Back when we ran a movie palace — the St. George Theatre — in 1976 and part of ’77, we complained a lot about bad bookings — the second or third-run movies our agent forced on us, because we couldn’t afford to bid for first-run product; after all, we were a “buck fifty” house (a dollar fifty for adults, 90 cents for children under twelve). What came our way was either a box office failure already or something ancient — if classy. Recently I’ve done a deal of research into what we actually did run, culling the microfilms of the local paper for the movie time clock ads we placed forty years ago each week. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Blazing Saddles, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist — I remembered those titles, but had conveniently forgotten The Giant Spider Invasion, The Dragon Dies Hard, and Don’t Open the Window. Some of those flicks, arguably all of them, are “cult films” these days.  What exactly IS a cult film? The definition is up for grabs — highly subjective — and since the Internet has a way of building cult-like enthusiasm around the least thing (Snapchat Specs for example), we’re all better off making a personal cult movie list of our own.

I think everyone would agree that a true cult movie (unlike the aforementioned specs) has to prove itself by surviving its own time. Some films — like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which we held over for a second week in June, 1976 at the SGT — were already showing evidence of doing just that. By the time we got ahold of Chainsaw, it was two years old. Leatherface had a permanent rep, and Tobe Hooper’s low-budget  ($300,000) thriller was already on its way to cult status. Banned at various times in a long list of countries, including Canada, Britain, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and West Germany, Chainsaw initially caused audiences in several U.S. theaters to walk out in disgust. The movie featured unknown actors and had the distinction of being panned — for gory content — by important critics, some of whom simultaneously praised it for its direction, cinematography and acting.  Ultimately, the film garnered $30 million in profits. In old box office parlance, it “has legs,” which, whatever you say, has got to be part of the definition of a cult film. Experts seem to disagree on which films actually are cult films, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on all the lists.

To quote Tim Dirks, cult films “....are usually strange, quirky, offbeat, eccentric, oddball, or surreal, with outrageous, weird, unique and cartoony characters or plots, and garish sets. They are often considered controversial because they step outside standard narrative and technical conventions. They can be very stylized, and they are often flawed or unusual...” Sounds like Chainsaw, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead to me. Wikipedia’s list of cult films, numbering some 1, 535, is way too inclusive (Being John Malkovich-—are you kidding?). Most of the films are clustered in the 1970‘s and forward — when, in all probability, the notion of cult films commenced. A handful of 1930’s films (Blonde Venus, for instance, and one title by Fritz Lang), then Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bedtime for Bonzo, and that’s it for movies before Eisenhower. There are other lists, readers’ polls and so on, which often include a small number of films from the 1970’s and the bulk of entries from the eighties and beyond, when readers were growing up. Obviously, when you were born has a lot to do with what you include on your list.

Eleven of the films on the Wikipedia list played at the St. George in 1976 and the early part of ’77, while we were tearing tickets at the door:
Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971)
Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 19 74) 
Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)
The Giant Spider Invasion (Bill Rebane, 1975)
Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier, 1936) 
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
 
Other films we ran which have, arguably, generated cult followings include: Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and Don’t Open the Window, aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974). Smile (Michael Ritchie, 1975), a gem starring among others a young Bruce Dern, ought to be a cult film, if it isn’t.

We almost ran Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1976) — -which is on the Wiki list, but ended up with Cooley High instead, arguably a cult film if there ever was one; Spike Lee lists it on his “List of Films All Aspiring Filmmakers Should See.” We can all learn a thing or two from Spike, whose movies, alas, didn’t come along until after we went bankrupt at the theater. To have seen Do the Right Thing on our screen — now that would have been something. 

In 1976 the St. George Theatre, which I was involved in running, was primarily a movie theater with a giant stained screen mounted on a stretcher in the middle of the stage. Other movie houses had shallow non-functional stages, but ours was authentic. The movie screen defined the stage, but behind it was a world built for living performers, a deep and storied space, with “wings” for actors to stand in, and six stories of rubble-strewn dressing rooms.

The second day we had the theater, a group of us climbed the steps that led from the orchestra pit and stood center stage, looking outward at a sea of unoccupied seats, then directly over our heads. “That’s a real fly loft,” a buddy observed. Backstage was taller than I had imagined.

I tilted my head, and, dizzy, took in all the weight hanging above us. The proscenium’s high gilded arch, viewed from the orchestra, had been deceptive. Three or four stories above the stage hung a series of long metal pipes, horizontal and suspended from steel cables. Each bore the imposing weight of a curtain. The “counterweights” along the side walls (attached to each cable) allowed a mere mortal to raise or lower these acres of heavy cloth lightly and quickly.

