I stepped into my favorite wine shop today and was offered a tiny tasting cup of Beaujolais, which I accepted gladly. As welcome as this sip was at two in the afternoon, I couldn’t help noticing a pungent scent that made me hope for another offering,  a toke. This is how times are, shops vacant for hours, like the coffee bar where, when I arrived a half hour later, the proprietor snapped to attention and promised to put a pot of coffee on. Obviously, he hadn’t seen a customer in some time. After the second tasting glass of beaujolais, the coffee was welcome in quite a different way. 
 
All of this, especially the lingering pot smoke at the wine shop, reminded me of 1976, and a midnight show at a movie palace I was involved in trying to save back then — you know, with that first burst of twenty-something energy.

Here’s the scene, as I recall it:
A wide-eyed patron, traveling in his own personal cloud of weed, staggers to the candy stand and slaps down a ten dollar bill.

“Tell me when this is gone!” he commands. (If you were alive in 1976, you might just remember how far a ten dollar bill could take you at a candy stand. You’re talking signioficant groceries!)

On screen behind him, dimly visible through the glass that separates the lobby from the auditorium, Reefer Madness, that antique polemic on the evils of marijuana, flickers through a haze of smoke. 
Ten dollars, as I said earlier, was a considerable investment in junk food, requiring a heroic effort at consumption, but this guy was up to it, even if he did need help carrying four large popcorns, three frozen Snickers, six double packs of Reese Cups, three or four Charlston Chews and God-knows-what-else back into the dark. The usher who’d delivered for him retreated once more to his perch in the empty balcony, where if you were lucky you could sometimes catch a contact high from rising plumes of smoke. 

As I intimated earlier, I was, at the age of 28, a movie theater operator, along with my husband and several partners, in a grand old Staten Island movie palace, the St. George Theatre. We were perpetually desperate, undercapitalized and, admittedly, a total anachronism, with our single large screen and 2,672 seats. We only lasted a year, but we learned so much.

The whole point of the midnight show was what, exactly? It drove concession sales through the roof, but we owed so much to the concession company — for loans we’d taken out against the stand’s profitability — that we were losing money staying open after midnight. The last showing of the regular feature finished around 11:40. Abe, the union projectionist, was pleased to clock in for another six-hours (at double time). Why not? Reefer Madness only lasted sixty-six minutes. He’d be home in bed by three.

Meanwhile, across the water in Manhattan at the Waverly, folks who’d lined up in costumes were already talking back to Rocky Horror Picture Show, the ultimate midnight fare. All we wanted was a crack at Rocky Horror, but the Waverly and one other theater in Manhattan had had a lock on the cult extravaganza since April Fool’s Day when it opened.

As a flea-bag suburban house, we had to content ourselves with Woodstock (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972 — “Filth is my politics, filth is my life!”), Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Ken Russell’s controversial 1969 film, The Devils (which though censored, still involved orgiastic nuns), The Who’s Tommy, and other played-out stuff. 

Twenty minutes before midnight, we did a clean sweep, and when we were reasonably sure those who’d come for the regular feature had gone home, we re-opened to sometimes as few as forty or as many as four hundred kids who paid a dollar fifty for solitude, sex, if they could sneak up to the balcony, or just a place to smoke weed and eat candy.

One Saturday just after midnight, Dean got into a shouting match in the lobby with three patrons who’d entered at eight o’clock for the last showing of The Omen, our regular feature that week. He insisted the midnight show was a separate admission.

“It says so in the paper!”

“We’ve already bought a ticket, man...” a tall guy in a feathered robe insisted, “...besides, movies belong to the people, they should be free.” 

(Power-to-the-people pronouncements were common in the sixties and seventies).

Well the show might as well have been free; we weren’t making any money. Dean sighed and studied the lobby's chandelier, two of its bulbs already burned out.

“Go on and enjoy yourselves,” he told them.

Afterthought:
Here’s The New York Times, circa 1995 on the subject of midnight movies (campy, etc.), as opposed to regular features shown at midnight (boring).  “...the first midnight movie is generally agreed to have taken place in late 1969 at the Elgin Theater (now defunct) in Chelsea. The movie was El Topo, a cryptic, hallucinatory and extremely violent western by the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky.” 

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.
 
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, a child of seven, I saw at least half of those. Once the curtain had risen, and you’d settled in with Good n’ Plenties 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, even As the World Turns and Search for Tomorrow — the soaps — most weekday afternoons. TV ruled. 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 the curtain that separated movies and TV was torn forever.
 
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. 
 
Before the pandemic, the last movie I saw at a single-screen theater, The Lion — at New York’s Paris — reminded me of  certain formalities long gone — what, for instance, it was like to watch a curtain rise on a movie. The theater’s interior isn’t movie palace level; it has stadium seating and was done in subdued grey velvet, compared by one patron to “...the fancy cinema on an old ocean liner.”
 
If movie theater attendance nationwide is to survive at all, in what we all hope will be the post-pandemic era, it will have to offer more than a seat facing a screen, even if that seat is capable of reclining, while offering serious food and drink. Meanwhile, 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 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, [my emphasis] which we don’t always recognize until later, if at all. It is the occasion, the atmosphere, that we crave.”

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 back then in front of 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 I was privileged to help run as a movie palace back in 1976, 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, 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 surface illuminated by 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, a danger I actually thrilled to.
 
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 — the opposite of vertical — with its rolling soft-edged frontage, reminiscent of an ocean wave.
 
It’s easy to go all nostalgic over old-style marquees with their very 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 shattered – 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.
 
Afterthought:
If you’re a film buff, you might find this post by Film Babble Blog author Daniel Cook Johnson of interest.

We’re out of what?” I asked.  “Popcorn,” said Dean. At the St. George Theatre a 2672-seat 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 trickle of customers. Rivals, sisters: 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 often not 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 (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.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. 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. 

​Lately, although the Paramount is still standing, it appears to have lost its marquee altogether; oh well, such is the life of movie palaces before, during and, presumably, after the pandemic.
 
2. How has movie popcorn consumption weathered the pandemic? Check out what’s happening in Korea!