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 2,672-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reader, if you’ve followed this blog in the past, you know that everything we had at the theater was at least somewhat out of date, including and especially our ancient carbon arc projectors.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, nohow. 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.
 
Afterthought:
Download The Exorcist sometime, it’s a great Halloween movie, and be sure to get the actual director’s cut!

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, long ago, 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 2,672-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, 23 cents 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 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 $11.00, though the National Organization of Theater Owners is keeping mum. How about that 23-cent ticket? 
 
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 shrunk to 27.3 million people, or just 9.7 percent of the population.
 
Forty-six 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), we managed to fill only about an eighth of our 2,672 seats 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 Halloween Ends, or The Woman Queen. 
 
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. The Paris in New York City has opened its doors again, the United Palace in Washington Heights has a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia, and, hey, there’s always L.A.! 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.

Did you ever pick your feet up from the floor of a movie theater? I did it a lot as a child, and not because of sticky Coke syrup. Taking my feet off the floor while watching a movie was a way of making myself feel safe. I’m pretty sure I tucked my sneakers under me in an attempt to escape Disney’s giant squid (in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954). Covering my eyes was another protective magic; I did both these things during Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956). When that giant saucer sliced through the Washington Monument and, with people everywhere on the run, headed for the Capitol Building, I just couldn’t look. It all seems so tame now, with real life way scarier, but back then, for a white middle-class eight-year-old struggling with the idea of the Neutron Bomb, the decimation of the revered (and extremely phallic) national monument and its partner the Capitol, a benign breast-like (Do I go too far?) dome, were tantamount to double murder. Movies were just too real!
 
The Wicked Witch of the West was consummate evil; her melting, in The Wizard of Oz, should have given me some comfort, but I couldn’t watch that happen any more than I could look on Ahab’s corpse tied to the Whale in Moby Dick. These cinematic traumas happened in the movie palaces and domed stadium theaters of my Cincinnati childhood. Movies that contain horror moments are, like roller coasters, more attractive than repulsive, and the theaters that contained these movies involved another deeper level of fantasy, which is  why, eventually, I was drawn to the project of running a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, where I’d come to live by 1976. Our St. George had its horror moments too.
 
I was grown up by then, but when Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974) came on-screen in our magic cave of a palace, my feet went off the floor. I didn’t watch all of this movie, partly because I needed to spend time sitting in my office trying to figure out another horror, how to balance the books, and come up with the staggering sum necessary to get our hands on the next picture. But who am I fooling? When he hangs the girl on the meathook, I’m up the aisle and out of there.    
 
The Exorcist, which I’d seen for the first time two years before, was just as scary, requiring me both to  cover my eyes and tuck my feet under me. I didn’t stay for the whole movie, but couldn’t claim it was because we were running out of cash. We actually sold out! For several nights the house was packed with maniacs all hiding their eyes. Were they picking their feet up? Whether or not that’s just my peculiar reaction, it would have been a smart strategy, in a theater where spilled soda and popcorn fed an ample population of mice who made bold each night after everybody left. Speaking of Exorcist, when my Yoga instructor encourages me, as she did last week, to turn my neck just a little further and look backwards, I think of Linda Blair; but my feet are firmly on the floor, I’m happy to say.
 
There were other movies in our theater year I didn’t bother to sit down for. The Omen? I stood in the doorway with a small popcorn, and Jaws? I watched it from the concession stand, ducking my head into the popcorn popper to shut out the screams of that solitary swimmer.
 
Movies, I believe, were and still are, the core of what we now call virtual reality. We’re used to movies, but they’re still, as they always were, collective dreams — which, if you ever watched a VR headset user stumble around in ecstasy or horror might make you long for a theaterful of fellow dreamers. I’d like to let Fellini weigh in on this subject:
 
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
 
"A language made of image.” I like that. When I hide from the image by shielding my eyes or lifting my feet up, I’m responding with my whole body, but I can see my body while I’m responding. 
 
Of course there are “VR” movies, but isn’t that a redundancy?
 
Long before I was around — in 1895, when cinema was in its infancy — legend has it that the Lumiere brothers presented a fifty-second short film (L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat) of a train moving towards the camera as it arrives in a station, which, it is said, caused the as-yet-ignorant-of-cinema audience to bolt from the theater in panic. The story of the audience’s reaction is apparently a fiction, but what does it matter? What does it say of our own sense of wonder at watching, that we like to think they ran away?
 
Afterthought:
 Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, was badly burned on both her face and hands during the famous “melting” scene. She knew better than to sue, and lose the possibility of future roles in movies, but from that point onward, a clause in her contract insisted she would no longer work with or near pyrotechnics. These days, the whole thing would have been portrayed via special effects, which is to say, virtually.

 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 the 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.” 
 
But his name still lives. That’s something, I suppose...
 
Afterthought:  
Thanks to Robert Endres, long-time friend and veteran projectionist (most recently and for a long time at Radio City Music Hall). He’s who gave me the notion to write this blog post, by mentioning his visits to each of three Foxes, though more thoroughly than most folks, being privileged to tour their booths as well. 
 
To which Bob says: Good job. One of our engineers 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.