I’ve never been to the movies in Paris, but a girl can dream. David Sedaris just took me there briefly in “The City of Light in the Dark,” and although his essay was written around the millennium, nothing much seems to have changed in Paris since then, from what I’m able to determine. Within a five-block radius of Sedaris’ apartment were/are “...a dozen thirty-to-fifty-seat revival houses with rotating programs devoted to obscure and well-known actors, directors and genres.” Apparently, many of these are “...mom and pop theaters, willing to proceed with the two o’clock showing of The Honeymoon Killers, even if I’m the only one in the house.”

I ran a “mom and pop” theater once, a 2,672-seat single-screen movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, back in 1976. Okay, it wasn’t like a tiny Paris revival house, but we did once or twice play to fewer than six or seven people, making the vast gold and red-velvet interior seem vaster.

It was on Wednesdays at the St. George, matinee day, when we could forecast our losses for the week. If the matinee did squat, we knew the movie’d be a doggie for the whole weekend: true for Gable and Lombard, equally true for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.

One particular afternoon, nobody at all showed up, all 2,672 seats empty. What to do?  Dean (the “pop” in our mom and pop operation) called Gabe in the booth and instructed him to kill the projector, but keep the sound track going, so we’d stay on schedule for the evening, in hopes that somebody eventually would show up. “Then,” he pointed out to the grizzled projectionist, “you can just fire up the projectors to go along with the sound. Why burn expensive carbons when nobody’s watching?”

Around four thirty, a lone customer appeared. He bought a ticket, grabbed some popcorn and headed into the dark. Dean instructed Gabe to fire up the projectors, and the movie bloomed on the screen.  

Seemed okay, but a few minutes later, our single patron reappeared. 

“Can I have my money back?” he asked Dean, who was stocking the concession stand.

“What’s the problem?” 

“Well, it’s just so lonely in there...” the man confessed.

That, apparently, would never happen in the City of Light, where the love of cinema trumps all, and where, remarkably even today, people would rather go out to the movies than stream or binge-watch Fresh Off the Boat. And the rep houses (long vanished in New York, for the most part), are so various in Paris that often two or three versions of a movie can be had in different parts of town. Want to see the 2013 Great Gatsby? You have to be careful not to show up at the 1974 or even the 1949 Gatsbys showing at other unrelated locales.

The other thing Sedaris prizes about going to the movies there is the silence. Parisians simply don’t talk during the movie, not even teens on a Saturday at a slasher flick. He prizes this silence, what he calls, “the French dark...” which he could never find in Chicago, where a neighboring moviegoer insisted on listening to the Cubs’ game during a movie. Or other places in the U.S. where people would rather defend their rights of self-expression than surrender to what’s on screen. 

This was particularly the case at the St. George in ’76, where, even before Rocky Horror, people talked back — or just talked — all through the movie. Our auditorium, in those happy times when the orchestra section was almost full, buzzed like an open-air market on a good Saturday. 

​So how is it that Paris gets away with this degree of cinema refinement? How do those tiny cinemas survive, sans even a concession stand, to offset costs? Apparently someone wanders the audience selling candy and ice cream from “...a tiny tray around his neck.” 

Moviegoing habits seem to be dying out on this side of the water, offset in some places by luxury seating and table service, but Paris cinema goes on, a lovely anachronism, silence and choice in a city that takes its movies seriously, the city where, in fact, movies began. 
 
Afterthoughts:
1. The original Sedaris essay was excerpted in a lovely book, Paris in Mind, edited by Jennifer Lee, Vintage Books, 2003.

2. If you do make it over there, I have it on recent authority that you’ll need to break a few codes to figure out movie-going in Paris, and a detailed guide to all the cinemas doesn’t hurt either. Here’s some news from a couple who conquered the cinemas there. Also, visit www.secretsofparis.com Don’t forget, you’ll be watching movies in English mostly, not French. I think that’s some of the allure for Sedaris, the familiar made unfamiliar.

3. Next time I get to Paris, I intend to check out the Grand Rex, largest single movie auditorium in Europe (2,750 seats). Wonder if they have a candy stand?

