It was a reckoning year. Our run as theater operators at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island ended abruptly in March, removing us permanently from further agonies of back room dealing, those increasingly desperate attempts to book the next movie. Who would get Smokey and the Bandit? Or Saturday Night Fever? Not us, though we might have screened them second-run, if we’d hung on a little longer; but that year was bigger than our solitary crisis. 1977 was pivotal, both for Hollywood, and for single-screen theaters wherever they were straggling out their existences. In New York City and Gallup, New Mexico; in Detroit, Cincinnati, and Youngstown, Ohio; even in L.A., the darkness that, for a decade, would seal the St. George, brought wrecking crews or conversion to formerly glamorous theaters, some of which morphed into warehouses or churches, parking garages, or even, in one case, a basketball court.
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The strip mall 'plex was hot, a trend famously begun by a man named Stanley Durwood back in the Sixties, who reasoned he could sell twice as many tickets and pay only one staff. It worked. His chain became AMC.

Still, there were problems from the distribution perspective. By '77 there were too many screens, all competing for fairly scarce product, from a Hollywood that was undergoing its own transition, still having not quite risen from the ashes of the studio system.
 
Released on Memorial Day weekend, two months after we popped our last corn, Star Wars was about to change the whole game, but nobody knew that. There were a lot of back room shenanigans going on, a bidding war of the giants, over George Lucas’ third movie. You might expect everybody wanted it, but if you did, forgive your hindsight. The war was of an inverse kind. You know how in baseball, when you get chosen last to play on account of the fact that everybody thinks you’re a nerd who can’t hit or field? Nobody wanted this quaint epic involving robots and lightsabers and a princess, when they knew The Other Side of Midnight was going to be the blockbuster of that summer. (Remember it? I don’t). Arguably the biggest box office behemoth since GWTW sat on the horizon, but nobody could see it. Star Wars would have been perfect for the St. George; though we would  never would have gotten it, even before the big guys knew what they had. It’s nice, anyhow, to imagine filling all 2,672 of our seats, the way we did just once in July of '76, for the re-run of The Exorcist. Ah well, such are the wistful dreams of ex-theater operators, even forty-plus years later.   

For palaces, 1977 was a demolition derby; and for Hollywood, conceptually, at least, it was a hard right turn. Before Star Wars,the studios aimed for the dating audience, with a tilt towards what pleased the guy (women would come along willingly enough it was assumed). I was part of the generation they aiming at, in movies like The Graduate, Alfie, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver; so much for college dating. Star Wars would be all about teen audiences returning again and again, and, while they were at it, buying the accoutrements, the dolls and regalia Lucas was smart enough to keep the rights to. Star Wars “...is modern pop cinema’s very own Big Bang: traces of it are to be found in every blockbuster thundering its way into your multiplex.” After Star Wars, in December of '77, came Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we were on our way.

Sci fi was suddenly cool, if not intellectual, and it was chock full of special effects. The force, if you consider The Shape of Water, is still with us today. 

Roger Ebert, looking back in 1999, says it best:
Star Wars effectively brought to an end the golden era of early-1970s personal filmmaking and focused the industry on big-budget special-effects blockbusters, blasting off a trend we are still living through. But you can't blame it for what it did, you can only observe how well it did it. In one way or another all the big studios have been trying to make another Star Wars ever since (pictures like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and Independence Day are its heirs). It located Hollywood's center of gravity at the intellectual and emotional level of a bright teenager. (See the review here.) 

It was 1982, coincidentally the year of E.T. I went alone to a movie, L'Étoile du Nord, starring Simon Signoret and Philippe Noiret; it was what I then called an “after therapy” flick. Having poured out my tale of a fractured family to my shrink, I indulged in a movie I’d chosen in advance, something with good writing (based on a Simenon novel) and character actors you could lose yourself in. The movie delivered. I was just getting up to leave as the lights came on, satisfied by a story that ends as an older woman recognizes her love for a man sent into exile in a penile colony. In the next row two slightly younger patrons shared their impressions, “That sucked! Where were the special effects?” 

