What could be better on Halloween weekend than stumbling into a darkened single-screen movie house, one that’s survived demolition, one that smells of fresh-pop with real butter, to watch a spooky Garfield cartoon with fifteen or so mildly-attentive four-year-olds — and their parents?  I can easily say I’m never bored, no matter where I find myself, because there’s a theater — saved, about to be saved, or not torn down yet — in every town I've ever visited. After an eight-hour drive through teeming rain and Sunday breakfast with my husband, getting in trouble at the local Friendly’s for bringing a cup of cold cappuccino, “imported from Staten Island!” into the restaurant from the car, I dropped Dean at the downtown convention center, then consulted my iphone and wound up at the North Park Theatre. It's a 600-seat house built in 1920 which, ninety-eight years into its career, is showing — later on if we care to come back — John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Taste the Blood of Dracula, a Brit flick from 1970.
 
On the gorgeous triangular marquee, they actually still use red plastic letters on tracks! — and they have enough of them to spell out, on one side, all the things about to be on-screen while still featuring BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY OPENS HERE NOVEMBER 1 on the other side. They may have done this because they'd exhausted their reserve of plastic lower case letters. I know that strategy. At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace which, by now, you probably know I helped to run in Staten Island in 1976, we barely had enough letters, upper or lower case, to spell out even a single feature longer than a few words on both sides. While we were going broke trying to save the St. George as a single-screen house, the North Park in Buffalo was surviving quite handily, thanks to luck, a really handy projectionist/manager named Norm, who could fix anything, a loyal crew, and a programming strategy involving Disney movies offered at atypical hours. It didn’t hurt  either that the surrounding neighborhood apparently never went through the kind of serious decline many neighborhoods went through, when multiplexes were the new thing. Then, too, this 600-seat gem had a really dedicated booking agent named Ike; booking agents can make or break a theater. 
 
The North Park can claim the distinction of being continuously open and showing flicks, from its beginnings in 1920 all the way through to 2013, with a brief hiatus for restoration and to install digital equipment. Unbelievably, the equipment taken out in that year included a Mark II platter system for single-reel take-up—state-of-the-art in the mid-seventies, but old school by 2013. Norm kept the old equipment up and running, finding parts when necessary. For a fascinating treatment of how a projectionist often demonstrates brinksmanship with aged equipment, check out this link, a digression, but worth it. Then think how valuable Norm really was. 
 
Bill, one of the managers, who was on shift the Sunday two years ago, when I discovered the North Park, recommended I try to get the ear of Ray Barker, the Program Director; a brief email to the info function of the theater’s website led to a conversation that filled in all my blanks. Without Ray, a professor of history who has transformed his original part-time job at the theater into a serious avocation, I would never have known about Norm or Ike or why the theater has lasted so long as a dedicated single-screen movie house. Loyal friends of the North Park, with Norm at the helm, saw the theater through the lean seventies with a brilliant policy of booking Disney product at night — while the new multiplexes only booked family fare for weekend matinees. Because the surrounding neighborhood has probably always been somewhat upscale (full of beautiful older arts and crafts bungalows), with a strong main street (Hertel Avenue), families with children kept coming for the all-Disney day and night fare, Fantasia, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound. In a solid middle-class neighborhood, this programming was just enough to get the theater through a decade that destroyed many single-screen houses in more urban areas. Case in point is Shea’s Buffalo, a sister theater downtown.  A full-out Rapp and Rapp palace, decorated in the 1920’s by none other than Tiffany’s, Shea’s Buffalo went through a difficult period in which its owners failed to pay their taxes, causing the City of Buffalo to seize the property. Downtown had suffered the usual urban blight; you know the story. 
 
By the eighties at the North Park, it was time for a programming adjustment. Management switched from all-Disney to discount second-run, settling in finally for a combination of the usual family fare and art films: Cinema Paradiso, My Life As a Dog.
 
“The customer who goes to a movie every week is rare,” Ray points out. Instead of expecting the same patron to come back frequently, it’s smart to program to a variety of audiences, which is the policy of the theater to this day, wise in an era of streaming and multiple distractions. 
 
Remember that name, Shea? Once the owner of a chain of some thirteen theaters, including the North Side and Shea’s downtown, Michael Shea, born, some say, in Ontario but raised in Buffalo, sold out to Paramount in the twenties. So the North Park passed from Paramount to Loew’s to Dipson, a regional chain. From 1966 to 2013,  Norm was always there as projectionist, eventually at the helm as manager, in a double role. The North Park seems to have been blessed. 
 
