of filling it to the brim with his own “private mix” of Root beer, Sprite and Coca Cola. “Swamp Water,” he called it. Some staff were really fond of popcorn, so they brought plastic soup containers from home.

Which brings me back to the subject of those greasy used popcorn cups we found in the back of the closet when we first moved in. Our predecessor — that early believer in recycling — had figured a way to make some hidden money on popcorn from Uncle Phil, or some other guy he was indentured to. 

In my July 21 blog post on the long-closed-down Victory Theater in Holyoke MA, you’ll find a picture Robin Locke Monda took of a tall stack of ancient, probably used, popcorn cups left behind who knows how many decades before? 

Note to self: Look at your popcorn cup when you go to the movies! Did it come from a virgin stack? 

A Blazing Saddles poster, featuring Cleavon Little on a rearing palomino, hangs in an upstairs bedroom of our house. Mel Brooks’ satire on race and the wild west was the movie that launched our theater year at the St. George. The poster was supposed to have been a good luck charm, like the five, ten and twenty-dollar bills people tape to the walls of their businesses on the first day. We rolled it up and set it aside, after a less-than-stellar first week, trying not to notice how many empty seats there’d been in our gleaming movie palace. When National Screen Service came to collect the rented poster and drop off the one for The Sunshine Boys, we claimed that Blazing Saddles had been torn and, for a small fee, we collected it.
            That particular poster was a one-sheet (27" x 41"), half the size of the two-sheets  (41" x  54") that fit our giant poster cases. Four of those cases line the wall opposite the box office windows, red and white to match the foyer’s chandelier. The first case always contained the main feature, with a card proclaiming in elegant script, Now Showing. The middle case housed the second feature if there was one — Also Showing — and the last two cases offered glimpses of Coming Attractions.
          Some of our coming attractions never actually came — there was a certain amount of dreaming associated with booking movies. What could you do if in your heart you really wanted to show The Wizard of Oz but the neighborhood wanted Towering Inferno?
            Back when The Wizard of Oz first came out (1939) the movie and the poster belonged to the distributor — Warner Brothers, etc. — and arrived, often enough, at the Greyhound Bus Station in most small towns as one package, overnighted via bus from the previous small town theater. Under no circumstances could the theater operator collect or give to patrons a beloved poster, because the next theater needed it!  For those of you who are collectors, this explains why pre-1940 one-sheets and two-sheets are so rare. For the most part, only “window cards” (14" x 22”) liberally distributed to shopfronts around a downtown area and not re-collected, remain to show us Claudette Colbert or Jean Harlow.
             In 1940, the National Screen Service took over the advertising wing of the movie  business, and suddenly there were plenty of posters, making it possible for me to snatch that Blazing Saddles one-sheet — and a few other things besides. To make things even more convenient for collectors of the future, those posters bore a NSS identifying system which makes it possible to verify their authenticity. 
            Like so much else in the industry that surrounded movie palaces, and other single-screen houses, NSS suffered a slow and sad demise with the advent of multi-screen theaters, losing much of its business beginning in the mid eighties and finally disappearing — bought out by Technicolor — a few years after the Millennium. 
            A few weeks ago, at our favorite Manhattan multiscreen theater, I joined Dean, who was mesmerized by what turned out to be the “posters” for film after film, flashing by, all on a ($70,000) Plasma screen: Coming Soon, Coming This Christmas, Now Showing, and, of course, the inevitable Starts Wednesday.

           

             

Labor Day at the St. George Theater: 1976, a Monday, the sixth of September. The Omen was on-screen, a banner day preceded by a banner weekend, great numbers, almost boffo socko (big box office) we talked about opening the balcony. At concession, Paulie was barely keeping up with orders for popcorn, Coke, Charleston Chews, kosher hotdogs on homemade Italian rolls, and Haagan-Dazs ice-cream (new that year in Staten Island). Great crowds of people strode into the lobby, ten and twenty at a stretch, family groupings, filling the gap between lunch and a picnic to mark the end of the summer. I was on box office, happy to deal with a continual rush a patrons.

Occult or horror films always did well at the St. George. The Exorcist, then three years old, had played to a packed house for us earlier in the year, and Carrie, not to mention Texas Chainsaw Massacre, had pulled good numbers. "Boffo Socko," the term our booking agent was fond of using to describe a box office hit (see also “boff,” “boffola,” “whammo” and “socko” by itself) is “slanguage” invented by or at least swirling around the showbiz mag, Variety. We spoke this dialect with pride, even going so far as to name two of the four puppies we had found and adopted in spring “Boffo” and “Socko.” 

By Labor Day, we’d been theater operators for exactly five months. Even though we’d lost money hand over fist the first two months, we’d begun to break even, so we thought we knew what we were doing. It seemed we always would be standing in the lobby tearing tickets, looking forward to another week. But the day after Labor Day, and the day after that and on and on, our lobby would, as it turned out, be, more often than not, still as the vestibule of a church, until winter kicked in, and it got very dark and very very cold.

