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The Concession Stand

10/28/2014

Through the cold cold winter of 1977, we joked, while warming our hands in the popcorn machine, about darkening the screen but keeping the concession stand open. Ridiculous as it sounds, we’d have saved the expenses of running a theater (carbons, the projectionist’s union salary, trailers, posters, film rental, most of the electricity). Besides, our stand boasted the highest per capita sales of any theater in the five boroughs of New York City, running nearly 35% ahead of the Broadway theaters in Manhattan.

Poor as the neighborhood was, it wasn’t unusual for a family to walk into the lobby and ask if they could just buy some food and hang out. For the most part, the honor system worked, and they didn’t try to duck into the auditorium. In addition to Sno-Caps, Charleston Chews, Good ‘n Plenties, Reese Cups, Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, Jujubes, Dots, and Jordan Almonds, we provided all-beef Kosher hot dogs on small homemade Italian breads delivered from a local bakery each morning. Our popcorn (freshly popped) came with real clarified butter. Haagen Dazs ice cream was almost avant-garde. A guy in a station wagon delivered it to the theater’s door in three flavors. Freshly-ground coffee — without which a number of us might have frozen to death — was a big seller. Coke, Diet Coke, root beer, Sprite, and Creme Soda arrived in syrup containers, carbonation and water to be added.

Looking out from the stand, through the plate-glass that separated the auditorium from the lobby, it was possible to follow the action on-screen while eating dinner. What would I have done that winter without at least one daily concession-stand meal? Popcorn, egg-salad from home, and kosher hot dogs formed the solid core of my diet, and I was not alone.

In addition to providing nourishment, the stand also served as a kind of hearth, where we gathered to keep warm and tell each other stories. Whoever had the night’s concession shift polished the glass, stocked the case, popped popcorn at strategic moments — before a feature began or between double features, filled the soft-drink heads, and inventoried the shelves in the closet. He or she was seldom alone. People from the street, who had no intention (or not enough money) to watch a movie came in to hang out. We could have set out tables on the tattered swirls of carpet in our lobby, if only it had been warm enough.

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Watching Trailers and Going Broke

10/22/2014

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Scene from The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), with Patric Knowles, Olivia de Havilind and Errol Flynn.

We never ran Gone With the Wind, but we ran its trailer. No doubt the St. George Theatre had run that epic in its day, but by the time we came along, what the neighborhood wanted was blood and action. A little sex was good, but not romance, and certainly not dated romance that harbored apologies for ante-bellum slavery. Still, late in the season of our crazy theater entrepreneurship, Dean insisted on ordering — and re-ordering — the trailer for GWTW, with no hope of booking the movie itself. When this “Coming Attraction” shone its red/gold light on the first few rows of the orchestra, I could usually find him camped out front row center, with a box of Sno-Caps. Max Steiner’s glorious sound-track had called us both to watch.

Trailers really are short films — there’s an art to making them. They’re hors d’oeuvres. If we couldn’t dine out on a classic, we could snack on brief glimpses of it: A spooked horse and a rickety wagon against the backdrop of burning Atlanta, Scarlett and the white portico of Tara, Rhett carrying his flailing wife to bed up an improbably long red staircase. As dated as the movie itself, the trailer was a satisfying glimpse of what our endangered movie palace had been built to contain.

That full-color trailer was crafted in 1939, arguably the golden year of movies, when stylized Deco letters swung in from the right and popped over scenes of a promised film: THE LAUGHS ARE MONSTROUS! (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), MIGHTIEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIME! (The Charge of the Light Brigade), SPECTACULAR! (almost anything not a comedy), in high-contrast black and white. Even though GWTW was one of Hollywood’s first full-length feature films shot entirely in color, its trailer stuck — but for the use of color — with the classic trailer formula: an establishing shot of name actors, a two-minute-thirty-eight second sound track, and the inevitable baritone announcer, “The most memorable event in the annals of motion pictures...”

GWTW’s original trailer currently boasts 68,361 hits, while a modern adaptation stands this morning at 1, 342,336. I’ve added one to each of these numbers. Remarkable! You don’t have to rent a movie palace to visit Tara anymore.

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Curtains

10/14/2014

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Fly Tower Battens by JWGreen

In 1976 the St. George was still primarily a movie theater with a giant stained screen mounted on a stretcher in the middle of the stage. Other movie houses had shallow non-functional stages, but ours was authentic. The movie screen defined the stage, but behind it was a world built for living performers, a deep and storied space, with “wings” for actors to stand in, and six stories of rubble-strewn dressing rooms.

The second day we had the theater, Dean and I climbed the steps that led from the orchestra pit and stood center stage. I looked outward at a sea of unoccupied seats, but he pointed directly over our heads. “That’s a real fly loft,” he observed. Backstage was taller than I had imagined.

I laid my head back, and, dizzy, took in all the weight hanging above us. The proscenium’s high gilded arch, viewed from the orchestra, had been deceptive. Three or four stories above the stage hung a series of long metal pipes, horizontal and suspended from steel cables. Each bore the imposing weight of a curtain. Dean explained that the “counterweights” along the side walls (attached to each cable) allowed a mere mortal to raise or lower these acres of heavy cloth lightly and quickly.