Afterthought 
If you skipped over an earlier link to the story of how (then Mann’s, now TCL but always Grauman’s) Chinese Theatre grudgingly agreed to take Star Wars for two weeks, then rushed to refurbish another fleabag theater it owned to hold onto the suddenly-hot flick, check it out.   

Yesterday, in the company of a thousand or so fellow citizens, I had a past-life experience; a past half-life, anyhow. I saw a movie long enough that after the word INTERMISSION appeared, I could get up and walk around, in a theater with a red-velvet house curtain that briefly closed on a generous-size movie screen. We sat in the front row, as is our custom, and I got a comforting dizzy sensation, harking back to childhood, as I gazed at the faux boxes left and right of the stage that shelter gilded statuary, and the filigree that frames the proscenium arch of this particular movie palace.

What palace, you may wonder? Wonder indeed: the theater used to be Loew’s 175th, an original “Wonder Theater,” but these days it’s styled the United Palace of Cultural Arts, a part-time church and rest-of-the-time cultural center. Eighty percent of the theater’s 1,800-seat orchestra section, was full of people just like me, looking up when they could at their surroundings. You never see that at Lincoln Square (it has Imax) or the Angelika or another regular movie theater, because there’s nothing to look up at. The movie in question, Lawrence of Arabia, which I grew up with — have seen it at least six times — was a perfect match for the United Palace, in what I think of as upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights). Having operated a movie palace myself (The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, 1976), I know what it means when an exhibition space rivals its movie. John Huston’s epic, The Man Who Would Be King, which we ran to an almost empty house, comes to mind. I also know what a miracle it is that a palace of any size, let alone one that seats 3, 330, is open as a multi-use facility, and actually still, occasionally, shows movies.

I came out, after three hours and thirty-six minutes of sand-blown dunes, and an exhausting camel ride that really did seem twenty days long, from one side of the giant screen to the other, feeling vulnerable in a way no Pirates of the Caribbean ever would have made me feel. Arriving at a depicted oasis actually made me reach for the water bottle under my seat. The blinding eye of the sun rising on one more inexorable cinematic day of trekking, was as big, in real life, as the circular recess in the theater’s central dome. What made me thirsty, tired and dusty feeling were the psychic dimensions of the movie, which matched in scope the screen and literal surroundings. This movie requires a frame vast and ornate enough to complement it. Given that frame, Peter O’Toole dancing in the garb of a Bedouin is as real as your own very personal dream, one that you unwillingly shake yourself out of, as the house lights come up. 
 
Later at home a neighbor casually mentioned that she has a DVD of Lawrence. Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu, Amazon, Starz, even DVD: what does it do to David Lean’s vision of a disintegrating hero lost in the desert to watch on at best a large-screen TV, let alone a Mac Book or iphone? (The video vs. film controversy I’ll reserve for another time). And how rare is it to see such a great movie in the setting it was designed for? Way back in 1962, Hollywood caved and let NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies have The Snows of Kilimanjaro and a host of other fairly recent movies. To promote its new film library, the network concocted a seductive pastiche of theater marquee lights to serve as an intro. So sad. Since then, quietly, something has been shrinking, and it isn’t just the picture.

Before that, when television had already begun to encroach on movie ticket sales, back in the early 1950‘s, Hollywood had fought back by thinking big, first with Cinerama, involving the projection of three simultaneous films at once. Cinerama gave way to the more dependable wide-screen technologies — VistaVision, CinemaScope and Ultra Panavision — as Hollywood struggled to keep audiences from straying entirely to the convenience of Bonanza and Ozzie and Harriet on the little screen at home. It worked, for a time, especially since Warner, U.A. and the brethren agreed to withhold important epic films from network exposure (black-and-white movies from the 30’s had made it to TV). But it was a tide they couldn’t hold back.

