I once (1976) helped run a theater, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, that contained, beneath its gilded proscenium, a single viewing screen arguably the size of a small playing field. What a wonder, that there ever were such behemoths, that single-screen houses had, until the 1970‘s, been the norm, or that people ever gathered together in the dark to watch a one-and-a-half-story tall Katherine Hepburn kiss an equally mammoth Spencer Tracey. The New York Times recently featured an image of a fan laughing while presumably watching Comedy Central on a cell phone. Screen size may be irrelevant these days, but it was once a subject of conversation, as when, in 1976, MGM finally released Gone With the Wind to television — first to HBO and, in November, to network television (NBC). It became (ironically) and remains, the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network, watched — in relative miniature — by 65 percent of television viewers. I watched on a portable Sony Trinitron at a lunch counter in Florida, as Rhett carried Scarlet up what seemed, at the time, like a dollhouse staircase. 

By then TV had been eroding the habit of movie-going for a couple of decades, a back-and-forth struggle. In 1963, the fledgling American Multi Cinema (AMC) Theatres — originally Durwood Theatres owned by Stanley H. Durwood — opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in Kansas City presumably to cut overhead, but also to steal back some of the viewing audience, by offering a choice of titles. Viewers — used to their Zeniths, Sonys  and Motorolas — didn’t seem to care about the relative smallness of these screens, and the trend caught on. A very American crisis ensued:  by 1976, there were actually too many screens for the product that Hollywood offered; a sudden 7.5 percent decline in movie theater attendance sent the movie business into a panic.

The average single-screen movie theater operator — most often located in a crumbling downtown area — couldn’t hope to compete for scarce film offerings. 

We were that operator. Our unofficial anthem during the dark winter of 1977 — a parody of an American Airlines ad then running on TV — went something like this:  “With our big screen to the north and our snack-stand to the south, we’re the St. George Theatre, living from hand to mouth.” 
The St. George Theatre ended its days as a movie house with our departure in 1977, the same year Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn and a number of other great old palaces went dark. Our luminous — if grape soda-stained screen, burned up a few years after we departed, in a backstage fire that would have taken down the house if the theater’s protective asbestos fire curtain hadn’t fallen and stopped the progress of the blaze. The St. George has survived, a home, these days, for live entertainment; but, for our theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.

It’s sad, but several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, or The King and Iin widescreen processes such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision or Todd-AO. William Paul argues that “Both the architectural screen and the technological screen have changed...in ways that directly affect our perception of the movie image.”  He also notes, “The screen itself might have influenced the development of film style.” [1] 

In an age when more and more households don’t even own a TV (the final irony!) hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions! In New York City, the venerable Paris (with balcony seating!) still boasts a pristine single screen, not a palace, but hey. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.:  they have so many restored single screen or older theaters in that town, you should plan to stay for a year. Check out The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd., and the Vista on Sunset Drive, just for starters. Seattle’s Cinerama Theater is, I’m told, a wonder.
​ 
There are scads of single-screen houses listed in Cinema Treasures. How many of them boast a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia (Super Panavision 70) is anybody’s guess, but I remain, as always, optimistic.

Note: I wrote this post several years ago (yes, I confess, this is mostly a re-run), and interestingly, it seemed to predict something that has come to pass. Lawrence of Arabia was reissued this year on actual film in, of course, 70 mm and, thanks to Tarantino and Nolan and others, has appeared on wide screens nationwide, including — and for me especially — the United Palace in upper upper Manhattan, where I was privileged recently to see it, and enjoy an upward-at-the-dome gaze during intermission. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, quite like an epic of that caliber in a pristine palace. 
​
[1] Paul, William, 1996, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology and the Motion Picture Screen, 
in The Movies: Texts, Receptions and Exposures, eds. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsburg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 245-6.

The projectionist at the St. George Theatre which I had a hand in running as a movie house in 1976 — was a minor god. His union contract granted him a highly lucrative $13.76 an hour, and made him more or less impossible to fire. No matter that he missed his reel changeovers more often than not distracted by Gilligan’s Island which he followed on an illicit television that was expressly forbidden in the booth. Or that he failed to tell us when (all-important, expensive) carbon rods, the source of light for our two antiquated carbon arc projectors, were about to run out. At least once I had to hop the Staten Island Ferry into the city and catch a subway to Times Square to borrow carbons from one of the porn houses, the only other theaters that still used carbon arc. My strongest memory of Abe is his backside as he hurries through the lobby, his shift over, “Take it easy now,” tossed off carelessly to no one in particular.
 
