Each faded red ticket from a pile of rolls I found in a closet off the mezzanine guaranteed a man or woman the right to a few hours in one pristine red velvet seat (orchestra or balcony) for a first-run viewing of whatever had been showing at our movie palace when movie tickets actually cost less than a quarter. It was 1976, the year I had a hand in running the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. The year these unused tickets had been intended for sale was no doubt some time in the late thirties, perhaps 1939, when, I recently learned, was the national average movie ticket price. 

The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind happened to be dueling contenders that year for Best Picture at the upcoming Twelfth Academy Awards, each movie available for less than the price of ten minutes at a parking meter today. Also available for less than a quarter that halcyon year include, among other movies, the remaining eight nominees for best picture: Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Stage Coach, Of Mice and Men, Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka, Dark Victory, Love Affair, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Gone With the Wind won, the following February at The Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel where the awards took place. But a lot of people thought The Wizard of Oz should have gotten it, and some movie buffs are still pissed off that Gunga Din and The Hounds of the Baskervilles weren’t even nominated.

Movies were cheap then, and, even after adjusting for inflation, memorable ones were plentiful. Of the ten top-grossing movies of all time, two from the late nineteen thirties (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Gone With the Wind) are still on the list. 

In 1939,  an average of 85 million Americans went to the movies every week. What else, besides listening to the Crosley Cathedral Radio, was there to do? Television, video games, Internet, were the stuff of future sci-fi. In addition to a (perhaps classic) movie like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, what were moviegoers getting in 1939 for 23 cents? Several cartoons, coming attractions, MovieTone News, (and no commercials!!!), all of this delivered in an opulent setting that included a velvet curtain, ushers in uniform and in many cases a golden dome.

How do we fare today? — sans curtain, usher, cartoons, and opulence, but including that tiresome ad for Sprite? Recently, the average movie ticket price hit a new high, at $9.26. Remember the 23-cent ticket? Nine twenty-six in 1939 dollars, adjusted for inflation, equals around fifty cents. In other words, we’re paying twice what our grandparents or great grandparents were paying for a fraction of what they got.

It’s shocking how steadily movie theater attendance has declined since 1939, when approximately 70% of the U.S. population sat in the dark and munched popcorn at a local palace or neighborhood cinema at least once a week. In the year 2000, that figure had shrunken to 27.3 million people, or just 9.7 percent of the population.

Forty years ago in 1976, for a buck fifty, we offered second- or third-run double features at our magnificently empty movie palace. Despite the 63-cent savings (first-run theaters charged around $2.13 cents in Staten Island), we managed to fill only about an eighth of our 2,672 seats, even on a good night, and the first-run houses, by the way, weren’t turning people away either.

By then, in addition to a steady drop in theater attendance, ( culprit: television), twins and multiplexes were proliferating. In 1963 AMC famously opened the 2-screen Parkway Twin (Kansas City) brainchild of Stan Durwood, who apparently realized he could double the revenue of a single theater "by adding a second screen and still operate with the same size staff."  

Falling audiences, but more screens, followed by competing entertainments or techno-pursuits equals higher ticket prices. And so we arrive at a family of four spending a hundred dollars for tickets to Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

But don’t listen to this discouraging math! Big screens are worth your while, like the Prytania in New Orleans, the last remaining single-screen theater in Louisiana. While the Paris in New York City has finally closed its doors, the United Palace in Washington Heights has a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia, and L.A. is wide open for quality movie-watching. At some theaters, it’s necessary to come late (so as to miss the annoying ads for chain restaurants or, ironically, HBO). The theater owner will still get her or his money for placing these billboards — you just don’t have to look at them. 

With streaming and binge-watching what they are these days, it’s downright patriotic to go out to the movies; it may be what’s left of being American, that we all can share: slouching in the dark, reaching into a bag of exploded corn.

Afterthought:
This just in from Thom Moon, my far-flung correspondent, in Dayton, Ohio:

It seems that some smaller theaters in towns, such as Englewood, near Dayton — closed for a while — are re-opening, despite the topsy-turvyness of the movie exhibition business, offering prices a family can afford (“All tickets the first two weeks will be $1. After that tickets will be $4 with a $2 deal day on Wednesday”). Sowers and Rand, the two partners, are going second-run initially with hopes of expanding to first-run if they can get new projection equipment, presumably digital.  They’re in their twenties, reminding me more than a little bit of who I was in 1976. Whatever they run, and for however long, I wish them boffo socco (big box office)!

