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Starts Wednesday: A Year in the Life of a Movie Palace
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New Year's Eve, 1976: Beneath the Marquee at Midnight, in a '68 Pontiac

12/28/2016

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PictureFireworks in New York City's harbor.
Work will begin soon to replace the original leaky marquee of the St. George Theatre —a marquee that leaked forty years ago in 1976, when a band of enthusiasts, myself included, ran the 2672-seat St. George as a third-run movie palace. The rusting marquee will soon come down, and a state-of-the-art electronic one will rise — it’s about time. Since the seventies — when we projected real film, via two Carbon Arc projectors, onto a giant stained movie screen — lots of other things have come and gone. Case in point, you can watch anything  (Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca) on just about any surface imaginable now: a flatscreen at home, your ipad, an Android, an iphone. Gone are technologies not yet or barely begun in 1976: VCRs, movie rentals, DVDs purchased or delivered (replaced by HULU and HBO-GO, for less than the price of an adult ticket at any surviving theater). With social media dominating much of the rest of our time, it’s a wonder there are theaters at all.

Which leads me to Facebook, which, in its well-intentioned way, suggested recently that I friend one Paul Plonski, an aircraft engineer and former Staten Islander — an odd bit of serendipity, since, for the last two New Years, I’ve reprised a chunk of an email Paul (we called him Paulie back then) wrote me, a memory of New Years Eve, Dec. 31, 1976. He worked the candy stand as a teenager, while I froze at the box office, waiting to see if anyone would come through the theater’s red and gold doors that preternaturally cold night. After the last show, we darkened the house, closed down the box office and locked the concession stand door, threw the giant breakers to power down the marquee, bolted the glass doors and wished everybody well in the coming new year, 1977.  Paulie jumped into his car, parked just below the marquee, and a few of us straggled up the hill towards home.

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. 


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​Flashback Forty Years
December 31, 1976

In Search of Noah’s Ark:
See it on the giant screen!
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Christmas, 1976, the Hometown Movie Palace

12/20/2016

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PictureThe original escape artist, Houdini.
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.


Flashback Forty Years:
December 22, 1976
In Search of Noah’s Ark
Special Performances Dec 27:
Ronald McDonald, 
a stage
​version of The Wizard of Oz

and
Irv Laurice IV, Magician
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Movie Palace Hangout: An Interview

12/14/2016

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PictureOriginal "Ice Station Zebra" poster.
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?


FLASHBACK FORTY YEARS:
December 15
This week, forty years ago, the staff and management of the St. George Theatre were taking a long winter’s nap, recovering from the bone-chilling cold of an unheated palace.

Nuff said.
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Old Marquees Never Die

12/7/2016

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PictureRev. Ike''s United Church Science of Living Institute, formerly the famous Loew’s 175th St. Palace. Note the marquee is still in use!
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.

PictureAging marquee on the St. George Theatre, Staten Island 2016.
In 1976, when I and a gang of like-minded entrepreneurs ran Staten Island’s St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace, the marquee was still more or less functioning, give or take some cast-aluminum letters that had fallen, from time to time, to the sidewalk and broken. Although a number of businesses, including one flea market and a church, operated from the St. George in the decades that followed its use as a movie house, a building owner in the 90’s chose to cover the marquee (which leaked badly in any rainstorm), with stucco, thus rendering it more or less useless. That marquee still leaks and, unfortunately, is still covered with the same ugly stucco. It will be replaced, rumor has it, some time soon.  Meanwhile there are plenty of other former theaters whose marquees have outlasted the auditoriums they once served; some are even in languages most of us can’t understand.

For example, in Rego Park, Queens, the former Trylon Theater now serves as the Ohr Natan Bukharian Community Center, its semicircular marquee spelling out that title in Bukharian, a (Cyrillic) dialect of the Tajik-Persian language. The community the old theater serves is Jewish/Russian.

The Brandon Cinemas on Austin St. in Forest Hills, a pediatrics urgent care clinic, boasts after hours and weekend pediatrics care. 

On New Dorp Lane in Staten Island, where I live, the excellent neon Art Deco marquee of the old Lane, a stadium theater that was landmarked some time in the eighties, has become the signboard for its new resident, the Crossroads Church. There are other more stellar examples of theater churches. The famous Loew’s 175th St. United Palace, originally one of five “Wonder Theaters,” in the Greater NYC area and home, morphed in 1969,  into Reverend Ike’s United Church Science of Living Institute. The exquisitely restored "Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco” Thomas Lamb theater is also now a cultural center, as well, advertising that whole enchilada on its wraparound marquee. The State Theatre in Los Angeles is a temporary lease site for a the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a Brazilian congregation, whose previous gig was at the Million Dollar Theatre in that same town. These churches get around.

When CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, that almost-always fatal message, appears on a theater’s marquee, more often than not, renovation has nothing to do with what’s going on. It’s likely here’s a business whose heart just skipped a beat, the owners out of money, out of energy, out of product. So it was for me and the rest of our gallant theater management staff, forty years ago this week, struggling to keep our gorgeous Spanish Baroque red and gold anachronism open and showing movies. But on December 1,1976, our marquee read, CLOSED RENO (as usual, we were missing the full complement of cast-aluminum letters to finish the message). We opened again ten days later — it wasn’t, after all, quite the end for us — as it was for our rival, the Paramount, down the street. A year later, in 1977, that theater advertised its own demise, FOR SALE, on the marquee. The Paramount operated as a nightclub, then as a rock venue, and finally, for a decade or so as a warehouse for neighboring Steckman’s Sporting Goods. These days its magnificent crumbling marquee advertises itself once again, this time not for sale but for lease. Like so many American movie palaces, it has an uncertain future, recently slated for redevelopment as a catering hall and restaurant.

I’d like to end with a little bit of good news. Sometimes CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS on a marquee means exactly that! Case in point: The Michigan Theater Foundation announced this fall that the State Theatre in Ann Arbor would, as of September, 2016, close for a major facelift. To quote a recent press release, “The...Foundation is undertaking a large-scale interior and exterior renovation of the State Theatre to restore its art deco look and feel in conjunction with its 75th anniversary in 2017.” The work apparently includes the refreshing of an iconic Art Deco marquee.  Opening in 1942 with “The Fleet’s In,” the State then went through a fairly normal career as a movie house, resulting by the 1970’s and 80’s in some plexings and repurposings, then falling happily into the hands of its rescuers in the late nineties. It will reemerge in 2017, if all goes well, as what it was designed to be, a movie theater. 

There was no  “Flashback Forty Years” feature last week — because forty years ago December 1, we hung those marquee letters spelling out “Closed for Reno.”  Happily, on December 11, we reopened--see below.


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FLASHBACK FORTY YEARS:
Saturday, December 8
Starting 7 PM, Lady Sings the Blues
Then live in concert:
Johnny Maestro & the Brooklyn Bridge
(Formerly “The Crests”)
Movie 2: Mahogany
Movies, Concert, $8
 
Bonus: Check this out, for a nostalgic stroll past some great old marquees.
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    Victoria Hallerman

    Author

    Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.

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