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, which I was involved in operating, In Search of Noah’s Ark was playing to scant audiences. This forgettable “documentary” purported 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.
 
To divert us from these dismal thoughts, on Monday, December 27, between showings of the Noah’s Ark movie, the grand and sporadically-used stage of our palace sprang briefly to life, with a series of offerings tailored to take the chill off an unheated auditorium. For better or for worse, the whole she-bang had been intended as children’s holiday entertainment. Ronald McDonald made a surprise appearance in his red and gold clown uniform, followed by an amateur stage version of The Wizard of Oz.

Bringing up the rear, but really the best thing going, were the illusions and heroic feats of Houdini-style escape performed by Irv Laurice IV, a sixteen-year-old local magician. I don’t honestly remember much about this live stage interlude (I was too busy warming my hands in the popcorn machine) but despite the cold, Laurice got everybody’s attention. (Didn’t we all want to escape?) He slithered out of an astonishing array of manacles, padlocks, ropes and chains, then finished off with magical tricks, some involving a serene pair of trained white doves, which soared into the fly loft of the theater in a way that convinced me I must be dreaming. The few souls who were present that day were captivated, as I was. (Irv was captivated in a more literal sense, of course).
 
Irv was actually the son of a friend of mine. He was obviously talented, though I assumed the magician thing was a passing adolescent phase. After the theater, I lost track of him entirely, but guess what?  Irv Laurice has actually spent his life escaping:  “...from a straight jacket, handcuffs and prison leg-irons, while chained and padlocked from neck to groin, and hanging only by a burning rope over a spiked viper pit filled with poisonous snakes and scorpions.” According to his official fan site, ABC News observed that he had “uncanny ability.” Fox News, CNN, Leno — he’s been up there. And don’t forget he got his start at the home-town movie palace!

I hope those doves had a long and flight-filled life.

Being on the stage...and realizing this place where I’ve gone to see movies actually has a stage! — it was a cool perspective. I could hardly see because of the lights. —Andy Kass
 
2672 seats: it was a full house. The stage in question belonged to Staten Island’s premier movie palace, the St. George Theatre, and the year was 1969. Andy Kass, a friend and neighbor whose memories are the substance of this blog post, was graduating from I.S. 27/Prall Junior High, which required its gown-clad students to ascend the steps to the stage of a theater they’d at that point only experienced from the perspective of movie-going. Movie palaces were good for a lot of things: children’s theater and dance recitals, visits from the traveling cast of the Metropolitan Opera, performances of a local magician, as well as graduations.

But returning to Andy’s story, he received his diploma, went out to lunch with his dad, an insurance broker whose office was nearby, and returned to the St. George in the afternoon for the 1:30 matinee, Ice Station Zebra. The St. George Theatre — the metaphorical true north this blog’s needle is always seeking — had a few more years to function as a first-run house (though Ice Station Zebra may not have been among them). Eight years later, in 1976, along with a group of like-minded entrepreneurs, I’d have a hand in running that theater, both as a movie house and concert venue. In the intervening years, Andy, while growing up, enjoyed it as the hub of activity it was designed to be.

As a seven-year-old, he knew it was special. “You walked in and had the sense you were in a different kind of place, paintings, open chambers, a real cantilevered balcony, the dome itself. This is where to see a movie.” From a lot of moviegoing, he recalls only a few film titles, surprising to me until I realized how scant my own memories of specific movies are, from the RKO Albee, the Cincinnati palace of my childhood. Looking up at the dome, taking in the statues in alcoves, seems to have occupied more permanent memory space than the actual films!

One memory did come back to Andy, a horror festival which included The Invasion of the Blood Farmers. “I remember sitting in the back, right next to the door, so I could duck out, if I had to. It  was gross...”

In high school, Andy says, the movie palace was an ideal date night out. “Why go to Manhattan? St. George was as close to the city as you could get and still be in Staten Island. It wasn’t the neighborhood you were from, but it was right on the edge...”

On the edge indeed. By the mid-seventies, the theater, like so many other single-screen palaces, had slipped from its perch as a premier first-run movie house, to a “Buck Fifty” place, with second-run fare and beyond, not quite a grind house, but definitely a cut below its former status. Although I wouldn’t get to know Andy well until almost forty years later, we met briefly back then: as a friend of Diane, who worked the box office, he had a hand in helping out, for concerts and things.

“Because of all that space,” he recalls, “the St. George was a hang-out. It had those generous chambers downstairs...” Andy is referring to the basement men’s lounge, the women’s powder room, and the terrazzo tile floor that united them. There was even a faux baronial “fireplace” downstairs to give the place atmosphere. It was interesting to hear about the theater’s basement from a recreational perspective: many of our crowd control problems had to do with teens who had drifted — some in varying alternate states of consciousness — down those very same tiled stairs.

By December of our theater year, an on-going heat war with the landlord made it harder and harder for us to draw audiences. On November 24 we managed a small concert:  Buzzy Linhart and The Brooklyn Bridge (aka Johnny Maestro), followed by The Groove Tube. Clearly, we were going for the audience who liked to hang out at powder-room level, but not very many of them showed. Those who did, Andy recalls, drifted around a lot through the inevitable haze of pot-smoke, “freezing” and mostly on the move. Who could sit in those unheated seats?

But it’s as a sumptuous palace that Andy most remembers the St. George. He grew up in a distant neighborhood, Dongan Hills, not far from the nearest town, New Dorp, which had its own memorable small Art Deco movie house, the Lane Theatre, these days a church. “Wednesday at 1 PM I’d ride over to the Lane, chain the bike and walk in.” But despite the commute, “...the St. George was my second choice.” He recalls riding the 103 bus to see movies at the St. George. One afternoon he realized he didn’t have money for the return fare, so made it home on foot to the middle of the island, a reverse pilgrimage.

Movie palaces were worth it, Andy seems to be telling us. “If you’re going to a movie in a mall, you’re going to a mall and seeing a movie... but if you’re going to a movie palace, you’re entering the movie’s world before anything comes on the screen.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Thank you, Andy, for taking the time to share your reflections with me for this post. Andy, BTW, is a really talented writer. Check him out! 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  
 
...Also, BTW, movie palace memories are always welcome at Starts Wednesday. What was the palace of your dreams?

What happens to a old movie marquee when movies aren’t showing anymore? In New York City, where I live, the new owner of the closed-down movie palace or neighborhood cinema is allowed to use the defunct marquee, as long as the new owner — of a dry cleaner, a deli, a parking garage — has a marquee-use permit. The other night, as I was driving out of the Upper East Side, I spied the marquee of the Clearview Cinemas, a six-screen theater, now defunct, repurposed as one of the sites of Manhattan Mini-Storage. I imagine that pretty soon there will be more mini-storage units in Manhattan than there are apartments. Meanwhile, the new owners of the building have seen fit to list a number of phony movie titles on the marquee: Lost and Out of Space, Space Hunter, and other wonders.