Ever go to a movie you really wanted to see, picking the theater first? You wouldn’t have gone to that movie at all if you’d had to see it someplace else. Case in point: when I helped to run a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island (1976), running in the red as we were, we managed to get our hands on The Exorcist, first run in ’74 but taking another turn around the block. We’d paid a small fortune for it, and were already settling in for the usual dejection of Wednesday afternoon, when typically only one or two people showed up to whatever we were showing. 

But wonder of wonders, by four o’clock, lines had begun to form around the block, and by nightfall our 2,672-seat hall had filled nearly to capacity –twice. People told us later it was the dark mysterious cave of our auditorium that had drawn them, with its rich red velvet and gold statuary. Most had already seen the movie first run, but imagined the light of certain key scenes, playing on gilding and drapes, and so they lined up. The first time they’d seen it had been for the movie, the second time for the theater. 
    
What’s the relationship between a movie theater and its movie? In this age of streaming, it’s a good question to ask. 

Last week, I wrote about a certain pop-up theater on the upper west side of Manhattan that has come to be because the constituents miss the closed Lincoln Plaza across the street. They miss watching art house classics, but also something more; the very drabness of the lobby, with its portrait of Humphrey Bogart as Rick from Casablanca, its smoked salmon sandwiches and the proprietors’ daughter’s artwork, at the derelict and empty Lincoln Plaza they hope will one day re-open. This loss has drawn them to rent an auditorium and seek publicity, with hopes.... It’s the Lincoln Plaza they loved, as much as the movies that it showed. 
  
In a memoir workshop I facilitate on Saturdays at the local library, a writer brought in a piece on Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971. Although her piece was dedicated to the link between the sense of smell and memory, with a nod to  the Necco Wafers factory, which dominated the neighborhood with its toothsome scents (chocolate on Wednesdays for example), she broadened it to describe other aspects of the community, including an intriguing reference to Central Square Cinemas, one of two art houses then in the neighborhood. The movie theater blogger in me sat bolt upright when she read the following sentence, “Another indoor space that Necco Wafers could not penetrate was the Central Square Movie Theater. It reeked of popcorn and salt. This venue showed the same picture, The King of Hearts, for five years.”  

Five years? Clearly they were desperate for product! A 1966 film, The King of Hearts, in those days something of a failure, would definitely have been rentable as a B pic, dodging the necessity of booking weekly features — which would require a deposit-and-percentage arrangement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, launched a little later at The Waverly in Manhattan, had, I’d assumed, been the standard-bearer for ritual viewing, the first of its kind, Now I know better. 

If Rocky Horror was more-or-less launched as a cult film by repeat performances at The Waverly,  The King of Hearts was largely pulled out of the viewing trash heap by Central Square. Its reviews in 1966 had been dismal. Without those five faithful years of presentation, and the word-of-mouth that ensued, Hollywood might never have been forced to cut fresh prints.

A bio of Henry Sheehan, film critic and native of Boston notes, “...Further down Mass. Ave. were the twin Central Square Cinemas, though they almost didn’t qualify as a twin, since Philippe De Broca’s King of Hearts took up one screen for at least three years (no joke; there’s some kind of record involved).”

I have been looking hard for evidence of this official record, haven’t found it, but in the process of looking, found the following, in the annals of The Harvard Crimson (1980), “The 1967 film 'King of Hearts' starring Alan Bates, directed by Philippe deBroca, began its run in 1971 as a ‘fluke,’ assistant theater manager David C. Skinner said Sunday. The film began as a co-feature in the double-screen theater, only to skyrocket to a five-year engagement that became a Cambridge classic.

Joseph W. St. George, a film programmer, Sunday said he attributes part of the movie's success to ‘being anti-war when Nixon was invading Cambodia.’ He added, ‘It was absurd, beautiful and warm-hearted. It didn't offend your sensibility. It didn't make you think.’’’ 
 
No doubt it was the anti-war theme of the movie during the darkest years of the Vietnam War that drew people to it initially. Then word-of-mouth, followed by the tradition of attendance at Central Square made it a “Cambridge classic.” In other words, a ritual of attendance. 

Have we lost this important link, between attendance and theater?  Or, as I mentioned earlier, in an age of binge-watching and streaming, attendance at any theater?

Closed since 1980, Central Square Cinemas’ original site is, apparently, a Quest Diagnostics storefront these days. Farther down Massachusetts Avenue, the Orson Welles, the more serious art house in Cambridge, survived another six years, succumbing on May 24, 1986 to a fire which started, sadly, in the popcorn machine. Thus do movie theaters end, either in conflagration, via fire, or in the ice of troubled booking and no attendance.

