I’m thinking about the week we ran The Exorcist, during that fabulous if ill-starred year — 1976 — when I struggled, with a couple of friends, to run the St. George Theatre, a slightly shabby but still viable 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island.
           
We were showing that most profitable of all horror movies and, wonder of wonders, not losing money! Despite the fact that the movie was two years old and playing at another theater in Staten Island, we’d filled the house. Our palace was spooky, a veritable house of shadows, it had drawn people of every age and demographic to see Linda Blair throw up pea soup and spin her head like a top. Just as we were congratulating ourselves on actually making a little money — could we pay off some of the loan we’d taken out on the concession stand? — the phone next to the hot dog warmer rang. My heart fell, as from the dome, into the orchestra pit. The only person likely to call on the concession phone at such an hour was the projectionist, and I knew he only called with technological trouble in mind.

Sure enough, he told Dean, “Your exciter lamp is about to fail.”

Dear reader, if you’ve followed this blog in the past, you know that everything we had at the theater was at least somewhat out of date, including and especially our ancient carbon arc projectors. Theaters that could afford to do so had, by that time, gone to something called Xenon. Audio in either system was delivered on a separate optical track that ran down the length of the film and was translated into sound by something called an “exciter lamp.” Exciter lamps for the older projectors were scarce: ideally, we should have had three in the booth at all times, one for each projector, and a third in reserve. Again, if you’ve been following this blog, you know that we had nothing in reserve: spare change, candy, popcorn, toilet paper, carbons, money to pay anybody, no safety net no how. An extra exciter lamp, when we hadn’t paid ourselves in several months? Foolish extravagance.

“How long does it have?” Dean wondered.

“Well,” Gabe yawned (hoping for the rest of the night off), “it may make it through the night, but when it goes you ain’t gonna like what you hear.”

When an exciter lamp begins to fail, it picks up only part of the optical track, which causes an intermittent effect, not dissimilar to the sound of an outboard motor layered over spoken words.

So there we were on a Saturday night, last show: around fifteen hundred people in the house, the balcony actually open. Sam and I had already taken the night’s receipts--a considerable amount of cash — to the night depository two doors down. We couldn’t have refunded anyone’s money if we wanted, and we didn’t--want that. I was just settling into the notion that we would make it through on what was left of this old lamp. Max Von Sydow — the senior priest in the movie — had commenced the rite of exorcism, driving the Devil from the soul of the possessed little girl, when the sound track went to mud. Dialogue became harder and harder to discern.

To reconstruct what this sounded like, try an experiment:
“The power of Christ compels you,
The power of Christ compels you...”
 
While pronouncing these words (Max Von Sydow’s lines from the movie) keep your mouth slack and shake your head violently from side to side, so your lips shimmy.

That’s “motorboating,” the effect that used to happen several technologies ago, when an exciter lamp was about to die.

A brave group of seven or eight patrons gathered near the orchestra pit, making its way up the aisle to the lobby. 

“We need to see the manager...” a self-appointed leader stated.

When Dean appeared, they sang out in unison, “We want our money back!”

“What’s the problem?” Dean queried, feigning ignorance.

“Hey man, can’t you hear? ...the whole thing’s under water in there — can’t make out a thing...”

Dean paused, then took his best shot, “It wasn’t well advertised, but this version of the movie is actually the director’s cut!”

​“The WHAT?”

“The director put back some scenes originally taken out, with special effects. The Devil in this version possesses the entire room, everybody: little girl, priests and all!”

Silence. The stunned complainants absorbed this new information.

“Really?” asked one gullible young man.

“Sure! ...And you’re missing the best part of the film right now!”

There was some grumbling, a little discussion, then the posse, including its skeptics retreated back into the theater. Five or six rows in, I heard someone say, “No, no — it’s, well, special effects of some kind — a director’s cut.”

Next day one of us — was it me? — trekked into the city, to 42nd Street, the porn district, where equipment of the same vintage as ours still existed, and borrowed a spare exciter lamp to see us into Monday.
 
But wait, there’s more!
 
Twenty years later at a neighbor’s Christmas party, a short balding man with gray hair, who seemed an older version of someone Dean had met once, approached.

“Didn’t you manage the St. George Theater?”

​Dean nodded. “A long time ago.”

The man grinned and poked his right index finger into the center of Dean’s chest. “ I don’t care how long it’s been — that was no director’s cut!” 

Dean grinned back and reached for his wallet, “You want your buck fifty back?”

“We had a damn good time anyway,” his interlocutor insisted.

​Dean doubled over with laughter, sheepish and amused all at once.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 Download The Exorcist sometime, it’s a great Halloween movie, and be sure to get the actual director’s cut!

​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 2672-seat movie palace, a theater that had, since its opening in 1929, seen a lot of action — both live and cinematic — 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 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 a Warner theater in Manhattan, were “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” The film and its technology were a smash, a Vitaphone/Western Electric sensation.

This meant that 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. Amazingly, projectionists in the late 1920’s had to first cue the film for a “talkie” to a specific marked frame, then cue the 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.

The evolution of Vitaphone 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 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, but they were 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 movie theater we knew something about back in Cincinnati. 

After seeing the five-foot tall VoT’s, I was stunned. “Amazing! — that that 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. 

The announced double feature at the St. George Theatre (a 2672-seat movie palace I and a handful of friends lost our shirts running in 1976) was Smile, an early indie about a beauty contest, and The Sunshine Boys, starring George Burns and Walter Matthau as a couple of aging Vaudevillians. Showtimes were in the papers, but folks who attended the six o’clock screening were treated to an inadvertent triple or quadruple feature, two movies plus audio portions of what was playing upstairs in the projection booth, re-runs of McHale’s Navy and Gilligan’s Island from an omni-present illicit television not so far off. These features played to an audience of one, Gabe, the projectionist, long past his prime, who hardly cared what was on the big screen down below.

