A friend who lives near Philly mentioned the other day that he’d come up to NYC to see the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall; don’t believe he even spent the night, just came and went, mesmerized by the mechanics of the show, the elaborate stagecraft, the appearing and disappearing orchestra, and no doubt the iconic Wooden Soldier Fall, a dance move dating back to 1933, that mimics falling dominoes, as each dancer/soldier falls on the next one. This year’s show, I’m told, includes the falling soldiers and, of course, the usual camels, part of the traditional “Living Nativity” — also dating back to ‘33. There are other post-millennial wonders of course, including a finale with overhead drones. Where are there NOT drones these days? I live in the five boroughs, so of course haven’t been to the Christmas Show in years. The last time was about fifteen years ago with my sister, who’d come north to see me through a knee operation. I was on crutches, barely able to walk, so the sight of all those perfectly proportioned bodies, their parallel legs raised six inches above their heads, seemed surreal. But then, I’ve always found chorus lines dream-like...
 
It all started on December 21, 1933, the year after the Music Hall opened. That first Christmas Show was accompanied by the movie Flying Down to Rio (strange choice, perhaps) and The Night Before Christmas, a Walt Disney Silly Symphony — an animated short film. The show, created by the Music Hall's stage producer Leon Leonidoff and none other than Vincente Minnelli, (then Radio City’s music director) lasted just two weeks.
 
Fast forward to the 1970‘s: the nearly six-thousand-seat Radio City was still showing movies and presenting a stage show, but drawing scant audiences, something I failed to notice that year, busy as I was, running a movie palace of my own. (Well, not my own, because I didn’t own it, just the right to go broke paying its rent). That would be the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat hall in Staten Island, seventy blocks south of Radio City and a ferry-ride away. We had no Christmas Show at the St. George in 1976, just a four-wall “deal” involving a little-known movie called In Search of Noah’s Ark, which purported to prove that pieces of Noah’s original ark had been found on Mt. Ararat. Well, it was a living, at least for that month, and because it was a four-wall, we didn’t have to do anything but turn the theater over to  Sun Pictures, and pop some popcorn. Towards the end of the Noah’s Ark run, we managed to get a local teen escape artist/magician onstage between showings, to take the chill off.  
 
As a result of running the St. George, I met Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City and, the following year, got a private tour of our big sister theater, including a private showing of some or other forgettable movie (Pete’s Dragon?) and a rehearsal of the Rockettes. A private showing in a nearly six-thousand-seat hall really is a little unnerving... By that time, I was an ex-movie theater operator, and could see just how much trouble big theaters were in everywhere. There was talk, that year and the year after, of the demise of Radio City, the last of the Manhattan behemoth palaces; which brings us to January 1978, when the end nearly did come for the music hall. 
 
“Nostalgia Draws Music Hall Crowds, Despite Cold”
 
The headline could have come out of yesterday’s New York Times, but it didn’t. The date at the top of the column is January 8, 1978. Radio City, Roxy Rothafel’s great gold Deco clamshell of a theatre, occupying — since 1932 — several thousand square feet of prime NYC real estate, about a half-block of Midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was in trouble. Everybody knew about it; 5,690 mostly-vacant seats in Midtown? "Vacant" anything is a no-go in Manhattan. Management promised to keep the doors open till Easter. Then the Rockettes — once upon a time Russell Markert's Music Hall Roxyettes — and the whole shebang would be gone. Folks from as far away as Minnesota braved the frostbite of forty-one years ago, in lines four deep around the corner, compelled by the notion that the Music Hall was going the way of so many palaces. It had been “curtains” (pun intended) for the Roxy, Radio City's sister theater only a few blocks farther downtown (demolished in 1960) and on the other coast, for the 3,387-seat Paramount (aka Graumann’s Metropolitan) in L.A. (torn down in 1961), just to name two spectacular demolitions. By 1978,  it seemed there might be more movie palaces down than standing.
 
I’d read the headlines too, and had felt the despair. I was still grappling with my own severe depression: less than a year before, my team had crash-landed, after trying and failing to keep the St. George open as a movie palace. The year after our failure, my old favorite hometown palace, the RKO Albee, had finally been reduced to a pile of marble and plaster dust in Cincinnati, despite a vigilant Save the Albee committee. My friend and colleague, Robert Endres, then still head projectionist at RCMH, recalls the shock of hearing that Radio City would close:
 
I guess you could say I was ‘stunned’ at the closing announcement as was everyone else. I had been out in Illinois with my parents over the Christmas holiday.... I walked into work that first day back to be told there was a meeting in the large rehearsal hall and we were told to attend. When I got there the Music Hall executive staff was there, as was Marshall [president of Rockefeller Center] who made the announcement. The mood was pretty grim.
           
