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 us 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; as for news, they got it 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 declared.  “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.

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; after all, we were a “buck fifty” house (a dollar fifty for adults, 90 cents for children under twelve). What came our way was either a box office failure already or something ancient — if  noteworthy or classy. Recently I’ve done a deal of research into what we actually did run, culling the microfilms of the local paper for the movie time clock ads we placed forty years ago each week. 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 of one kind or another.  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, we’re all better off making a personal cult movie list of our own.
 
I think everyone would agree that a true cult movie 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 still “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 Chainsaw is on all the lists.
 
To quote Tim Dirks, cult films “....are... [often] 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. 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, or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Bedtime for Bonzo are cult items. 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) 
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), and 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, ought to be a cult film, if it isn’t.
 
We almost ran Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1976) — which is on the Wiki list, but we ended up with Cooley High instead, arguably a cult film if there ever was one; Spike Lee features it on his “List of Essential Films.” 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 something. 

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 — even, in one case, a basketball court.
 
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 guys (women would come along willingly enough it was assumed). I’d been part of the generation they aimed 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 Tenet or The Shape of Water, is still with us today. 
 
Roger Ebert, looking back in 1999, said 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 even 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 Simone 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: 
In case you skipped that earlier link, here’s the back story of how (Mann’s, now TCL — but always Grauman’s) Chinese Theatre grudgingly agreed to take Star Wars for two weeks, then rushed afterwards to refurbish another fleabag theater it owned to hold onto that suddenly-hot flick — check it out.   

In 1976, the St. George Theatre concession stand boasted the highest per capita sales in the five boroughs of New York City, including the grind houses on Times Square. Ticket sales? Not so much. We operated a candy stand with a theater attached to it, but it took us a while to figure that out.
 
In the concession-stand closet of our lovely old 2,672-seat movie palace, we found, on the day we moved in, a large stack of dirty popcorn cups. Why hadn’t the previous exhibitor just thrown them away? This remained a mystery for some time, though it was hardly first on our minds, consumed as we were with running a huge business already heavily in the red. It had taken only about two months for us to feel how cash poor we really were. How to pay for movies so we could show them? Like Michael Anthony of The Millionaire, that TV fable of the 1950’s, a well-dressed man named Phil showed up in the lobby one afternoon, just as I was pining away for a few thousand to put down on the next week’s double feature. His company — I forget the name now — was headquartered out of upstate NY, and offered us a whopping $10,000 — interest free and instantaneous — for the “temporary” rights to our candy stand. We grabbed for this oar with nary a thought. 
 
The terms were simple: Phil leased the stand until that halcyon day when we would ostensibly have paid off the ten-thousand-dollar loan. We supposedly split the gross income of the stand 50/50, but while the loan was in effect, our 50% went to pay it off. Phil’s company got the other fifty percent, and he paid for all the candy, cups, popcorn, hotdogs, soda. It was a slippery slope. We’d begin to pay the loan off, then need to borrow more to get film from Warner Brothers or MGM or another one of the big-guy distributors. The only real profitable aspect of our aging movie palace was the candy stand, and we’d sold that off to keep movies on-screen. In other words, we’d sawed off the legs of our own table.
 
Here’s a trivia question: A large soft drink in 1976 went for 75 cents; how much did it cost “Uncle Phil” to put sixteen ounces of Coke, Sprite, Tab or Root Beer in a cup on the counter? Two and a half cents.  As was and is true of the restaurant business, the profit is in the bar — in our case, in popcorn. 
 
Twice a month, Uncle Phil sent a representative to the theater, to spend a morning counting everything in the concession stand:  each bar of candy, hot dog, bun, or cup of ice cream. Popcorn and soda, however, sold by the ounce in a cup or a bucket, is only quantifiable by counting containers. 
 
It was our unspoken rule that staff could have unlimited supplies of popcorn and soda so long as they brought their own personal cups. Paulie’s soda cup, which stood at the ready for him on a low shelf in the stand, sported a giant painted PAULIE. He was fond of filling it to the brim with his own “private mix” of Root beer, Sprite and Coca Cola. “Swamp Water,” he called it. Some staff were really fond of popcorn, so they brought plastic soup containers from home.
 
Which brings me back to the subject of those greasy used popcorn cups we found in the back of the closet when we first moved in. Our predecessor — who seemed like an early believer in recycling — had actually figured a way to make some hidden money on popcorn from Uncle Phil, or some other candy man he’d been indentured to.  
 
In a post on the long-closed-down Victory Theater in Holyoke MA, you’ll find a picture Robin Locke Monda took of a tall stack of ancient less-than-pristine popcorn cups left behind who knows how many decades before? 
 
Well, it was a living...