1933, Billboard: The marquee of the Rivoli, where Samarang is playing, reads: 'One of the most exciting films ever shown.'
 
I don’t know a thing about Samarang — an apparently unremarkable 1933 flick — but I’m enticed by the notion of seeing its title on the marquee of a long-ago vanished Manhattan theater, the Rivoli, where I first saw Jaws in 1975. The Rivoli had a famously curved 70mm screen, which gave the effect of peripheral vision, and a sound system that really rocked. Twinned (destroying the curved screen), it was eventually demolished in 1987, the victim of rising Manhattan real estate values, but I digress. It’s really marquees I want to talk about right now. Ever wonder why the overhang of a theater has that fancy name?

Go back a century and cross the pond to England; you’ll find an officer’s battlefield tent. (“Marquee” may possibly be a corruption of “marquess” — a nobleman whose tent would be grand indeed). The tent meaning then evolves to describe the kind of pavilion still used for weddings and celebrations — often pitched in front of or behind hotels to accommodate overflow crowds. By 1912, in America, movie palaces are becoming the big thing and their marquees — no longer tents, but overhangs-- shelter a waiting crowd, affording a place to meet in the rain, before entering the hall of dreams. Moving pictures depend on their advertising! Cars blitz by at record speed, so the marquee, once a tent, then an overhang, morphs into a kind of three-dimensional signboard, the print simple and bold, lighted by that other novelty, electricity. Ben M. Hall, esteemed granddaddy of theater historians, called these new marquees that graced theaters like the El Capitan in L.A., “electric tiaras.”  Indeed. 

The St. George Theatre, the still-extant hall that generated the book I’m about to publish, Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of  Movie Palace, had, on the day of its opening, December 4, 1929, a splendid marquee, white letters on a black ground and all the requisite light trim. Forty-seven years later, when, for a year, I served as one of several theater operators, the theater’s marquee had begun to leak badly in rainstorms; but it still functioned, tracer lights framing a white ground of tracks over a bed of six-foot fluorescent bulbs.The whole thing was lit by a frightening circuit of giant Buss cylindrical fuses that arced when you threw a wooden-handled lever in the panel at the back of the box office. There was a good deal of drama and peril in throwing that switch: how well I remember.

In the 19-teens and 20’s, when, besides the St. George, the Roxy in Manhattan, the Fox in Atlanta, Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre in L.A. and thousands of palaces coast-to coast went up, marquees were almost as lavish as the elegant spaces they fronted. What began as the plain rectangular box, soon soared upward, in many cases, with vertical illuminated letters. The newly-restored Kings Theatre on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is a personal favorite of mine, with its rolling soft-edged frontage, reminiscent of an ocean wave.

It’s easy to go all nostalgic over old-style marquees with their breakable black aluminum letters, but if you ever dangled on a ladder in a wind storm, trying to hang those things on a steel track, you’d think programmable LED’s are an amazing refinement. After a certain number of M’s have broken, for which you’ve had to substitute W’s, the glamor of a hand-built movie title melts completely! Nostalgia often forgets to consider the details of daily existence.

BTW, If you’re a film buff, you might find this post by Film Babble Blog author Daniel Cook Johnson of interest. 

There had been the Fillmores, East (New York)and West (San Francisco ) — and other copycat Fillmores: Miami Beach, Charlotte, Philly, Silver Springs. The Belle Epoque Academy of Music on 14th Street was transformed into the derelict Palladium. The Beacon Theater had yet to make its leap from Manhattan’s largest surviving movie palace to a permanent home for rock, but it soon would. Meanwhile, in 1976 in St. George — the wasted downtown of Staten Island’s runt NYC borough, a small group of twenty-somethings (of which I was one) worked hard to draw crowds for concerts, from across the water in Manhattan and Brooklyn, to our 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre. That theater happily still stands — just up the hill from  the ferry in a gradually transforming North Shore of Staten Island. There are other lovely old movie palaces like the St. George — in L.A., Greensboro, Washington Heights, San Francisco, San Antonio and towns and cities too numerous to list, theaters saved by local citizens in every case. And yet, many more fabulous palaces that once were, exist only in the memories of their aging former patrons. One such, the Eastown Theatre in Detroit, has a story so poignant I can’t resist telling at least part of it. 

