In Search of Noah’s Ark, a “four wall” doggie of a documentary we’d been stuck with for several weeks, had just gone off-screen at the St. George Theatre, our 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. Gabe, our grizzled projectionist (returned to the fold after being disciplined by his union for TV watching in the booth) wanted to get on our good side. Shift over, he strode to the concession stand and slapped down on the glass display case a rather ordinary box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies.

“Happy New Year!” He smiled at me, that crooked tobacco-stained grin of his. “These are for you and Dean. Yeah, yeah, I meant to give’m to you at Christmas, but I forgot...” Relieved, he buttoned his peacoat and made for the street, his brief foray into sociability accomplished.

Paulie, who had the concession shift that night, was just shutting things down, counting change, locking the case. He pointed a pretend revolver at the back of the retreating projectionist, and fired a phantom bullet. I laughed, Dean patted Paulie on the back. Everybody knew Gabe’s hourly pay was $14.76. Rich as he was, the Entenmann’s seemed as puny as the gesture that produced it. We hadn’t paid ourselves in months, and Paulie, worth eleven of Gabe, got minimum wage, $2.20 an hour. 

Dean stepped into the stand and grabbed Paulie’s Windex and rag.

​“It’s almost midnight, and I imagine you’ve got other plans,” he told the kid, who was fourteen years his junior.

Thirty-eight years later, thanks to the internet, Paulie, then in his fifties (an aeronautical engineer), found me via this website. We’re reacquainted as full adults since then, and I’m happy to say that his memory of that particular New Year’s Eve has become a traditional post for SW.

On that preternaturally cold night, we darkened the house, closed down the box office, locked the concession stand, threw the giant breakers to power down the marquee, and bolted the glass doors. We wished whoever remained good luck in the coming new year, 1977. Paulie jumped into his car, parked just below the marquee, and a few of us “management” folk straggled up the hill towards home and some eggnog I had ready. But Paulie’s night would be a little different:

You and Dean had 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 still on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing. [It was around 18 degrees F, with wind gusts of up to 25 mph].

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...and happy new year.

Peace to everyone, as a matter of fact. And in the coming year don’t forget to like us on FB, and don’t be shy about comments!

How is it I’m nostalgic about smoking? But for one brief puff of a Marlboro on the playground (followed by a gritty spate of coughing), I never smoked a cigarette in my life. Of course I was a passive smoker; anybody who survived the fifties, sixties and seventies inhaled plenty of secondhand smoke. With the exception of primary and secondary school classrooms and cafeterias, there was virtually no place in 1950’s America where smoking didn’t happen. It prevailed at home (Mom and Pop and all their friends), on buses, in lobbies, at restaurants, in (yes!) hospitals, on airplanes (cigarettes were passed out for free) and certainly beneath the copious dome of your favorite movie palace, its chandelier dimly visible through the haze. The presence of a dome made movie palaces particularly smoke-friendly. By the time (April, 1976) a group of young entrepreneurs — of which I was one — took over the lease of the St. George Theatre, an aging 2,672-seat movie palace, the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning that cigarette smoking is hazardous to health was twelve years old, and new research in the early seventies was pointing a finger at second-hand smoke. Some people were choosing not to be smokers, and those people didn’t want to sit next to people who were.

We never sold cigarettes at the St. George, but you can be assured a ciggie machine had graced the theater’s lobby  before we came along. There’s something else to be nostalgic for: putting a quarter into the cigarette machine for your daddy, then pushing the button under “Parliament” and hearing the thunk as a pack of cigarettes (and often matches) slid down into the tray. But getting back to the St. George in 1976, a lesson about the all-pervasiveness of cigarette smoking over time was waiting in the lobby for us to discover.

By the time we took over, the lobby chandeliers hung like dark armored shapes above the corridor, each ringed by a set of (burned out) electric candles. Late in our first month, a hard-working member of our team figured out how to crank the chandeliers down for bulbing. Voila! What I’d assumed all along were plates of copper sheeting at the center of each chandelier were actually panes of colored glass, revealing more electric candles inside. Over the period of a very long night, this comrade scrubbed patiently, dipping the glass panels in a solution of ammonia and soap, and, by daybreak, transforming them from opaque seemingly faux-copper to fully-transparent glass. What had hidden their beauty? Forty-plus years of cigarette smoke! Standing beneath their now blinding light, I wondered what the insides of the lungs of all those smokers looked like.