Afterthoughts:
1. Chris Cato, whose piece, “Scent and Memory,” I’ve referenced (thanks Chris!), also notes, “The Orson Welles Cinema included a record shop, bookstore, and a restaurant that notoriously required strangers sitting at the same table to order the same meal. I ate there only once.” Odd place, Cambridge in 1971!

2. Here’s another intriguing entry from The Harvard Crimson (1975) on booking troubles at Central Cinemas.

“Something magic still happens when you go to the movies,” according to Naomi Rossabi, quoted in a recent Alex Vadukul New York Times article about a currently operational movie theater with actual ushers.

So what if they happen to be 81 and 83 (Ms. Rossabi) respectively? The concession workers and ticket sellers are about the same age. The article continues, describing a recent showing of Mr. Klein, the 1976 World War II psychological thriller; "Ann Logan, 71, yelled directions to customers as she sat in her walker; Norma Levy, 76, sold tickets from rolls of red paper stubs and stashed money into a little metal box; Rita Lee, 88, helped sell refreshments at a foldout table." 

If this sounds like a small-town operation, be surprised: the pop-up is on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where art house enthusiasts mourn the closing of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, two years ago across the street. Despite general dinginess and water leaking from its ceilings, its concession stand sold lox sandwiches, and most quarrels — about sound during foreign films — were amicable enough. Operational from 1981 till a little past the death of one of its two founders, Dan Talbot (and his wife, Toby), it was arguably the best art house in the city, affiliated with a French chain. Its landlord, Milstein Properties, recently declined to renew its lease, citing the expense of repairs, and the theater has displayed a sadly blank marquee ever since. The pop-up cinema just across the street, New Plaza, is, according to the Times, “...trying to establish itself at a time when independent theaters are in a death struggle with streaming video and a generation of moviegoers demanding in-theater craft brews and plush recliner seats.”  

Yep, it’s a troubled time for traditional movie theaters, on a downward slope since the seventies, when I was part of a young group of hopeful entrepreneurs, who strove mightily for a few months in 1975 and the better part of 1976 to keep a 2,672-seat movie palace open, with a movie on-screen, hence this continuing blog.  

Recently, I profiled another operation in rural Pennsylvania, the Mahoning, a drive-in theater, that’s gotten around the problem of not replacing their original projectors with (very expensive) digital projection, by being extremely clever in programming and social media.

Over a year ago, I devoted this column to the Majestic, a Rapp and Rapp theater in Streator, Illinois,  the project of the indefatigable Katie Troccoli and her hard-working family. The Majestic appears, sadly, not to be in operation as of this writing, but knowing Katie, it may rise again.

What do all these theater operations, past and present, open and otherwise, have in common? They either are or were entirely volunteer. What does it say about us as a culture that the movies — that ritual of sitting together in the dark — that held us together through two world wars, Vietnam, the sixties and seventies, even the high-rolling eighties — has devolved to the level of lemonade-stand entrepreneurship? 

Interestingly, the staff of the pop-up New Plaza, might have helped us run the St. George in 1976. In those days, these same ushers and concession workers would have fit right in; they’re only a little older than I am right now. Is this the last gasp of boomers and pre-boomers, who remember the sense of community movie theaters used to afford?

What is it about community, which seems to have almost vanished in a country — and a world — where people don’t talk with people who don’t agree with them, and typically  either watch Fox or MSNBC (or vote pro- or anti- Brexit)? Are we afraid of sitting next to each other in the dark? Or just too lazy to go out? 

The staff of the New Plaza are likely MSNBC watchers at home, but that is not necessarily true of the mixed bag of people who will show up next spring in Pennsylvania, to get the Mahoning ready for another season. From what I can discern, they just love drive-in theaters, and the variegated fare they remember from growing up at them. This is how it was for us at the St. George in Staten Island, while we struggled to keep ten red and gold doors open.

In September, 2018, Thomas Beller (“The Death of a Movie Theater,” The New Yorker), quoted his mother on the closing of Lincoln Plaza:

“It is not so much the physical place as it is the atmosphere. The level of the films. The world of the films selected that created, in turn, a world of its own that encompassed us. The physical space became dear to us. I want to hug it so it could not be taken away from us. But it is not hug-able.” 

