Solitude at midnight on New Year’s is pretty rare — not to be lonely at that solitary moment, rarer still. So it was that Paul (Paulie) Plonski — who worked as a teenager at the concession stand of our 2672-seat movie palace in 1976 — sent this account of what he was doing as 1976 became 1977. The St. George Theater was and is located halfway up a steep hill in Staten Island overlooking New York Harbor, a pretty interesting place at midnight in any company. Here’s Paulie:

“...We had a late show at the St. George. You and Dean made sure to get us out of the theater before midnight so we could make it home in time.

My ‘68 Pontiac Firebird was parked on Hyatt Street, right in front of the theater. At around 11:30 I got in, started the car, but could not get it into gear. So...at midnight I was on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing.
 
Quiet, except for the wind. Then at the stroke of midnight, the ships in the harbor sounded their whistles and shot off fireworks. It was just me, the wind and the ships with the NYC skyline, a night to cherish forever.
 
PS: The New Years party was still raging when I made it home (nothing missed)."

Privation, exhilaration. These fit my overall experience of running the theater in 1976 and the first few months of 1977. It was going to be a cold cold winter; we’d be out, broke, by spring. But the theater, while it lasted, was itself a kind of fireworks, a lit spark I try to keep going, in these blog posts. Thanks again, Paulie!

Peace in the New Year everybody. 

For Christmas in 1976, a friend gave us a vintage toy tin Marx movie theater, with its own small red and gold proscenium and a moveable paper roll which can be wound to reveal the scenes of a small “movie,” Bobby’s and Betty’s Trip to Jungleland, a 100% production of thrills and surprises. 

That small feature was showing in my living room, but down the street, in our real 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, a forgettable Biblical “documentary,” In Search of Noah’s Ark, was playing to scant audiences, purporting to demonstrate that fragments of Noah’s Ark had been found on Mt. Ararat. We should have been happy — we’d gotten a “four-wall” deal — a religiously-affiliated entity had rented the theater for a flat fee for ten days, giving us, beyond brief visits to the theater to sell popcorn and decorate the candy stand with pine boughs, an opportunity to rest from our theater labors of the spring, summer and fall. 

But there is no rest for young entrepreneurs. The flat fee was way too flat: we needed a Christmas miracle to make the rent and pay the big distributors, Warner, Columbia and the gang. While I quaffed  eggnog — delivered by a milkman we didn’t owe that much money too — yet — and cookies — paid for with cadged money from the theater’s candy stand — I wondered how we were going to survive at all.

There’s nothing like being broke for the first time — you think your life is over. We were drifting along on money borrowed or cadged, and we couldn’t imagine what was next.  What was next, as it turned out, was 1977, the trough of a huge recession in the movie business, and the tail-end of a national recession that had nearly seen New York City itself go bankrupt. 

1977 plays a prominent part in a book I’m just starting to read, City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg. I haven’t gotten very far, but already I recognize in its pages the desperation that permeated every aspect of our young lives. Anyone who lived through 1976 and 1977 in NYC knows what that desperation meant. The Upper West Side — regardless of who you were, rich or poor, black or white — was risky to walk in alone after dark; whole blocks of brownstones were boarded up, and parts of the Village weren’t much better. Times Square? Don’t ask. Almost everybody I knew had been mugged at least once. Large chunks of Manhattan’s northerly, formerly middle-class neighbor, the Bronx, were on fire or already rubble. In Brooklyn, beyond Park Slope and the Heights, it was tough going. The city didn’t have the money to light all those streets, and shops in a lot of places were boarded up.

Commerce helps streets to be safe — the light of the delicatessen can be a haven. This was true in my own neighborhood, where a single deli glowed, sometimes, like the manger at Bethlehem, to those of us walking up Fort Place in the dark. Of course, because everybody but the rich had fallen on hard times, a lot of people were desperate enough to try to steal what they couldn’t get otherwise.  

There was a reason--beyond the demise of movie palaces and the economic woes of the movie business — why we had a hard time selling tickets at the theater. Our streets were deserted too. As I ate cookies and tried to forget the business we strove to bring out of its nose-dive, starting up again in the very bleak new year of 1977, I played with my little tin Marx “Movie Palace,” virtually the only gift I’d had to open on Christmas morning. No tree — couldn’t afford it. 

The one in Canton, CT is a post office. The St. Louis franchise morphed into Cathedral of the Crossroads, and the Niagara Falls venue has been split between OTB (Off Track Betting) and a pizzeria. Jerry Lewis Cinemas as a franchise concept were a horrible failure, with perhaps 200 of these small (less than 300-seat) cinemas open nationwide at their peak in the mid-seventies. While we were going broke running a 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theater, in Staten Island, only twenty minutes away another would-be entrepreneur was struggling to keep the doors of the local Jerry Lewis franchise on Forest Avenue open and in operation. We had more in common with this unfortunate theater operator than we might have been willing to admit.