The slow slide in movie theater attendance that had accelerated in the 1940’s had become an avalanche. In 1940, roughly 50% of all Americans went to the movies at least once a week. By 1950, it was 40%, and by 1960, 20%. By 1962, 15% were still out to the flix on a weekly basis. In 1962, the year, paradoxically, that Lawrence of Arabia hit the screen in Super Panavision 70, the opportunity to stay home and watch big deal movies, some of fairly recent vintage, was just too good for a lot of people to pass up. A number of the movies NBC got their hands on had been executed for the wide screen, so had to undergo a process of “pan and scan,” — a severe cropping — to adjust to television’s then very-limited  4:3 aspect ratio. The picture wasn’t just shrinking, but changing shape. You know how that works. You buy a museum postcard of a Monet haystack painting. You think you’ve got the whole thing, but something seems off, then you realize that postcards are always a standard size, and the card maker has truncated the image of the painting to fit standard format. In movies-to-TV there is still "letterbox" which at least preserves the shape of the shot. But....

It goes without saying, screens everywhere are getting smaller, and, yes, more confined. As they shrink, they take with them a piece of the audience’s imagination. In Lawrence on the big screen, a figure contained in a desolate horizon is observed with increasing frenzy by Lawrence’s panicked guide. We — and Lawrence —see nothing for several seconds. But then, either at the same moment Lawrence recognizes the rapidly-approaching figure on horseback, or a few frames later, we see the rider, growing bigger as he approaches. The delay in recognition is important; it increases the tension, arouses the curiosity of the movie gazer, and demonstrates the vastness of the desert, as well as the illusion of its emptiness. How would this be possible on anything but a very large-screen wide-format TV? Even on that screen, the lag time between the guide’s comprehension and Lawrence’s, and ours, would be too great. 

Unless you’re a cinemaphile, who’s sought out one of Quentin Tarantino’s or Christopher Nolan’s most recent releases — on film — you’re likely not even to know where the nearest theater offering 70 mm projection might be. I have to admit I went to Nolan’s Dunkirk without even bothering to check out the specs in advance. Despite this, I left thinking “Wow, I feel as though I actually was on the beach in France for all those hours, being shot at.” The scope of Nolan’s vision in that movie is similar to the scope of Lean’s in Lawrence. Nolan shot Dunkirk in a combination of 70 mm and IMAX, resulting in an aspect ratio of 1.43:1. That’s the tallest frame you can get, creating a visceral experience that makes you feel as though you’re there.  Nolan describes it as “virtual reality without the goggles.” Well, so I didn’t see it in Imax,  but I did see it on-screen at a theater which supports 70-mm, and the scope of the director’s vision apparently got across.

We live in an age that lacks scope, cinematic and otherwise. What has become of us? When you conceive a movie for Netflix, a movie which will probably never see a real movie screen, let alone a screen sized to present a big idea, you’re trapped in a tiny world-view. 

Since this blog post began on the subject of that delicious evening in August when I crossed the desert on a camel, I’d like to give the last few words to the theater itself. In 1969, when Loew’s cut its Wonder Theaters (and other venues) loose, their 175th Street Theatre, occupying a full city block, was as vulnerable as Cincinnati’s Albee (razed in 1977), the Kings in Brooklyn (shuttered in the mid-seventies, the home, for many years to come, of the sadly homeless and gang shoot-outs), and the Loews Triboro in Queens (dark since 1974 and demolished, according to the New York Post,in that very dark year, 1977). But not so for the United Palace, saved by faith. Or, more notably, by a preacher whose ministry focussed on the good feelings brought on by economic prosperity. What better place to feel prosperous than a gleaming movie palace? And so the theater began its apprenticeship as a church, morphing into a dual-purpose facility gradually, as church and occasional rental hall and then, after Reverend Ike achieved his heavenly reward, passing to his son Xavier, a musician. He fulfilled his dream of creating an arts and cultural center to transform lives through the arts in Washington Heights, by expanding the former Loews theater to its current dual cultural and religious status. 

The icing on the gilded movie-palace cake is that this Thomas Lamb theater’s original Robert Morton 4 manual 23 rank organ, recently removed for renovation by the New York Theater Organ Society,will return soon, refurbished and ready for action. I’m going up there when it does.


Afterthought 1:
Of the five Wonder Theaters, so named for their Robert Morgan “wonder” organs, the UPCA is the only one whose original instrument remains.

