Deep into our desperate year at the St. George Theater, the gold and red velvet movie palace I helped to run in 1976, we still hoped to lure some film buffs. Perhaps we’d dish up some Bergman, or Citizen Kane, or a series of rep films like It Happened One Night. We were, of course, living in la-la land. John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, one of the best pieces of traditional cinema to come out in years, had been a terrible box-office flop for us, while Carrie, Jaws, The Omen, and Deliverance had actually drawn the dregs of a local audience. Only a deluded bunch of young entrepreneurs — that would be us — would have concluded, as we did, that if you can’t fill 2672 seats — and you’re having a hard time paying the bills — you should open another theater!

About five blocks away, an ancient wreck of a neighborhood movie house had closed in the previous decade. Its Vaudeville origins lay in the mists of time. I remembered it as The Victory, a place of modest pretensions, just big enough to hold around eight hundred people. Sans marquee (which the new owners of the building had had removed) “Tompkinsville Theater,” incised in the stone entablature above the door, gave a hint of its past as a live house.

“Why’d you take down the marquee?” Dean wondered, as the building owner was showing us around.

“Costs money — there’s a tax on marquees,” he observed. We knew about this, having already coughed up $385 of our own, to pay the City of New York for the leaky St. George marquee that also hung over a public sidewalk.

The Tompkinsville’s marquee wasn’t the only thing missing: there were no seats, no screen, curtains or concession stand. There was, however, a projection booth, equipment missing. Photographs of what must have been the staff in around 1940, clung crookedly to the wall next to the port.

But if it had had impeccable velvet seats and state-of-the-art xenon projectors, we couldn’t have cobbled together a down-payment. What were we thinking?  Ostensibly, we imagined we’d show the action pictures our audience craved in this more modestly-sized house, and save the art flicks and live shows for the grand dame, the palace we couldn’t begin to fill on a regular basis. Hadn’t we, after all, been running the trailer for Gone With the Wind, a movie we knew we couldn’t afford to lose money on, for months?

So does a gambler who’s just lost the deed to her house at the blackjack table, prepare to double down with what’s left on her Visa card, for a last play. We were saved by the fact that we had nothing, not even credit, we could lay our hands on.

We were in love with a past we had no inkling of, which was why we were touring this defunct theater, an old sister of the St. George, in the first place. Almost forty years later, I wish I’d taken pictures, especially of the staff in that yellowing photograph, the proud ushers in their matching brown uniforms.

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After the Fact: What Became of the Victory/Tomkinsville Theater?
To look at the theater building as it exists today is to understand why it could never have succeeded from the 1960’s forward.  There is absolutely no parking.  When I stopped to take pictures, I was forced to occupy a crosswalk. People attended Vaudeville and early to mid-century movies on foot or via bus. 

Designed by a local, James Whitford, who also designed the Empire Theatre featured in last week’s blog post, the Tompkinsville Theater, these days, serves three different purposes, none of them theatrical, but all laudable and two downright commendable. The main entrance serves as a sports apparel shop, but the the side doors facing Victory Boulevard belong to On Your Mark, a non-profit organization which employs disabled people in store-front businesses. Two of those businesses are a chocolatier and a florist. Wouldn’t it be terrific if the candy shop happened to occupy the former space of the theater’s concession stand?

It is interesting to note that the blocks surrounding the former theater, include a diverse list of businesses. Dembner’s Hardware, established in the 1920’s, where we, as managers of the St. George Theatre, had an account, still survives, largely untouched, in its third generation, under Harry Dembner. On the same side of the street are The African Homeland Store and Cinderella Restaurant: Rio Pan Mexican. Across the street, Tacqueria Gallo Azteca, serves some of the finest tacos to be had in the neighborhood, and TurnKey (used) Furniture is planning a Black Friday sale. New residents of the block include thinkDESIGN, with a wild green snake-like facade. Who knows what’s next in St. George and Staten Island’s North Shore? 

