The back office of the St. George Theatre — which I was involved in running for one deeply magical year, 1976 —  had the words DISTRICT OFFICE stenciled in red on its door. By 1976, all that survived of its former prestige was a battered desk, a creaky chair and some filing drawers. At the desk, my husband sat making calls to film distributors, while being stiffed by booking agents; but deeper in the theater’s history, the stenciled letters had signified the theater’s status as a “flagship” of its chain. (The 2,672-seat St. George had never actually been the flagship of the entire New Jersey-based Fabian organization, but “the George” had apparently been Fabian’s district hub, beginning in the mid-thirties. Before that time, it had been the central ruby in the metaphorical necklace of another local theater entrepreneur, Solomon Brill, who’d built it on the spot of a splendid copper-domed mansion, torn down in the 1920‘s. Brill sold the theater to Joseph Kohn in 1932 who sold it to Fabian, or so the story goes.  
         .  
These days, theater chains may be, like the U.S. Postal Service’s mailboxes, fast becoming a rarity (95 U.S. theater chains are listed in Wikipedia where once there were hundreds). Many of the original chains bore the names of the great moguls who dreamed the dream of movie palaces in the first place: Sid Grauman, William Fox, Alexander Pantages, Marcus Loew. Some early Vaudeville entrepreneurs, seeing the writing on the wall (or the shadow on the screen!) began building or accumulating movie theaters early on: Edward Franklin Albee, and B.F. Keith (of Radio Keith Orpheum) come to mind. All of these names live on in theaters they built across the U.S.(still standing and in operation as cinemas or live theaters or both): Grauman’s Chinese/TCL Chinese, Grauman’s Egyptian, the Atlanta Fox, and Fox Oakland come to mind. The Keith-Albee in Huntington, West Virginia bears witness in its name to the blending of Vaudeville and motion pictures and the ultimate dominance of movies. B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee, corporate newlyweds via merger, oversaw the construction of this Thomas Lamb theater, under the aegis of Keith-Albee-Orpheum. Formed in January, 1928, KAO, the ultimate Vaudeville circuit for about a half an hour, operated a chain of over 700 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, with more than 15,000 Vaudeville performers, including the (then) recently-signed-but-as-yet-relatively-unknown couple act, Burns and Allen.

Corporate mergers are, oftener than not, piracy. So it was that in May 1928, five months after KAO was formed, a controlling portion of its stock was sold to the notorious booze-runner and father of a future president, Joseph P. Kennedy. By pre-arrangement, the stock was then purchased in October of that same year by Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as part of the deal that created Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO Pictures).  

By 1928, Vaudeville, despite its 15,000 performers, was on the slide and everybody knew it. It would survive for a while in brief and increasingly shabby entertainment interludes on the stages of movie palaces, many of them, like the St. George, built initially for live performance.
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The names of the old impresarios — Keith, Albee, Pantages, Fox, Loew — would linger on, obscure as names on neighborhood street signs. 20th Century Fox (which has the surname of a mogul embedded in it), was once a theater-owning entity. But by the time of my childhood, it was, by law, strictly a film corporation. It’s owned, these days, by 21st Century Fox. That’s the 21st Century owning the 20th, and almost nobody knows who Fox was!

Afterthought:
I had meant to include, in this reflection on names and naming, certain latter-day chains, including Mann Theatres (our booking agent at the St. George worked for Mann and for us on the side). Walter Reade was another prominent chain owner, proud of the cleanliness of his movie houses. The briefly-extant Jerry Lewis Cinemas, formed by the comedy star in 1969, is an anomaly. There was nothing like this chain before, and thankfully nothing like it after. Jerry Lewis‘ business plan was a “perfect storm; ” it could be used in business schools worldwide as a classic example of “how not to.” The chain nearly bankrupted Lewis. Suffice it to say, the 1970’s were a terrible time in the U.S. movie business.

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, NSS lost much of its business beginning in the mid eighties and finally disappeared — 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, however, was perfect in the role, lending his character charisma, tinged with irony. He died in 1983 of colon cancer and is remembered primarily for his role in the Brooks farce.  

2. And while I’m thinking about Blazing Saddles, which happens to be a movie about racial bigotry produced and directed by a white man, HBO Max has seen fit recently to give it some “context.”  They did the same thing with GWTW, although the two movies hardly belong in the same category, as one glories in racism, while the other calls it constantly into question.   
 
2.  National Screen Service  also dominated the trailer industry for the better part of the last century, beginning in 1919.