Projectionists have been on my mind lately, perhaps because I toured the Valencia Theatre in Queens a couple of weeks ago, a palace converted to a church, where the projection booth serves as a “prayer tower.” Or is it because last week in Buffalo I heard the tale of a projectionist named Norm who worked the North Park Theatre from 1966 to 2013, taking on, eventually, the duties of both projectionist and manager? He kept that theater open and functioning during lean times, fixing broken equipment nobody else had a handle on. It’s the dedicated projectionists I like to think about, for whom the job is a craft. 

Speaking of dedicated, it was Robert Endres, head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, who strode into our lobby one day in ’76 and volunteered to take the occasional shift, announcing, “I admire old theaters — collect them in my head...” He never handled film with his bare hands, the way Abe did, even if the prints we got were already pretty badly scratched. For forty years we lost track of Bob, but, thanks to a mutual dentist, are now happily reconnected. These days, he volunteers periodically as a specialized tech advisor for this blog, on the subject of all things projection. (Check out his comments in “Afterthought 1.”)

Eight years ago, in Slate, Grady Hendrix predicted the gig was up for projectionists. He chatted up a veteran NYC projectionist named Joe Rivierzo,and the result was a lucid description of how projection evolved — and is devolving — over the course of the last century.  And I quote: 

...nowhere is technology eliminating the need for human labor faster than in motion-picture projection. From the birth of cinema until the 1960s, the system was the same: Every projection booth had two reel-to-reel projectors with carbon arc light sources.The movie would start playing on one machine, and the projectionist’s job was to watch for the changeover cues: usually a small circle or an X in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

...Getting a lamp that was bright enough to throw a projected image onto a screen hundreds of feet away was a huge problem, and the first solution was the carbon arc. Two carbon electrodes are brought together, they touch and are then pulled apart, creating a brightly burning arc. The strong, steady light would bounce off a reflector and toward the lens.

But starting in the 1970’s, the light source — always tricky while it depended on an arc between two carbons — was gradually replaced by the xenon bulb, expensive, but steady and reliable. With the arrival of that bulb, the projectionist’s job was greatly simplified, no longer requiring trimming or changing of carbons. The bulb was a steady source of light; you could keep an extra couple of them around and dispense with rod maintenance, which had taken some finesse. Maintenance of the rods, come to think of it, was probably the only thing keeping Abe awake in our antiquated booth; changeovers certainly weren’t doing it. Speaking of reel changeovers, according to Rivierzo, when the platter system came along in the late seventies, the job  of projectionist became idiot simple. There was absolutely nothing for a projectionist to do after the reels of film had been delivered and loaded on stacked platters; and as the challenges of projection became minimal, managers saw opportunity.

Rivierzo tracks the de-fanging of Local 306, the once-powerful NYC projectionists’ union, to efforts in the Giuliani era to dumb down projectionist licensing tests. Local 306 used to have roughly 3,000 members in the 1950’s but, by 2010, was down to just 400. After xenon and platters, and simplified testing (which no longer required a projectionist to know much about electricity or master complex skills), almost anybody could staff a booth.

The Slate blog post I’m quoting from was written long before the recent digital revolution was complete. At the time, Rivierzo predicted that, “Digital will eliminate us completely. All you have to do is load it and play it, and a lot of this stuff can be done off-site. We have theaters now running with 35 percent of the house digital. Once they go over 51 percent running digital, and they run it that way for 90 consecutive days, they can eliminate the presence of a projectionist. Our only saving grace is they can’t manufacture these digital machines fast enough.”

True? Well, this just in, from 2015, two years after the digital revolution was mostly complete. According to What It’s Like to Be a ‘Hateful Eight’ 70mm Projectionist (With Quentin Tarantino Watching),  by Adam Witner, it was easy for him to get work projecting The Hateful Eight for its well-known director, a champion of non-digital tech. The catch was, Witner had no opportunities to practice in advance before he joined the roadshow; and practice would have been a good thing. You see, he had somehow never operated a platter system before. He’d worked at UNC School of the Arts in Winston Salem, N.C., as an archivist and projectionist, a situation involving not platters, but two-projector reel-to-reel systems. Something did go terribly wrong for Witner, but Tarantino, in the audience the first night, never knew it, at least while the film was rolling, because this guy Witner is a true professional. If you haven’t by now read the link, don’t miss it; it contains a real nail-biter of a situation, deftly handled. It also proves that projection is not only not dead, but still an art, especially given the fact that, in the age of digital projection, the equipment that directors like Nolan and Tarantino ship all over the country for their roadshows has a lot in common with the old Chevys still on the road down in Cuba. 