Meanwhile, whatever you do, be sure to check out this link on The Victory Theatre, including a series of “recent comments,” — reminiscences — beginning with one by Vito.
             

​We never ran hard porn at our Spanish Baroque movie palace, the St. George Theatre, but we came close. By “we,” I mean the small crazed band of young entrepreneurs I was a signature member of in the year 1976. When you can’t fill more than a few hundred of your 2672 seats — and fear you won’t be able to meet payroll — you get desperate. What once seemed unacceptable may suddenly not seem so bad. Porn, why not? After all, we’d run Ken Russell’s (heavily cut) The Devils. Why not stray just a little way across that border? The border between Ken Russell and porn turned out to be more absolute than imagined, less about what body parts are actually  exposed, and more about artistry — or its lack — which would be ours to learn. Feminism was another, more personal, hurdle to get over, but the empty bank account prevailed.

Accordingly, we ran a soft-porn double feature, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS and Women Behind Bars (this last from the director of the famed 99 Women and Sadomania). We were riding on the theory that Staten Island’s only existing porn house, the Empire, was already covering the XXX market, and that people who wanted a little titillation without having to endure the dubious hygiene of the Empire’s filthy seats and floors would come to us. We hadn’t thought about the possibility that hygiene problems might come (no pun intended) along with the crowd attracted to the she-wolf and imprisoned women, another lesson to be learned.

Soft (or any kind of porn) turned out not to be the solution to our empty auditorium anyhow. A disappointing crowd of seedy-looking characters who, with their suspicious brown bags, avoided the concession stand and bought even fewer tickets than the (mostly-white suburban) watchers of mainstream movies (The Man Who Would Be King, etc.) proved the point. I was relieved. Our theater was an aging beauty with a lot of class; why subject her to streetwalking?

As for the Empire, our downtrodden sister theater just a few miles away in Port Richmond, curiosity finally got the better of a few of us. A mixed crowd of management staffers, boys and girls, piled into somebody’s car and caught the next XXX double feature they were showing. We stayed halfway through the first movie, Slippery When Wet, but left before Box Lunch began. I will never forget the sad figures in the dark, paper bags in their laps.

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After the Fact: What became of The Empire?
In 1978, a year after the St. George closed as a movie house, the Empire suffered the same fate. It is rumored that after we left the St. George, the Empire went straight and, for a brief encore before closing, ran such movies as A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand, but if so, I was unaware. The theater, with its two castle spires, had had its grand opening (1916) in the then-thriving community of Port Richmond, Staten Island. This community, whose oldest cemetery dates to the late 1600‘s, housed (until 1945) the St. James Hotel, where Aaron Burr died. Port Richmond resident, James Whitford, who designed the Empire Theatre, would have been saddened to see his small fine neighborhood house brought low by porn. Perhaps he would have found its recent use — until recently the headquarters and storage facility for  Farrell Lumber — a better fate.  Such is the life of aging theaters.

​“We’re out of what?” I asked.  “Popcorn,” said Dean. At the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat Staten Island movie palace we kept open for the better part of a year beginning in 1976, popcorn was (strange comparison?) our life blood. And if indeed it was a kind of plasma, that Sunday afternoon we badly needed a corn transfusion.

There was at that time, in our community and many other towns and cities in the United States, a sisterhood of theaters, most with single screens. In Staten Island, there were around eight, including our local Paramount Theatre, the only other palace on the island, a high chrome Art Deco wonder, with suggestions of the Chrysler Building in its facade.

In the summer of 1976, the Paramount was the kind of tramp we were, bumping along, fighting us for the same sorry trickle of customers. Rivals, sisters, it was one and  the same thing. One warm summer night earlier in the year, an usher from the Paramount had showed up with two fifty-dollar bills begging for “...singles and quarters, man...we’re out.” Change to a small business of any kind, especially on the weekend, is never given lightly — especially in those days, when banks closed at three on Friday for the weekend. We crossed our fingers that we had enough change to make it to Monday, and gave him a heavy sack of rolled coin.