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 movie exhibition year, 1976, at the St George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace a group of us struggled to run in Staten Island, long after single-screen palaces were anything but a Quixotic adventure. The Blazing Saddles poster was supposed to have been a good luck charm. 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 red and gold Spanish Baroque hall. 

When National Screen Service came to collect the rented poster and drop off the one for The Sunshine Boys, we claimed Blazing Saddles had been torn and, for a small fee, we collected it: easy to do in the 1970’s, but nearly impossible in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. 

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 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. We even went so far as to rent trailers for movies we never had any intention of showing. What could you do if in your heart you really wanted to show The Wizard of Oz but the neighborhood wanted Towering Inferno?

Prior to 1939, when Oz first came out, movies and their posters generally 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 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 by the seventies 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 an NSS Identifying Number bottom border on the right — which makes it possible to verify their authenticity. 

Like so much else in the industry that surrounded movie palaces, and other single-screen houses, 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. Multiplexes, for one thing, discouraged all but the smaller one-sheets, given the lack of space for coming attractions. 

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.

Afterthoughts:
1.  Speaking of Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little, (seen rearing on the palomino) was not Mel Brooks’ first choice for Sheriff Bart.  If the studio heads had trusted Richard Pryor, it would have been an entirely different movie... Little died in 1983 of colon cancer and is remembered primarily for his role in the Brooks farce.

2.  National Screen Service also dominated the trailer industry for the better part of the last century, beginning in 1919, so that trailer for Gone With the Wind, which we had no intention of ever showing as a feature at the St. George, came directly from them.

Starting with Tea for Two in 1950, when I was so young I couldn’t eat popcorn for fear I’d choke, it’s  been the movies, or nothing for me. By which I mean not “film,” or “cinema,” whatever that really is. I don’t know any souls who consider themselves cinemaists.  

Some people style themselves “Film Buffs.” Speaking from a NYC perspective, now that The Paris on Central Park has closed its venerable doors, the serious film crowd have shot over to Lincoln Center Cinema, a cliff-dwelling of sorts hanging under the fortress of serious music. There’s “cinema” for you, used mostly to glam up theater titles. 

Back in the nineties there was a short TV series on Saturday Night Live — via Second City – “Sprockets,” hosted by a fictional German film buff, “Dieter” (Mike Myers). but it was really a take-off on European affectations, not about America at all. 

More than a decade before that, in 1976, when, along with a crew of like-minded idealists, I helped run a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, we hoped to screen a “film” or two (whatever we thought that was in those days); but we mostly never got around to it. Our audience were moviegoers through and through, meaning, I suppose, most of them wanted action and grit (Scorcese, Pacino) though they’d put up well enough with Mel Brooks and were mad for Carrie (1976) or The Exorcist (1973) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

So what makes a “film” a film, and a “movie” a movie? You would never call Tea for Two anything but a movie, and not much of one at that, but The Breaking Point which came out the same year, 1950, is nothing if not a film (film noir, at that). Ever notice you can call a film a movie, and mean no disrespect?

Americans are all about movement. So, we seem to trust the term that has the most forward thrust in it, “moving pictures,” “movies,” defined by the one-room Nickelodeons. But it was always film too, the dangerous (explosive) celluloid run at anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four frames a second, past a flame which sometimes ignited (the projector got it’s own room or booth, finally, to protect the audience).

Other defects in early projection began to define the new medium with its catchphrase, “flick” or “flicker,” whose origins are mysterious, but hover around 1926; early film projectors had a large advance time between frames, in which a shutter obstructs the light source, and of course the source of light was a flame.

I still say I’m going to a “flick,” but nothing, especially after the forced retirement of Carbon Arc projectors with their natural moving flames, can be said to flicker anymore (unless you know where to go).
​
So to define this mess of visual narrative, we have the movies. When you come down to it, even high tone film people in North America seem to trust the word “movie” more than anything else. The best of them know to be frugal with intellectual stardust, so Roger Ebert, a first-rate film buff if ever there was one, reflects on an old fave of mine: 

Casablanca" is The Movie. There are greater movies. More profound movies. Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance. There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time. But when it comes right down to the movies we treasure the most, when we are — let us imagine — confiding the secrets of our heart to someone we think we may be able to trust, the conversation sooner or later comes around to the same words:

I really love 'Casablanca'.