The curtains were like dresses in a closet, but, beyond the asbestos fire curtain which had another purpose entirely, this lady had only two things to wear, a plain red velvet everyday curtain stained at the edges, and something very dark and heavy — I could just make out the giant tassels. Much later in our year there, a particular staff member would spend all the hours of one night — from ten to six A.M. — hand vacuuming this exquisite curtain. Its tassels were four feet high, each one thick as a heavy rope. Painstakingly, he stripped away the layers of dust, almost heavier than the red and gold brocade it clung to.

The formal house curtain was our proudest possession, really no possession at all--because we were just renters. A member of the Theater Historical Society, unaware that we were not the curtain’s owners, offered us $40,000 for it: there were theaters in Manhattan that knew what to do with such a treasure. Later, when the landlord turned off the heat, and still later when I couldn’t pay the electric bill, I entertained fantasies of curtain theft. But this would have been a violation, like the forced cutting of a beautiful head of hair. The gilded figures in the alcoves left and right might have seemed to avert their plaster gazes, and the very boards of the stage might well have moaned.

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Signs

10/8/2014

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Off the mezzanine was a room devoted completely to signs. A Giant blue and gold banner with gold fringe around three sides, SNEAK PREVIEW TONIGHT, hung along the back wall. There were stacks and stacks of small laminated plastic signs: STARTS SUNDAY, STARTS MONDAY, STARTS TUESDAY, STARTS WEDNESDAY, all the way to the end of the week. Because movies generally started on Wednesdays,

STARTS WEDNESDAY was available in a variety of styles and fonts. A small hand-painted sign read SUNDAY THROUGH TUESDAY. Another sign, dating back to the 50‘s — when cast members of the Metropolitan Opera had graced the theater’s stage — offered the remarkable bargain of FOUR OPERAS FOR THREE DOLLARS.

Propped in the corner of the room, a cardboard display poster advertised Ben Hur. I was twenty-seven when I found this poster. Gazing at it instantly erased sixteen of those years. In 1959, when Ben Hur played the Capitol Theater in downtown Cincinnati, I’d been eleven. Two hundred camels, twenty-five hundred horses, and ten thousand extras in Ultra Panavision: Ben Hur and other epics such as The Ten Commandments and Around the World in Eighty Days, were family events. They had to be taken in on a Sunday — that was the only day big enough — with multiple buttered popcorns, followed by sandwiches and chocolate marshmallow sundaes at Mill’s on Fourth Street.

Here was the chariot race poster just as I remembered it, with its twenty-story monolithic stone letters that spelled out:

BEN-
HUR

— as if the letters were, themselves, architectural constructs. And there was bare-chested Charlton Heston whipping four mad-eyed white stallions around some illustrator’s idea of an ancient Roman race track. At nine, I’d thought the idea of making the poster’s title seem like a building, like part of the coliseum itself, really cool. Sadly, I’d grown up, and to my adult eyes, it all seemed so trite and over-blown, like a Fredericks of Hollywood catalogue.

The theater we were trying to save, on whose mezzanine I’d found this relic, was itself way beyond Rococo, with outsized gilded statues, bullfight scenes and tiled fountains. But I ignored all that: you do when you’re in love.

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Aluminum Marquee Letters

10/1/2014

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I’m sitting in my car directly beneath the marquee of what once was our theater. Despite the fact that around fifteen years ago someone chose to cover the marquee — like a badly iced cake — in beige stucco, Although it’s been forty years, I can blink my eyes and see the steel tracks that used to run around three sides, and the erratically flickering St George Theater in curved neon centered above.

My original intent today was to get a cappuccino. The space to the right of the theater — a failing barbershop when the marquee still had its tracks — is now a coffee bar. I’m waiting in my car beneath a red NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, just long enough for the barista to make my double shot. When it’s ready, she gives me the signal. I dash in, slap a five dollar bill on the counter, grab my drink and run back to the car. I’m late to leave for my next appointment, but sitting beneath the marquee for even a brief time is a kind of transport, like falling down a mine-shaft in time. I sip my coffee and tumble.

It’s 1976. Jim, a senior usher, is teetering on a 15-foot ladder on the uphill side of the marquee. A dangerous wind threatens him, as he tries to keep his balance while hanging that most fragile of items, black-painted aluminum marquee letters. It’s Tuesday night. A new movie starts on Wednesday. It’s Jim’s job to spell out, “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea,” for all to see. It’s an impossibly long title. He has to substitute an upside-down m for the W, and two capital i’s for the L’s. We inherited our incomplete set of letters — and not much else — from the previous theater manager, who pulled out in the dead of night. At least he left us the means, more or less, to spell out the names of the movies that would break our hearts, week after week, failing, one title at a time, to fill our cavernous auditorium. A gust of wind causes the ladder to sway, and Jim drops a precious capital G. There is no sound quite like the sound of breaking cast aluminum, a surprisingly brittle material. Almost like glass but not quite. What’s a substitute for G?

I shake myself back to the present, press the button that starts my 2014 Volvo, and pull out from under the marquee’s shadow.

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The Concession Stand

Watching Trailers and Going Broke

Curtains

Signs

Aluminum Marquee Letters

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