Covering nearly half a city block, seven stories tall with three basements and sub-basements, and eighteen dressing rooms, the St. George Theatre in 1976, when we arrived, was a massive time capsule. Suddenly let loose in a 2,672-seat movie palace, we stumbled on something new and surprising, even historic, almost every day. I’m thinking now of a singular discovery we made in a storage space beneath the stage.
 
Barely five feet high, the space had originally been designed to hold the elevator for the theater’s 3/30 Wurlitzer organ. Behind that vacant space however, a friend found a megaphone-like device nearly three feet across. It reminded my husband and partner, Dean, of the loudspeakers once hung on telephone poles at his HS stadium. This one had a Western Electric logo at its base, and “VitaPhone Sound” imprinted on the bell. The logo jogged his memory; hadn’t we found some literature in a mezzanine-level storage closet? 
 
According to those frayed pages, the Vitaphone dated back to the day the St. George Theatre opened with So This Is College on December 4, 1929. The movie was an early “Talking Picture” — the hot new technology. A few years later, beginning in the early 1930‘s, all talking pictures would use an SOF (Sound on Film) format — an optical audio track on the film itself. But the first ever Talkie, usually credited as The Jazz Singer and predating So This is College by two years, had been, for all the hoopla, a primitive product. These movies had sound, yes: Al Jolson’s first words both seen and heard in the Warner Theatre, October 6, 1927 in Manhattan, led the way: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The film and its technology were a smash, a Vitaphone/Western Electric sensation. Two years later at the St. George on opening night, sound was the norm, proving, as always, how quickly new tech changes expectation.
 
But how did it actually happen? How did word and image manage to coincide?
 
The sound portion of the film was actually presented on a 33 1/3 16-inch record, amplified through one or more speakers like the one we found beneath the stage. Projectionists in the late 1920’s had a lot to do:  amazingly, they first cued a “talkie” to a specific marked frame, then cued it’s record to a white arrow painted on the disc itself.  Hopefully both image and sound started at once. However, keeping the two tracks in sync was a mechanical process which the poor projectionist had to struggle with, as each 11-minute reel spun out. That’s right: the poor guy had eleven minutes till the next possible glitch!
 
Who made this transition possible?
 
Vitaphone ‘s evolution involved an unlikely assortment of characters, including Lee DeForest (one of the fathers of radio who contributed the Audion Amplifier Tube in 1913), Will Hayes (whose Hayes Commission  on Censorship would trouble the industry for decades — nonetheless credited with the first spoken words “on film” — introducing The Jazz Singer), and Harry Warner, the film mogul, one of the original Warner Brothers. Vitaphone also involved mega industries of the times, including Western Electric — later Bell Labs – and the Edison Company, not to mention Paramount Pictures — Warner’s competition. The race to good sound dominated the movie business in the mid-twenties and well into the thirties.
 
But I digress. Having found the scuffed and dusty battleship-grey speaker horn, with some cloth-covered electrical wires sprouting from its end, and a poster announcing the marvels of a “talking picture house on Staten Island,” we looked for the amplifier, the phonograph and other relics of the theater’s first sound system. They were, alas, lost to time, perhaps in some sub-basement. So it goes in an aging movie palace.
 
Despite our inability to pay even the most basic bills in our year at the theater, we managed, by sleight-of-hand, to install improved sound behind our grape-soda-stained giant screen, importing two (state-of-the-art for their time) Altec-Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers from a defunct triplex back in Cincinnati. 
 
After seeing the five-foot tall VoT’s, I was stunned. “Amazing! — this Vitaphone thing once managed somehow to fill this whole place with sound!”  The Vitaphone hadn’t had to work very hard. We were accustomed to talking to each other center-stage to upper balcony, without in the least straining our voices, and not even a rumor of an echo. The St. George was and is (how miraculous that I can speak of our theater still in the present tense!) an acoustic grande dame of ever-increasing beauty. 
 
 Afterthoughts:

1. My knowledge of acoustic perfection has been refreshed several times in the last fifteen years, as a patron. The St. George under its current management is all about live performance, including, on at least three occasions, Tony Bennett, who loves the theater. The first time I heard him, from what once had been our balcony, he asked that the sound system be silenced, then, hardly shy in his late eighties, belted out “I Left my Heart in San Francisco,” a capella. Bennett knows a “sweet” house when he finds one... 
   