The curtains were like dresses in a closet, but, beyond the asbestos fire curtain, which had another purpose entirely, this lady had only two things to wear, a plain red velvet everyday curtain stained at the edges, and something very dark and heavy — I could just make out the giant tassels.  Much later in our year at the St. George, a particular staff member would spend all the hours of one night — from ten to six A.M. — hand vacuuming this exquisite curtain. Its tassels were four and a half feet high, each one thick as a heavy rope. Painstakingly, he stripped away the layers of dust, almost heavier than the red and gold brocade it clung to. In recent Internet travels, I’ve located a professional service which does, at great cost, what one man took all of one night to do on his own, with only an Electrolux canister for company.

The formal house curtain was our proudest possession, really no possession at all — because we were just renters. A member of the Theater Historical Society, unaware that we were not the curtain’s owners, offered us $40,000 for it: there were theaters in Manhattan that knew what to do with such a treasure. Later, when the landlord turned off the heat, and still later when I couldn’t pay the electric bill, I entertained fantasies of curtain theft. But beyond grand larceny — and probable jail time — this would have been a violation, like the forced cutting of a beautiful head of hair. The gilded figures in the alcoves left and right might have seemed to avert their plaster gazes, and the very boards of the stage might well have moaned.
                                                                                     *   *   *
​
The above is a republished blog post, to which I’d like to add an interesting footnote:  An organization called “Curtains Without Borders,” headquartered in Vermont, just completed the restoration of a scenic curtain/theater backdrop at the Academy of Music in Northampton, a project that seems to have taken all summer, involving “the largest scenic curtain on the Eastern Seaboard” — 42' x 28'. The backdrop was introduced in 1913 for the Northampton Players company, and appears to depict part of the original landscape of the town, including Paradise Pond on the Smith College campus. The St. George Theatre had no pictorial curtains in its fly loft, but many Vaudeville houses — especially older theaters and opera houses — had these particular backdrops in storage, enough, apparently, to keep a hard-working group of post-millennium Vermonters busy. Check it out!  

On a long-ago trip to Paris, I was shocked to hear the cab driver say, waving dismissively as we passed a long line of elegant (if shabby) buildings that pre-dated the Revolution, “It is all merde — trash from the 18th Century!” New construction in other parts of the world would inspire awe in America, where we treasure the Hollywood sign and where “ancient” (beyond merely “old”) is a church built around the same time as those shabby apartments in Paris. And so, thankfully, we treasure our movie palaces, because palaces themselves are relatively rare here, not to mention ones that were built to serve our great grandparents before there was television or the net or social media. One such people’s palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I was fortunate enough to help run in 1976, was where I first fell in love with the grassy smell of ages-old popcorn, which, in the “older” theaters, penetrates velvet drapery, thick wool carpet and plaster. Unlike most structures built in North America, the palaces were built to last, their smells and gilding part of the sanctuary they still offer.

Thankfully, a movement to preserve and restore theaters is afoot nationwide, growing stronger by the year, as people in towns and cities across America revive spaces that started out as theaters and morphed temporarily into supermarkets, tile warehouses, basketball courts, even parking garages.

Several years ago, I attended the League of Historic American Theatres’ national conference in New York City, keen to pass out cards and chat with people from all over the U.S.A. who have gone to the mat for one or another imperiled older theater. As I noted the day after the conference,

“The new theater partisans I sat with...were older and wiser than I was when my friends and I (in our mid-twenties) signed on the dotted line to lease a 2672-seat theater in New York City, expecting to support ourselves from the enterprise. In most cases, the people I met...were less aspiring entrepreneurs than volunteers who had kept their day jobs, even if they did raid the 401K to keep the local Rialto from becoming a Red Lobster. That hypothetical Rialto, is these days likely a not-for-profit, eligible for grant money and tax abatements. As my husband (a former partner in our long-ago misadventure) is quick to point out, “We were a not-for-profit — we just didn’t know it!” 

It’s important in this tear-down culture to celebrate the salvation of lovely old buildings (even if that Parisian taxi-driver might consider them recently-built merde). A successful theater restoration project at the Fox Theatre in Hanford, CA deserves attention. On March 20, 2014, that theater’s once magnificent ceiling collapsed. The man behind the restoration effort, one Dan Humason, walked into the theater and thought a bomb had gone off. “Every chair in the 1,055-seat theater was covered in white powder and debris....” Two years and four million dollars later, the theater and its ceiling have been restored, the original electric stars shining — lit, these days, by LED technology.

Humason is, apparently, a go-to kind of guy: “If I run out of projects,” he told the Fresno Bee, “I’ll die.” He confesses that the theatre “owns me,” a sensation I recall from my theater management days forty years ago, while I had the privilege of locking and unlocking the St. George Theatre. With its 2672 only partially broken seats, its tar-stained chandeliers and leaking dome, the St. George held a group of us hostage — at the very least as servants, at best, as freelance archeologists. Humason makes a connection to archeology too, something about a lost ring under a seat. Spoiler? Nah — read the Fresno Bee! 