That’s how I feel about The Paris, recently closed, but saved again, perversely, by Netflix for premiers, something I suppose we’re expected to be grateful for. It’s how I felt about the Albee in downtown Cincinnati where I grew up, which kept its appointment with a wrecking crew in 1977, about the time we were forced out of the St. George in Staten Island. We had never intended to be volunteers there, but we had no choice, barely able to pay our teen concession and box-office workers, and eventually unable to make the steep monthly rent. 

So here’s to the New Plaza, on the Upper West Side, where two or three million dollars (what it would take to occupy the vacant Lincoln Plaza across the street) isn’t an out-of-this-world donation for someone whose brownstone is valued at far more. According to New Plaza volunteer, Barry Schulman, “We only need one of those people. Maybe two. We’ll let them name the place.”

Good luck guys.

Afterthoughts:
1. New Plaza’s single-screen auditorium, rented from the New York Institute of Technology, seats 259 people, and is secure to the volunteers until at least May, 2020. Meanwhile, they’re looking for donations!

2. My husband, when he was nine or ten, operated his first movie theater in a neighbor’s backyard, the screen a bed-sheet, bottles of Kool-Aid for sale, the clientele on bicycles. You could say it was a pop-up drive-in!

Covering nearly half a city block, seven stories tall with three basements and sub-basements, and eighteen dressing rooms, the St. George Theatre in 1976, when we arrived, was a massive time capsule. Suddenly let loose in a 2,672-seat movie palace, a theater that had, since its opening in 1929, seen a lot of action — both live and cinematic — we stumbled on something new and surprising, even historic, almost every day. I’m thinking now of a singular discovery we made in a storage space beneath the stage.

Barely five feet high, the space had originally been designed to hold the elevator for the theater’s 3/30 Wurlitzer organ. Behind that vacant space however, a friend found a megaphone-like device nearly three feet across. It reminded Dean of the loudspeakers once hung on telephone poles at his high school stadium. This one had a Western Electric logo at its base, and VitaPhone Sound imprinted on the bell. The logo jogged his memory; hadn’t we found some literature in a mezzanine-level storage closet? 

According to those frayed pages, the Vitaphone dated back to the day the St. George Theatre opened with So This is College on December 4, 1929. The movie was an early “Talking Picture” — the hot new technology.  A few years later, beginning in the early 1930‘s, all talking pictures would use an SOF (Sound on Film) format — an optical audio track on the film itself. But the first ever Talkie, usually credited as The Jazz Singer and predating So This is College by two years, had been, for all the hoopla, a primitive product. It premiered on August 6, 1927 at The Warner Brothers Theater in Manhattan. Al Jolson’s first spoken words both seen and heard were “Wait a minute...wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The film and its technology were a smash, a Vitaphone/Western Electric sensation. 

This meant that the sound portion of the film was actually presented on a 33 1/3 16-inch record, amplified through one or more speakers like the one we found beneath the stage. Amazingly, projectionists in the late 1920’s had to first cue the film for a “talkie” to a specific marked frame, then cue the record to a white arrow painted on the disc itself.  Hopefully both image and sound started at once. However, keeping the two tracks in sync was a mechanical process which the poor projectionist had to struggle with as each 11-minute reel spun out.

The evolution of Vitaphone involved an unlikely assortment of characters, including Lee DeForest (one of the fathers of radio who contributed the Audion Amplifier Tube in 1913), Will Hayes (whose Hayes Commission on censorship would trouble the industry for decades — nonetheless credited with the first spoken words “on film” — introducing The Jazz Singer), and Harry Warner, the film mogul, one of the Warner Brothers. Vitaphone also involved mega industries of the times, including Western Electric — later Bell Labs, and the Edison Company, not to mention Paramount Pictures — Warner’s competition. The race to good sound dominated the movie business in the mid-twenties and well into the thirties.

But I digress. Having found the scuffed and dusty battleship-grey speaker horn, with some cloth-covered electrical wires sprouting from its end, and a poster announcing the marvels of a “talking picture house on Staten Island,” we looked for the amplifier, the phonograph and other relics of the theater’s first sound system, but they were lost to time, perhaps in some sub-basement.

So it goes in an aging movie palace. Despite our inability to pay even the most basic bills in our year at the theater, we managed, by sleight-of-hand, to install improved sound behind our grape-soda-stained giant screen, importing two (state-of-the-art for their time) Altec-Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers from a defunct movie theater we knew something about back in Cincinnati. 

After seeing the five-foot tall VoT’s, I was stunned. “Amazing! — that that Vitaphone thing once managed somehow to fill this whole place with sound!”  The Vitaphone hadn’t had to work very hard. We were accustomed to talking to each other center-stage to upper balcony, without in the least straining our voices, and not even a rumor of an echo. The St. George was and is (how miraculous that I can speak of our theater still in the present tense!) an acoustic grande dame of ever-increasing beauty. 

