We were eating fried eggs on the porch yesterday, listening to a playlist of song covers by Nat King Cole. “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” Thanks to the requisite devices we all carry it didn’t take long to find a film with exactly that name (William Holden, Jennifer Jones, 1955). The song, by Alfred Newman, won a Best Original Music Score Oscar that year. Ah, the fifties (and early sixties) : “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “The Days of Wine and Roses,” anything by Mancini. Violins. Those fiddles were fading by the time I was grown. “Let It Be” won Best Original Song Score in 1970, give or take a laid-in violin or two. The world was changing and movie music reflected those changes.

​In New York, where, for one perilous and unforgettable mid-seventies year, a team of us ran a movie palace, movie music was a far cry from fifties or even sixties romance. The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre  in Staten Island was our home in 1976. And so Dean and I were wondering yesterday over our Sunday eggs, what music we remember from that year, emanating from our grand mostly–empty theater auditorium?

The mid-seventies were a brooding time at best. Jaws, which we ran in early may of ‘76, had won an Oscar in ’74, later ranked as the sixth-greatest score by the American Film Institute. The "shark" theme, an alternating pattern of two notes  became a classic piece of suspense music. Its composer, John Williams, described the theme as "grinding away at you, just as a shark would do, instinctual, relentless, unstoppable.” 

Jaws’ shark theme really did penetrate beyond the glass-enclosed auditorium. I could hear it (and see the swimmer about to be pulled down into the water) from as far away as the concession stand.

No wonder we ran the trailer for Gone With the Wind over and over, even though we had no intention whatsoever of showing the movie to our action-obsessed audience. Not so secretly, we craved the kind of movie whose music wraps its violins around you and pulls you in. Could’ve run a Casablanca trailer, come to think of it. “As Time Goes By,” was the kind of song I needed to curl up inside of.

Of the more than a hundred movies we ran in our theater year, only the shark and those tubular bells from The Exorcist come to mind as music that penetrated my consciousness, although we did run a number of movies with sound tracks worth noting:

• “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” R&B, Freddie Perren and Chrstine Yarian’s song from the 1975 Cooley High, obscure then, but a cult film now.

• Jack Nitzsche’s score for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, won an Oscar. Speaking of on-edge music, the dominant sound has to do with a bow drawn across a saw; it’s up there with tubular bells and shark music.

• Composer Jerry Goldsmith’s “Avi Satani,” won an Academy Award for The Omen in 1976. It’s a lovely if unsettling piece of music. As late as it came along in our desperate year, I don’t remember it well. Was I in my office trying to come up with a rent check? Probably.

• Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in a class by itself, an amalgam of music by local Texas talent never brought together into anything as formal as a sound-track. People have tried. See the above link if you’re curious.

As a movie exhibition year, 1976 was between two music worlds. Movies with heroic themes came along afterward: post–‘Nam, post–Watergate, and beyond the recession that, among other things, had early bankrupted New York. Is this why the movies I remember loving used music less as a theme and more, the way Hitchcock had in Psycho, as an effect? From Psycho’s brilliant tearing violins — in the shower scene — to the tubular bells of Exorcist isn’t very far in movie music time.

Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Chariots of Fire, Fame, even All That Jazz (despite its dark vein) followed in the late seventies and eighties, offering music with a kind of resolve, that might, after all, reach movie-goers standing outside an auditorium and draw them through the doors. Alas, by that time, those doors were in multiplex labyrinths, not single-screen palaces. After we left the movie business, the music changed, in more ways than one.

Who knew his real name? He was the sole proprietor and probably the only employee of “Gabby’s Pure Oil Service Station and Pony Keg,” a few blocks down from the Deer Park Theater, in the suburb of Cincinnati where my husband Dean grew up. Gabby’s store was an important source of early revenue for Dean, whose allowance wasn’t quite enough to get him into a Saturday matinee at the theater. A decade later he’d meet me, and we’d go on to run a theater of our own for one year, the 2,672-seat St. George, in Staten Island, where we live. That’s the story that caused the blog you’re reading now, and the book that will follow it. Meanwhile, here’s Dean, in his own words, a growing-up story with a tiny theater at its center: 

We moved to Deer Park  (Ohio, not Long Island) in August, 1955, a tiny city, exactly one mile square. Tract houses, shoulder-to-shoulder on quiet tree-lined streets, it was teeming with kids under ten, and we all grew up together. There were four centers of activity in Deer Park: school — K through 12, Chamberlain Park with its four baseball diamonds and swimming pool, Gabby’s Pony Keg and, the center of life under fourteen, our own Deer Park Theater.