Afterthought 2: This just in from Robert Endres, whom I originally met at the St. George Theatre and who was, for many years, the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall. Beyond being a generous friend, he’s a tech genius of all things projection. Here he’s answering a question I asked about viewing availabilities in NYC:

With regards to 70mm theatres, both the Regal on 42nd Street and the Loew’s/AMC Lincoln Square have 70mm equipment (kinda) as does the Village East.  The “kinda” is because some of the 70mm projectors put in by Weinstein for “Hateful 8” were bought by Warner Bros.They have their own crew that’s called when they need to have 70mm projection.The projectors also “travel” between screens in some of the multiplexes so it’s hard to tell just what size screen the picture may be shown on. One of the projectionists is from New Jersey where he’s a stage hand most of the time, but has made a pretty good living lately running Warner 70mm equipment at both the Regal and Lincoln Square.  Another house that has 70mm equipment is Cinema I on the East Side. I know they’ve run a few pictures that I didn’t even know were available on 70mm such as Wonder Woman. Alas, with the exception of Lincoln Square, all of the screens are flat rather than curved. The Lincoln Square screen has a shallow curve but nothing like the deeply curved screens used for three and single projector Cinerama and Todd A-O and 70mm Panavision. None of the D-150 screens have survived either. With the exception of the Cinerama Dome in L.A. and the Cinerama theatre in Seattle I don’t think there are any curved screens left, although both of those houses can run three strip Cinerama.

Why is the dearth of screen curvature sad? Here’s a partial explanation. 

NOTE: Thanks to Matt Lambros at After the Final Curtain for the wonderful photo!

Hello?
Is this the Tiki Theater?
Yeah..waddaya want?
What are you showing tonight?
Wha...?
What movies are you showing tonight...
Pornos! Three pornos...Come! You like!
What are their names?
Huh? 
(click)

What does the Tiki, an L.A. porn house, have in common with the St. George Theatre, a movie palace I helped keep alive in Staten Island way back in 1976? Well, for one thing, like every self-respecting single-screen theater in the mid-seventies, the St. George ran a little porn. Granted, it was soft, but it did attract an unusual clientele and required considerable clean-up. We did not have leather seats, alas.

I’m evoking the Tiki, end of a long long road, one that’s involved the three previous posts, exploring theaters on or near old Route 66, which wound, at mid-twentieth century, 

...from Chicago to L.A.
More than two thousand miles all the way...

The Tiki happens to be on old Route 66, the last pure porn house in town, and, it is said, a silent theater built in 1919.  

The conversation quoted above took place between my husband and whoever answered the phone there, proving that some people can still get their kicks on Route 66 (or at 5466 Santa Monica Blvd, as the USPS knows it these days). 

Going from the ridiculous to the sublime, porn is the least of what you’ll find as 66 ends. The entire Broadway district, is chock-full of theaters. Since the district grew up at the same time as Route 66, it became a kind of glorious theatrical end for the iconic pilgrimage highway.

The National Parks Service waxes poetic on this subject, “As the western terminus of Route 66 between 1926 and 1936, the [Broadway] district was a portal to coastal California for a national audience ranging from Dust Bowl refugees to pleasure-seeking tourists.” To this declaration, the Los Angeles Times (2006),  adds “...screen goddesses and guys in fedoras rubbed elbows with Army nurses and aircraft pioneers.”

Here’s a brief tour of theaters more or less still extant as show houses in downtown L.A.The United Artists (now the Theater at the Ace Hotel), presents an interior inspired by a cathedral in Segovia; the hotel grew up around it, a great example of adapted use, if that kind of thing must exist, and it must. Moving right along, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights premiered at the Los Angeles Theatre, in 1931, but you can happily book your own event their right now. The Palace (originally known as the Orpheum before the other Orpheum opened nearby) became the Newsreel Palace, then just the Palace, and boasts the first decorative polychrome terra cotta in L.A. Meanwhile, the Spanish-Rococo State Theatre  was doing time as a church until this year — but seems about to become a theater again, thanks to the Broadway Theatre Group who owns and lavishes TLC on it and three other district theaters. Hats off to these people. Don’t forget the Orpheum, the only house in the district that still has its Wurlitzer organ;  and then there’s the Globe, a legitimate theater whose marquee received recent restored neon. 