Back when we ran a movie palace — the St. George Theatre — in 1976 and part of ’77, we complained a lot about bad bookings — the second or third-run movies our agent forced on us, because we couldn’t afford to bid for first-run product. Recently I’ve done a deal of research into what we actually did run, culling the microfilms of the local paper for the weekly movie time clock ads we placed forty years ago. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Blazing Saddles, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist — I remembered those titles, but had conveniently forgotten The Giant Spider Invasion, The Dragon Dies Hard, and Don’t Open the Window. Some of those flicks, arguably all of them, are “cult films” now. (Texas Chainsaw was already a cult film).
 
What exactly IS a cult film? The definition is up for grabs — highly subjective — and since the Net has a way of building cult-like enthusiasm around the least thing (Nike Air Force 1S’s for example), we’re all better off making a personal cult movie list of our own.
 
I think everyone would agree that a true cult movie (unlike the aforementioned specs) has to prove itself by surviving its own time. Some films — like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which we held over for a second week in June, 1976 at the SGT — were already showing evidence of doing just that. 
 
By the time we got ahold of Chainsaw, it was two years old. Leatherface had a permanent rep, and Tobe Hooper’s low-budget  ($300,000) thriller was already on its way to cult status. Banned at various times in a long list of countries, including Canada, Britain, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and West Germany, Chainsaw initially caused audiences in several U.S. theaters to walk out in disgust. The movie featured unknown actors and had the distinction of being panned — for gory content — by important critics, some of whom simultaneously praised it for its direction, cinematography and acting.  Ultimately, the film garnered $30 million in profits. In old box office parlance, it “has legs”  which, whatever you say, has got to be part of the definition of a cult film. Experts seem to disagree on which films actually are cult films, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on all the lists.
 
To quote Tim Dirks, cult films “....are usually strange, quirky, offbeat, eccentric, oddball, or surreal, with outrageous, weird, unique and cartoony characters or plots, and garish sets. They are often considered controversial because they step outside standard narrative and technical conventions. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a classic by these standards. They can be very stylized, and they are often flawed or unusual...” Sounds like Chainsaw, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead to me. Wikipedia’s list of cult films, numbering some 1, 535, is way too inclusive (Being John Malkovich — are you kidding?). Most of the films are clustered in the 1970‘s and forward — when, in all probability, the notion of cult films commenced. 
 
A handful of 1930’s films (Blonde Venus, for instance) seem to have made the cut; then there’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bedtime for Bonzo, and a paltry few other movies before Eisenhower. There are other lists, readers’ polls and so on, which often include a small number of films from the 1970’s and the bulk of entries from the eighties and beyond, when readers were growing up. Obviously, when you were born has a lot to do with what you include on your list.
 
Eleven of the films on the Wikipedia list played at the St. George in 1976 and the early part of ’77, while we were tearing tickets at the door:
 
Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971)
Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 19 74)
The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976) 
Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)
The Giant Spider Invasion (Bill Rebane, 1975)
Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier, 1936) 
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
 
Other films we ran which have, arguably, generated cult followings include: 
Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)
Don’t Open the Window, aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974)
Smile (Michael Ritchie, 1975), a gem starring among others a young Bruce Dern. It ought to be a cult film, if it isn’t.
 
We almost ran Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1976) — which is on the Wiki list, but ended up with Cooley High instead, arguably a cult film if there ever was one. Spike Lee lists it on his “List of Films All Aspiring Filmmakers Should See.” If you haven’t read this list, you should. We can all learn a thing or two from Spike, whose movies, alas, didn’t come along until after we went bankrupt at the theater. To have seen Do the Right Thing on our screen — now that would have been a fine thing. 
 
Afterthought:
I never did answer the question, “What is a cult film?” Sometimes I think it’s just any movie you yearn to see more than once. By that measure, I’d like to add Casablanca (seen it about fifteen times) and Two for the Road (at least fifteen) and Becket, and In the Heat of the Night and and... (well I could go on and on) to my personal list.

 Dog Day Afternoon is such a seventies flick. As part of a strangely-matched double feature we somehow paired with Law and Disorder, Dog Day was the third major movie we ran at the St. George Theatre almost half a life-time ago in late April, 1976. Dog Day was over a year old, but we were a “buck fifty” house ($1.50 for adults, 90 cents for children) — and lucky to get it, however many other theaters had already shown it. Starring a heartbreakingly young Al Pacino, it’s the more or less true story of a desperate man, John Wojtowicz (Sonny Wortzik in the film), who tried to rob the Chase Manhattan Bank at 450 Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn, for money to, among other things, buy his lover a sex change operation. Before the story rolls, Sidney Lumet gives us New York City at street level the way it was then. 
 