2. When I say the St. George is currently “all about live performance,” the theater does, from time to time, present movies, though it lacks its big – grape-soda-stained as I recall it – screen. Those big screen days, I suspect, are over, in a post-movie palace era. Yet there are former palaces, like the United Palace (the old Loews 175th St.) in upper upper (Washington Heights) Manhattan, presenting epics on a wide screen. Nothing like Lawrence of Arabia in the format worthy of its original vision. 
3. Both theaters mentioned above, like all theaters everywhere, are threatened by Covid-19 closures that seem to go on and on.  It’s up to you to support them, both now, with a donation, while they’re in their dormant stage, and when we come out on the other side of Covid, finally, wanting to sit together under a great dome. Let’s make sure those domes are still there to sit under.

I’m not the only one with room in her imagination... and heart...for the perilous careers of old movie houses. This from a friend:

Vicky --
I came across an account of a 1930s Art Deco movie palace in Queens, the Earle. In time it showed porn films (sound familiar?), and by the 1980s it was a Bollywood theater whose new owners renamed it the Eagle by changing one letter, the r.  Since the neighborhood had many Asian immigrants, it did a good business until a nearby video store began selling copies of the films the theater was showing. When a successful Bollywood film director went into the store and asked for pirated copies of his films, and found they had lots, he started yelling at the owners. Unperturbed, they invited him for tea, said they were honored to have him in their store as a guest, told him that his films were very popular, and that he should take this as a compliment. They kept on selling his films. What is that old movie palace today? A food bazaar called Ittadi.
So it goes. 

Thanks Cliff. 
​
Movie palaces that aren’t lucky enough to be saved either meet appointments with a wrecker’s ball or they find themselves still standing but transformed — as in the fairytale, going from coach to pumpkin. Transformations can be kind of fascinating: a parking garage in Detroit, a basketball court in Brooklyn.  So many are churches, like one NY “wonder theater,” coincidentally also in Queens, the Valencia, its “naked” proscenium statuary swaddled in angels’ robes.

What intrigued me about Clifford’s tale of the Earle was the details of its slow descent, the makings, perhaps, of a good short story — a name change varying by one letter, and those unscrupulous/ingratiating video store entrepreneurs. 

Let’s start with the theater’s Bollywood owners, who  chose to re-create the Earle as The Eagle, in their name choice varying only one letter, obviously wanting to start fresh. The why of this decision is lost to time, though perhaps they were making a money-saving signage move. Wow do I get that! As a former theater operator (The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, 1976), I can attest that we were often forced to be creative with signage, using upside-down W’s for missing M’s on the marquee, for example. 

Deep into the Bollywood career of the Earle/Eagle, the arrival of the neighborhood video store with it’s pirated movie copies, and desperate clever store owners, offering the Indian fat cat tea and adoration, is a tale within a tale. 

Assuming this story is accurate, the Earle’s descent parallels the rise and fall of video itself — not surprising, given how many technologies and techno-based industries have come and gone since motion pictures were created (silent films, newsreels, network TV, single-screen theaters, movie palaces...).

Fact-checking has yielded few specifics of Cliff’s story. The Earle makes a cameo appearance in the last paragraph of “Closing of a Gay Theater, the Site of High-Risk Sex, Is Upheld,” a 1995 New York Times piece focussing on the shuttering of The New David Theatre on West 54th Street in Manhattan. “The Earle Theater, 73-07 37th Road in Jackson Heights, was closed on Feb. 8 and allowed to reopen under a stipulation calling, among other things, for the hiring of two uniformed guards to monitor sexual activity and eject anyone caught in high-risk sexual activity.” 

In all probability the theater’s name change had something to do with its naughty bawdy former career. 

There’s not much to glean on the Earle/Eagle in Cinema Treasures, often a trough of information. Here is the theater’s entire CT entry: 

“Located in the Jackson Heights section of Queens. The Earle...was an Art Deco theater, similar in style to the Lane Theatre in Staten Island. This one-time porn house was shuttered for a while and later resurrected as the Eagle Theater. It continued to operate in later years, showing a healthy dose of Bollywood films. However, it was closed in May 2009, due to a strike at the film production studios in Mumbai.”

Well that last bit is a fitting finale: a film strike in India triggered the demise of a Deco movie palace half a world away, in Queens. As Cliff says, so it goes.