It stood across a four-lane street, its raceway marquee flickering in afternoon light. My first memory of that marquee is THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA, a 1949 WWII flick starring John Wayne. I realize now that the movie was six years old, almost as old as I was the summer we moved in, but who knew — or cared —about that? What else do you do on a Saturday in August but revisit the war your daddy and everybody else’s daddy fought in? I was three years under age, eligible to purchase a child’s ticket for the low, low price of 35 cents, but, alas, I was ten cents short, since my allowance was just a quarter. It’d been raised to that amount on my birthday, so I knew I couldn’t ask for more.

No problem! Sodas at Gabby’s came in glass bottles. Size didn’t matter, they were all ten cents, and if you had an extra empty to turn in, you got 2 cents back. You could walk around the neighborhood looking for those empties, and if you got as many as six, your next soda was free! Or.... you could add twelve cents to a quarter in your pocket and watch the sands fly and John Wayne as he dodged the bullets.

I wasn’t alone. Up and down the railroad track, boys my age and even some girls, spent their free time trolling for empties. Under the bleachers in Chamberlain Park, down at the Dillonvale Plaza parking lot. I didn’t get enough to see the movie that first Saturday, but a week later I was ready. With a little more than two dozen empties, I headed for the pony keg.

Gabby seldom said anything. A WWII Marine Vet in his late forties, he sat resolutely on a stool inside the station, watching over his two coolers, one for sodas, one for beer. “Don’t be touchin’ that cooler on the right, boys...that’s for your dads!” was the extent of his repartee.

I turned in my treasure, got my half dollar, thanked Gabby. He nodded. Walking out of the pony keg just before noon, with a 5-cent Snickers, a 5-cent Hollywood Bar, and a dime package of Twinkies Snowballs, I made my way down to the theater, with 30 cents from scrounging and a quarter allowance, to spare. Concealing my candy purchases, I bought a child’s ticket and spent the rest of my loot on some Good n’ Plenties and a dime’s worth of popcorn. Mrs. Weigel at the candy counter was a real crab apple,

“Popcorn? ...it’s a dime, a DIME!!! Don’t count out all those pennies!” She gazed down the bridge of her nose, past her glasses, anchored around her neck by a silver chain. Everything was a rebuke.

“Good n’ Plenties? Say it then.”

“Gooood n’ Pleeenties...?” 

Slam. The box went down on the glass.

It didn’t matter. I was in, with my contraband candy, and John Wayne awaited.
           
The Deer Park Theater was the center of my world well into high school. Then suddenly, no more John Wayne, you could get on the bus on a Saturday, go downtown and see a movie at the RKO Albee or the Grand, something grown up, like The Apartment (that you didn’t tell your dad about). Soon guys got licenses, we discovered the Montgomery Drive in. Could the larger world be far away?

The building that was the theater still stands. Last I looked the marquee was gone, but the opening of my neighborhood dream house is still at a verticle 45-degree angle to the sidewalk. For a while, it was the home of a company that sold potbelly stoves and fireplace inserts. I could not bring myself to go inside.

Was it only two months ago I spent a sweet week in Jacksonville? Sunday, mid-June. The river then was nowhere near the bottom of the bridge I crossed over in my rental car, eager to find and photograph The Florida, an elegant  1,900-seat Moorish-themed movie palace and live theater. It opened, with around 2,200 seats, in 1927, and has one of the sweetest marquees going, all script letters in neon. I parked and talked my way in, the way I’ve done in so many other cities and towns that have surviving theaters. They’re like charms on my bracelet: The venerable newly-rescued Victory in Holyoke, Mass., the 1,100-seat Rapp & Rapp  Paramount in Charlottesville, which I spotted on the town square after glimpsing its striking vertical marquee. And of course, the Niantic Cinema in Connecticut, a shoreline treasure; theaters that have survived, theaters to write about. The Florida had (and I hope still has) the coolest built-in concession stand, all done out in dark-veined green marble, first thing you encounter before entering the nobly-ornate Spanish lobby. My particular fondness for The Florida may have something to do with the fact that its decor reminds me of the theater I co-managed for a year in 1976, The 2672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, also Spanish-themed, with bullfight scenes and wrought-iron fake balconies over the lobby. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that I’m a fool for old theaters.