Smoking in theaters was still permitted, but most operators relegated that activity to one or another area. Since, due to scant audiences, the balcony was generally not open, we chose the left-hand side of the orchestra as our smoking section, then struggled to keep smokers corralled there. A number strayed into the general audience when nobody was looking, especially if the smoking section was full, but most stayed put, their smoke trailing upwards beyond the lip of the mezzanine.

Now here’s the core of my nostalgia: before the smoke reached those exulted heights, it passed through the beam of the projector in rich eddies, morphing into a kind of transparent marble.

How could anything so lethal be so beautiful? I remember my daddy’s cigarette smoke the same way: he knew just how to blow smoke-rings. Seated on his lap, I could poke my finger through them! Daddy, he was so Bogie...

Speaking of Bogart, the movies themselves were one reason almost every adult smoked in the nineteen fifties. Before I wax rhapsodic on the glamor of filmic smoking, let’s cut the nostalgia by reminding ourselves that style frequently boils down to economics. “The link between Hollywood and tobacco goes back to the beginning of talking pictures,” Stanton Glantz (Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, the University of California, San Francisco) reminds us. “It was a way to thoroughly embed tobacco use in the social fabric.”

Bogie in To Have and Have Not smoked Chesterfields. What could be sexier? Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracey all smoked “Luckies” (Lucky Strikes) when they smoked on screen, openly promoting them in print media and on radio. 

Product placement was still invisible then; the stars were gods. Even to those of us who never lit up, smoking was sexy. There they were, inhabiting their universe of the giant screen, enveloped in movie smoke, and just below, mere mortals (my parents, other adults, rebellious teens) knocked an ash off a genuine cigarette, sending the smoke of their peculiar incense up to the theater’s dome, by way of the film’s radiant beam.

Afterthoughts:

1.Weed. Of course, there was no designated smoking section at the St. George Theatre for the cigarette of my generation. We all smoked it — me only occasionally, because, despite the payoff, holding smoke in my throat just hurt too much. But, especially for midnight shows, grass was ever-present, making its benign path through the bright beam of Woodstock or a Ken Russell extravaganza, all the while spreading good cheer, smelling vaguely like oregano, and blessedly lighting a fire under candy and popcorn sales.

2.Well, in a way I did smoke, if you count candy cigarettes! My brand was Lucky Strikes. 

What’s on-screen at a theater might be Get Out or Alien: Covenant, but what if something else is giving the audience (or, more likely, the staff) that prickly feeling under the hairline? Way back in 1976, we ran The Exorcist in our admittedly Gothic 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, and (a rare occurrence in those days of diminishing movie palace attendance) we sold out, thanks to the perfect match of theater and subject matter. What’s more conducive to creepiness than a vast cavern of shadows? Nevertheless, there were no actual ghost sightings at the St. George, although at least one of our ushers, Leroy, was convinced backstage was haunted, (hence his marked reluctance to go there and turn up the house lights). Given all the lives that had passed through that place before we came along and those who followed us, it’d be a wonder if some or another ghost hasn’t decided to set up shop, but to my knowledge no apparition, phantom, poltergeist, shade, spectre, spook or wraith ever has. (I sometimes think it’s Dean and me as failed entrepreneurial ghosts, who haunt the rafters, but then, we’re still alive, so we don’t really qualify — yet). Meanwhile, I have discovered in my researches, a number of theaters which do seem to offer up an otherworldly presence or two. It’s a popular subject. I wonder if horror flicks do well in theaters with permanent after-hours populations?

First to come to mind is the Pantages in L.A., a glorious palace with a glamorous ghost inside. He’s even famous! Howard Hughes owned the place from 1949 to 1967, and had an office over the theater. When the building was being renovated, his spectre appeared one day to a workman, drifting over the scaffolding and onto the balcony. When the hapless worker asked it what it wanted, it melted into thin  air, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare. Hughes’ ghost is usually well-dressed, which doesn’t necessarily sync with his image, at least in latter days, when he became completely unhinged (syphilis? obsessive compulsive disorder? both?). A singing female spirit is said to keep him company (Jean Tierney? Rita Hayworth? Ava Gardner? — they were all at one time his lovers). Whoever she is, she’s said to have haunted a mic being set up for a performance. Banging noises and cigarette smoke also provide atmosphere for some of these haunts.

The Strand in Skowhegan Maine has a big rep and a very angry ghost, apparently. Built in 1929, it’s a small palace, originally 900-plus seats. Someone died in an apartment over the theater back in 1978, and the ghost exacts a kind of revenge on people, especially workmen. (Why always workmen?) Several were shocked by their own electrical tools, despite the fact that they weren’t plugged in. Stains appeared on newly-painted walls, and a piece of balcony ceiling tile was thrown at someone. Handprints found on the movie screen seem dubious evidence of anything to me, but you never know.

