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 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 Theater 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. 

Afterthought:
Speaking of marquees, the Paris Theatre in NYC, which last displayed Pavarotti below script neon, before closing its doors seemingly forever, as the last single-screen house in the city, has been granted a reprieve by Netflix. 

Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, whose 26-day run in very few theaters is coming quickly to a close, will air on Netflix starting Thanksgiving weekend. During the month of November, it has shown on a paltry number of screens, around 135, by my count, nationwide. Netflix paid for the whole she-bang and doesn’t care much about a construct as old as “box office.” Streaming is king, no fooling. What will be lost when it wins out?

Richard Schickel, the late movie critic, viewed the experience of moviegoing as carefully as he did movies themselves. He’d begun at age five, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and went on to see — or so he boasted — 22,590 movies. I have no clue how many movies I’ve seen in my long lifetime. I know that, in the year I ran a movie palace, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, I saw 71 features.

Well, not exactly saw, because, as a theater operator and would–be entrepreneur, I didn’t spend all that much time sitting down in the dark, staring at the screen. I took them in, sometimes standing transfixed behind the mahogany–framed glass in the lobby, other times glimpsing a giant spider or
naked torso, on the way to my office or the concession stand. Other people were inside, in the dark, forgetting the meager balance in their checking account or a toothache or a lost love, what Schickel calls “...consolations...for some temporary trouble.”

Before I signed on to run a dream palace, I’d had twenty-six years of sitting in the dark as a patron, starting aged two with Tea for Two, which my sister dragged me to at the Twentieth Century in Cincinnati, my natal digs. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I galloped through an eclectic mix:
Three Coins in a Fountain, Ben Hur, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, Alfie, Two for the Road, Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, to name a few features I remember. Never saw Psycho: my mother believed sex in movies was okay for a young teen to watch, but not violence (oh how right she was).

Accordingly, she let me attend steamy Tom Jones when it came out in 1963 (Albert Finney), and, that same year, Cleopatra, complete with Taylor and Burton, hardly able take their hands off each other. I came of age at Cincinnati’s downtown palaces, the Albee, the International 70, in the company of equally horny girlfriends, some of whom didn’t have their mothers’ permission. There was freedom in the dark, in the words of Richard Schickel, “...at a public event for private reasons.”

It seems plausible that I saw at least seven hundred movies in early–to–mid childhood, the 1950’s, judging from titles that spring from lists I’ve read. There were 199 American films released in 1955, and I saw at least half of those. Once the curtain had risen, and you’d settled in with Good n’ Plenties
(also Richard Schickel’s go-to munchy) and the all–important popcorn, your afternoon was covered. You could see two features or just stay and watch the whole thing over again, including — in the early days — Movietone News, the “wascally wabbit” (Bugs Bunny), Coming Attractions and Selected Short
Subjects.

My (and everyone’s) theater attendance went down in the sixties, or did it just become more selective? Only 130 American films were released in1963, way down from the yearly two-hundred-plus release lists of the mid-fifties. By 1963, I’d become the ad hoc TV Guide in my parents’ household, the person
who knew every second of prime time, what was showing. Theater operators had to compete with the likes of Ben Casey, Mr. Ed, aka “the talking horse,” and The Lucy Show; but they also lost out to their own product in different settings.

In 1961 TWA began showing in-flight movies in first-class, via a Bell and Howell projector aimed at a tiny screen (By Love Possessed, Lana Turner). I didn’t know anybody who flew first class, but in September of that same year, Saturday Night at the Movies premiered on NBC, with How to Marry a
Millionaire (Monroe, Grable and Bacall), and you could say the single–screen movie exhibition dam had pretty much burst.

By the time 1976 came around, a movie palace like ours had to compete not just with the “vast wasteland” of television but with consumers’ willingness to wait for movies to come to TV. The Fox Plaza Twin on Hylan Blvd. (eventually to morph into the UA 15 on Forest Ave.) didn’t have to fill 2,672
seats and could offer a choice of screenings. The Paris, New York’s last full-on single-screen movie theater closed recently after 71 years. The last movie I saw there, The Lion, reminded me of what it was like to watch a curtain rise on a movie. The theater’s interior wasn’t movie palace level; it had stadium seating and was done in subdued grey velvet, compared by one patron to “...the fancy cinema on an old ocean liner.”