How did he know we’d be watching from the future? The streets were trash-strewn and desperate: he shows us the sheer grime of it all, the anger and cynicism of ordinary citizens, ready to cheer a man with the audacity to rob a bank. 
 
The desperation was entirely real. What else were we doing in an aged movie palace, if not hiding from the streets? We had a kind of sanctuary. We had at least the illusion of safety — under our pleasure dome and in the cool recesses of the alcoves, the defunct green-tiled water fountain in the lobby, the pink and white-tiled candy stand with its sweet and grassy (popcorn) smells.
 
Outside, people were getting mugged, sometimes right under the marquee. A fist-fight blew up there one afternoon, resulting in one guy knocked out of his Birkenstocks — they remained pointed downhill on the pavement while he flew sideways into the street. He got up, using his teeshirt to staunch the blood, and moved on. Nobody called the cops. 
 
Many people, white as well as Black, didn’t trust cops. The need to keep things to yourself was primal, which is why we had grown men from the neighborhood working off the books on weekends — to keep some of the tougher local kids from walking on the backs of the theater’s seats or assaulting each other with broken bottles in our lobby. 
 
The shops up and down Hyatt Street — the luncheonette, the barbershop next to the theater — were part of another era. I never saw a soul go into the barbershop; it was as if the ninety-year-old barber lived there, periodically flicking dust off his red naugahyde chairs with a frayed whisk broom. 
 
Night was another thing altogether: the street deserted, sounds of glass shattering. The bank’s night drop was only two storefronts away from the theater. Some nights I just didn’t go, but hid the cash in a locked cabinet under the flashlight batteries. 
 
Dog Day was one of many movies I watched in snatches. Seeing it recently, I remembered parts of it, and other parts seemed new, which may mean I had never seen them at all. Back then I’d get some popcorn, go in and sit down for a half hour or so, then remember that I needed to figure out how to make payroll and still buy cleaning supplies — or pay the carting company, who, it was rumored, would break somebody’s kneecaps if not compensated in a timely fashion. That detail from my actual theater-management life fits the tenor of Dog Day nicely — that and another movie we showed, Taxi Driver — about a Vietnam Vet with violent streaks who drives a night taxi and tries to save a young girl turned sex worker.

Desperation was part of the Zeitgeist.

Which is why I savor my memories of the theater’s cool lobby and sheltering dome. Like a medieval cathedral, it held us:  you could walk in there and drop out of time.
 
Afterthoughts:

1. One night in the early seventies, we’d invited a couple to dinner. She was on time, but alone, explaining that her husband, who worked at AP, was on assignment covering a hostage situation. He did arrive eventually, two hours late, grateful for the steak we'd warmed for him. Turned out, he’d just covered the John Wojtowicz robbery, whose story later became Dog Day.
 
2. It’s easy sometimes to think the times we’re passing through are the worst ever. The other day I said to a friend, “I almost think this is a harder decade than even the Depression.” She said her father, if he were alive, would argue with that, and I’m glad she called me out. The Depression and seventies New York, in its own way, were brutal and frightening. Covid times are too. There is, I think, no “worst ever.”
 
3. An early version of this post elicited the following comment, from my friend, Beth: “It's sometimes hard to believe that much of the Upper West Side was as gritty as some of those films. Think of The Panic In Needle Park, for example; that 'hood is now fairly posh. Interesting to watch those films "from the future", as you wryly put it. Like catching glimpses of Paris in years past in some new wave films."

 iHow did the wicked witch end up melting in The Wizard of Oz? (It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie; the answer to the above question appears in “afterthoughts,” at the end of this post). Wizard was big in my 1950’s childhood, so big I saw it about twelve times, and almost always at one or another of Cincinnati’s movie palaces: the Albee, the Twentieth Century, or the RKO downtown. Some movies demand a decently big screen and Wizard is one of those. You want to really see Margaret Hamilton melt and look carefully for the fabled trapdoor she’s supposed to disappear into (I never manage to see it, but I always look).
 
Back in June, a friend sent me a card of the 1939 fab four:  Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (which is to say, the scarecrow, Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion) skipping arm in arm down the yellow brick road on their way to Oz. Why do I still want somebody — anybody from the movie I saw so many times growing up — to still be around? Now it all really does seem like a dream. 
 