He routinely missed change-overs, treating the audience to periodic tag-ends of reels, with perforations and white space. At the exulted salary of $13.76 an hour (equivalent nowadays to $61.50), why did we cut him a paycheck? We hadn’t paid ourselves in forever. Local 306, the NYC projectionists (and spotlight operators’) union, had a lock on the five boroughs. There wasn’t even, as I recall, a contract: 306 had simply been at the theater since it opened in 1929. Whatever guy they deemed to bestow on you, you took, no questions asked. Gabe more or less came with the theater, along with the dirty carpets and soda-stained movie screen, our inheritance, whether we liked it or not.

We complained often to the union. Dean called  the rep, the “local” secretary, and  he invariably promised to talk to our wayward “employee.” Sometimes he did. After these chats Gabe was worse than ever, rolling in moments before screen-time, glaring as he ascended to the booth. For a while there was television silence, but a week or two later, McHale’s (Ernest Borgnine’s) unmistakable bray eventually filtered through the soundtrack of whatever was showing. It was always jarring, but sometimes downright surreal, as when Roy Scheider was trying to stare down the great white shark in Jaws. 

One magic morning, following several talks with the local secretary, two representatives of 306 strode into the lobby, to talk about our “problem.” But talk is cheap. We took them to the booth and out its side door there, onto the theater’s catwalk, a railed pathway within the skeleton of the dome. It was a world unto itself, which also incidentally served the booth as a kind of techno burial ground. Amid the dead projector parts and other detritus to the left of the walkway, lay a brand-new Sony Trinitron, as well as a half-dozen discarded portable TVs — two RCAs a couple of Motorolas, even a Dumont, from the more distant past. The reps were speechless.

There was a hearing the following Tuesday, and we never saw Gabe again. On Wednesday, a nice young man strode into the lobby, displayed his union card, shook hands all around and asked for directions on how to get to the booth. I think his name was Phil. Perhaps the reason I don’t remember him as clearly as Gabe was that he did his job flawlessly, he was pleasant, he came and he went. 

When you’re going broke in a business, humor is an important survival tool. Woody Guthrie was a hero of mine. He’d written a terrific song I have always admired, which was often sung at Depression-era union rallies. It goes like this: 

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.

Times were tough in the thirties; my own mother’s best friend had been a union maid, an organizer. But in our case, in 1976, the shoe of desperation was on the other — entrepreneurial — foot. Accordingly, we sang our own parody of Guthrie’s song:

There once was a management maid who wasn’t getting paid. 
She was in a fix with 306....
 
I won’t treat you to the nastier verses of our parody. 

After the union did right by us, we went back to the business at hand, going broke. We were a single-screen movie house in the age of TV dominance,  fighting for audience share with the multiplexes. But in the larger sense, while Gabe was around, we actually had more than one screen.

The St. George Theater, a 2672-seat movie palace, under our command, had only been open about a week. Grosses for Blazing Saddles and Take the Money and Run, our first double feature, had depressed our booking agent, but we thought we were doing pretty well. Some cash, any cash, seemed good.

Into the lobby strode a man wearing a hopeful smile and lugging a large sales case.

“I’d like to show you some light bulbs...” he began, extending his hand to Dean.

“We can’t buy that kind of thing door to door,” Dean countered, but somehow, the man had already made his way past the usher’s station to the candy stand. There, he  quickly unlatched the heavy four-sided sales case, covering the counter with every imaginable size, color and shape of lightbulb — flame-shaped, pencil-thin, clear with a glass rosebud in the center — each screwed into its own special socket. With a Robert Preston flourish, he pulled a cord from the side of the case, and gestured for someone to unplug the butter warmer.

Row by row the case came alive as he hit the switches; it was like watching E. Power Biggs play the pipe organ at the Fillmore East.

“These are for accents — and these... are long-lasting! These two lines are utility.” He paused a moment, not wanting to rush things. “Now these... are for your chandeliers and sconces!” He gestured approvingly at the three dark shapes looming above the lobby. 

It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that, before selling light-bulbs, he’d apprenticed with a hypnotist.

A group of us gathered, and someone came up with a notebook.
• 15 stained-glass exit signs, 1 bulb each
• 4 fire hose door signs, 2 bulbs
• chandelier in the outer lobby, 24 candles
• chandeliers in main lobby?  (we didn’t know what they contained, having never cranked them down)
• footlights, 24
• backstage lights, 7
• aisle lights (too numerous to count)
• 22 sconces
• statuary illumination?
• bulbs in dome? 

The list ended with the biggest question mark of all, the main chandelier, which, we imagined had at least 80 empty sockets, although we couldn’t figure out how — or if it was safe — to crank the thing down. There were niches and indentations with outlets we’d never dreamed of, which we found from time to time, crawling around the catwalk and in other out-of-the-way places, some with bulbs dating, perhaps to the second world war, rusted into their sockets.

Back at the candy stand the euphoric salesman slid his hand into the a crevice of the sales case and, with another flourish, withdrew a hand-held calculator, one of the first I’d ever seen. I wanted that too!

“It all comes to just $917.60!” he told us, beaming.

A full fifteen seconds passed. “We don’t have that much money,” Dean said.

“Oh...that’s okay, you can put it on time!”

So we did. Time was something we didn’t have much of either, but we didn’t know it yet.

How could we refuse him? — so earnest! — and his bulbs did make the theater a little less dusty and cave-like. By the following spring, the first of them had begun to burn out, after our hopes, dimmed months before.