We were a buck-fifty, second-run house. They were a buck seventy-five. We booked The Sunshine Boys, if I remember, for what was supposed to be an exclusive second run, and they got their hands on exactly the same product. In newspaper parlance you could say they “scooped” us, but it didn’t really matter, because there was no way we could cover our overhead, even if every soul who sat in their cracker-box seats had come over to our tough super-urban St. George neighborhood. As rivals we were both failing, and for many of the same reasons. For much of the rest of the year we were in business they continued to run Airport 1975, trying to work off a huge advance.

What exactly were the Jerry Lewis Cinemas anyhow?  How did the comic star whose name is most associated with Dean Martin or with Muscular Dystrophy telethons nearly go bankrupt himself with a chain of movie theater franchises?

“If you can press a button and meet our investment requirements, you can own one or a chain of Jerry Lewis Cinemas...” began the full-page October 8, 1969 ad in Variety. 

Seven years later, as we prepared to open our own movie house, we could have taken a lesson from this already failing business model. By the mid-seventies, a number of Jerry Lewis franchisees — including, probably, the poor schmuck on Forest Avenue — had already discovered what we in turn would learn. Of all the businesses on earth to jump into feet first, movie theater operation, with (in the seventies) its dearth of available product, wars with movie distributors and hidden costs, might be second only to restaurant ownership in difficulty of management. The typical Jerry Lewis theater owner was a movie-goer, not someone who had grown up tearing ticket stubs or popping popcorn. To quote Cinelog, “...the most glaring flaw was the very concept that anyone could own a theatre and operate it with minimal effort. As with far too many ‘get rich’ schemes, all of the [operators] had been ‘blinded’ by their fantasies and failed to consider the practical realities of running a successful business, let alone a business as unique as a movie theatre.”

Near as I can tell, our local Jerry Lewis Cinema went out of business around 1980. It is rumored (verification unavailable) that they were turned off by Con Ed for non-payment, something that nearly happened to us on several occasions. 

By that time, Jerry Lewis and his partner in the venture, National Cinemas Corporation had filed for bankruptcy, though Lewis saved himself by making a movie with the ironic title, Hardly Working. He is said to have greatly regretted his decision to found this ill-starred chain, and the feeling, amongst former managers and their families, seems to have been the only thing that was mutual.

To quote cinelog once again, “...one particular individual [a former franchisee]...relayed that, even thirty plus years after the fact, Lewis’ yearly telethon appearance never fails to anger him.” It hadn’t been Lewis’ intention to fail. He made several mistakes, not the least of which was to establish a chain which booked only PG and PG-13 movies at a time when R ratings were the norm. But in the larger sense, he made the same mistake we made at our failing movie palace: he thought you didn’t have to have any direct experience to run a movie theater. Perhaps, as a performer, he assumed that the movie exhibition business was no big deal. He assumed, as we did in a completely different theater setting, that you can jump into the water and then learn how to swim.

​These days, the Lane Theater on New Dorp Lane in Staten Island, has two perpetual showtimes, at 11 AM and 6 PM on Sunday. After roughly fifty years as a movie house (1938-1988), the Lane did a brief stint as a nightclub (the EleMenT) and Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club, before settling into in its most recent incarnation, as the Casual, Contemporary, Caring Christian Church (Crossroads Staten Island). I’m grateful to the church for maintaining a favorite haunt of years gone by, where I saw New York, New York, The Goodbye Girl, and Saturday NIght Fever in Art Deco comfort.

In 1976 and 77, while I was involved in running the St. George Theatre (a 2672-seat movie palace on the other side of Staten Island), the Lane — with its chrome wall sconces and soft lighting, its sweet rounded blue and green neon bands of light and modest stadium-style auditorium — was a sanctuary of another kind for me to run away to. Like all single-screen theaters at that time, the managers of the Lane were in as much trouble as we were at the St. George, but I pretended not to notice. On grim evenings, when nobody was buying tickets to see whatever well-worn movie was showing on our screen, a few of us would pile into a friend’s British Racing Green Volvo and high-tail it over to the Lane, buy somebody else’s popcorn and soak up a little heat. This last was an important item: in the severely-cold winter of 1977, our theater landlord had adopted the killer habit of turning off the boiler, so it was a solace to sit, for once, in a theater where you could feel the warmth in your toes and not see your own breath.

But back to the present. Across the street from this new house of worship, proprietors of Blue Velvet Beauty Lounge & Spa tell me all the good things the church has done, raising money for local residents who lost their homes to Hurricane Sandy and Cancer victims. And who can complain? — those wonderful chrome wall sconces have been preserved. The concession stand, nowadays, offers doughnuts and coffee, and the old comedy club’s Green Room has morphed into a children’s Bumble Bee play room. LIfe goes on.   