The St. James Theater in Wellington, New Zealand was originally home to silent movies, but there’s nothing silent about it these days. For one thing, a “wailing woman,” supposedly the ghost of an actress who was booed off the stage, demands an encore. Some blame her for the misfortunes of current successful actresses, who’ve fallen and broken various limbs. A WWII boys’ choir sang its last performance at the theater before boarding a ship that was lost at sea. It is said the choir sings every now and again for staff and stagehands. Then there’s Yuri, a Russian acrobat, who fell to his death in a performance, and is credited with putting on a periodic light show.   

What is it about theaters that seems to welcome the paranormal? Carney folk are notoriously superstitious: actors can’t run lines from MacBeth, or call that “cursed” drama anything but “the Scottish play,” except outside the theater; nobody knows exactly why. Whistling on stage is also verboten, and the expression “break a leg” — to replace “good luck” — is a theatrical invention.

A number of New York theaters are thought to be haunted, most notably Radio City Music Hall, which harbors the ghost of its builder, Samuel Roxy Rothafel. On the occasional opening night he appears, they say, accompanied by an elegant woman. Opening night hauntings would make sense. Radio City’s grand opening, December 27, 1932, was a notorious turkey, beginning at 8 PM and running to 2 AM, with so many acts and extravaganzas they literally canceled each other out. Film historian Terry Ramsaye observed, "...if the seating capacity of the Radio City Music Hall is precisely 6,200, then just exactly 6,199 persons must have been aware at the initial performance that they were eyewitnesses to...the unveiling of the world's best ‘bust.’” Roxy lost control of the deep-in-debt music hall soon after its debut and died a few years later.

The New Amsterdam Theatre harbors, supposedly, the ghost of silent film star Olive Thomas. That theater was the home of the Ziegfield Follies, of which she was perhaps the greatest star (also, for a time, the lover of Flo Ziegfield). Thomas actually died of mercury poisoning in Paris, but it  makes an attractive story to think of her as haunting the theater, a story the Disney folks have not discouraged. 

I haven’t done the research, but assume there is a “ghost light” in many of the live theaters I’ve mentioned. That’s the solitary light on a post, center stage, when the theater is dark at night. It's practical purpose is to keep ushers or stagehands from falling into the orchestra pit before they manage to find the lighting grid, but there are lots of superstitions that surround ghost lights. Tradition holds that every theater has at least one ghost to deal with. The Palace Theatre, London actually keeps two seats open in the balcony for its resident ghosts. One of the perks of ghost lights, for ghosts, is the opportunity to perform onstage, an appeasement that may prevent them from cursing the theater or sabotaging the set or production. 

Most movie palaces are, or have been at one time, live houses. We had a ghost light at the St. George in ’76, a shabby affair. Its cord was frayed, so we didn’t feel good about leaving it lit. How then to mollify the spirits? Leroy was convinced that, behind our giant stained screen, in the space below the fly loft, there were presences of one kind or another. Tired Vaudevillians? Expired managers? The ghosts of ushers past?

​As Prospero reminds us:  We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on.

So it goes.
                                                      
 

Over yogurt this morning, I was struck by the mention of movie-going on a political talk show. (Any mention of movies, movie-going, palaces, film vs. digital, whatever, wakes me instantly.) Senator Chuck Grassley, in a recent statement, condemned three vices he figures [non-wealthy?] people who don’t invest wisely are prey to: “...spending every darn penny they have...on booze or women or movies." Now Grassley is from the heartland (Iowa), and so am I (Ohio, originally); so I got it instantly that movie-going is to him a wasteful and low kind of activity. It seemed familiar; what a coincidence, I mused, having just begun a post that touches on the possibly sinful aspects of movie-going, as originally defined by the (Dayton, Ohio) father of an old friend.

​Thom has recently written me about the Victory Theatre in Dayton, his favorite of the downtown houses there. It still stands, moniker changed to the Victoria, having survived a number of fires and the nearness of a1970‘s-era wrecker’s ball. Thom’s fondest memory of the Victory/Victoria is the day his dad took him downtown to see The Spirit of St. Louis and have dinner at a favorite restaurant.