It was a time, the late seventies, when hardly anybody could see far enough into the future to imagine how the great halls could ever be useful again. Across America, in most cities, suburbanites hardly ever went “downtown” anymore: derelict palaces in badly-lit urban settings made downtown movie-going seem a lonely, even dangerous experience. Even inside the theaters, there were incidents. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb. Such was the life of the urban movie-goer — and exhibitor.
 
The Music Hall had an entirely different problem. Manhattan is the ultimate “downtown,“ so even in the dire seventies, there were plenty of people on Midtown streets, and the Music Hall was certainly safe, if hardly populated. But with nearly six thousand seats, a dwindling NYC tourism couldn’t begin to support Radio City; and New Yorkers didn’t think of the Music Hall as a place to go for movies. To quote New York on the subject of moviegoing in 1978, “ You consulted one of the foldout sheets everyone had tacked above their desks or in their kitchen, from the revival houses, blessed be their names—the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Regency, Theatre 80 Saint Marks, the Bleecker Street Cinema.” These were the theaters of the day. Ironically, it’s these very art houses that are mostly gone now, while among other refurbished movie palaces, Radio City stands. 
 
It was — who else? — the Rockettes who finally saved Radio City. Two days after Alton Marshall made the announcement that the theater’s last day would be April 12, Rosemary Novellino the dance captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company and Eileen Collins, the Rockettes' union rep, founded The Showpeople’s Committee To Save Radio City Music Hall, with the Rockettes at the movement’s core.
 
While all those patrons were standing in lines four deep on the cold pavement, Rockettes were entertaining them! The committee, meanwhile, launched its letter-writing campaign gathering better than 150,000 signatures worldwide, an impressive feat pre-internet. This and a number of efforts at publicity – including some guerrilla theater, in which committee members gathered signatures while dressed in suits of armor (to highlight their “war” to save the Music Hall) – could not be ignored by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the morning of March 14, the day of Radio City’s Commission hearing, the committee organized an “impromptu” Rockette kick line on the steps of City Hall. 
 
Two weeks later on March 28, the Music Hall's interior was declared a landmark, and not a moment too soon, given Marshall's deadline. Six weeks after that, on May 12, 1978, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. 
 
A little more than forty years after the Rockettes danced in the cold — for all those people who assumed they were getting a last look at Radio City — the hall is still standing, a live house featuring occasional film.  
 
As are many grand theaters across America, including my own St. George. Despite our failure to keep it alive as a movie house in 1976, and a number of failed subsequent efforts by entrepreneurs at repurposing the St. George (roller rink, dinner theater, antiques venue), it’s alive and kicking; and I mean that literally, with a children’s corps of dancers onstage many afternoons. This story can be had via the recent PBS Documentary, Treasures of New York: St. George Theatre starring our theater’s eventual savior, Rosemary Cappozalo, and her family. Rosemary, or "Mrs. Rosemary," as she's known in Staten Island, was a Julliard-trained dancer and veteran teacher herself. What is it about dancers? In the cold, on the sidewalk, or in a deserted theater, they just keep moving!
 
Afterthoughts:  
1. Coming Soon: the story of Shea’s Buffalo, the only Tiffany-designed theater still standing, a theater-rescue story to follow the near-demise of Radio City.
​
2. The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York City would never have existed if the city hadn’t demolished one of its most glorious buildings, the old Penn Station, and felt a deal of remorse about that fact, passing the Landmarks Law in 1965. So without the loss of that fine Beaux Arts transportation hub, Radio City Music Hall (and a number of other buildings, including Grand Central and large parts of the Broadway Theater District) might never have been spared.

3. Something anecdotal: a story in my husband’s family involves a friend of his father’s, a WWII G.I. who was in the vanguard of American troops that liberated Paris in 1944. Story goes, he was riding on a tank in the liberation parade when a woman tossed him some flowers, exclaiming, “Vive les americaines!” In return, the soldier shouted, in his best high school French, “Vive la Arc de Triomphe.” Determined to have the last salute, the smiling woman sang out, “...et vive la Radio City Music Hall!”

​4. Bob  Endres (formerly of RCMH) gets the last say:  “I heard one interesting story from a former vice president who, after he retired, had lunch with Alton Marshall...President of Rock Center. Marshall apparently told him that they really didn't want to close the Hall, but...had to do something about the format, so they put the story out that they were going to close...to get enough attention to be able to restructure...”  