An article in Vanity Fair in March of this year, seems to indicate that well-trained projectionists who are still alive, kicking and able to handle a reel of film, may still be quite valuable. I’ve noticed this effect in other fields. For example, my sister finally did retire at 78, from her job, traveling around the world teaching main frame, a supposedly outmoded tech that is no longer taught in schools that feature computer technology — but which governments and the military seem unable to do without. Technology moves too fast, eating up the landscape as it goes; but there are things in the landscape that we need to hold on to. One of them just may be film. 

I started with Abe, who wasn’t very good (anymore?) or very careful, at a time when projection was complicated enough, that incompetents could hide behind a strong union. From the seventies to 2010, unions weakened or died and digital projection, like compact disc technology (or e-books), seemed to be the whole future. In this period, Eastman Kodak filed for Chapter 11. Then Tarantino and Nolan and friends stepped in, in hopes that film would still be available to shoot on and project light through. 
Proving? It’s not over until the projectionist — of any size and shape — sings. 

Afterthought 1: And this just in from Bob Endres, my favorite projectionist...
I know Joe Riverzo and his comments pretty much summed it up eight years ago. The projectionist who wrote about Hateful 8 was wrong about one thing. Platters were designed to run 70mm but the problem was lack of maintenance over the years. One of our engineers had a problem on the first screening of Hateful down at the Village 8 on opening night with Tarantino in the audience. In that case they had to stop while he pulled a gear out of a spare projector and actually rebuilt the projector head in a relatively short time while Tarantino entertained the audience with stories about the film.

What isinteresting is that we have a number of theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn that are installing two projector 35mm systems in at least one of their screens. The Metrograph and the Quad are two, and the Metrograph runs reel to reel 35mm on an almost daily basis (suppliers of 35mm prints don’t want them chopped up with leaders and tail pieces cut off when the reels are spliced together for use on a platter). Our engineer that does the tech for Dolby film screenings says he’s seen more film this last year than in a decade, and a lot of it has been 70mm.

Afterthought 2: Check out this treatment of the recent restoration of 2001, a Space Odyssey, which features another young projectionist who learned his now-obscure craft at a college campus. and is working for Alamo. Christopher Nolan is responsible for the film restoration. 

Afterthought 3: For a 2016 treatment of the emulsion vs. digitalization tug-of-war, check out an earlier post.  

What could be better on Halloween weekend than stumbling into a darkened single-screen movie house, one that’s survived demolition, one that smells of fresh-pop with real butter, to watch a spooky Garfield cartoon with fifteen or so mildly-attentive four-year-olds — and their parents?  I can easily say I’m never bored, no matter where I find myself, because there’s a theater — saved, about to be saved, or not torn down yet — in every town I've ever visited. After an eight-hour drive through teeming rain and Sunday breakfast with my husband, getting in trouble at the local Friendly’s for bringing a cup of cold cappuccino, “imported from Staten Island!” into the restaurant from the car, I dropped Dean at the downtown convention center, then consulted my iphone and wound up at the North Park Theatre. It's a 600-seat house built in 1920 which, ninety-eight years into its career, is showing — later on if we care to come back — John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and Taste the Blood of Dracula, a Brit flick from 1970.

On the gorgeous triangular marquee, they actually still use red plastic letters on tracks! — and they have enough of them to spell out, on one side, all the things about to be on-screen while still featuring BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY OPENS HERE NOVEMBER 1 on the other side. They may have done this because they'd exhausted their reserve of plastic lower case letters. I know that strategy. At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace which, by now, you probably know I helped to run in Staten Island in 1976, we barely had enough letters, upper or lower case, to spell out even a single feature longer than a few words on both sides. While we were going broke trying to save the St. George as a single-screen house, the North Park in Buffalo was surviving quite handily, thanks to luck, a really handy projectionist/manager named Norm, who could fix anything, a loyal crew, and a programming strategy involving Disney movies offered at atypical hours. It didn’t hurt  either that the surrounding neighborhood apparently never went through the kind of serious decline many neighborhoods went through, when multiplexes were the new thing. Then, too, this 600-seat gem had a really dedicated booking agent named Ike; booking agents can make or break a theater. 