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, our 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 our rep at 306, 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 calls to the union, 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  rallies back in the Depression. 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.
 
Afterthoughts:
1.   A lot has changed since 1976. With the advent of digital projection, the job of projectionist in most theaters has devolved to a side-gig most managers can handle. Even as far back as 1996, the once-strong projectionists’ union was struggling to keep its membership up as you can see from this article in the archives of The New York Times 
 
2.   The quality projectionist, as he (were there women projectionists?) was conceived has always been a skilled technician and, yes, an artist. The intricacies of trimming carbons, keeping two projectors going — one loaded and ready, the other in process, then siting cue-marks and making the changeover flawlessly from reel to reel, all the while coping with malfunctions in delicate equipment, handling the film itself, requires constant attention. Thankfully, there is still film, projected the traditional way in bigger cities, like L.A. and NYC, and even in rural Pennsylvania (see last week’s blog post on digital vs. film).
 
 3. Ironically, TV, once the enemy of the movies, is side-lined these days too, as smaller and smaller screens take over, implicit in this Variety piece about Martin Scorcese’s new film, The Irishman. He’s made it with Netflix, which pretty much guarantees it will make only a brief appearance in theaters, and in many households, not even on TV. The most troubling aspect of the Variety article is the economics of movie production...read it.

After watching At the Drive-In, a documentary about the Mahoning Drive-In Theatre in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, I was moved to reprise the blog post you’ll find  below, which I wrote on 2/16/16 about the struggle between traditional film and digitalization. Yes, two years later, digitalization is winning the battle, but there are always glorious hold-outs, and one of them happens to be the Mahoning an entirely volunteer operation which is, after three years, an enormous success. The theatre is owned and managed by a projectionist aided by a crowd of local film buffs. For a time, its giant screen was dark, because no one could afford the switch to digital, and the only way to stay on the current film distribution circuit would have been to drop the cash for a technical switch. So what did this crew of desperadoes do? They took themselves off the current film circuit, opting for retro, and continuing to run their original 1940's Simplex projectors, while renting whatever older films could still be shown on their screen. You would think, in the wilds of Pennsylvania, this would doom them, but thanks to social media saavy, the programming decision worked, drawing people from all over the U.S., some of whom camp out to go to one of the Mahoning’s festivals, or see a particular film in its traditional format. And that’s not all the Mahoning crew has done; I refuse to spoil the narrative of this fine documentary by telling you what happened when Jaws,which they’d rented on film from Hollywood didn’t arrive on time. You’ll have to watch At the Drive-In yourself to learn about that.  

Meanwhile, below please find my 2016 treatment of Film vs. Digitalization, with some updates at the end. Currently, of movies released in 2018, 91% used a digital format and just 14% used film. Not all that much has changed, but film’s hold is getting more tenuous...  

I have’t climbed to the balcony — then the fourteen steep stairs from the back of the balcony to the projection booth — of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I helped to run — since 1977, when we pulled out from under the marquee, taking what was left of the popcorn and candy, a couple of movie posters, some foot-light covers we’d paid eight dollars apiece for, and whatever was left of the cash.
 
For about a year and a half after the theater went dark, the light of a single bare 40-watt bulb, visible from six stories below in the parking lot, told me there was still electricity up there; then that last bulb went dark, and the booth became, in my memory, a shadowy dream space, its hulking pedestal-mounted carbon-arc projectors a fantasy I had to struggle to recall.  
 
Even then our projectors were antique, a technology which used actual  fire to illuminate film as it passed through the gate — as primitive in what had then become the age of xenon and platter projection as quill pens and inkwells.  
 
Every technology is superseded by the next, and the next. What would Gabe, the grizzled old union projectionist we overpaid back then, think tomorrow, if he climbed the stairs to the booth and found, in place of two behemoth projectors of ancient vintage, a laptop? In this most digital of ages, not only has film itself fallen into mortal danger, but so is the thing once called “projection.”  If Tarantino, Scorcese and Nolan are right, the death of film is the death of film art. Is film — hard to transport, easy to scuff and scratch, hard to preserve, environmentally un-friendly — really better (sharper, richer, just plain more authentic) than digital imagery? Would my old friend and  teacher, Hollis Frampton, a structuralist film-maker who died in 1984, agree?
 
