Beyond size, what makes a movie palace a movie palace?  It’s style, baby! Think of the United Palace of Cultural Arts, formerly Loew’s 175th Street in upper Manhattan, variously described as “neo-Assyrian,” and/or “Indo-Chinese.” Think Graumann’s Egyptian or it’s sister, Graumann’s Chinese. The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, whose doors I spent a humbling year (1976) trying to keep open, has been described as “Spanish/Italian Baroque,” whatever that means. Red and gold, with paintings of bullfighters.
 
Well, it’s almost Halloween, and I feel moved to talk about a movie palace whose wall sconces are made out of actual skulls. The style of this theater, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, may be unique in all the world:  Native American, specifically Pueblo. 
 
How is this possible? Though the concept of a “palace” may be far off the Native American cultural mark, the cliff-dwelling peoples are and always have been agricultural (as were their ancient ancestors, the Anasazi. Farming is not nomadic; it results in permanent structures.
 
So I give you the KiMo, a not-entirely-bizarre blending of Pueblo style and what some call Art Deco.  It’s a movie theater designed to resemble the inside of a ceremonial kiva, with log-like ceiling beams depicting dance and hunt scenes. The skulls (Buffalo, actually) that I mentioned function as variations on wall sconces throughout the theater. Unsurprisingly, rumors abound that the theater is haunted. Beyond the skulls, the death of a small boy in the 1950’s adds credence to this myth.     
 
Who dreamed this movie house into reality? Oddly, it was Oreste Bachechi, an (Italian) immigrant, who made his living in dry goods and liquor. Like so many successful small-town entrepreneurs, he wanted to build his own movie palace, a building "that would stand out among the Greek temples and Chinese pavilions of contemporary movie mania." His family, especially his wife, had close ties to local citizens of Pueblo descent, a very American story, the newly-arrived embracing a culture whose roots go back to the first millennium. Accordingly, Oreste hired an architect, Carl Boller, of Boller Brothers, out of Kansas City, who had already built an impressive number of movie theaters in the west and midwest. This was a sizable commission for Carl, who didn’t just dream up Native American flourishes, but traveled extensively, visiting the pueblos of Acoma and Isleta, and the Navajo Nation in search of inspiration. 
 
On September 19, 1927, the theater opened to a sell-out crowd of 1,321. Pueblo and Navajo citizens ("numerous prominent tribesman of the Southwest...”)  performed on stage that night: Isleta’s Pueblo Governor, Pablo Abeita, offered a name for the new theater, KiMo, is combination of two Tiwa words meaning "mountain lion," liberally interpreted as "king of its kind." 
 
The KiMo was then and is today three storeys in stucco, with the stepped characteristic of native Pueblo architecture, blending with recessed spandrels and  a strong vertical thrust reminiscent of Art Deco. Both the exterior and interior of the building offer a variety of indigenous motifs: a row of terra cotta shields above the third-floor windows, hand-woven rugs disguising air vents, and chandeliers shaped like war drums and funeral canoes. Wrought iron birds descend the staircases, and those garlanded buffalo skulls with glowing amber eyes are in full evidence. 
 
As part of the Paramount chain, the theater had a good run until the early sixties, when a fire destroyed most of the stage and the proscenium arch, and did other considerable damage. It’s a familiar story: downtown Albuquerque was wracked with white flight, and the theater had been reduced to showing “adult” fare. A brief flirtation with demolition (1977) ended when the City of Albuquerque and a group of concerned citizens intervened. 
 
An extensive renovation included many small singular efforts, including the matching of door handles that were original kachina dolls (a Hopi motif). In one notable case of delicate restoration, “The balcony railing in the lobby, composed of wrought iron bird figures, was 11 inches too short to meet modern safety codes; but Harvey Hoshour [restoration architect] devised a novel solution to retain the railings' original look. Additional metal was inserted in the birds' necks and legs to make the railing taller. The talented craftsman who performed the work was none other than the grandson of the man who created the original railing.” 
 
Lobby murals of Southwestern landscapes that include cliff dwellings, were restored in another phase. In a third and final (1999) phase, perhaps the most expensive,  “conservationists worked for months atop scaffolding far above the auditorium floor to restore the spectacular 'environmental' artwork [that had been destroyed by fire]. Vigas (roof beams) decorated with Pueblo Indian motifs seem to open onto a starry night sky,” a nod to atmospheric theater styles.
 
What happened to Oreste Bachechi? Sadly, he died the year after his theater opened, although his sons operated the KiMo for the intervening decades. Reflecting for a moment on the turtles, birds, buffalo, stars and other natural effects that grace his beautiful theater, I found this: “27 acres of fertile valley farmland,” the former Bachechi estate, is apparently on the verge of being developed by the City of Albuquerque, with hopes of turning it into a kind of wildlife preserve, a  “balanced master plan... that promotes non-competitive recreational uses and environmental educational opportunities such as wildlife viewing, hiking, multi-use trails, improved and dedicated equestrian parking, native landscaping, an expanded pecan tree orchard, a memorial rose garden dedicated to the Bachechi family, an expanded wetland, and an agricultural field to attract migratory water fowl with perennial crops of bluestem, sacaton, lovegrass, and ricegrass.” 
 
Now that the movie palace has been safely restored, what better way is there to treat the local movie mogul’s fertile acres? 
 