The day I walked in, The Florida’s lobby was full of kids waiting to perform in a dance recital, eating pizza on the steps. Hard to imagine that same lobby a wading pool, with Hurricane Irma and the St. John’s River its only guests. Of course that’s nothing compared to all the condos, trailer homes, houses, libraries, hospitals and even shelters filling up all over the wracked state of Florida and its neighboring states.The river in Jacksonville crested yesterday at historic levels, almost covering the bridge I took last June.

Theatre demolition is generally something you can blame on (developers’) greed and (citizens’) lack of imagination, or both. Well, wait a minute. What, after all, causes mega-hurricanes? — among other things, greed and lack of imagination!  Wrecker’s ball? Or series of gigantic hurricanes brought on by overheated oceans? — wreckage is wreckage. And If this storm has switched off or changed the lives of millions of people, then a treasured movie palace — even if it is the one where Elvis caused hundreds to pray for his soul merely by threatening to gyrate his famous pelvis — is still relatively small potatoes. So I send all good thoughts to each and every resident of Florida, as well as all the states affected directly or indirectly by Irma and her companion storms: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama,Texas, even Virginia, according to some sources. And to my friends in California, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, and other western states, surrounded by  yet one more of the four elements, fire. 

Finally, here’s to the Florida Theatre on East Forsythe Street, a street I fear might be a canal today, with waist-high water. Hope I’m wrong.

This is what fantasy does to a writer. It was the same with my overactive imagination for years after we ran the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, where I live. The theater was shuttered for the better part of the 1980’s, its marquee depositing rust stains on the sidewalk. I used to walk under that marquee (or even around it, because I was afraid it would fall on me!) and wonder when the wrecker’s ball would come. But despite the fact that greed and lack of imagination (frequent causes of theater demolition) are hardly in short supply in my borough, the St. George still stands, and has become a post-millennium working theater. New York Harbor is right down the hill; but in that we are lucky as well, because the storm that climbs high enough to flood our theater probably will not happen in our time. If you want to read further on that topic, read Ian Frazier’s excellent New Yorker piece written in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy. Or don’t, if you’re not in an apocalyptic mood!

Here’s a more comforting solution: go to a movie! No, not in your living room, but somewhere with a nice high and dry concession stand --eat popcorn! -- and seats facing a shared screen. It’s what our ancestors did, gather around the hearth. It’s what we all need to do right now.   

In my twenties I spent a single precious year, 1976, running a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre. Why exactly did this adventure appeal to me? You could say I grew up in the dark, which is to say, in movie theaters. By age two I was already gazing at giant technicolor lovers, watching my first movie, Tea for Two (the film version of the 1924 Broadway production No, No Nanette,) in an elegantly-appointed single-screen Cincinnati theater. Exactly which theater, nobody knows for sure, but there are some likely suspects. I’d been dragged, kicking and screaming into the place by my sister Judy and her friend Madge, thirteen years ahead of me in age, who’d been charged with my care. They more or less tied me to a seat between them, then settled in to watch Doris Day, the quintessential all-American girl (coincidentally, a fellow Cincinnatian) sing and kick up her heels with Gordon MacCrae. Perhaps only blocks away, my future husband and eventual theater partner — then a boy of four — was already having his own early movie-going experiences. Movie theaters were multipurpose facilities in those days: for babysitting, mooning over Hollywood stars, smoking, necking, or just plain hanging out. Here, for your entertainment, is a snippet of an email conversation the three of us — me, Dean and my sister Judy — had almost exactly six years ago. (Judy had just reminded me that Tea for Two was, indeed, the first movie I’d ever seen).

9/3/2011 9:43 am [Me]:  I was barely walking, so I don’t remember a thing...but I’ve looked it up on IMDB, and the math is right: Tea for Two was a 1950 movie and I was exactly two. I am so grateful for this; you’re the only person in the world who remembers my life before I remember it! What theater was that, BTW, sixty-one years ago?

