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Starts Wednesday: A Year in the Life of a Movie Palace
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Skulls on the Walls of a Movie Palace

10/27/2021

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Picture
KiMo in Albuquerque, New Mexico / Daniel Schwen / CC BY-SA 4.0
Picture
Detail of the KiMo interior. CC BY-SA 3.0
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?
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James Bond and Beyond

10/20/2021

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PictureOuttake of Sean Connery in from "Goldfinger".
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.

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William Shatner, Boldly Going

10/13/2021

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PictureStar Trek: The Original Series poster (1966)
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]


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Three Ample Foxes, of the Theater Variety

10/6/2021

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PictureThe Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan has a spectacular interior.
Alphabetically, from Amarillo, Texas. to Witchita, Kansas, there once were arguably 66 movie theaters bearing the word “Fox” in their names. It was a prestigious moniker, in the 1920’s and 30’s, when William Fox one of the great movie moguls of all time, was in peak strut.
 
Most of these theaters were grand and copious enough to qualify as palaces; some were even atmospheric. More than half survived the ravages of the nineteen seventies, when the wrecking ball, the  architectural equivalent of the guillotine, snugged up under many a darkened marquee. During that period I briefly struggled to keep alive another movie palace, the St. George Theatre, 2,672 seats on Staten Island’s north shore, another story, the basis for this blog and the book that will eventually stand behind it. Meanwhile, back to the Foxes.
 
A friend writes that he has now visited two of what he considers the big three Fox theaters: Atlanta, St.Louis and Detroit. He’s thinking of major Fox theaters still standing. From another perspective, there are five “sister” Foxes, all linked by their designer, C. Howard Crane, which would make an entirely different list (Brooklyn, Atlanta, San Francisco and Detroit), but alas, glorious as they all were, two of them no longer stand. The Brooklyn Fox went down long ago to make way for a Con Edison building, and the San Francisco Fox was demolished after a gala last-night “party,” movingly described in a video that includes a lavish tour of the doomed house; the video takes you all the way to the wrecking ball phase, if you can stand to watch it. 
 
I’m choosing to stick with my friend’s picks, the three major Foxes that survived. So here, for your pleasure, are: the Atlanta, the St. Louis and the Detroit Fox(es), past and present. Long may they stand, as they have so far, miraculously.
 
While a lot of movie palaces have ended up as temples or churches, The Atlanta Fox actually started out as one; a temple for a fraternal group, the Shriners. Back in the waning glory days of the 1920’s, the Shriners broke ground to build a lavish temple/HQ in Atlanta, but their dream was too elaborate for them to afford. Enter William Fox, who plugged in the additional bucks to finish the project, opening the Fox as a full-blown movie palace on December 25, 1929, a little less than two months after Wall Street, according to the famous Variety headline, laid “an egg.” (The egg that Wall Street laid would end William Fox’s empire, which has a lot to do with the fates of all the Foxes, from Amarillo to Witchita).

The Fox bankruptcy (Fox stock plummeted from $119 a share to $1 after the Crash) pitched ownership of the lavish Moorish/Egyptian atmospheric back onto the city of Atlanta, which auctioned it off for a paltry $75,000, not much for something that took $2.75 million to build. But the movies, and traveling live shows, not to mention big bands, were how a lot of people got through the Depression; so the theater did just fine then and afterwards, until the nineteen seventies when, like so many other single-screen theaters, the bottom fell out. 

In 1974, Southern Bell, the regional arm of AT&T, approached the owners of the theater with an offer to buy, with the intent of tearing the theater down to build the parking deck for a new headquarters on the site; but here’s where civic pride and celebrity muscle kick in. Lynyrd Skynyrd and (unlikely bedfellow) Liberace, in company with the newly-formed Friends of the Fox, persuaded the City of Atlanta to find a way to hold the wreckers back, which it did, finally refusing to issue a demolition permit. Returning briefly to Lynyrd Skynyrd, their first live recording, One More from the Road which later went platinum, was based on concerts given at the Atlanta Fox. 

 
Many consider the saving of this movie palace as the template for not-for-profit theater revivals nationwide. To this day, the Atlanta Fox is reportedly the only major theatre in the country to have a full-time restoration staff.  
 
Described by a now-defunct local paper as having “...a picturesque and almost disturbing grandeur beyond imagination,"the Fox’s original architecture comprises two styles: Islamic (building exterior, auditorium, Grand Salon, mezzanine Gentlemen's Lounge and lower Ladies Lounge) and Egyptian (Ballroom, mezzanine, Ladies Lounge and lower Gentlemen's Lounge).The Egyptian Ballroom echoes a temple built for Ramses II at Karnak, while the mezzanine Ladies Lounge features a replica of the throne chair of King Tut (all the rage in the twenties) and makeup tables that reveal tiny sphinxes. The 4,665-seat auditorium replicates an Arabian courtyard, complete with a night sky of 96 embedded crystal "stars" (a third of which flicker) and projected clouds that slowly drift across the "sky." Apparently, a rumor that one of the stars was actually a piece of a Coke bottle was confirmed in June 2010 when two members of the theater’s restoration staff (that’s when it’s good to have one!) conducted a search above the auditorium ceiling.
 