What could possibly go wrong?  The answer is digitalization, a crisis that closed theater doors all over the U.S. quite recently. The crunch of technology, as the mechanisms of film production and distribution made traditional projection more or less impossible, required a huge outlay of cash to convert to digital presentation. Dipson, the owner, wasn’t interested, while Ike, the movie booker, had died, and Norm needed to retire, a triple challenge.
 
All good theater stories feature a savior or group of them, and this story, as you know, has an upbeat ending. In the case of the North Park, it was local defense attorney, Tom Eoannou, and his friend, Mike Christiano, a restauranteur, who closed the deal, more or less on a handshake. Restoration took eight months, the only period the North Park has ever not shown movies. I asked Ray how bad it really was inside. While nothing structural was about to collapse, the dome, he told me, “was obscured by filth.” I didn’t understand at first, but as he described what art restorers had had to do, it became apparent he was talking about decade after decade of cigarette smoke and tar. It had been a brown ceiling for a very long time. These days, the small dome of this Henry Spann theater gleams, an ornate series of murals painted by Raphael Beck depicting classical themes. 
 
Although he’d been going to the theater since he was a young child, Ray had actually never seen the dome in pristine shape until recently! The mural above the proscenium, featuring a dancing woman flanked by ballerinas, came out from behind its shroud of a curtain. A new lobby-side concession stand, an exquisite stained-glass window boarded up for decades behind the marquee, repaired and presented to the public: the North Park is a showplace these days.
 
Ray remembers a couple of moments that reminded me of my time at the St. George. Buffalo is known for its forbidding winters and, during some or another blizzard in the nineties, while Ray worked for the intrepid Norm, the call came to “get over here.” The general public had been ordered off the roads, but Norm insisted. Fortunately, a neighbor who worked for the police was on his way to work, so Ray caught a ride, then, safely arrived, found himself changing the marquee in a blizzard. I know what that means, having watched the tracking of new letters to spell out an upcoming feature, in wind, in rain, yes probably in ice too, the ladder shifting on the sidewalk. But that's not all. According to Ray, Norm and his wife slept in the theater during the famously terrible Blizzard of ’77 (see #2 on the blizzard list).
 
Now those are show people! 
 
Afterthoughts:
1. The North Park has just re-opened despite these pandemic times...  If you’re a resident of Buffalo, you know this already, but I was heartened to hear... Anyhow — hot stuff — they’ve got Tenet! —Mazaltov!  

2. Read about The Perils of Marquee Letters in a Vanished Age.

Sound familiar? It does to me, right down to the fact that, if you live right now in these barely united states, we do appear to be residents of two very different cities. You know what those differences are, I won’t elaborate. Is there anything we all have in common? Was there ever?

Once upon a time, we all went to the movies. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor or in between. Whatever your religion or political opinions, you went. It did matter if you were white or black, but even segregation couldn’t keep people with African ancestry away from “the pictures,” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation in public places, changed that. 

A little over ten years later, in 1976, a group of well-intended twenty-somethings, of which I was one, briefly ran a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island (New York), the St. George Theatre. At that point in time, before VCRs, the American habit of buying a ticket and sitting in the dark facing a screen of some kind, on which flickered an image on Safety Film illuminated by light, was something we all had in common. 

The St. George was a “buck fifty” house, second-run in most cases, if not third- or fourth-. Back then you couldn’t wait for it to come to a screen you had at home (in those days your TV), unless you wanted to wait maybe twenty years. Case in point: The Wizard of Oz, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was first released in theaters on August 25, 1939, then re-released nationwide in 1949 and again in 1955. It was first broadcast on television on Saturday, November 3, 1956.

Well, almost twenty years. Million Dollar Movie, originating in NYC, made the RKO vaults from the thirties and forties available on TV for free, too. 

People came to the red and gold lobby of our slightly derelict palace to see a young DeNiro in Taxi Driver or Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon or Sissy Spacek in Carrie. A few even came for the 68-year-old Katherine Hepburn in Rooster Cogburn, a movie based on Charles Portis’ novel, True Grit (Hepburn, despite her age and gender, was still a star). If there was a movie you wanted to see that had come out any time in the early to mid-seventies, you had to see it in a theater. 

The habit of movie-going took a couple of hits not many years after we left the St. George. The VCR, by 1979, was affordable for most folks, despite a format war between VHS and Betamax.

By the 1980’s, most households had a means of recording whatever had come on TV, and a lot had come.  Quick! When was HBO born?  1972, actually, as “The Green Channel!” Didn’t have many subscribers then, but, as you know, by the eighties, it was hot. Movie-going eroded slowly, with the advent of technologies that offer immediate access and total convenience.