Afterthought:
When Europeans arrived, some ten million people were already living here, in what we have come to call America. (That our continents, North and South America, were named for a European adventurer, Amerigo Vespucci, underscores the point I’m about to make. History is like a twisted ribbon, whose surfaces blend. Despite centuries of bloodshed, native peoples (First Nations in Canada) are remarkably still around, and such miracles should be honored. Think Sherman Alexi, the poet/filmmaker/novelist or John Herrington, astronaut of the Chickasaw nation, or Charlene Teters said to be the Rosa Parks of Native American culture. Then there’s the heritage of naming: hardly a state in the lower forty-eight exists that isn’t woven through with Native American river names: Mississippi, Shenandoah, Ohio, Tallahassee, Missouri, Miami, Truckee, Kankeekee, to name a few. I wonder how many movies that portrayed the old cowboy vs. Indian theme played the KiMo mid-twentieth century?

The first James Bond movie I ever saw had subtitles — in English. I was in Mexico City, in 1964; Goldfinger, the hottest American movie of the moment, had been badly dubbed into Spanish, but somehow (because there were, even then, lots of Americans living in that very international city), someone had seen fit to add English to the bottom of the screen. It was fascinating when Sean Connery, strapped down and threatened with torture by Goldfinger, said, “¿Esperas que hable?” (“Do you expect me to talk?") — for me it was as good an opportunity as any to puzzle out Spanish.
 
I don’t remember much about the theater we were in, except that it was fancy and big enough to have a balcony, like the movie palace I would be involved in helping to run twelve years later, when I was all grown up and in New York.

In Mexico that summer, I sat with other Senior Girl Scouts, sixteen and in our green uniforms. “Muchos American women!” a man in the lobby exclaimed, whistling low while demonstrating his partial command of English. I suppose there was a reason we’d decided to see Goldfinger in this underwater, under-the-tongue sort of way. I can also remember hearing snatches of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” coming from a taxicab radio. It was the zeitgeist, all mixed up and filtered through another culture.
 
We never showed Bond movies in the previously-mentioned theater I later took a hand in running, in 1976. The Man With the Golden Gun (starring Roger Moore as Bond) had come out in 1974, and it would have been possible for us to show it two years later. But we were, after all,  a “buck fifty” movie house, second-, even third-run; and Bond was, after all, pre-feminist, and, more important for our neighborhood, he was a white man with a gun. There were enough of those in police uniform. 
 
At our theater, Staten Island’s St. George, whose 2,672 seats a team of us only succeeded in completely filling briefly — for the week we showed the remastered Exorcist — action movies did sell tickets; but they had to have a gritty street feel, like Taxi Driver or Dog Day Afternoon.
 
Bond belonged to the period before things got tough, before all those assassinations (Kennedy, Malcolm X, King, then one more Kennedy). Before ‘Nam claimed so many lives, and the Beatles broke up, and rock morphed into punk. 
 
Single-screen movie palaces by that time had stopped somehow being first-run show places, but we didn’t know it. So, for a year, we had a time of it, working together without pay, watching Robert DeNiro, and Melanie Griffith (Smile) and Jack Nicholson (Cuckoo’s Nest) and Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles) and Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek and Gladys Knight and so many others find or continue to claim their places in the showbiz cosmos. Bond belonged to the era before, to the mid-sixties and its cold war, and to the ignorance America could no longer afford. 
 
Afterthought:
I just read Anthony Lane’s October 18 New Yorker review of the latest (final?) Bond movie, No Time to Die, starring Daniel Craig. Bond is so old he isn’t 007 anymore, and his replacement (Black, a woman) threatens to shoot him in his only reliable knee! The movie just sounds sad, but the review is brilliant.

Today, if schedules hold, Captain Kirk is actually riding the big one into space. Talk about “when worlds collide!” — the actor, William Shatner, becomes the role. There were no Star Trek movies, back when I was running a movie palace, in 1976. Those blockbusters would come later, beginning, in 1979, with Star Trek: the Movie, going to the big screen where almost no TV show had gone before — and to eternal re-runs on smaller screens. It would take Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars to build the platform for Star Trek and other space movies a decade later, blossoming in countless multiplexes, after we’d gone out of business — and our beloved movie palace had morphed briefly into a flea market.
 
But when we were still selling popcorn, we’d shown some sci-fi of the classic kind — At The Earth’s Core, and The Land That Time Forgot (both B movies, an Edgar Rice Burroughs double feature) and something called The Outer Space Connection, a 1975 documentary. In my own childhood, there’d been Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, pretty small potatoes compared to the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, Klingons and sharp-eared Spock and all. 
 
By and large, the giant screen of our theater, the St. George — a 2,672-seat palace I helped pilot for one glorious year — offered earth-bound fare. Taxi Driver, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon. They reinforced a popular opinion, first uttered when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left their footprints on the moon in 1969, that our problems on this planet (among them poverty, discrimination, war and what we then called “pollution”) were big enough to keep us fastened to terra firma, until we solved them. I was mostly of this opinion and am strongly persuaded by it today, especially now, given the fact of billionaires competing for that “final frontier.” And still...
 
Kubrick’s movie, with its disobedient computer and “space baby,” had suggested to the young me that by the impossibly far-off year, 2001, as casually as I flew to Cincinnati, we’d all be journeying to space — the thought of which, in my twenties, filled me with wonder. Despite my cynicism, I couldn’t wait to go aloft! 
 
But I continued to age, and, increasingly, even before the towers fell (which is what really happened in 2001), I became more and more nervous about flying. What was actually keeping that 747 in the air? Flying to and from Hong Kong took just about all the nerve I had left. 
 
Let’s face it, I admire William Shatner — who’s actually ninety years old, almost two decades older than me. How can he just do that? Sit on top of all that fire? Maybe, after all he is Captain Kirk! I wish him a safe journey. When he looks out the window, I hope nobody peers back.
 
Afterthought:
1. Looking for references to Kubrick’s “space baby,” I found an interesting “conversation.”

2. Here's a link to launch coverage: [https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/13/science/blue-origin-william-shatner]