Never heard of the Eastown? Neither had I, but then I don’t know nearly enough about Detroit where in 1931 the Eastown, one of four elaborate motor city movie palaces, opened with Sporting Blood, starring Clark Gable. Fifteen cents a head in the afternoon, a quarter weeknights, thirty-five cents Saturday and Sunday evening, and kids always a dime. The Easton had a nice three-and-a-half decade run, but then, like most of its sister palaces, fell on hard times in the mid-sixties. White flight to the ‘burbs, TV, multiplexes, you couldn’t fill a palace anymore for a single showing. Then a couple of neighborhood guys pulled off at the Eastown what we hoped for at the St. George, reopening on May 29, 1969, as a rock n’ roll palace. The Who, the Kinks, Yes, Fleetwood Mac, the Faces, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Captain Beefheart, Steppenwolf, King Crimson, James Gang, Rush, J. Geils Band and Joe Walsh all played there. Ted Nugent and The Amboy Dukes recorded “Survival of the Fittest” in that hall, and Joe Cocker began his “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour there.

A great success story, right? Names as big as that we only dreamed of bringing to our stage at the St. George. By 1976, while we were struggling to keep our similarly sized palace open for movies, hoping to attract rock acts from Manhattan, the Eastown was in a world of trouble. Audience members had quickly gone from popcorn to tabs of acid, with over twelve drug rings operating out of the audience during concerts. Acid, heroin, ‘ludes, coke and of course grass — you name it, and a lot of them were bogus, in some cases substances that only appeared to be what they actually were, and could kill. On one occasion, two deaths had been associated with attendance there. People reported stepping over the bodies of OD’d patrons, and the place operated without permits from the city.

In 1976, under new management and newly renamed (the Showcase Theatre), the Easton reopened to what would hopefully become a new era, with the likes of Ravi Shankar, Tom Waits, Pat Metheny and James Brown. But it was rough going, with local drug lords and street gangs nipping at the edges of everything. Chris Jaszczak, one of the three twenty-something high school buddies running the place at the time, recalls, “When we went out to change the marquee, we’d have to send two people out there or else they’d steal the letters and try to sell them back to us…. We’d do a show and patrons would come out and all their tires would be gone.”

After this crew pulled out, the Detroit Center for the Performing Arts took roughly a decade to slowly fail: there was never was enough money for the arts in Detroit, and the Eastown, with its upstairs ballroom and adjacent apartments, was just too big, too complex to survive. There were performances here and there after that. A church occupied it for a time, renting the adjacent apartments to various church members.

The end came post-millennium, after abandonment. There had been an earlier apartment fire, and a subsequent one reduced much of the theater to rubble. It’s physically painful to read this story in detail, the fire, concomitant demolition notices, scrapping, stripping the place of its copper piping, cutting the steel that held up the dome, then the demo crew. 

In August, 1997, speaking to The Detroit Free Press, Alice Cooper credited the Eastown with having “the best audience in the world... Any other city, people went home from work to put on their Levis and black leather jackets for a concert. In Detroit they came from work like that. The Eastown — those were pure rock ’n’ roll times.”

In L.A. or New York or San Francisco, this theater might still be standing, but in Detroit, a distinctly blue-collar setting, made more desperate by the collapse of local industry, it’s amazing the palace lasted until November 20, 2015.

For me, all roads lead back to the St. George Theatre where I got a sense of just  how rare and sacred these cavernous old halls can be. We went into the St. George hoping to create a great rock palace —just like the Fillmores — or the Eastown? Drugs, gangs, chaos: beware of what you wish for.