Movies were always  social occasions when we were growing up: the family outing at Cinerama on a Sunday, or a date at some or another opulent palace, or even just a matinee with friends. We knew the social importance of movies when we took over the St. George Theatre, that brief year in our lives, 1976, when palaces were disappearing as quickly as fireflies at the end of a summer night. Thom was with us for part of that adventure, as our “standpipe operator.” The St. George must’ve seemed to Thom just a little bit like the Victory, back in Dayton.

A mid-size city in close proximity to Cincinnati, Dayton has always had something to do with flight (think the Wright Brothers). Thom, eight years old and sick with the flu, had devoured in two days all of The Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh’s personal account of his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection that year. Thom loved everything that had anything to do with flying.

My Dad came home from work and Mom told him I had read Lindbergh’s book. He didn't  believe it at first...so he quizzed me and I "passed." 

I'm not surprised. Thom, who has always had a photographic memory, was bound to be able to recite that whole book verbatim. Later, at the St. George Theatre, he impressed us all, studying for a single night, then acing the really difficult Standpipe Operator’s Test, which allowed our motley crew to stay in business as failing theater operators.

Impressed as Thom’s dad really was with his reading chops, father and son were not really close.

It wasn't that my dad was distant. It's just that his interests and my interests did not mesh in any way. He loved...to fish, go mushroom hunting and blackberrying and work on the yard. I couldn't sit still in a boat for hours on end and not be completely bored; I've never liked getting dirty...and yard work to me is fruitless...why waste time?

Thom’s dad was a print specialist in an ad agency downtown, a detail man, whose front lawn never had a blade of grass out of place. He was also an old-style Congregationalist. 

...we didn't go to movies. Dad had a strong Protestant belief that movies were the Devil's work (I was strictly forbidden to go to the movies on Sunday, for instance).

In addition to disapproving of flicks, Thom’s dad actually had an aversion to airplanes, having witnessed a disastrous crash at a 1920s air show. Still, he remembered Lindbergh’s flight, as headlines in the Dayton Daily News, and when the movie version of The Spirit, starring Jimmy Stewart, came to the Victory’s giant screen, father astonished son by suggesting they go downtown to the Victory to see it!

Built in 1866 as the Turner Opera House, the theater burned two years after that, rising from its ashes as the Grand Opera House, which it remained until after the WWI Armistice, morphing into the Victory. It remained a live house for another decade: Houdini performed there in 1925, using — it is said — the theater’s vents for his great escape. With the advent of talkies, the theater was outfitted for movies, and, beginning in the thirties, became a movie palace, remaining so through Thom’s childhood. Was it the Victory’s serene past as an opera house that made it seem more respectable to Thom’s dad than other showier theaters in downtown Dayton?

The RKO Keith's, whose last picture before demolition would ironically be entitled Once Before I Die, was to fall to wreckers a decade after Thom and his dad had their downtown date. The RKO Colonial, perhaps the showiest of all with its two marble staircases, would undergo demolition seven years later, replaced by a Lutheran church.  Loew's (The Dayton) waited until 1975 to become wreckage, serving ultimately as a parking lot. All of these theaters were showier than the Victory/Victoria, but it was ultimately, the old opera house that Daytonians wanted to save.

As Fred Bartenstein, a founding member of Save the Victory tells it, “... the Loew’s theater downtown across from the Victory was already being demolished. The wrecking ball was literally out on the sidewalk.”  The greater Dayton community rallied, spurred on by a  local radio D.J., who put out a call to listeners to head downtown. According to Bartenstein, “People were driving by and handing money out of their car windows for donations.” A non-profit was formed, and, by 1989, 17.5 million dollars worth of refurbishment turned the Victory into the Victoria, which it remains to this day.

But on that special day in 1957, Jimmy Stewart commanded the Victory’s wide screen, and dinner at Servis and Buhl, with “heavy silver and white tablecloths,” did not disappoint. Thom’s favorite memory of dinner remains — true for most eight-year-olds — dessert. It was some kind of chocolate thing, and it arrived sporting a tiny parasol. Downtown with Dad for the story of Lindbergh, then dinner, and a chocolate dessert with a parasol? Who could ask for anything more?

Thom reflects: I think taking me to the movie was a sort of reward. But, of course, we never discussed it. I was just thrilled to be going with my Dad --  to that movie in particular.
On the subject of other violations of his dad’s scruples about movie-going: 
Well there were a few family visits to Cinerama in Cincinnati.  Dad loved the concept  - the screen that wrapped around the audience, even though there were the two "seams." Plus the subjects of the first Cinerama movies made them more travelogues than anything else. So they were "educational."