Or as my former mentor, Hollis Frampton, a structuralist filmmaker from the seventies, used to say (a paraphrase, forgive me):

I know it’s a good movie if it makes me forget my toothache, the balance in my checkbook, or the love I just lost. 

Notice the word “love” in both instances.

Afterthought:
Whether you call it a movie or a film, I love:
Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Berman) 
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
The Dead (1987, John Huston)
 and a host of other things; don’t get me started! 

As a child I loved sitting down with my popcorn fifteen minutes into Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and trying to figure out exactly who that man and woman were (a scientist and his wife, it turned out) and what exactly was happening with the aliens. After the feature was over, I watched Sylvester and Tweety, and a couple of trailers, waiting patiently through MovieTone News munching on the grannies in the bottom of my popcorn tub. I was not alone; people had straggled in at various times. The movie would start up again soon, and I’d find out at last what the main character and his wife had been doing when I sat down. Having reached my recognized entry point, I — or we, if I was with my family — got up and headed for the door. All of this seemed completely natural, we went to the movies; it was a package deal, a continuous loop. Then it all changed. 

“No one but no one...will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance of Psycho.”  Hitchcock went so far as to have this sign posted at all theaters where his epic thriller opened. Right then and there he re-trained the movie-going public to start at the beginning. And it wasn’t just the public; the movies of my adolescence that followed — Tom Jones, Cleopatra, Dr. Strangelove —were movies you didn’t want to miss the first fifteen minutes of. 

By the time I walked into the lobby of the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I was involved in running in 1976, the film was the thing, the whole thing. MovieTone newsreels had been gone since 1963, and cartoons, though sweet, cost an extra fifty bucks (as much as the second feature) to run. 

Most of our patrons were grownups who didn’t care anymore about Bugs or Daffy Duck; they got their news from television. Our mid-seventies audience had come at the appointed time to see Taxi Driver or Carrie or Don’t Open the Window — whatever it was we’d advertised on the movie page that week.

They got a little surly if too many “short subjects” intervened.  

We had several patrons who were almost Hitchcock trainees. Dean’s nickname for one particular guy was “Time Clock,” but box office staffers had another name for him, a middle-aged man (accountant?) fixated on the actual start time of any film we ran.

“It’s three minutes past eight o’clock,” he’d state emphatically, pointing at his wrist.

“Yes,” I said, “...and your problem?”

“The film is scheduled to start at eight; it said so in the papers, on your sign board, and in that infernal message I hear when I call the theater.” (We were proud of our answering machine, one of the first of its kind). 

“Eight o’clock is eight o’clock! — it’s now five minutes past eight,” he said, checking his watch.

Over his shoulder and through the glass partition that separated the auditorium from the lobby, I could see the trailer package grinding away, nearly 11 minutes of COMING ATTRACTIONS, for films we mostly couldn’t afford.  

“I think,” I said, “it’ll start in six, maybe seven minutes...” 

And we were off.

“That is preposterous!” he ejaculated.  “I paid good money for an eight o’clock movie! Truth in advertising!  I want my money back.”

Dean appeared, shrugged and reached into his pocket for a dollar and two quarters, and placed the ticket price in the man’s small immaculate palm.

He stormed out the door. 

“Who is this guy?” I wondered.

“Staff calls him Tic Toc, but I think of him as Time Clock,” Dean explained.

Tic Toc was not the only time-troubled patron. A mother surrounded by three children of various ages stood outside the box office one Saturday afternoon and, after purchasing four tickets, inquired when the main feature would start.

“It started only about five minutes ago,” Brenda responded. 

Puzzled and disappointed, the narcissistic mother asked, “Well, could you re-start it?  Traffic was terrible...”

Brenda actually stopped chewing her perpetual gum and stared at the woman. “No way,” was all she could muster.
​
I was getting my hair cut yesterday, so asked my stylist — a friend of many years and one of the most savvy moviegoers I know — if, when he was growing up in the fifties, he’d been in the habit of arriving late to movies.  “Absolutely not!” he replied, “My whole family...we were always on time; it was important to us.” On time, and ahead of his time.