On the activist side of the argument stood, in 2015, a small but impressive band of directors:  Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), Laszlo Nemes (Son of Saul), Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible --Rogue Nation),  Adam McKay (The Big Short), Todd Haynes (Carol), J. J. Abrams (Star Wars: Episode VII), Judd Apatow (Train Wreck), Sam Mendes (Spectre), Scott Cooper (Black Mass), Bill Pohlad (Love and Mercy), Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs), and David O. Russell (Joy). All of the previously-mentioned movies were produced in 2015, using Tarantino’s newly-tweaked Ultra-Panavision (2.76:1 aspect ratio) 70-millimeter film process. Beyond that, roughly 100 movies were produced that year on film.
 
But, (as Ron Popeil of Ronco used to say) “...wait!  There’s more!” The slow anticipated demise of film technology that’s been going on since the millennium isn’t just  about aesthetics; it’s about people’s livelihoods. Over the last several years, since Paramount became the first major distributor to announce that it would no longer produce or distribute film as a physical project, mom-and-pop cinemas and smaller chains in the U.S. have been packing up their popcorn, the way we did in 1977, closing the doors, and going home. To combat this, and to create a platform for the new 70mm phenomenon, the previously-mentioned A-list directors went to eBay looking for old projectors to rebuild. In 100 cinemas nationwide, they installed the new systems, their aim to create a viewer experience reminiscent of the fifties, when the palaces were still at a high shine.
 
In 2011, A.O. Scott of The New York Times, trying not to sound too nostalgic, observed: “The machinery of production and distribution is in the midst of an epochal change, part of the rapid and convulsive digitalization of everything under the sun. If you go to a movie theater, you are less and less likely to see a film in the traditional, literal sense. Cans and reels have been replaced by hard drives and digital files, and some of the old material hallmarks of cinema — the grainy swirl of emulsion as the light passes through the stock, the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector — are quickly taking on an aura of antiquity. Movies are shot and shown digitally and increasingly distributed that way as well, streaming onto the screen in your living room or in your hand.” 
 
Have the activist directors turned back this tide? — or just plugged a temporary hole? Do/will audiences miss that “grainy swirl of emulsion?” Is film arguably better, in the way some argue that vinyl is richer than CD’s were or downloads are? “Digital projection is just television in cinema,” Tarantino maintains. Is he right? What is it about technology that supersedes itself constantly, putting whole industries and thousands of small storefront operations inadvertently out of business? It isn’t just storefront businesses, either. 
 
Kodak, once the “jolly yellow giant,” as one filmmaker friend used to call it, drifted into deep trouble, around the time Scott was waxing poetic about grainy emulsion. The company was losing 100 million dollars annually. Now thanks to Spielberg, Tarantino and the gang — not to mention Nolan and Scorsese, and a growing crowd of others, the big K is back, anticipating profits in 2016, for the first time in years. 
 
On to the next challenge: processing labs, many of which no longer exist. Unbelievably, according to Ed Lachman, who shot Carol, “the New York Film Lab [a partnership between Deluxe and Technicolor that was created to respond to film’s shrinking footprint] is closed. They were going to throw out all the equipment. I inquired about it, and the general manager let me have the lab equipment. I have it in storage. We can develop film at Fotokem in Los Angeles, which is a very good lab. ... But there's a market and [we need] a lab on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.” 
 
Perhaps enough theaters capable of projecting film will be able to stay in business — which brings me to a thought I’ve been harboring as I read about all this Errol-Flynn-like brinksmanship. What if — way back at the St. George — we’d been required to replace those old carbon arc relics with digital projectors? I have a vivid memory of one Saturday night in 1976, having to hop on the ferry (the St. George Theatre was and is in Staten Island) and schlepp via subway to the porn district in Times Square. We’d run out of carbons to operate our antiquated projectors (probably because we hadn’t paid the supplier). The porn houses were virtually the only theaters left in NYC that had our kind of projection. They loaned us the carbons, and we soldiered on. What if Dog Day Afternoon, Cuckoo’s Nest and The Exorcist could only have arrived in a lovely beam on our wide stained screen if we had the latest technology? Xenon, the techno breakthrough of that time, was way beyond our reach. Fortunately, nobody required us to upgrade: as long as we remained in the movie palace business, smudged and scratched prints, more than one of which burst into fire on-screen, continued to arrive each Wednesday in heavy steel canisters our intrepid ushers managed to lug up seven flights to the booth.
 