I’m thinking right now about the man in the spangled suit. The “jazzman” we called him, a side-man of some kind who’d probably played bass or baritone sax or some other instrument at the Vanguard in Manhattan or the Blue Note or whatever jazz club he could get a gig in. Wearing one of his show costumes — a bright green silvery jacket and pants with a matching green glittery slouch cap — or the same thing in red, blue, silver or gold — he’d buy a hotdog (“yellow dog” he’d call it, thinking of the mustard) and a thirty-five-cent Coke. Then he’d stand about ten feet away from the concession stand, talking to himself, watching the movie through the glass. Anywhere else but a movie palace, this kind of behavior would seem odd, but at the St. George, the 2672-seat Spanish Baroque theater whose red and gold glass doors we opened each morning in 1976, the jazzman was just a regular guy.

People were drawn in off the street by our spectacular concession stand, which, we often joked, could function as a fast-food restaurant with a darkened movie screen in the background. With all-beef Kosher hotdogs on mini-Italian breads that were fresh-baked daily (topped off with Dijon mustard), fresh-popped corn with real butter, [Eat Popcorn!]frozen Snickers and twenty-odd other candy bars, and the first ever Häagen-Dazs (so avant-garde it was delivered by a man in a station wagon), we boasted the highest per capita stand sales in the five boroughs of New York City. There were whole families in our desperate urban neighborhood who used to walk in and ask if they could “just buy dinner” (no ticket) and take the food home, so perhaps we should have tried the dark-screen idea after all. 

It cost us $13.75 an hour in 1976 to pay the union projectionist, wage that seems cheap until you compare it with the buck fifty we charged an adult for a ticket or the 35 cents the jazzman paid for his Coke. Carbons to burn in the projectors (the source of light that made the movie do its magic on-screen) cost roughly a hundred-seventy-five a box, and we ran through two or more per hour. It cost way more to keep that booth running and the movie on-screen than we raked in most weeks at the box office window. We owed the concession company that stocked our beloved candy stand whatever we sold in hotdogs, so there was no profit there.

With our big screen to the North
and our snack stand to the South,
we’re the St. George Theatre,
living from hand to mouth...
 
—so went the little ditty we used to sing, to the tune of a now-long-forgotten American Airlines television commercial. 

I would think it had all been a waste if we hadn’t kept the St. George, now a working performance house, alive for one more year in what has turned out to be its almost full century of life. During our tenure at the St. George, from April, 1976, to March, 1977, old movie theaters, many of them palaces, were meeting the wrecker’s ball in ever-increasing numbers. It was a year that would see the demolition of the Moon Theatre on Douglas Street in Omaha, Nebraska, the Orpheum in Portland, Oregon and many others nationwide, including both the Shubert theater and my beloved RKO Albee in Cincinnati, my hometown. 

It had been the Albee’s imminent destruction — eight hundred miles away — that partly fueled my passion for working at the St. George in the first place. Where the Albee once stood in Cincinnati, just across the street from Fountain Square, a Westin Hotel currently squats. The aforementioned Portland Orpheum was replaced by a Nordstrom’s, BTW. There are parking lots, shooting galleries, garages, lumber yards, warehouses and Chinese restaurants where theaters once stood, all across America.

​Thanks to luck, perfect acoustics, low real estate values, and a hard-working family, the St. George still stands. The jazzman no doubt still haunts the lobby every Wednesday afternoon, eating his “dog” and watching a phantom movie through the glass, while mumbling the names of his old lovers to himself.  At least that’s what Paulie, the concession staffer who listened to him, thinks he was reciting, all those forty years ago.

Amateur archaeologists that we were, and brief as our stay was, we never ran out of things to discover in our movie palace. A half-level beneath the St. George Theatre stage, a group of us discovered a cramped area Dean likened to the “under-gun deck” of a frigate ship. Low-ceilinged, crowded, musty,  and full of junk, it seemed to be some kind of pit. "Over here," a friend called, gesturing with a flashlight. I could just make out the word ELEVATOR and a set of what appeared to be controls, below which lay a hydraulic mechanism riveted to the floor. An elevator? To where? Hell?  