The North Park can claim the distinction of being continuously open and showing flicks, from its beginnings in 1920 all the way through to 2013, with a brief hiatus for restoration and to install digital equipment. Unbelievably, the equipment taken out in that year included a Mark II platter system for single-reel take-up—state-of-the-art in the mid-seventies, but old school by 2013. Norm kept the old equipment up and running, finding parts when necessary. For a fascinating treatment of how a projectionist often demonstrates brinksmanship with aged equipment, check out this link, a digression, but worth it. Then think how valuable Norm really was. 

Bill, one of the managers, who was on shift Sunday, recommended I try to get the ear of Ray Barker, the Program Director; a brief email to the info function of the theater’s website led to a conversation that filled in all my blanks. Without Ray, a professor of history who has transformed his original part-time job at the theater into a serious avocation, I would never have known about Norm or Ike or why the theater has lasted so long as a dedicated single-screen movie house. Loyal friends of the North Park, with Norm at the helm, saw the theater through the lean seventies with a brilliant policy of booking Disney product at night — while the new multiplexes only booked family fare for weekend matinees. Because the surrounding neighborhood has probably always been somewhat upscale (full of beautiful older arts and crafts bungalows), with a strong main street (Hertel Avenue), families with children kept coming for the all-Disney day and night fare, Fantasia, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound. In a solid middle-class neighborhood, this programming was just enough to get the theater through a decade that destroyed many single-screen houses in more urban areas. Case in point is Shea’s Buffalo, a sister theater downtown.  A full-out Rapp and Rapp palace, decorated in the 1920’s  by none other than Tiffany’s, Shea’s Buffalo went through a difficult period in which its owners failed to pay their taxes, causing the City of Buffalo to seize the property. Downtown had suffered the usual urban blight; you know the story.

By the eighties at the North Park, it was time for a programming adjustment. Management switched from all-Disney to discount second-run, settling in finally for a combination of the usual family fare and art films: Cinema Paradiso, My Life As a Dog.

“The customer who goes to a movie every week is rare,” Ray points out. Instead of expecting the same patron to come back frequently, it’s smart to program to a variety of audiences, which is the policy of the theater to this day, wise in an era of streaming and multiple distractions. 

Remember that name, Shea? Once the owner of a chain of some thirteen theaters, including the North Side and Shea’s downtown, Michael Shea, born, some say, in Ontario but raised in Buffalo, sold out to Paramount in the twenties. So the North Park passed from Paramount to Loew’s to Dipson, a regional chain. From 1966 to 2013,  Norm was always there as projectionist, eventually at the helm as manager, in a double role. The North Park seems to have been blessed. 

What could possibly go wrong?  The answer is digitalization, a crisis that closed theater doors all over the U.S. quite recently. The crunch of technology, as the mechanisms of film production and distribution made traditional projection more or less impossible, required a huge outlay of cash to convert to digital presentation. Dipson, the owner, wasn’t interested, while Ike, the movie booker, had died, and Norm needed to retire, a triple challenge.

All good theater stories feature a savior or group of them, and this story, as you know, has an upbeat ending. In the case of the North Park, it was local defense attorney, Tom Eoannou, and his friend, Mike Christiano, a restauranteur, who closed the deal, more or less on a handshake. Restoration took eight months, the only period the North Park has ever not shown movies. I asked Ray how bad it really was inside. While nothing structural was about to collapse, the dome, he told me, “was obscured by filth.” I didn’t understand at first, but as he described what art restorers had had to do, it became apparent he was talking about decade after decade of cigarette smoke and tar. It had been a brown ceiling for a very long time. These days, the small dome of this Henry Spann theater gleams, an ornate series of murals painted by Raphael Beck depicting classical themes. 

Although he’d been going to the theater since he was a young child, Ray had actually never seen the dome in pristine shape until recently! The mural above the proscenium, featuring a dancing woman flanked by ballerinas, came out from behind its shroud of a curtain. A new lobby-side concession stand, an exquisite stained-glass window boarded up for decades behind the marquee, repaired and presented to the public: the North Park is a showplace these days.