Now that the St. George Theatre, our local palace, has a movie screen for the first time in forty-one years, I’m thinking wistfully about the old one. I remember it well, having run the 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque theater, in the last full year of its cinema career (1976). After serving briefly as a flea market and a dangerous dark period of near demolition, the St. George is, these days, largely a performance space, as so many surviving movie palaces are. But film is finding its way back into the palaces of yore; think the United Palace of the Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights) and the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, N.C. among so many across the U.S. So the St. George has caught a ride on the film series band-wagon.

Descending on a pipe from the fly loft, the theater’s current screen is a relative postage stamp, compared to its predecessor, a classic of the 1950’s, mounted on a giant curved stretcher. Consisting of a huge piece of heavy white perforated material, the old screen had tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual metals embedded in their surfaces. Designed to accept Cinemascope, our screen had a good “gain” — or reflectivity — and was “pearlescent.” Black tones came across as very dark gray, and the overall image was bright — if you ignored the grape soda stains in the lower left-hand corner, from some impulsive long-gone patron. 

The screen curved slightly outward at the left and right edges. I always thought the curve had something to do with wrapping the audience in light, and I was partially right. A flat screen makes light travel farther to its corners, encouraging a slightly distorted image, the so-called “pincushion effect.” Godzilla battled Megalon on our screen with no distortion, the grape stain hardly evident, once the battle was underway.

Everything I know about the screen and screens in general, I have learned in retrospect. In 1976, we were just trying to stay alive, relieved if more than a few hundred people paid money to sit in the dark and watch, and grateful that we had a screen at all. Although we could hardly afford a new one, our buddy, Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall conspired briefly to get us a “used” screen at no charge. Radio City, then primarily a movie theater, traditionally replaced its pristine screen annually (no soda stains for them). Theirs was better than twice the size of ours; so half of a discarded Radio City screen would have been plenty. Alas, our stint at the St. George was over before we could take advantage of this bargain.

Certain ushers liked to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. Little did our audience know that, while they were watching, all sorts of antics were going on behind the screen. Each night an usher went into the shadows back stage to engage two switches: one to bring up the red and blue footlights and another to light the house sconces, as the film ended. Leroy — scrawny, barely 5’5” and 130 pounds — was always reluctant to go into the dark, even if only a comedy was showing. 

One night during the last reel of The Exorcist it fell to a reluctant Leroy to do this duty. One priest was already dead and another would soon hurl himself from a window, possessed by the Devil. Add all of this to the soundtrack of tubular bells — indeed creepy. Unbeknownst to Leroy, Cheri, a bit of the devil already in her, lurked in the shadows, stage right. As he approached, she pushed a flashlight beneath her chin and rasped out, “I willlllllll possess you!”

The blood-curdling scream and pounding footsteps that came easily through the perforated screen, probably seemed just one more chilling movie sound effect to folks still seated in the house. Who knows if some long-ago patron of ours hasn’t downloaded the movie recently and wondered as the credits rolled, Wasn’t there a last scream?

Afterthought: In last week’s post, I recounted an evening spent at the first movie to show at the St. George in decades, Working Girl, on the new small screen I mentioned. Heading for the balcony, I felt a bit like a returned working girl myself, glimpsing, as I passed, my former office under the stairs in the lobby: a pang mixed with a thrill.  

I have a number of small souvenirs from the St. George Theatre, originally a 2,672-seat movie palace which I had a hand in running for one year,1976 (and a little way into 1977). Rolls of tickets (1 adult $1.50), Starts Wednesday, Starts Sunday, and other signs for every day of the week, BALCONY CLOS D, an original EXIT sign, cast-aluminum marquee signage: TECHNICOLOR, AND, even a lone cast-aluminum marquee comma. Our year in the theater didn’t end well, as you may already know. Perpetually in the red, in a decade when single-screen theaters, let alone movie palaces, were imperiled, we cut corners in all sorts of crazy ways, like running the film but not the light in the projector, to keep on schedule, in case somebody showed up. The projectors ran on very expensive “carbons,” two of which (positive meets negative) created an “arc” similar to that used in welding, hence fire, hence light. Primitive? The technology was old even then. I have a box of carbons, come to think about it, one more ancient souvenir.

And now I have a new item to add to my St. George Theatre collection, a drink cup bearing the legend “St. George Theatre, A Non-Profit Organization.” As my husband Dean is fond of remarking, “We were non-profit back then, too; we just didn’t know it!” 

I got this cup last week for attending the first movie offered at the St. George since we loaded up our U-Haul forty-one years ago. 