9/3/2011 12:43 pm [Judy]: It was the Saturday matinee.  But where? Couldn’t have been the Hyde Park Theatre — that was always more sophisticated fare, The Lavender Hill Mob, that kind of thing. Might’ve been the Ambassador — it was newer and much less gritty than the 20th Century... I think you weren’t allowed popcorn because the lady at the concession stand thought you’d choke, which infuriated you. So I bribed you with Good n‘ Plenties, one of my passions back then.

Whether the movie in question was at the Ambassador or the Twentieth Century, rival theaters on a small village square in the neighborhood called Oakley, is lost to us now, behind an immovable scrim. I was charmed to learn why I’ve always been partial to Good n’ Plenties.

Meanwhile, enter into the conversation my husband and theater-managing partner, who, as I said, also grew up in Cincinnati:

9/3/2011 4:19 pm [Dean]: Gritty? How dare you besmirch one of my favorite theaters! The very reason we got seduced into running a movie palace in New York was my memories of the glam Twentieth Century! During the Korean War, my mother’s friend, “Aunt Jane,” had free passes to that theater because her husband, “Uncle Rick,” was the manager. I imagined his job to be the most luxurious one in the world. His office was on the same level as the projection booth, about three floors up, with a massive picture window overlooking the auditorium. There was a speaker box on his desk — clunky, but I thought it was swank. Seated in his big leather chair, with one turn of the speaker’s knob, I could watch the movie and gobble down endless free candy and popcorn. The adults sat in the corner, talking, laughing and drinking (not soda). And there are other connections... Imagine the tug on my heart, when I walked into the St. George in 1969, a newly-minted adult, and the same maroon-swirled-with-beige-gold-and-carmel carpet was on the floor, the exact pattern I’d played on at the 20th Century in 1953! Near the end of our theater year, someone from the Theater Historical Society asked if we had spare carpeting for their archive. Alas, we had no spare carpet, only spare memories.

To make sense of Judy’s reply, you’ll need to know that Judy’s got 11 years on Dean...She’s also used to being the oldest, so claims her seniority easily.

9/4/2011 9:49 pm [Judy]: Ah, what a difference 11 years makes! In 1944, Betty M. and I were old enough to walk down Paxton, cross the railroad tracks and turn down Isabella to the 20th Century, where Saturday matinees always began with a newsreel, then a cartoon — Tom & Jerry or Bugs if we were lucky — then some Perils-of-Pauline short subject and, finally, the movie, National Velvet or The White Cliffs of Dover or even Laura. After the war, about the same time Dean was born, they refurbished an older theater nearby which became the Ambassador. Glamor had come at last to Oakley Square! We deserted the Twentieth Century immediately. Betty and I saw Gone With the Wind for the first time at the Ambassador — I was seriously in love with Leslie Howard. We had had to take Betty’s little brother Bobby who sneaked out at intermission. He was 8 and had had enough of girls in dresses, especially the scene where Scarlet eats those carrots and vomits them up and then declares she’ll never go hungry again. We were so transfixed by the movie, we didn’t even notice he’d left — which earned Betty about a million demerits. Later, as teens Madge and I returned to the Twentieth Century, for racier stuff like A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun — teen fare. They had a balcony, where the big kids necked, and you could smoke. I’d learned to smoke at Girl Scout Camp, so Madge and I would take to the stairs and light one up, and maybe watch Betty necking with some boyfriend of hers.

By the time Dean was spinning around in Uncle Rick’s chair, I’d probably graduated to the Albee downtown, on dates with Harry or Dick. Now the Albee, that’s a full-fledged palace!!! I saw From Here to Eternity there, the sexiest film ever, or so I thought at the time.

Gone With the Wind was five years old in 1944, and making the rounds at neighborhood houses. Judy eventually saw it over 20 times on various screens; she couldn’t get enough of Leslie Howard (Madge was mad for Clark Gable). When I was six, my sister took me to GWTW for the first time. As for the Albee, we all graduated to dating there. Growing up, you went to the fancy downtown theaters with your family -- for Ben Hur and such -- on Sunday, then you dated there later on.

The movies — and the theaters that contained them — such was our life.