Ray remembers a couple of moments that reminded me of my time at the St. George. Buffalo is known for its forbidding winters and, during some or another blizzard in the nineties, while Ray worked for the intrepid Norm, the call came to “get over here.” The general public had been ordered off the roads, but Norm insisted. Fortunately, a neighbor who worked for the police was on his way to work, so Ray caught a ride, then, safely arrived, found himself changing the marquee in a blizzard. I know what that means, having watched the tracking of new letters to spell out an upcoming feature, in wind, in rain, yes probably in ice too, the ladder shifting on the sidewalk. But that's not all. According to Ray, Norm and his wife slept in the theater during the famously terrible Blizzard of ‘77.

Now those are show people! And the spirit continues. Thanks, Ray.

Afterthought 1:
Read about The Perils of Marquee Letters in a Vanished Age.

Afterthought 2:
Stay tuned for a treatment of Shea’s Buffalo, worthy of its own blog post.

, The nine “angels” in shell-like recesses above the proscenium of the Valencia, a former Loew’s Wonder Theatre, don’t quite look the part; their wings seem cramped, each extending well above its niche, and their robes are too white for the azure stucco of a theater built in Rococo/Spanish, Colonial/PreColumbian styles. Sister Theodora Forbes, the secretary of the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People — which calls the old palace home — is leading us through this Eberson-built atmospheric. On the balcony she pauses to explain, “...they were naked Greek gods and goddesses...” Bishop Ronnie Davis put it more succinctly to the New York Times, on the occasion of the theater’s  landmarking, ''We dressed them up and sanctified them, put wings on them and made them angels.'' Whether the nine figures were originally gods and goddesses or, more likely, the nine muses, they have undergone a transformation, as the Valencia itself did, from a temple of dreams and date-nights to, well, a temple — or more specifically a tabernacle. 

How is it exactly that a theater gets sanctified? When my husband, Dean Thompson, and I ran the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 1976, we rented it for a Sunday to an evangelical group, who arrived in several busloads. We watched that afternoon, as worshippers dropped their crutches and walked in faith to the stage. That was just a single day; after the rental was over we went back to showing Jaws. The St. George was church for a day, but the Valencia is a dedicated sacred space. There’s a wall just outside the auditorium (sanctuary) hung with crutches and braces of all kinds. I imagined those healing moments, not unlike the time lightning struck my childhood home, and Great Aunt Marie dropped her cane, running, miraculously, three times around the kitchen table. Presumably the owners of the crutches on the Valencia’s wall never went back to fetch them (as Aunt Marie finally picked up her cane and began using it again). God’s power is after all more permanent than lightning. 

Upstairs, in the lobby outside the balcony, I spied a pair of locked wainscot doors, bearing the sign PRAYER TOWER (see the photo in the slide show above). Intrigued, Dean asked Sister Forbes what that might be, and she replied, “People go up there to pray.” 

“But what was it before that?” he asked.

“You know, it was where they showed the movies from.” 
 
In other words, the projection booth! I couldn’t help thinking about the lonely projectionist, and I wondered if, whoever he was, he sometimes prayed. For the carbons that lit the projectors to last till the end of the show? For a smooth night with no splicing or mishaps?

It was in that darkest of movie palace years, 1977, that church founder, Apostle Johnnie Washington, eager to move his congregation to a worthy space, purchased the 3,554-seat palace for a single dollar. The flock then accomplished a Herculean task, working night and day and raising two hundred thousand dollars to do a basic clean-up and paint-up. Solidy built and with a sound roof, the Valencia has actually never undergone a major renovation.

Gone, sadly, is the Robert Morton Wonder Organ (4 manual/23 rank) which originally distinguished this and four other palaces in outlying areas of New York City as “Wonder” theaters. Remarkably, all five — the Valencia (first to be built), the 175th Street Theatre in Washington Heights, the Paradise in the Bronx, currently leased to a church, the Jersey in Jersey City, and the Kings in Brooklyn — are still standing. The Washington Heights theater, (United Palace of Cultural Arts), these days a part-time church, still possesses its Robert Morgan instrument. The Jersey City has acquired what was once Loew’s Paradise’s organ. As for the Valencia’s, it was sold in 1964 to the Balboa Theatre in San Diego where it happily sings out to this day. 
 