I’ve listed theaters that are still in some manner working houses, but a nod goes to: the Roxie, the Olympic, and the Arcade, all currently in retail, the Cameo, once a 775-seat Nickelodeon and these days a swap meet, the Mayan, a nightclub, the Warner Brothers Downtown, a jewelry store. The Tower, an S. Charles Lee renaissance revival gem, is destined to become an Apple retail location. The Los Angeles Conservancy seems pleased that this long-time vacancy will be filled. Such is the world. 

By 1931, the original district housed so many theaters that it actually contained roughly 15,000 seats. Post millennium, half these theaters are doing duty as something other than theaters, but, well, they’re still standing; and the rest are, in some fashion or another, working houses. Shakespeare would approve, I think, and Marcus Loew as well (“We sell tickets to theaters, not movies.”). 
In New York, and all the way across the U.S., the same can hardly be said. Let’s hear it  then for L.A. and the Broadway Theater District, the only large concentration of movie palaces left in the United States.

As for Route 66, it's time for me to go home.

Afterthoughts and apologies:
1. My husband protests that he was only doing “research,” calling the Tiki on my behalf! Or was he thinking of hopping the red-eye?

2. I apologize for skipping over the last mentioned stop in the Route 66 song lyric, and giving short shrift to the one before it. So here’s to the Skyline Drive-In in Barstow, and the California Theatre of the Performing Arts in San Bernardino, which has a kick-ass ticket booth; check it out!

Next week I’m recalling a warm August night, when we took in Lawrence of Arabia, at a still-standing palace of some note in New York City, an original Loew’s Wonder Theater. While the movie’s on, you can gaze in rapture at the wide screen, but at intermission, all you can do is look up. Up’s the thing, baby. 

If you missed last week’s post, it’s still blazing in St. George, Staten Island, my neighborhood, where the St. George Theatre (a 2,672-seat movie palace I ran with a group of brave entrepreneurs in 1976) stands, within walking distance of New York Harbor. I‘ve stayed pretty close to home this summer, but in my imagination I can go anywhere, so I’ve hit the virtual road: Chicago and parts west, following the arbitrary itinerary laid out in “Get Your Kicks on Route 66,” a song about a road that hasn’t entirely vanished and has, in fact, become iconic. Movie theatre enthusiast that I am, I’m looking for theaters all along the way.

This week brings me to Gallup, New Mexico, with a slight detour in Albuquerque...

Who could resist an “Art Deco Pueblo Revival Style theater?” The KiMo in Albuquerque is a blend of decorative motifs from indigenous cultures, adobe building styles, and, some say, the linear repetitions of American Deco. “Some” say this, because there is a lively dispute in the comments section of the KiMo’s Cinema Treasures entry about whether there’s any Deco in the mix at all, and even whether Art Deco is a worthy architectural term. That argument has been going on in broader circles for some time, since “Art Deco” seems to have been coined way after the style it describes. The KiMo (“mountain lion” in the native American language, Teva) is a three-story stucco building with the stepped massing characteristic of native pueblo architecture. 

The interior is designed to resemble the inside of a ceremonial kiva with log-like ceiling beams depicting dance and hunt scenes. Air vents are disguised as Navajo rugs, and chandeliers morph partially into war drums and funeral canoes. As if this weren’t a bit over-the-top wrought iron birds descend the staircases, with rows of garlanded buffalo skulls. I would be surprised if Navajo and other N.A. visitors don’t find this a bit patronizing, not to mention clandestine or even atavistic, but movie palaces are movie palaces. The family that built this theater had friends who were members of several tribes, and, so the story goes, were trying to please everybody. 

The theater went through typical mid-century movie palace turmoil:  a fire which destroyed the original proscenium and stage, urban decline and an Adults Only phase of movie exhibition, closing and near demolition in the seventies; but the citizens of Albuquerque voted to save it, so it’s now safely on the historic register, its proscenium and stage fully restored and functional. It started life in 1927 at 1,321, but these days accommodates 650. 