“It’s not very deep,” Dean observed.  “There’s only one way, and that’s up!  

But nothing is stored down here,” he pointed out, “that anyone would want on-stage. What’s it for?”  

Having just read a little way into the movie palace enthusiast’s scouting manual, The Best Remaining Seats, I thought I had the answer, “It’s for the organ,” I said.

The St. George had once had a pipe organ, a 3/30 (3 manual, 30 rank) Wurlitzer which, like other organs of the era, rose from the depths on an elevated platform, stage right (left, as you face the proscenium). I recalled hearing something about a sale a few years back, when the owner of the building — our landlord with whom we’d already begun to have issues--got quick cash for a number of items — lamps, rugs and what-not. The Wurlitzer (1929 cost: $25,000.00) was probably the last to go. Silent since 1935 — when its last full-time organist, Andy Anderson, was fired to trim theater expenses — its new destination, according to local sources, had been Pipe Organ Pizza (see the menu above) in Memorial City, Houston, Texas, where it entertained pizza-eating patrons for at least a decade.

Eventually the pizza joint itself became an object of reverie, evoking this nostalgic query on a website of historic interest to Houstonians: Does anyone remember the pipe organ pizza at memorial city mall? It had the huge pipe organ and the 20's and 30's theme inside with pictures of all the old movie stars on the walls. 

It becomes impossible to trace the whereabouts of our Wurlitzer at this point. Like an aging Chevy in a junkyard, it may have been sold for parts, cannibalized to keep several other pipe organs going, a sad ending, far from home.  

With the theater’s exquisite acoustics, I can only imagine what all those pipes would have done to the place. 

If you’re aching for a real live working theater organ, you might try a journey to Suffern, New York, to the Lafayette Theater, to take in a flick and listen to Wurlitzer Opus 2095 installed there by the American Theater Organ Society. Although the Wurlitzer at the Lafayette isn’t the original  house organ (removed in 1933 to accommodate an “air cooling system”), the organ currently residing in the Lafayette has a venerable history. It began its travels from its original home, the Lawler Theatre in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to the Rainbow Roller Rink in South Deerfield, Mass. Then it journeyed  on to a New York City Duplex owned by a noted theater historian, Ben M. Hall (the author, coincidentally of the previously-mentioned and much-revered tome, The Best Remaining Seats). It remained at his home until his death some three years later, passing at that point safely into the hands of the American Theater Organ Society. Traveling briefly to California, ostensibly to become part of a museum on the estate of Harold Lloyd, it returned back to New York City--that gig having fallen through. Some time after that, you may have heard it, if you went to the Carnegie Hall Cinema during its decade in that tiny (no longer extant) theater. It enjoyed a few years in storage, then came out of retirement in 1992, to what may be its permanent home in the newly restored Lafayette Theatre — where it has entertained weekend audiences ever since. Such are the life and travels of a theater organ lucky enough not to be cannibalized.

Forty years ago this week The Sensuous Teenager (aka Libido, Forbidden Passions, and I am a Nymphomaniac) was the main attraction at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I was involved in running, along with a group of committed and equally delusional friends. Porn was not our metier; as an ardent feminist, I despised it. We’d run some Ken Russell films and a few soft-core items earlier in the year, the line between these genres was thin. But actual porn? How had we sunk so low?