It’s a good thing we have plenty of technologies now; shut in as we are, what would we do without them? But in a week that has seen Regal Cinemas, the second-largest movie theater chain in the U.S., close all 500 of its venues, it’s not surprising that The New York Times’  A.O. Scott, “The Flickering Fortunes of Movie Theaters,” seems so gloomy on future prospects for sitting down together again in the dark, any time soon. It isn’t just about the pandemic; it’s about Netflix and more. It’s about TikToc and Instagram and the three billion people forecast to be using social media of some kind by 2021.  

But here’s the thing...

​Bless habits that die hard. Our millennial neighbors just over the hill have two Dual turntables (one in the kitchen!) and they listen to vintage Jazz. Bless anachronisms! Bless, for that matter, the romantic turn of mind!.

​Bless you, if you’re thinking, “When this is all over, I’m getting me a giant buttered popcorn to hunker down in the dark with.” It may not be a palace, your nearest cinema, but it’s time to get nostalgic for it.  

When we come out on the other side of this terrible time, we’ll need to remember how to do a lot of things: ride trains and buses, walk down the street without judging each other, sit together inside restaurants that are at capacity, sing--together. What better training for civic-mindedness is there than going out to a movie?

Meanwhile, speaking of civic-mindedness, may I remind you it’s time to vote? Then you can say, quoting Dickens once again in A Tale of Two Cities,  “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...” And you won’t be speaking from the scaffold!
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Wade past the ad, and here’s Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, (1935), at his journey’s end.

2. Here’s a link to a fascinating blog which details the gradual erosion of the experience of movie-going via technology, from the sixties to the eighties. 

“Wall Street Lays an Egg,” Variety headlines read on October 30, 1929. To “lay an egg” in theater parlance means to fail — to flop — and flop the stock wizards did that day, ushering in the Great Depression. One month and four days later, on December 4, a classic movie palace, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, opened its gleaming red and gold doors for the first time, to several thousand souls bent on escape: the talkie, So This Is College, and Blossom Seeley, the original “red hot mama,”  live onstage.
 
Forty seven years later in 1976, a team of young would-be entrepreneurs who had grown up under the domes of similar palaces, took our turn at running the shopworn, mostly empty but still elegant, St. George. 
 
What did I know of movie theater management that April? I hardly understood the lingo agents and vendors spoke, though some of it was recognizable. Alright, so issues of Variety did show up, from time to time, at our house, but I had never cracked them. They seemed clubby, and the brash show-biz dialect put me off. The very first week we ran the St. George, our booking agent (a short dark-haired dude who dressed in Dacron and pulled down his regular paycheck from the showbiz mogul, Ted Mann, wished us Boffo Socko on opening night with our first double feature, Blazing Saddles and Bananas. Only afterwards did I learn what “boffo” and “socko” mean and that, as a matter of fact, side-by-side in a sentence they actually form a redundancy. Both mean “very good” when applied to B.O. (not “body odor” — “box office”). So  our agent Nick was wishing us a very very good night. Now if he’d added whammo to those verys, he’d have been anticipating something on the order of a sell-out, which Blazing Saddles sadly fell short of, as did the vast majority of the films we showed in our theater year. 
 
By the time we left the St. George, we were broke, yes, but I was a little more fluent in theater operator patois. I knew that a movie (or any kind of show) with staying power or “stamina,” has to have legs, a term with such legs of its own, it’s traveled beyond show-biz. Scandals, the ones that involve senators in washrooms or presidents in oval offices, can also be said to have legs. (What is politics anyhow, if not a big show?).
 
When, BTW, the actual legs in a movie are as provocative as Madeline Kahn’s are in Blazing Saddles, they definitely have sex appeal, a term Variety takes full credit for inventing. Who knew? It’s in their Slanguage Dictionary after all!
 
We never ran a horse opera after Blazing Saddles (which was, after all, a satire of one), but we did run three Bruce Lee Kung Fu’s which, I now learn, are sometimes called chopsocky. We ran Cooley High, about growing up black in the Cabrini-Green projects, in Chicago. It’s a classic these days, an early example of black cinema, though some list it under the genre Blaxsploitation. The previous is not a Variety coinage, though it sounds like it. The word was actually minted by L.A. NAACP head Junius Griffin, a film publicist.
 
Three to five hundred people a day (if we were lucky) in a 2,672-seat auditorium meant we were flopping — or laying small eggs — a lot. But we got lucky a couple of times. Once only, we actually had a sellout: boffo (boffola), whammo, socko, The Exorcist, in its return to the big screen, which required us to open the balcony for two weekends. After that, we returned to our usual doggies, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Bad News Bears, In Search of Noah’s Ark. That last was a four-wall, which Variety reminds us is “...a theater rental contract where the producer assumes responsibility for all of the expenses of a show and gets all of the revenue.” Essentially, it reduces the theater operator to the role of sharecropper, which, by Christmas, we more or less were.     
 