I don’t begrudge this church their Sunday morning and evening services. Many theaters, including the United Palace on 175th Street — saved by Reverend Ike and still serving, among other things, as a place of worship — have been preserved by congregations. Isn’t preservation what it’s all about?  Peeking out from behind the marquee’s plain purple and white church signage those rounded red Art Deco letters still spell out LANE.

Another example of a great theater preserved, in part, by becoming, for a time, a church is the Belasco in L.A. Speaking of L.A., it’s interesting to note that the line between church and movie theater in that town can sometimes  be so thin as to be almost non-existent. "We'd be lost without the screen," said the 43-year-old leader of Destiny People Christian Church, which holds services at various multiplexes. The screen, according to this pastor, plays a central spiritual role. A number of L.A. congregations seem drawn to movie theater homes. 

Returning to the theme of sanctuary, how many of us who cherish the old theaters, consider them sacred spaces? And how often does one sanctuary replace another? A friend once told me that, on the Aventine Hill in Rome, stands a church, beneath which, in the first century, was a shrine to an ancient Mithraic cult. Gazing through the Lane’s steel gates at what was briefly a small shrine to cinema, is it Thalia, the smiling muse of comedy, I’m looking for? And, of course, her frowning cohort, Melpomene.

Like dormant burial mounds, old movie houses riddle the American landscape. They morph into so many things: churches (The State Theater aka The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Los Angeles), or become a parking garage (the Michigan Theatre in Detroit), a basketball arena (The Brooklyn Paramount), a lumber yard (the Empire in Staten Island), a clothing boutique (The Hyde Park in Cincinnati), a Sporting Goods Store (The Paramount in Staten Island), or even a grocery store one couple told me about in a small town in Texas.

Some lucky communities contain theaters that are largely untouched, their original seats still set and stages intact. (That “luck,” by the way, is almost always a product of hard work on the part of some dedicated group of enthusiasts). Most resurrected  theaters nowadays are live houses, with film as an occasional sideline. The theater to which this blog is dedicated, the St. George, is a Spanish baroque 2672-seat palace in Staten Island which I ran with my husband and a group of idealists, beginning in the spring of 1976; it survives these days as a live working house. We are not its current saviors — that’s another story. 

The St. George’s eldest sister, the Ritz, only twenty-minutes away in Port Richmond, was a sixties rock venue of some note and a fine old movie palace. These days it’s a ceramic tile warehouse, its former lobby a showroom for bathroom fixtures, granite and tile. A sign above the plinth reads, “SPACE AVAILABLE, 20,000-80,000 sq. ft. build to suit.”                       

Nosing around the neighborhood yesterday, I walked along the side of the building, which takes up half a city block. The old side exit happened to be open, so I stepped in. If you hadn’t seen this cavernous space in its glory as I did, you’d never know it had ever been anything but a warehouse.

“Habla Ingles?” (do you speak English?) I asked the man on the fork-lift. He seemed friendly.

“Un poco,” (a little), he replied.

“This used to be a theater...” I began, gazing up at the structural work that used to support the dome. 

He looked blank. “Teatro...?” I continued, and he smiled. From the iphone in my hand, he could see that I wanted to take some pictures.

“It was very beautiful...” I told him.  “Hermoso.” 

He smiled again and looked away.  

I took the pictures. It was time to leave. I’d begun to shiver, remembering a certain red velvet curtain, a sad memory. We made a single visit to the Ritz in the winter of 1977, to seek out our landlord, who owned both the Ritz and the St George Theatre, which he’d rented to us. He was in the process of tearing the Ritz apart, under the misguided notion that it might succeed as a roller rink. Twenty minutes away at the St. George, which still had its seats and curtain intact, we were trying to keep the doors open, but the landlord had turned off the heat again, in that coldest of NYC winters.

Watching the demolition of the Ritz that day felt like standing on the steps to the guillotine: I couldn’t help but imagine that the St. George would be next. The Ritz’s  seats had just been torn out, and the theater’s slanted floor (the rake) was being leveled off by a man steering a cement roller. The air was thick with concrete dust — you couldn’t take a breath without tasting it. A workman on stage flicked his cigarette, which arched over what had once been the orchestra pit. Then he wiped his cement-laden hands on the heavy crimson velvet stage curtain, a two-story wonder exquisite as the one on our still-intact stage. 

​Via a combination of miracles and coincidence — and the dedication of a handful of people — the St. George Theatre survives. Why is this so important? In our fractured post-millennium world, where people retreat farther and farther into their own imagined spaces, the screens they watch little bigger than playing cards, we need our great halls, the grander — and more cavernous — the better. We are humans after all, and like our ancestors, who sat together around the communal fire, we need to be in the dark together.
           
*apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of that famous story with a similar title!