Afterthoughts:

1. The literal first sound in movies is hard to pin down.  Jolson’s famous “...wait a minute...” begins the first spoken words in film, but sound had been coming on for some time.  Here’s a scrap of The Jazz Singer entry from Wikipedia, to illustrate: “The...Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, Don Juan (premiered August 1926) and The Better 'Ole (premiered October 1926), like three more that followed in early 1927 (When a Man Loves, Old San Francisco, and The First Auto), had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects. The Jazz Singer contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech.”
2. It’s hard to imagine, in our over-saturated media age, what the advent of sound meant to motionpictures. So many fine actors, whose gifts were largely visual, lost their careers because their voices just weren’t up to it. Vilma Banky couldn’t lose her Hungarian accent. Douglas Fairbanks retired early. Clara Bow, the “It” girl, summed it all up, “I hate talkies,” she said in 1930. “They’re stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there’s no chance for action.” Check it out. 

A wide-eyed patron, traveling in his own personal cloud of weed, staggers to the candy stand and slaps down a ten dollar bill.

“Tell me when this is gone!” he commands. 
 
On screen behind him, dimly visible through the glass that separates the lobby from the auditorium, Reefer Madness, that antique polemic on the evils of Marijuana, flickers through a haze of smoke. 
 
Ten dollars at a candy stand in 1976 was a considerable investment in junk food, requiring a heroic effort at consumption, but this guy was up to it, even if he did need help carrying four large popcorns, three frozen Snickers, six double packs of Reese Cups, three or four Charlston Chews and God-knows-what-else back into the dark. The usher who’d helped carry his groceries, retreated once more to his perch in the empty balcony, where if you were lucky you could sometimes catch a contact high from rising plumes of smoke. 
 
If you’re new to this blog, you might not know that I was, at the age of 28, a movie theater operator, along with my husband and several partners, in a grand old Staten Island movie palace, the St. George Theatre. We were perpetually desperate, undercapitalized and, admittedly, a total anachronism, with our single large screen and 2,672 seats. We only lasted a year, but we learned so much.
 
The whole point of the midnight show was what exactly? It drove concession sales through the roof, but we owed so much to the concession company — for loans we’d taken out against the stand’s profitability — that we were losing money staying open after midnight. The last showing of the regular feature finished around 11:40. Abe, the union projectionist, was pleased to clock in for another six-hours (at double time). Why not? Reefer Madness only lasted sixty-six minutes. He knew he’d be home in bed by three.
 
Meanwhile, across the water in Manhattan at the Waverly, folks who’d lined up in costumes were already talking back to Rocky Horror Picture Show, the ultimate midnight fare. All we wanted was a crack at Rocky Horror, but the Waverly and one other theater in Manhattan had had a lock on the cult extravaganza since April Fool’s Day when it opened.
 
As a flea-bag suburban house, we had to content ourselves with Woodstock (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972 — “Filth is my politics, filth is my life!”), Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Ken Russell’s controversial 1969 film, The Devils (which though censored, still involved orgiastic nuns), The Who’s Tommy, and other played-out stuff. 
 
Twenty minutes before midnight, we did a clean sweep, and when we were reasonably sure those who’d come for the regular feature had gone home, we re-opened to sometimes as few as forty or as many as four hundred kids who paid a dollar fifty for solitude, sex, if they could sneak up to the balcony, or just a place to smoke weed and eat candy.
 
One Saturday just after midnight, Dean got into a shouting match in the lobby with three patrons who’d entered at eight o’clock for the last showing of The Omen, our regular feature that week. He insisted the midnight show was a separate admission. “It says so in the paper!”
 
“We’ve already bought a ticket, man...” a tall guy in a feathered robe insisted,
 
“...besides, movies belong to the people, they should be free.” 
 
(Power-to-the-people pronouncements were common in the sixties and seventies).
 
Well the show might as well have been free; we weren’t making any money. Dean sighed and studied the lobby's chandelier, two of its bulbs already burned out.
 
“Go on and enjoy yourselves,” he told them.
 
Afterthought:
Here’s The New York Times, circa 1995 on the subject of midnight movies (campy, etc.), as opposed to regular features shown at midnight (boring).  “...the first midnight movie is generally agreed to have taken place in late 1969 at the Elgin Theater (now defunct) in Chelsea. The movie was El Topo, a cryptic, hallucinatory and extremely violent western by the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky.”