For a long time, the current proprietors, a local family with roots in children’s dance, Rosemary Cappozalo and her daughters, Luanne Sorrentino, and Doreen Cugno,  seemed reluctant to present movies. Hadn’t the theater originally been built for Vaudeville? The fact that the old stained screen had burned long ago in a fire had to have been something of an impediment; but several local groups, including Staten Island Arts, have shown interest in presenting movies; and arts grants are a good thing  – that’s what admitting you’re actually not-for-profit gets you! 

Working Girl, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, was the entertainment of the evening, a movie born of the decade that followed our theater time. Our Zeitgeist had been all about horror (The Exorcist, Burnt Offerings, Carrie) or mean streets: Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Cooley High; but by 1988, the St. George was dark, having exhausted its brief post-movie house careers as 1.) a flea market and 2.) a roller rink. Across the harbor, mean streets had given way to Wall Street and the Reagan years. 
It had been bitterly cold when I’d last seen a movie in the theater, February, 1977. Carrie; I remember shivering in the balcony. It was too cold to sit down.The landlord had stopped heating our beloved cave in late November, and we had worked for months in the cold, selling tickets with gloves on, warming our hands in the popcorn machine. To watch the first movie officially screened in almost half a century, at the theater we lost — despite every effort, legal and otherwise, to keep it open — and for that movie to drag New York Harbor uphill just a few blocks, and let it fill the screen before us, while we sat in the familiar (somehow warm) dark, was my catnip. 

Friends I was sitting with had never seen the theater’s interior before, so I gave it to them in backstage tales, explaining why a digital projector tethered to the lip of the balcony isn’t the same at all as two carbon arc projectors, pointing up and back at the darkened portals of the projection booth. We had wine and popcorn, a strange pairing, one that seemed wrong, but made me wonder if I’d have gotten through the winter of 1977 better with a little pinot noir hidden behind the candy stand. There had been grass, but I wasn’t much given to smoking it back then; besides, it was expensive, and we were broke. 

There were vendors the other night, working the lobby and the mezzanine. You could get your hair styled and teased on the spot, you could buy a vintage coat with shoulder pads. For many of the nine hundred or so people who showed up, it was an event, to share on social media, a local arts party. 
Where was I? What decade was I in? Melanie Griffith, Alec Baldwin, and Harrison Ford were all so young, they could have played adolescent walk-on roles in one or another of the movies we showed.  I just checked: Griffith actually DID play such a role in Smile, a 1975 Indy we showed early in ’76. 

I settled in and watched. The format  of the new screen was, as I’d feared, terrible, almost square; the title, Working Girl, was at risk of losing its W and its l, on the truncated flat white surface. As is true almost everywhere nowadays, the beam didn’t come from on high; it lacked a certain divinity.
I closed my eyes and listened to the movie; and, thanks to those gorgeous acoustics I knew all about, the sound track wrapped itself around us, voices in a dream. The three of us — my goddaughter, her mother (my friend) and I — had planned to walk out after the opening, having come to see a New York Harbor we two older women remembered commuting back and forth on, with its then-intact World Trade Center and packed morning ferry.  As it turned out, we stayed a little way into the movie, past the point where Melanie Griffith cuts her hair.

“We’re walking out of the 1980’s,” I whispered, as we made our way down the steps from the balcony.

Or was it the seventies? 

“This is really something. I wish I could enter the settings of my first adventures...” my friend said.

She meant, “...the way you do when you come here.” 

​Well, she had a point. (What exactly is the past?)

“When it’s winter, and I’ve got tickets to a concert here, I can’t quite believe my feet are warm,” is all I had to say.

​Movies are time-benders, living dreams. Movie palaces — I truly believe this — are the Faberge Eggs built to contain them.

One slate-sky day in 2003, I rounded the corner on Hyatt St. in Staten Island, just a few blocks north of New York Harbor and the ferries, and a few blocks south of my house on the hill. I was just about to pass the St. George Theatre, which, as a matter of fact, I’d gone bankrupt running as a movie palace, twenty-seven years before. The theater had been closed for most of those years, but it wasn’t closed that day. There, to my astonishment, under the crumbling marquee, was a pair of star wagons, a catering truck and some generators; a movie was obviously in the making. I’ve seen star wagons galore and nearly tripped over half-dressed actors of some renown across the water in Manhattan; Richard Pryor, sitting on a folding chair on Bleecker Street next to a fire hydrant sometime in 1989 comes to mind; but my home borough is a rarer location site, and our local, then-defunct movie palace rarer still. The movie being filmed that week was, it turned out, School of Rock, the vehicle that propelled Jack Black into the indie stratosphere. It’s presence caused me to reflect, even then, about theaters as locales for movies. How many movies do you know that feature a theater? 