Now we were out of popcorn, another — almost equally vital — kind of currency. A brief call to the Paramount’s manager, and a staffer was on his way to pick up all the “pre-pop” we wanted. 

“Pre-pop," I muttered.  “...oh well, beggars can’t be choosers.”  We were concession snobs, queens and kings of fresh popped corn with real butter, Kosher hotdogs on homemade rolls. If Michelin had awarded stars to theater concession stands, we’d have had at least four. Still, we were grateful.

Within 30 minutes, our messenger returned to the lobby with four enormous clear plastic bags of commercial pre-pop. I began to shovel the stuff into the warmer, while Paullie melted Odell’s (clarified) butter to top it off. Whew! — back in business. There was no scent of popped corn on the air, but the audience was probably too stoned to notice. 

The following morning a truck rolled up with ten five-pound tins of kernels. We knew right away we had to repay the favor. It took over four hours, but we popped enough corn to refill each of the clear plastic bags, and that very afternoon drove them down the road to the Paramount, where they were (no pun intended) warmly received.

Neither of our palaces would make it to 1978 showing movies, but for a night or a week, we were both still in business.

After the fact:
What became of The Paramount?  
Like the St. George, it still stands, a testament to luck and low real estate values in the north shore of Staten Island. The Paramount endured the usual twists and turns of post-movie theater transformation:  The Paramount Nightclub, a rock concert hall (featuring The Ramones, Squeeze even the B-52’s), becoming at last a storage facility for a local sporting goods store that occupied, eventually, all the storefronts in that block. This last may have not been such a harsh fate. Basketballs and hockey sticks are benign cargo, and the sporting goods mogul, Steckman’s, had to keep the theater’s roof repaired to ensure that his stock stayed dry. Unluckier shuttered palaces — Loew’s Kings, for example — suffered terrible damage from unrepaired roofs. 

​As for the sisterhood of movie houses that once gave Staten Islanders a choice of unique places to see movies, “Stay tuned,” as we used to say back in the television day, for blog posts that shine a sometimes surprising light into darkened theater corners both here and elsewhere.

​After hours, movie palaces are never silent. If there isn’t the rustle of a mouse — and there is usually more than one under the great dome, there’s the sound of sneakers on the outside fire escape stairs around closing time. So it was for us in 1976 at the St. George, our 2672-seat magic cave of cinematic and other fantasies. Kids whose one desire it was to stay when everybody else had left, had to be flushed out and down the long five stories of iron stairs from the upstairs exits. Those doors, by law, couldn’t be locked shut while the theater was open, so the problem of ejecting hidden audience members at closing time was the inverse of a problem we’d confronted earlier in the day: the same kids we chased out were, often enough, the very ones who’d snuck in when the doors were first unlocked.

I get it about sneaking in for free, but why spend the night? What is it about a dome? About bare stage boards and statues in darkened grottoes? There was a case-hardened steel padlock on the concession supply closet, and the cash boxes were behind double lock and key, which anyone clever enough to stow away would be likely to assume. What else then to do after hours but wander like a ghost beneath darkened chandeliers?

​I spent only one complete night in the theater, the night the father-and-son team who comprised our cleaning service, quit. Three of us, a broom and an Electrolux canister vacuum succeeded in cleaning every carpeted and marble inch of the place. We’d booked the theater for an event the following morning, so I had very little time to soak in the solitude, but I was aware of it. Ever steal into a cathedral on a weekday? Or walk alone in a Sequoia forest?  A friend who worked on the staff of an arboretum once told me that, at closing time, people who don’t want to leave the park hide in the tallest trees and have to be shaken out of them, literally. Do these compulsions spring from ancestral memory? The safety of trees, the comfort of a deep cave? I understand why ancient peoples left their handprints on the walls of Lascaux and Altamira. I wish I had left just one set of my own somewhere in the St. George, perhaps on the back wall, next to the door to the projection booth.