Six storeys above our theater’s mostly vacant orchestra, in the projection booth, Gabe, our aged projectionist, unspooled the film that arrived each week in hexagonal canisters. “Unspooled” still circulates at Cannes they say, despite a dearth of actual film...
 
In the end, we failed spectacularly to achieve the house nut, (cover our operating expenses). Short of cash and hope, you could say we ankled (walked out on) our jobs at the theater. The landlord had nixed us, as in a certain well-known Varietyheadline from 1935, “Stix Nix Hick Pix,” (hit this link, if you want a translation).
 
In the year of the theater, there had been some consolations. For one thing, we had a terrific staff, who would have worked for free if we’d let them (we were tempted).  Just up the hill, beneath a bush in our yard, a stray bitch had given birth that spring to six pups. It was a cold April: two died immediately. We took the remaining four inside and raised them on powdered milk from doll baby bottles. The pups — Boffo, Socko, Ruffian and Ralph — lived, for a time, in the theater’s mezzanine. It was, finally, Ruffian and Boffo we ended up keeping. Now she really had legs! 
 
Afterthought:

1. By now you may have figured out that all the underlined slang in this article was at one time invented by Variety. Some rag! (not their coinage apparently).
2. Ruffian the dog was named for a thoroughbred filly who died after breaking down at the track in 1975.

I grew up in an analogue world, a world where telephones stood in glass booths on the street and elsewhere, or rested on their rigid plastic cradles at home, waiting to be dialed— that word signifying real finger-power. At the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace which, along with a group of inspired cronies, I helped to run in 1976, we had a wood-and-glass phone booth with an elegant velvet seat in it, a booth big enough for Clark Kent to change clothes in.
 
It stood just outside the box office, next to a heavy mahogany stand marked Western Electric, with slots for telephone books: Staten Island, Manhattan, Queens, The Bronx, Brooklyn. When we arrived, in April of our theater year, the phone in the booth still functioned. Hardly anyone ever used it. It sported a dial phone, though touch-tone technology had been around since 1963.
 
One day, a boy came to the box office window, complaining to Yvette — on shift behind the bars, “That phone don’t work!”
 
“What’s the problem?” she asked. 
 
“I push the numbers ‘an nothing happens!”
 
Seems the kid was pushing on the numbers embedded in the rotary dial. 1963 was, by that time, thirteen years in the past, and — despite the fact that there were still rotary phones around — he hadn’t encountered any (after all, the mean age of our patrons was probably twelve or thirteen). Such frustration with outmoded technology may be the reason an angry unobserved customer tore the receiver off the phone one night in July, rendering it useless. I called New York Telephone (in those days, the service provider also installed and maintained the hard-wired equipment), only to learn that the utility didn’t think it was worthwhile replacing a phone that had only netted $6.50 in three months (we were supposed to get thirteen percent of that six fifty, or a fast eighty-five cents).  
 
So the phone passed into obsolescence, and — with Superman nowhere in sight — the booth was largely a relic. Still, it served a few odd functions. At least once, a young patron — hoping to spend the night and raid the candy stand — hid out inside, scrunching down below seat level. The booth door was suspiciously closed — he was discovered and escorted out the door.
 
Wooden phone booths and church confessionals have something in common. I was reminded of this on several occasions, involving one member of the management staff, who also happened to be an investor in our failing enterprise. On more than one occasion, I came out of my office under the stairs and spied a pair of legs sticking out of the phone booth. They belonged to my comrade-in-arms, sitting in the booth, on the velvet seat, his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, for warmth.During the hard dark fall and winter which followed our disastrous cash-poor spring and summer seasons, he must have found solace in the booth, even if there was no priest to hear his story. 
 
 Afterthoughts:

1.  1. Check out This American Life's episode (Really Long Distance) about a very special telephone booth.
2. There are currently only four phone booths left in New York City, according to the New York Times — all of them on the Upper West Side. The last remaining booths can all be found on West End Avenue at 66th Street, 90th Street, 100th Street and 101st Street. Don’t neglect the above link, which contains the story of an obsessed citizen who, until recently, campaigned to keep the booth in his neighborhood there and open for business.   
3. Peter Ackerman, author of the children’s book, The Lonely Phone Booth, observes that, “They’re like mini-theaters. You can walk by and see people laughing in there, crying in there, and you couldn’t hear them, so you could project your own stories onto them.” So our phone booth was a theater within a theater, I guess. 
4. This post originally appeared on 10/12/16 in a slightly different version. The pandemic has created a longing in me for some kind of sanctuary, though confessionals and phone booths are definitely off-limits for the time being...