Kansas is in stormy black-and-white (actually dyed sepia), and Oz in vibrant Technicolor, a process invented  back in 1917, though seldom used till The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind came out. By then, the Depression not quite over but waning, and the scent of war in the air, it was time for those ruby slippers. The slippers are, as a matter of fact, silver in the book, but Samuel Goldwyn was paying for all the Technicolor, and he wanted those shoes to dazzle. All these years later, after the last munchkin, Jerry Maren, died at 98, the whole speaking cast of that great movie is completely over the rainbow, with no more lollipops for the guild to present. 
 
It’s been eighty-three years since 16-year-old Judy Garland stepped into the role of Dorothy, a little girl in gingham wearing red sparkly shoes, and belted out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” for wide release. That wide release probably included the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, which many years later I was to have a hand in running — but I digress — The Wizard has the show today. 
 
Early releases of Wizard are interesting to muse over. On June 5, 1939, sneak previews in Santa Barbara, Pomona and San Luis Obispo, California, helped director Victor Fleming figure out what to cut (the movie ran two hours, though 90 minutes was the max in those days). Amazing note: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” almost got the hatchet, which, beyond robbing the world of a great song sung by a great young voice, would also have stolen away an Academy Award for the production.
 
Three August “test screenings” (August 11, in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Cape Cod Massachusetts, and August 12 at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin) gauged audience response to the now 101-minute movie. Of these three unofficial premier sites, only Oconomowoc (Strand demolished in 1960) celebrates with frequency the 1939 screenings. There’s a plaque on the site where the Strand Theatre once stood, “This commemorates the World Premier of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, shown here in downtown Oconomowoc, at the Strand Theatre on August 12, 1939.” Well not exactly the world premier, even if you count trial screenings, since Cape Cod and Kenosha beat the Strand by a day. Meanwhile, that hasn’t deterred Oconomowocs, from erecting colorful statuary of Dorothy, Toto, and her three companions, to which this summer a father/daughter team added a mural, the first of several improvements planned by  city officials. 
 
Admission to the original 1939 evening showing, BTW, at the Strand was 40 cents for adults and 10 cents for children. Each anniversary of the movie’s release, despite the Strand’s untimely death, citizens of Oconomowoc have gathered to watch the movie on a temporary outdoor screen. How America does love to remember. And to capitalize.
 
On August 15, 1939, at  the then 12-year-old Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in L.A., The Wizard of Oz was officially born to its viewing public. Munchkins and other cast members in formal dress were in attendance. Already on a train bound for New York City, Judy Garland and her side-kick-of-the-era, Mickey Rooney, planned live entertainment for the stage of NYC’s Capitol Theatre, where Oz would open to the East Coast, on August 17th. 
 
Alas, there is little that remains, even of descriptions of the Capitol. According to Cinema Treasures, the theater had better than four thousand seats, and, at one time, was managed by none other than S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel himself. It was a Thomas Lamb theater.
  
With Hitler fifteen days shy of invading Poland, and the Depression not really over yet, people waited in line at the Capitol, and at Grauman’s too – and under a lot of other marquees – to forget a world that must have seemed to be falling apart.

Perhaps we need a little Oz these days too?  
 
Afterthoughts:

1. The wicked witch “melts” because witches and water don’t mix. Dorothy has doused the witch with water to keep her from setting fire to the scarecrow. According to one source, Hamilton “...was standing on a trap door and was supposed to disappear down into it quickly when the smoke (followed by fire) puffed up, but during the second take of that scene, the fire came too early and her costume started burning. She suffered second and third degree burns and was unable to work for a month. When she came back, she refused to do any more work with fire.” Can’t say as I blame her.
 
2. As of May 24, 2018, with the passing of the last living Munchkin, Jerry Maren, at 98, (who portrayed one of the three representatives of the Lollipop Guild), it can now be said that every actor who received an on-screen credit or spoke dialogue in The Wizard of Oz is dead.
 
3. I’d like to imagine that The St. George Theatre, which I ran for a year in 1976, premiered The Wizard of Oz after it left the Capitol; seems logical, as, 37 years before we showed up, the St. George was a first-run house, the biggest and most ornate theater on the island.
 
4. From a New Yorker cartoon: little girl sits with her mother watching The Wizard of Oz on television. Caption: “But why does she want to go back to Kansas, where everything is black-and-white?”  Interestingly, a decision was almost made not to feature Kansas as black-and-white — too austere for children! Imagine that... 
 
5. The Wizard of Oz has been officially tapped as the most influential film ever made, by a group of Italian researchers who analyzed 47,000 films across 26 genres. Runners up in that contest include: Star Wars, Psycho, King Kong (1933), and 2001: A Space Odyssey. A list of the top twenty is contained in the link above. Their definition of “influential” has a lot to do with outstripping other movies in how much a film has inspired and been referenced in the film industry.