There are all kinds of theater mavens. I’d like to close with a nod to Matt Lambros, a remarkable photographer whose passion for old theaters shines through his work and words making him, in a way, a visual archaeologist. Here’s a paragraph from his blog (After the Final Curtain), so gorgeous I couldn’t resist sharing it: “As I write this I’m sitting in the audience in one of my favorite abandoned theaters, waiting for a 15-minute exposure to finish. The air smells faintly of stale popcorn and wet paper, and the brightest thing in the room is the finished photograph on the screen of my camera. It’s warm spring days like this, when the contrast between the living and the dying is so stark, that I’m reminded again of the startling beauty of decaying buildings.” 

Stale popcorn, oh yes.

People think December 31 is the last day of the year, but they’re wrong, as anybody who ever vacationed in Coastal Connecticut (myself included) can tell you: the boats come out of the water on Labor Day, never to be seen again until spring. This notion of Labor Day as New Year’s is also evident, I recall, in the running of movie theaters; September is not a Boffo Socco month. At the St. George Theatre, which, along with Dean and the gang, I helped to run in 1976 and a little ways into ’77, Labor Day was a kind of cliff’s edge. We’d been doing pretty well all through August, but, like the boats in Connecticut, our audience more or less disappeared after Monday, September 6. The week after Labor Day, while elements of our audience were home watching the new season on television, we were watching nobody, or practically nobody, come into the foyer of the theater and head for the box office window.

In the 1930’s and 40‘s, before there were sitcoms, movie going had not been seasonal. The lobby of the St. George and other movie houses--palaces, small cinemas, stadium theaters — were filled each week, rain or shine, blistering heat or searing cold, with people who got their news, entertainment, and social experience — the whole package — sitting in the dark watching a single screen a couple of days every week. All that changed in the early 1950‘s, when televisions started showing up in storefronts. At first, people stood together and watched them from the sidewalk. Then a single family would get a TV, and the rest of the block would follow suit. Mad Man Muntz, the TV/appliance king, made a killing from what some people had thought was a passing craze.   

Some craze. With a tiny screen in every house, moviegoing became something people chose to do — not a twice-a-week requirement; in other words, it became seasonal. Major films were released between Thanksgiving and Christmas, minor titles in spring, with summer movies to balance the whole thing out. September and October were dead months.

But for an old movie palace entrepreneur, there are consolations in the cycle of techno births and deaths: each fresh wonder kills the previous one. Film in its heyday crushed Vaudeville. The live dog and pony shows, singers and dancers, which our beloved theater and thousands of theaters nationwide had been built to house, had  disappeared long before, in the early thirties. All those empty dressing rooms at the St. George, six floors of them, had been built for a stage that was dominated in our time by a giant grape soda-stained screen.

Then TV eroded the movie-going habit, something we’re still experiencing. Nobody showed up in our movie palace lobby after Labor Day, not only because Hollywood was withholding product, but because the new season on the three then-dominant networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, was timed to soften the blow of back-to-school. How could we compete with Farah Fawcett in the newly-launched Charlie’s Angels? or  M.A.S.H. in its fifth season, or Chico and the Man?  Roots, the television miniseries with its Nielsen record-breaking numbers, would be an even crueler blow to moviegoing in the winter of ’77.

What’s next? It’s only fitting that two generations after a group of us went broke running a movie palace, the Internet, which has introduced binge-watching and instant gratification, has forced television to change its thinking in turn. 

Back when, you’d never see a new show launched in July, like Vice Principals, or in August like Better Late Than Never.  Is it time for TV as we have known it to take a deep theatrical bow and disappear from the stage?  

I’ll close with the following exchange, cribbed from my husband who claims he remembers everything ever said to him and can repeat it verbatim. (Either that’s true or he just really rocks when it comes to writing dialogue). This exchange took place at the concession stand, the week after Labor Day, forty years ago.

Me: Maybe we should have booked some other title... (said while polishing the candy case, rubbing it with a terrible ferocity). 

Dean: Dunno....even if we could have had that boxing movie [he was referring to Rocky], the one that’s gonna come out soon, and offered everybody free popcorn and valet parking, I think we’d still outnumber the audience.

At that, a man in a vintage Brooklyn Dodgers cap trudged up to the door with the ticket he’d just paid for. Dean tore it and studied the man, as he bought a small popcorn, pivoted on his heel and entered the auditorium. The number of people watching the screen in our 2672-seat movie palace now outnumbered the staff — by one.

FLASHBACK FORTY YEARS:
Wednesday, September 8, 1976
The Giant Spider Invasion 
plus
The Legend of Bigfoot
"All Seats, All Times, $1.50, 
Children 90 cents."
 ​