The former US 66 through Albuquerque is now owned and maintained by the city, with a few US-66/BUSINESS I-40 signs remaining along Central Avenue, where the KiMo stands. We’ll follow those signs out of town, where I-40 overlays the old road for much of the distance, about 138 miles, on the way to Gallup, at the end of the state. 

But let’s digress one more time and check out a museum that sounds well worth it.  Ever heard of the Navajo Code Talkers?  What an American story that is: how Navajo children weren’t allowed to use their native tongues until they served in WWII and then were actually sent to school by the army to become fluent in a tongue so strewn with metaphors Nazis couldn’t think of breaking the code. I swear when I really do go to Gallup, I’m checking it out.

The El Morro, a Spanish Colonial style theater, has apparently never stopped showing films! Built in 1927 with seating for 900, it’s down to 471, but laudably still in business, though I don’t want to see Jurassic World: Fallen. If I could stick around till September 29th, I could catch the “True Colors All Star Drag and Talent Show,” which is really what still-in-business movie palaces are all about. I won’t get to see it, but I’m glad the City of Gallup is running the show. 

Flagstaff Arizona,
Don’t forget Winona....

I won’t forget Winona, but it doesn’t have a theater; in fact, it and Flagstaff are a package deal these days, which is to say Winona was so tiny it became part of Flagstaff. It survives, mostly in legend, because of the song. Winona used to have a somewhat respected trading post,  but only the skeleton of that remains, with a working gas station. Another interesting fact: Winona is the only locality in the Get Your Kicks song that is out of order in the itinerary. Flagstaff is farther west, but Bobby Troupe,who wrote the song, needed a rhyme. 

Flagstaff is a college town, and so it has the Orpheum, a 300-seat theater that opened as The Grand Opera House in 1911 (or the College Theatre, depending on which source you believe). It’s mostly a live venue these days, and since Common Kings, InnaVision and Analea Brown, currently showing, don’t interest me, I’ll pass on through. 

Kingman is the last stop in the state of Arizona, and I’m sorry to say it doesn’t have a theater of note, but its history as a site for filming is a rich one. For one thing Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were married in Kingman at the St. John’s Methodist/Episcopal Church, during a break from shooting Gone With the Wind.The city has been a location for several road pictures (why is this not surprising?), Roadhouse 66 and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971 movie of the year — Esquire). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was filmed at the Kingman Airport. Mars Attacks! a comic sci-fi directed by Tim Burton (in which Martians are finally defeated because their heads explode if they hear the song “Indian Love Call”), was partially filmed there. Aliens in Kingman was entirely shot in Kingman, not surprising given the local legend that, in 1953, an alien spaceship was said to have crashed there.

There is an Arizona Route 66 Museum to investigate, then I can get some shut-eye at El Trovatore Motel, the first motel in Arizona to feature air conditioning. (Can you imagine a motel in Arizona without AC?) If you’re curious, check out the recent flap about Kingman and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? Of course it’s a set-up, that’s what he does.

Its 206 miles to California.

If you want to get the feel of the road, check out this (only slightly abbreviated) YouTube of the drive all the way from Kingman to Barstow California, the next stop on this virtual journey. One unnamed town in between reveals two horses playing with each other in the middle of Main Street, around which the driver maneuvers! You can tell you’ve arrived in Ca. when you see the palm trees.
There’ll be one more dispatch-from-the-road, including:

Barstow, San Bernardino.

And of course, L.A. — the song’s destination, as promised in its beginning.

Afterthought:
When my husband was five, during the Korean War, he and his mom drove West, Cincinnati to San Francisco, to meet his father on leave from the Navy. They must’ve taken Route 66, since the Interstate System was then still a dream in President Eisenhower’s eye. Dean distinctly remembers entering the state (the only time he ever did so in a car). When I read him this post, he asked, “what...no troopers at the border?” Perhaps there was some kind of farming blight that year; every car was stopped and searched for fruits and veggies. He remembers leaning out the back window of a 1949 Carnival Red Ford sedan while troopers, checking for perishables, unwrapped all the Christmas gifts stowed in the trunk. He was delighted with the drama, but his mom, who’d wrapped them with such care, was extremely pissed.