In retrospect, it had been cheeky of us to show The Omen, an occult film featuring a malevolent child — ”the antichrist” — whose sign is 666 — on, of all things, the 6th of September.  More than a few numerologists might be tempted to blame the sudden and precipitous decline in our box office sales that followed the day after Labor Day, on our choice of product. But that most ironically named American holiday, the day that ends the summer, was the real culprit: the beginning of every new business and school year, the end of the movie theater operator’s season, a fact we had yet to learn. Most of the movies we showed after Omen, films I hardly remember, turned out to be the opposite of “boffo socko.” To borrow another, more familiar, Variety-coined term, they were, plain and simple “flops.” 

They were also “turkeys,” a term Variety doesn’t claim which, according to the Word Detective, “seems to date to the U.S. in the 1920s, when ‘turkey’ first appeared as show business slang for a movie or stage production that flopped (‘The boys at the studio have lined up another turkey for us…. I saw the present one the other day and didn’t care much for it,’ Groucho Marx, 1939). The logic behind ‘turkey’ in this sense is a bit mysterious, but it may have been a reference to the inept attempts at flight of a domesticated turkey.” That seems just right: none of those movies could fly! So it goes in (can you believe Variety gave us this word too?) “showbiz.”

The major difference between a de luxe and any other movie show consists of closing the curtains after the feature film...  —Arthur Mayer

“When the movie’s over, it’s over,” Leroy, our youngest usher, shrugged, making his way backstage to satisfy what he considered an affectation of those of us who passed for “management.” Dean tried quoting Arthur Mayer on the subject, but Leroy had no clue who that dude was, nor did he care.The era of fancy dress was over.

That era had built the palace we were standing in. Young as he was, Leroy grudgingly understood we should at least tip our hats to whatever dream state had produced the seventy-bulb central chandelier and six-story proscenium, the gilded muses, leaded-glass exit signs, faux Spanish balconies and green and gold tiled alcoves. By 1976, all of that glory may have been a bit musty, half the original curtains gone, the 30-rank Wurlitzer organ sold off to a pizza parlor in Texas. Fabian Theaters’ former flagship was, by the mid-seventies, less a palace than a dark gilded cavern, with its own plaster stalactites. Still, the very presence of all this finery seemed to call for some degree of stagecraft. 

A small troupe from the Metropolitan Opera had played at the St. George in the 1950’s: we had the sign, found in a store room upstairs, “Four Operas for Three Dollars” to attest to that fact. We’d bulbed the footlights, replaced the alternating red and blue filters that covered them and vacuumed the formal red and gold brocade house curtain, with its five-foot high gold tassels.

The five stories of dressing rooms backstage may have been vacant, but they held the ghosts of Vaudeville and other live performers, beginning with Blossom Seeley, who opened the St. George on December 4, 1929, less than two months after the stock market crash that ended an extravagant era.

Eighteen days later, an even more fabulous palace, the Atlanta Fox, was scheduled to open, as noted on December 22 of that year in The Atlanta Journal. A certain Mlle. Fanchon was arriving aboard the Crescent Limited  “...to supervise the rehearsal of the two carloads of Fanchon & Marco Sunkist Beauties who will appear in the opening show at the new Fox Theatre on Christmas Day. The presentation entitled ‘Beach Nights’ comes to the Fox direct from Philadelphia. Atlanta represents the forty-first week of Fanchon & Marco...a total of fifty-two weeks from coast to coast.” 

F&M were — as is obvious from “Sunkist” — a West Coast outfit, akin to Hollywood’s Sid Grauman. Sid was the ur-impresario of all time, who built his Chinese Theatre, already famous for its stars’ hand- and footprints in the cement forecourt, and before that Grauman’s Egyptian, with its bearded Bedouin in striped robe carrying a spear, as mascot. Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre had set the tone for stage shows at movie palaces on the West Coast, with something he called the Sid Grauman Prologue. In New York, S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel had his own extravaganzas, live acts to support and frame the hot new technology — the moving picture. But leave it to Grauman, who styled himself the “Roxy West of the Rockies,” to perfect the themed show, and the brother/sister team of Fanchon & Marco, among others, to take it on the road. Who knows but what the Fanchonettes (formerly the California Sunshine Girls aka Sunkist Girls) might have played the St. George, before F&M stopped doing traveling movie palace stage shows and before the talkies and the Depression — not to mention Busby Berkeley — killed all the live thrills. Gone forever, the famous F&M “living chandelier” (made up of Sunkist Girls appearing to hang from the stage’s fly loft).      

Now that single screens are all too rare, at the St. George, and most remaining movie palaces, it’s the stage that carries the place, with acts great and small. Tony Bennett,  DooWop, Irish Clog Dancers, Steve Martin, you name it. If there’s a ghost now, it’s Leroy backstage:  the place was always haunted.