Afterthoughts: 
1) Here’s an interesting example of reverse discrimination, exhibitors miffed over having already done the digital conversion, rendering them unable to project Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in 2014. 
 
2) Check out the comments column from the original post.

3) Stephen Follows, who has written extensively on film vs. digital, with a recent update. Apparently, genre has a lot to do with what audiences seek out:

In my original article, I looked at what percentage of films of each genre were shot digitally over a six-year period (2010-15).  It showed that 77% of sci-fi films had switched to digital but that only 41% of romantic films and 33% of war films had followed suit. At the time I spoke to a Director of Photography who said: ‘History films shoot film more because it’s softer and people associate it with a period look now and Romance because film still makes actors look more attractive than digital.’

​By adding the last three years to the dataset, we can see how things have changed. Sci-fi movies are still the most likely to be shot digitally (now at 91%) and war and romance films are still among the least (both at 73%).  Although the order has remained very similar, we can see that all genres have increased their reliance on digital formats.
 
Thanks, Steven.

The “movie palace”  was, arguably, invented in America. Where else would “palace” find itself appended to the synonym for (last century’s original technological obsession), the “moving picture?” (Possible answer, if I wanted to argue with myself: “in England, where they’re called “Picture Palaces”) 

Movie palaces were ubiquitous by the time I came along, which explains why, in 1976, a hard-nosed crew of us enthusiasts fought so hard to keep the doors of The St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque confection in Staten Island, open for business. It was our birthright, we assumed, to watch movies in elegance on a giant screen. 
 
There are no real palaces in these United States, with a few exceptions — Vizcaya in Miami? Hearst Castle in California? The former home  of the Archdiocese of New York, once known as the “Villard Houses,” built for the president of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1884? The President lives in a house whose only notable attribute is its whiteness. Palaces--Buckingham, Windsor, the Doge’s domicile — are for princes.

Raised in the 1950’s, I thought of our beloved Cincinnati movie palaces — the Grand, the RKO Albee, and, yes, the Palace (later the International 70), with their extravagant smoking and powder rooms, hall of mirrors (reminiscent of Versailles) and soaring domes, as — echoing the Communist rhetoric of our day-- “people’s palaces.”  But in the land of free enterprise, they’d been built to lure the upper crust.

What was the first ever movie palace? Some say the Regent Theater (designed by the estimable Thomas Lamb,) which opened in NYC’s Harlem in 1913, followed almost immediately (1914) by Lamb’s million dollar Strand Theatre on Broadway — back when a million was a million. By 1929 there were already — springing up like so many elegant Chanterelles  — roughly 21,000 movie palaces coast to coast. Lamb and his colleagues could hardly keep up.

When the San Francisco Fox opened in June of 1929, newspaper and magazine advertisements proclaimed: "No palace of Prince or Princess, no mansion of millionaire could offer the same pleasure, delight, and relaxation to those who seek surcease from the work-a-day world...You are the monarch while the play is on!"

The whole thing had really started as an attempt to make upscale opera crowds investigate movies, an experience that, prior to 1913, consisted of sitting in “flea pits,” on wooden benches, while ushers waved lighted sticks of citronella (“punk”) to keep the insect population at bay. But as a business-school grad once told me, it’s not the “classes” but the “masses” you want to serve if you’re an entrepreneur, and serve the masses the moguls and impresarios did, with enthusiasm. 
​
So, thanks to all this enterprise and the average person’s desire for a little glamor, we still have the palatial (Grauman’s) Egyptian, and Chinese theaters, New York’s United Palace (one of the original “wonder theaters”), and who could ignore other  “Palaces” still at this point listed as standing and operational: The Palace Theatre (Albany, N.Y.), The Palace Theatre (Marion, O.), and The Palace Theatre (Louiseville, Ky.), among so many? No doubt there are other unabashed palaces, so named, still open for business;  if there’s one I’ve ignored, please let me know!