​If art house movie theater attendance nationwide is to survive at all, it’s making strides through the new night-club model with booze and food and recliners (Alamo, Metrograph), hardly elegant as an ocean liner. Well, you can still go to L.A. for a classic movie-going experience, or, in lieu of The Paris, you can go to Paris itself, where
mom-and-pop cinemas seem to be surviving on air.

When the last single-screen movie house goes dark, we’ll have lost something both public and achingly private. As Richard Schickel reminds us about going out to the movies, “We go to see them, much of the time, in search of something else — the comforting darkness of the theater, the play of light and
shadow on the screen, the consolations they offer for some temporary trouble,” he wrote. “A lot of the time we don’t give a hoot what’s playing. We are at a public event for private reasons which we don’t always recognize until later, if at all. It is the occasion, the atmosphere, that we crave.”

Afterthought:
In New York, at least, you can still occasionally get the “big screen” experience at The United Palace in upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights), where I’ve seen a couple of movies intended only for a giant screen, preferably an out and out movie palace. At the intermission for Lawrence of Arabia, hardly anybody left their seats. Most people just looked up at all that gilded extravagance. 

Most drive-in theaters that still survive in the states that endure all four seasons are in their dormant phase right now. What better time to think about them, as their screens go dark? It wasn’t so once upon a time, when there were thousands of outdoor viewing opportunities, coast-to-coast, all year long; you could see a movie at one of them most any night it didn’t snow, at least in Cincinnati, where I grew up.

It has been almost fifty years since I met the man I went broke running a movie palace with. New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati: What’s New Pussycat was on-screen — a blur— it was raining. We talked until midnight, the first of many amazing conversations. Four years later we left together for New York City, where we settled into Staten Island, and, ten years after our first date, tried our luck at running the St. George Theatre. What was it about movies in the century of their supremacy? Indoors, outdoors, film demanded a specialized viewing space.

My mother, who grew up with the movies, remembered seeing her first silents projected on a bed sheet in a vacant lot in Toledo, Ohio. Oddly, the first drive-in involved a bed sheet:  Richard Hollingshead, who invented this variation on movie-going, was said to have had an obese mother who wanted to go to the movies. Accordingly, he put a 1928 projector on the hood of his car, settled her in the front seat, and tied a sheet between two trees. Five years later, he opened the first drive-in in Camden, New Jersey, charging 25 cents a head to watch movies under the stars, with the slogan, "The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” Shankweiler's Drive-In Theater, opened a year later in Orefields, Pennsylvania, followed by the Drive-In Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Texas, and the Pico at Pico and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles.   

With RCA’s invention of car speakers in 1941, the novelty of outdoor viewing  became a commonplace (before that time, speakers on towers near the screen blasted cars in the front row). By the time I was in fourth grade (1958), there were better than 4,000 open-air theaters in the U.S. That year, in the back seat of my best friend’s mother’s boyfriend’s Buick Elektra, I waited until 1 A.M. to watch the “adult” films (The Long Hot Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Vertigo), while everybody else slept. Management programmed family fare for early in the evening, then showed the arty flicks after most people had either left or gone to sleep.

​Time for a trivia question: What caused the decline, in the 1960’s, of drive-in movie theaters? Answer:  shopping malls; land was just too valuable. Take the previously mentioned Pico, at the corner of Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles. It survived as a drive-in until 1947, after which the Picwood, an indoor theater rose on that spot. Today at that same corner the Landmarks Theater in the Westside Pavilion, a shopping plaza, boasts twelve screens with a wine bar and reserved stadium seating. Indoor or outdoor, it’s been all about movies at that street corner for better than 80 years. In Staten Island, where I live, Fabian Theaters, the same chain that originally owned and operated our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, also owned NYC’s first drive-in on Staten Island, in 1948, which closed in the 1960’s, to make way for Staten Island’s first shopping mall.