What does St. Louis have to offer? The Fabulous Fox as it styles itself now, was designed in “Siamese/Byzantine” style, a close twin to its Detroit sister. (Both were flagships for the Fox chain). In the lobby, a pair of huge gold griffons flank the grand staircase, and deep red faux marble columns ring the mezzanine level. From every corner statuary peeks out—including a group of large gilt maharajahs. What are maharajahs doing in a Siamese/Byzantine palace? (What, for that matter, is a Siamese/Byzantine palace?) Opening its doors in 1929, with 5060 seats, at a cost of five million dollars, around  71 million in today’s bucks, St. Louis’ Fox had a good run.

However, like its four other Crane-designed sister Foxes in Brooklyn, Atlanta, San Francisco and Detroit, the St. Louis Fox was in bad shape by the seventies, reduced to showing mostly Kung Fu to sparse audiences. After hard times, it was rescued by one Mary Strauss, a hard-working wife of a real estate developer. Mary persuaded her husband to buy the theater with a consortium of friends in the early eighties, and restored it for two million, in under two years. That’s important in the annals of movie palace survival — no time for vagrancy or leakage to set in. She recalls, “Almost everything that Leon and I approached was not ‘What are the obstacles?’ It was ‘Why can't we try? 

"Being an artist growing up, I think I knew how to approach a project. One of the things that Leon and I did was we went in the summer of 1981 to a League of Historic American Theatres ramble in Ohio. We met people, we networked....What I learned is everything can be reproduced and fixed if you find the right person.” The Fabulous Fox opened in plenty of time to host home-town rocker Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday in 1986. 

 
If it weren’t for MoTown and a steady diet of Blaxploitation films, the Detroit Fox might not be standing. But it’s a good thing it is:
 
“On the side walls at the orchestra level are Moorish arches extending to the balcony. Above is a colonnade at the balcony level with nine vermillion scagiolia columns matching those in the lobby. The columns support decorated arches and behind the first three are grilles that conceal the bays containing the 2,700 pipes and other effects for the organ. The areas between the other columns are filled with tinted mirrors. The walls are topped with a cornice decorated with lion and human faces set among geometric designs and sunbursts. 
 
The ceiling is designed to resemble a round tent with an oculus supported by spears. The tent drapes slightly and is covered with acoustical felt bearing a stenciled design. The ceiling of the oculus is blue with a globe chandelier of colored glass suspended from a starburst design. The chandelier is 13 ft (4.0 m) in diameter weighs 2,000 lb (910 kg) and contains 1200 pieces of glass.” (The previous is direct from Wikipedia — just too rich not to simply put quote marks around.)
 
Said to be the largest surviving movie palace of the 1920’s, the Detroit Fox has 5,048 seats (5,174 if removable seats placed in the raised orchestra pit are included). Here’s something to ponder: in the orchestra section alone are 2898 seats. That’s more seats than many palaces have, in total.The Detroit Fox hosted a lot of biggies in its time. For a Martin and Lewis promo of their (then) up and coming movie, Money, check out Cinema Treasures entry, specifically in the “comments” column where Bob Furmanek left us a little treat. 
 
I’d like to close with a sad tip of my hat to William Fox, an enterprising immigrant  (weren’t all the moguls?) whose greatest talent may have been in picking movie stars; Theda Bara comes to mind, entirely a Fox invention. William Fox’s life didn’t end well, because, as Vanda Krefft (The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox), observes, “Ultimately, Fox would venture too far away from what he really wanted to do—shifting too much of his attention toward business and away from art, engaging in questionable stock market deals, and trusting people he knew he shouldn't trust. As a result, in 1930, he lost control of his two namesake companies, Fox Film and Fox Theatres. He never recovered, either personally or professionally. After that, history turned its back on him and began its long, sad process of forgetting.” 
 
Or, as Shakespeare said, “What’s in a name?”
 
Afterthought:  
Robert Endres, long-time friend and veteran projectionist (most recently and for a long time at Radio City Music Hall), gave me the notion to write this blog post, by mentioning his visits to each of three Foxes:
 
“One of our engineers,” he remarked, “has done some screenings at the Atlanta Fox and loves the theatre and the crew. He’s roamed the theatre and has some great shots of things like the switchboard. I didn’t get to see a movie there, but did get to hear a bit of Bachman Turner Overdrive in concert there after touring the booth.” Booth tours are Bob’s privilege, always.

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    Victoria Hallerman

    Author

    Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.

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