Certain movies practically are their locations: Cinema Paradiso, The Last Picture Show, The Projectionist, Buster Keaton’s silent classic, Sherlock Jr. The last two involve fantasizing projectionists, while Cinema Paradiso and The Last Picture Show involve small-town memories of a returned successful artist. 
The movie theater in Cinema Paradiso wasn’t actual, but a confection based on the memories of its director, Giuseppe Tornatore, of his hometown in Sicily. To get a sense of how the mind of a director searching for location actually works, here’s a quote from movie-locations.com. 

Giancaldo (fictional name for the town), is based on the director’s birthplace of Bagheria, a short train or bus ride to the east of Palermo in northern Sicily...Although scenes were filmed in Bagheria, the famous town square [in the film] is Piazza Umberto in the village of Palazzo Adriano, about 30 miles to the south of Palermo...

The ‘Paradiso’ cinema was built here, at Via Nino Bixio, overlooking the octagonal Baroque fountain, which dates from 1608. The set obviously didn’t survive the filming, but you can still recognize the nearby house onto which Alfredo projects [the film] I Pompieri Di Viggiu (The Firemen Of Viggiu) ... Just to the west, the two churches seen in the film face each other across the piazza.

Like Tornatore, the novelist Larry McMurtry based The Last Picture Show on a reminiscence of his hometown of Archer City, Texas, fictionalized in the novel as “Thalia.” Peter Bogdanovich, his director, dubbed it “Anarene;” in the film, but no matter, the real Archer City served as the location for this 1971 movie. At the time, the town movie theater, the Royal, was closed down, just a shell, superficially spiffed up to become a temporary stage-set. This is where it gets interesting. According to movie- locations.com, 

In the Nineties, ambitious plans to restore the theatre finally bore fruit and, after 35 years, the Royal opened its doors again [this time] as a successful live theatre. 

The movie had become a classic, curated by the Library of Congress, and the Royal began attracting tourists. These days it hosts the Texasville Opry, the Late Week Lazy Boy Supper Club and numerous plays and performances. Its career as a dedicated movie house is over, but as a live venue,  the Royal has only just begun; and largely on account of the movie!

Let’s not ignore either of the projectionist flicks, Keaton’s Sherlocke Jr., and that weird indie, The Projectionist, both of which involve the craft of projection. I don’t know if the movie house in Keaton’s flick is or was real (if you happen to know, please tell me!), but the movie theater featured in The Projectionist, is an amalgam of several, according to IMDB: 

The film's main setting, a once-lush Times Square movie house, was composited with the façade of an Upper West Side cinema and the projection booth of an Asbury Park theater donated by the Walter Reade Organization in return for the courtesy of a first look. 

If you’ve never seen this 1970 movie, I strongly recommend it. Rodney Dangerfield plays the sleezy and utterly-believable manager, and Chuck McCann, the dreamy projectionist who eventually morphs into Captain Flash. Its unreality, based on the delusions of the projectionist himself, is its greatest charm. He longs for nothing more than to be a hero in a movie, that is, to cross over into the screen.

Which brings us to another movie that contains a movie inside it, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Woody Allen’s 1985 comedy presents a woman who falls in love with a fictional archaeologist, resulting in that character walking literally off of the movie screen and into real life. The film takes place in Depression-era New Jersey, but the theater where Cecilia (played by Mia Farrow) sees fictional Purple Rose over and over again, is named after The Jewel movie house in Brooklyn — one of the first theaters in Allen’s old neighborhood to show foreign films, and perhaps his favorite theater. Movie house scenes were actually filmed in the Kent Theatre on Coney Island Avenue in Flatbush, still operating today.

According to the New York Times, Allen, 

....recalled seeing cartoon double features for 11 cents at the Kent when he was young; entry came with a gift, like a comic book or a toy gun. He said the theater was “a pleasant addition” to the neighborhood, as it was the last place you could see a film before “it vanished into movie oblivion.”

How many directors, novelists and screenwriters have one or two hometown movie theaters on the shelf of their imaginations?

L.A. is, of course, the Mecca of movie house locations, perhaps most recently the Rialto (not the one in the downtown district, but the one in Pasadena), which serves as a locale for Sebastian and Mia’s first date in La La Land.  Sadly, it appears to have morphed into a church. Ah well.

What is it about the movie theater within the movie? Maybe the whole deal about filming inside a theater is a  kind of grown-up dollhouse longing, the famous theoretical “fourth wall” of theater broken down, for easier entrance?

Afterthought: Check out this formidable list of L.A. theaters that have served and continue to serve as locations.