We’d opened optimistically enough the previous April with Blazing Saddles and Bananas, but by November the worm had turned:  we were in the thrall of an unfriendly landlord who seemed disinterested in providing heat, and the season when movies rake in the most cash — summer — was long behind us. People just weren’t coming out. We weren’t aware at the time that the movie industry itself was in a lot of trouble, short of product; but we were increasingly aware that single-screen movie palaces had morphed into total anachronisms. The day our soft-core porn triple feature (the above-mentioned film plus Love Under Seventeen, and Love Times Three) hit the big screen in our nearly-deserted auditorium, was, as always, a Wednesday. November 3, as it turned out the day after one of the most notable elections in American history. A Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, was the new president, replacing Gerald Ford, who had himself replaced the only president ever to resign, Richard Milhous Nixon. On the eve of what will be — either way — another singularly notable election, one with clearly disreputable aspects, it seems oddly appropriate to recall our brief journey into porn. 

A seventy-five page essay might not cover the perpetual argument concerning what pornography is, so I won’t attempt clarification, except to say that one definition I found claims porn is intended to arouse erotic passion without deep emotion, while another (Merriam Webster, full definition) offers that porn depicts “...acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.”  Suffice it to say, there’s been porn for a long time, and there will always be porn, whatever it is.

A whole district of grindhouses (now vanished) populated Times Square in 1976 to purvey it. Many of them had been fine old movie palaces themselves. I was sent as a courier at least once to the New Amsterdam in its triple-x days, to pick up a package of carbons--for our ancient projectors. Carbons were pricy and we were always running short of them. By 1976, most neighborhood theaters had gone to xenon projectors, but the porn houses were--along with us--back on the last technology, carbon arc projectors. (For a full treatment of this topic, see “Running Out of Carbons”). By the time we got around to peddling soft porn, I feared the New Amsterdam (and the Victory, not to mention Peepland and Fantasyworld) might have more in common with us than antiquated technology. 

In spite of what it said on our marquee, the movies we ran in election week were, by porn standards,  pretty tame. In addition to The Sensuous Teenager (originally Je Suis une Nymphomane, directed by Max Pecas (1970), we offered Love Times Three, a 1973 release featuring a mother and daughter who share the same lover (“Now it takes three to tango...” ) and, circa 1971, Love Under Seventeen (Lieber Unter Siebzehn, directed by Veit Relin). Lost in the frantic mists of that time is the question of whether the third movie was subtitled; I assiduously avoided the auditorium while these flicks played, largely out of feminist shame, but also because the clientele we were attracting — all male — seemed, at the very least unsavory and possibly unhygienic. 

On the day before the movies ran, Dean phoned our booker in Manhattan. “I only have two x’s in the marquee room...” 

“Well,” said Charlie, “...just call the movies 'three-x.' It was me gave them their ratings in the first place.”

“Can you do that?” Dean wondered.  “Isn’t there some kind of commission to assign ratings?”

“Baby, I’m from the south, and a Georgia peanut farmer’s about to be president. Us southern men can do anything.”

Charlie was actually a New Yorker, born and bred; but he listened to Ray Charles and liked to affect a southern persona, so Dean didn’t challenge him.

It’s all vanished now, Charlie and the Times Square porn world where he had his office. These days if you want peep shows in the five boroughs, you might explore the streets under the BQE and the Gowanus Expressway, although I’m told Blue Door Video in Manhattan does a good business. There is still a multi-screen theater in Brooklyn, Kings Highway Cinemas, dedicated to porn, but according to one employee, numbers are low, because “the Internet fucked everything.” 

Why, did I start off talking about elections — the one that happened the night before we ran Je Suis une Nymphomane and the one that’s happening now — in a blog post dedicated to porn? Despite the rise of feminism, in 1976 men were still undoubtedly in charge — Charlie was quick to point that out. Then Times Square was “cleaned up” and Disneyfied, in the decades that followed our theater year, as women entered police forces, fire departments, building crews and armies, and achieved public office in much greater numbers. As women have begun to approach equality, porn has become at once more private--aided by the net--and more public, with presidential debates and cable news verging on the soft-core.

Can’t stand it? There may be a restored movie palace within driving distance.  Greensboro, L.A., Washington Heights, you name it. If I lived in Ann Arbor, I’d be heading down to the Michigan to catch A Man Called Ove tonight at 9:30.