Afterthoughts:

1. It’s interesting, to this Staten Islander, that The Lane, a small Deco treasure in my borough, living out its landmarked life as the Crossroads Church, is somehow reminiscent of the Earle. Church beats food bazaar...
2. Sometimes, the comments column in Cinema Treasures is almost more interesting than the actual entry: On February 6, 2012, Michael Kaplan reflected, “The Earle was the premier 'art' movie house in Jackson Heights, always showing the finest independent and foreign movies. Here’s a list of what I remember seeing there: Hiroshima Mon Amour, And God Created Woman, Medium Cool, Alfie. And God Created Woman featured Brigitte Bardot and you had to be at least 16 to see it. I lied about my age and the eager ticket seller let me in. Not a bad movie, actually, very daring for its time. The theater was a beautiful deco piece and very well maintained. That all changed when it turned into a porn venue; it was probably the raunchiest movie house in the neighborhood, the Fair and Polk running close.
   
3. Cliff tells me that some of the details from his account come from a NYTimes article, "This Neighborhood Contains Multitudes," by Michael Kimmelmann, appearing August 30, 2020, on Jackson Heights, which certainly does deserve a Walt Whitman tip of the hat for its diversity.
   

How’d you get into the movies when you were a kid?  Ever sneak in?  I remember a guy who waited till the crowd was emptying out, then walked backwards, heading past the ticket tearing box. We caught him, then showed him the door, but he almost made it.... That was at the St. George, in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat movie palace a group of us struggled to run, back in 1976. 
 
Most kids weren’t that nervy — they paid their way, also true when I was growing up, you might have to collect the money piecemeal, if you didn’t have the price of a child’s ticket. Then there was always popcorn; how could you live without that?  
 
Here’s the story of one underage entrepreneur earning his way into his hometown movie theater; it’s in his own words:
 
We moved to Deer Park  (Ohio), a tiny city, exactly one mile square, in 1955. Tract houses, shoulder-to-shoulder on quiet tree-lined streets. There were four centers of activity for a kid  under fourteen — K through 12, Chamberlain Park with its four baseball diamonds and swimming pool, Gabby’s Pony Keg and, the center of all life, our own Deer Park Theater.
 
My sole source of revenue beyond the quarter I got for my allowance, was “Gabby’s Pure Oil Service Station— and Pony Keg.” In case you never lived in Cincinnati, there’ a good chance you don’t know that a pony keg is a drive-through pick-up station for beer. Anyhow, Gabby’s was a few blocks down from the Deer Park Theater.
 
The theater 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 an impossibly young (by my current standards) 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 eligible to purchase a child’s ticket for the low, low price of 35 cents, but, alas, I was ten cents short. My allowance had been raised to 25 cents 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 was a man of few words. 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, suspended from 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 my tastes became more sophisticated, and, after bagging groceries at Kroger, my pockets actually contained some cash. You could get on the bus on a Saturday, go downtown and see a movie at one of the palaces, 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?
 
Afterthought:
 As for me, I had a slightly more prosperous childhood; my allowance, fifty cents, covered the price of admission at the Hyde Park Theatre, in another part of Cincinnati, where I grew up. The author of the above chronicle, my husband Dean, was and always has been a natural hustler. Who else would go into business as a theater operator, in a palace large enough to contain twenty Deer Park Theaters? Dean muses further about the demise of the Deer Park Theatre: The building still stands. Last time I was home, the marquee was gone, but the doorway of my neighborhood dream house is still at a 45-degree angle to the sidewalk, the home for a few years, of a company that sold potbelly stoves and fireplace inserts. Couldn’t bring myself to go inside.

Dear Governor Cuomo,
I’ve got a gripe. Its after Labor Day, and movie theaters of all kinds are still off-limits in New York. When I ran the St. George Theatre in 1976, a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque palace in Staten Island, we hardly ever sold more than a couple hundred seats. Drive-ins are enjoying a resurgence; why not give special dispensation to the few remaining movie palaces? Thousands of seats and only a few hundred patrons? Talk about socially distant!  
 
Or let’s not talk about it. The Governor’s got his metrics. Let’s forget 2020 completely and escape. How about 1920?  Movie Palaces were springing up like gloriosa daisies in a July landscape. Their styles were various. I’m thinking about Egyptomania, the craze that made 1920’s people fantasize going back even further, to 1320 (BCE). 

All that digging around the Valley of the Kings, the Victorians started it, looking for royal tombs that, down through history, hadn’t been raided. Two Brits, Howard Carter, and the ill-fated Lord Carnarvon got lucky and discovered King Tutankhamen’s gleaming still-intact resting place.  