Sometimes drive-ins just closed, their screens blank as tombstones until somebody bought the land. As of 2008 in Cincinnati, the Oakley Drive-In’s screen still stood, in a field of weeds. Dean and I had planned to visit that hallowed spot on the last day of 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. But alas, the newly-built Barrington of Oakley, a retirement community currently stands on the spot.  

Afterthoughts:

1. If you, dear reader, get the wanderlust, bear in mind that there may be as few as 330 active drive-ins left in the U.S.A, as of this writing. Two years ago, there were around four hundred, but the advent of digital movie projection cut the ranks of these mom-and-pop businesses (it costs around $70,000.00 to convert to digital projection). One of the surviving locations, thankfully, appears to be the second such theater to open, the historic Mahoning, in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, mentioned in a recent post. It has survived thanks to the heroic efforts of local movie buffs and a vigilant owner, who got around the problem of digital projection by embracing original technology: the theater’s existing projection set-up and film, which is still available, if you air mostly classics and cult films. Check it out, it’s the subject of a marvelous documentary, At the Drive-In. 
2. I remember when drive-ins charged by the carload, a dollar twenty. If only I’d known Dean when he and his buddies hung out at the Oakley’s rival, the Montgomery Drive-In. One of his friends had a dad who was a mortician. Just how many teenagers can you pack into a hearse?  

What do the Paper Bag Players, Chaka Khan the Trammps, Sly Stone a long-forgotten classical Spanish guitar player, Blossom Seeley, various members of the Metropolitan Opera, Tony Bennett, Garrison Keillor, Pink Martini, and K.D. Laing have in common? At one time or another, they all stood beneath the soaring gold-leaf proscenium arch of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat theater and former movie palace in Staten Island.

The arch is six stories tall. In our day — 1976, when I had a hand in running it as a movie palace, the arch framed a red and gold brocade house curtain suspended from iron piping, counterweighted by several tons of weights,  finished off at the bottom with gold tassels four and a half feet tall. "Entrance of a tent," from Latin proscaenium, from Greek proskenion: pro "in front" + skene "stage, tent, booth" (think “scene”). 

Some tent flap! Back when theaters were more primitive affairs, out in the open, like an amphitheater, or even a traveling sideshow, the proscenium may have housed little more than a tent or a piece of fabric. 

First there was an age of great theaters--the 19th Century--Opera, the arrival of stagecraft — and then the Twentieth, when silent movies gave the proscenium something virtual to frame. Theaters suddenly had two functions, one live — the actors, song-and-dance teams, juggling, magic, mime, dog–and–pony shows of Vaudeville — and that other drama, the one that required an organ playing in the background, the waking dream of cinema.

The proscenium arch was the gilded icing on that cake, as a description of the Canton Palace Theatre in Canton Ohio would seem to indicate: the theatre includes an ornate columned proscenium arch over its stage, an elaborate fly system for the numerous stage curtains and theatrical backdrops, eleven dressing rooms, a chorus room, a musician's lounge, a music room, one shower room, and an orchestra pit with seating for eighteen musicians. Moreover, at 21' x 46', the Palace's silver screen remains the largest movie screen in Canton. The original — and still functioning — lighting system, designed by Peter Clark, takes viewers from sunrise to sunset in the courtyard setting.

​Anything as elaborate as all that required an over-the-top frame.

I feel enormously privileged to have grown up when movies were events that still had about them some hint of the theatrical. In the 1950‘s even the smaller theaters had a platform over which the screen hovered, and an arch of some kind to contain the experience of seeing a movie.  
By the time I came along, the proscenium and stage had become an ironic comment on what had once been. Still, in the bigger theaters, it could occasionally be useful, as when Blackstone the Magician came to town and hypnotized a volunteer (my father) from a packed house at the RKO Albee in downtown Cincinnati. And when a movie was showing — Ben Hur comes to mind — the rusty shadows of the film played on gilded plaster, picking up highlights in the dome and lending a kind of drama to the overblown Louis XIV architecture.

A tiny golden Venus inhabits the center of the St. George Theatre’s proscenium arch to this day, keeping watch for almost ninety years — since Blossom Seeley, “last of the red-hot mamas” — belted out her first song in 1929. Venus is surrounded by a confection of gilded sea-shells, as if she’d just risen from New York Harbor, a few paces down the hill.