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Sid Grauman was just a little bit ahead of them. The month before, October 18, 1922, he’d opened America’s first Egyptian-style movie palace, still standing on Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, which was — superficially at least — more opulent than Tut’s tomb. It was the first of its kind, entirely reflective of what is now recognized architecturally as “Egyptian Revival Style.” 

Theater styles were often not singular. Movie palace architects and designers stretched building style like taffy, to suit the fantasies of movie patrons.

Case in point: the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, a Thomas W. Lamb theater, one of the original New York Loewe’s “Wonder Theaters,” has been described as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco,” by David W. Dunlap (New York Times).  No Egyptian in there, but everything else... 

Returning to Grauman’s Egyptian (architects: Meyer & Holler), that theater started life on the drawing board as an “Hispanic-themed” design, before the architects were persuaded to alter their plans. Egypt and all things Egyptian were such a craze by then, the design simply had to be changed. All that remains of the original hispanic casting, some roof pans above the main entrance, were used, even though they’re not consistent with the sight-lines of an Egyptian-styled building.

Grauman was, of course, onto something; and though he went on to open his Chinese Theatre, more famous, perhaps, than his Egyptian, Egyptomania, insured the opening of the Bush Egyptian Theatre in San Diego, a year later, followed by, among others, Peery’s Egyptian in Ogden, Utah in 1924, and The Egyptian in Coos Bay, Oregon in 1925. Here’s an interesting tidbit about the Coos Bay Egyptian:

Originally constructed in 1922 as the Motor Inn Garage and Service Station...the building was transformed into a movie palace after the easing of federal building restrictions. The discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 and excavations of the Great Hall of Karnak [Egypt] created a public sensation and inspired American movie palaces to move away from the Old World Renaissance and Baroque styles that previously dominated. 
​
There were approximately a hundred Egyptian style theaters when it was all over with, including two more in Utah, a state which seems to have gone all Egypto. There were theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada, including ones in: Bala Cynwyd (Pennsylvania), Concord (New Hampshire), Boise (Idaho), Quebec (Canada), Delta (Colorado), and DeKalb (llinois). These builders rode the curve of the fascination with all things Egyptian, until around 1929. The style — considered a subset of atmospheric theaters — peaked at that point, perhaps because its opulence was tinged with a bit of the macabre; The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon who had financed and fully participated in King Tut excavations, managed somehow to die a little more than four months after opening Tut’s tomb, while shaving the top off an infected mosquito bite, fueling stories of the “mummy’s curse.”

Egyptian style blossomed in the 1920‘s, but had its roots firmly planted in the 19th century, influencing a lot more than movie palace design style. Think: Art Nouveau (all those tendrils), and Verdi’s Aida, of course! — and even (arguably) the Washington Monument, which is, after all, an obelisk. And speaking of those, there are three original ones (all authentically Egyptian), sometimes called “Cleopatra’s Needles,” in Paris, London and New York City, all erected in the 19th century.

Just how Egyptian is Grauman’s theater? Here I’d like to shamelessly excerpt (with a tip of the hat to https://losangelestheatres.blogspot.com, who quotes Cezar Del Valle) — so that’s two hat-tips – here goes:

Cezar Del Valle notes in another Theatre Talks blog post that a month before the opening, the Egyptian was already inspiring religious fervor. He excerpts an article from the September 9, 1922 issue of the newspaper Holly Leaves reporting on a talk at the Krotona Institute on ‘Temples and religions of Egypt during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut’ by Captain Stuart Corbett, a ‘noted Egyptologist’:

Grauman’s Hollywood Theatre may not last a century [it seems, from this vantage point, it’ll make it!] but its art was old when the pyramids were built. The careful attention given to detail may be traced in the hieroglyphics on the walls. The reproduction of the cartouche from the royal scarab, bearing the inscription, 'O Let not my Heart bear Witness against me,' is wonderfully exact in detail.

Like so many gorgeous old movie palaces, Grauman’s Egyptian skated close to the edge of what might have been demolition, in 1993.  But let’s all serve up a sustained  round of applause for the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation, which carefully steered it in the direction of Historic Cultural Monument status, and saw it through to its current successful ownership.

​For a really great treatment of the Egyptian theater mania of the twenties, check out Bruce Handy's January 29, 2008 Vanity Fair article, "Watch Like an Egyptian."

Fifty years after the Roaring Twenties, artifacts from King Tut’s tomb toured the U.S. to rave reviews, reviving once more Tut’s (posthumous) Twentieth Century celebrity status (ironic, given the fact that his legacy in ancient times had been entirely obscured by his successors). “King Tut, Funky Tut,” sang Steve Martin in 1979, keeping the myth — and perhaps the curse? — alive.

Afterthought:
Lord Carnarvon, happened, by the way, to own Highclere Castle, the setting for Downton Abbey (think Lady Mary in an Egyptian-themed flapper dress!).

Through the freezing rain on the windshield of a midnight blue ’60 Buick Electra, I could just barely make out the cartoon that begins Blake Edwards’ classic heist movie, The Pink Panther. It was New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1965; I was on a double-date at the Oakley Drive-In. Did it matter if we couldn’t see the screen? We couldn’t even see the couple in the front seat, already lying down. 
December at a drive-in, in frosty Ohio? You bet. In those days outdoor theaters were open year-round, pretty much everywhere. The disappearance of the front-seat pair says a lot about the Oakley’s winter demographic in those days, mostly couples. 

Starting in the late sixties, drive-ins dwindled, until recently, to a few hundred nation-wide — from some 4,000 back in the day. A decade later, Dean and I (the back-seat couple from the story) had married and moved to New York, specifically to Staten Island, where for one year we signed the lease on a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre (1976). At that point, drive-ins were in steep descent, the result of an oil crisis which raised the price of gas and downsized cars (gone that Electra). Meanwhile, the value of vacant lots had made the land drive-ins were sitting on tempting for owners to sell off. Case in point, the 600-car Staten Island Drive-In which closed, in all probability, the year before we arrived, 1968; the land it had inhabited morphed briefly into part of a now-defunct airport, and finally, what else, a mall. 
   
Forty-four years later, Covid. With national chains of conventional theaters in serious trouble, drive-ins are suddenly the main-stay of the exhibition business. Forty-two states currently allow indoor movie attendance, but some big-audience states, New York and California, for instance, are still holding back. Hollywood’s not releasing much product, but drive-ins don’t care, they aren’t used to first-run flicks anyway. Going to the drive-in is not about the movie, but about the theater! — and about getting out. Drive-ins are  hot now...at least while it is hot, in the Northeast and Midwest. 

Until this year, northerly drive-ins had become largely a seasonal business, with the last movie hitting the screen in places like The Mahoning in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, on Halloween. “Our projectors start to have a harder time operating as it gets colder...” says Mark, who quickly answered my email. I can certainly imagine. They’re an amazing operation, the Mahoning; check them out whenever you can do it.

Who’d want to watch a movie through the snow anyhow?  Well, some will, we did, once-upon-a-time, and might again.You have to bring blankets, and run the car heater periodically – then there’s always body warmth!

Some older drive-ins in cold climes have made it a tradition to stay open year-round. As of 2016, in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington, some screens are lighted, if only on weekends, during bundling weather. The Ford Drive-In, so named for its proximity to Detroit, has been doing this, weekends only, for all seventy of its years. Valentine’s Day is a particularly popular weekend for them, despite the cold. This mention of V-Day plucked the strings of my heart, as two months after that New Year’s date, Dean and I returned to the Oakley on Valentine’s Eve, by ourselves, a heart-shaped cake and some flowers in the backseat.

I would think this winter weekend trend might actually accelerate, given the nature of our on-going health crisis. People are stir-crazy, and going to the movies is, traditionally, an activity that first comes to mind when you want to get out of the house.

If and when the big states do let indoor theaters open, the question will remain: how many people are willing to hazard being socially-distanced for several hours in the theater dark, in seats previously inhabited by other moviegoers? Meanwhile, you can always pack a picnic, and watch the flick through your windshield, iced or otherwise. Try it some time!

Afterthoughts:

1. The Staten Island Drive-In’s closing date is up for debate, which is why I said that, in all probability, it closed in 1968. That guess argues with the official text of its Cinema Treasures entry, but, if you hang out on Cinema Treasures, the comments are often illuminating.  One such commenter  mentions going to Rosemary’s Baby at the drive-in, a movie that came out in ’68.  Hmmm....

2. A link to a good piece on the drive-in craze, and a return to a familiar home drive-in, was sent by alert reader and dear friend, Beth Gorrie. The writer of the piece obviously pines for his youth... 

3. Walmart is making a play for the national drive-in market; pop-ups nationwide. Sounds alright, if hardly the real thing.