As many times as I have written about atmospheric theaters, Saturday was my first visit to one, and, although the original electric stars in the night-sky ceiling of this Eberson-designed theater were twinkling, no clouds drifted over. Of course, I knew all good atmospheric theaters had had drifting clouds, but if I hadn’t recalled this, I’d have been reminded. Taking the tour along with us were two or three men who had grown up going to the movies at the Valencia. David Delbaum, a lawyer, who recalls the theater from his late adolescence, said, “When the movie wasn’t any good, you could always just look up!” Several other people, including his friend Steve Friedman, a photographer accompanied by his wife Maggie, remembered the clouds. At our Q&A, Sister Forbes and Bishop Davis said they knew of the whereabouts of the equipment that projected moving clouds on the ceiling, but neither one knew how such equipment might work. The mechanism is explained in a wonderful paragraph from a book on the Palace Theatre in Marion Ohio, one of Eberson’s atmospherics: 

Rather than seating the...patrons in a boxlike, formal setting as passive observers of stage entertainment, the atmospheric design transported them to an exotic European courtyard or garden. A plain cerulean sky replaced the ornate dome of traditional theatre design. Wispy floating clouds produced by a projector replaced crystal chandeliers and gilt. Trees, plants, vines and taxidermy birds replaced gold leaf. Arches, trellises, balconies and plaster statuary replaced marble, painted wood panels and crystal chandeliers. As the entertainment was about to begin, lighting effects created the illusion of a setting sun, as colors changed from yellow to red to mauve. Small lights, arranged in the ceiling in constellation patterns, twinkled to create a sense of infinite space. The atmospheric theatre design made the theatre patron an active, comfortable resident of an imaginary time and place, not a passive, aloof occupant of an oppressive formal space.   

A chandelier, imported from Greece and added to the Valencia some time in 1977, seemed dead wrong to me from the moment we walked in. Atmospherics, by their nature, never featured central chandeliers. These theaters were supposed to replicate an open sky, the way a planetarium does. 
These days, an illuminated cross on the back wall of what was originally the fly-space, a banner reading “Reach the heart and save the soul,”  and stepped acoustical tiles where ropes and chains once held curtains and scenery, give the backstage area a feeling somewhere between the stage of a music hall and a formal church’s apse. To the left and right of the stage were once dressing rooms, some of which serve to fulfill laudable church missions, such as outreach ministry.  

Sister Forbes is quick to point out how lovingly Eberson fulfilled his promise to transport the Valencia’s patrons from their ordinary lives. The proliferation of lion heads in the carved ceiling beams of all three lobbies, for example, may be references to none other than Marcus Loew himself, an immigrant from Austria, whose last name, in German means “lion” (lowe). The church welcomes this theme as underscoring the Biblical “Lion of Judah,” which, in Christian iconography, is said to refer to Jesus, another layer of meaning for an already meaning-layered house.

Looking down from the mezzanine on a tiled fountain covered by a remarkable carved wooden roof, I was joined by my new friend David, whose memories of the Valencia date back to around his seventeenth year. I was staring at the artificial flowers that edge the tiles of the dry fountain, dreaming of water, when he recalled, “There were goldfish in there once.” Immediately I saw them, and wished that the church might consider adding this symbol of Christianity to its reinterpretation of the space. 
The outer lobby is as big as a good-sized screening room. Its carved pillars reference the Alhambra, and it contains, in addition to wrought iron railings for movie patrons standing in long lines, twenty or so poster cases. Where once they offered Should Ladies Behave? or The Ice Follies of 1939, these days they inspire a different audience, the waiting congregants, with Bible verses: 

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, / because he hath anointed me / to bring good news to the poor. / He hath sent me to heal the broken hearted / to preach deliverance to the captive/and recover sight to the blind,/to set the oppressed free.”  (Luke 4:18, variation of translation).

The great movie palaces, in their way, promised to do all of the above.They brought good stories, the next best thing to good news; and what could heal a broken heart better than a fine movie? So the captive and the oppressed were freed — and if you consider the  blind, my husband (his whole life suffering from macular degeneration), who at every movie still sits in the front row next to me, struggling as he always did, to absorb all that light transmogrified into images, well then, isn’t that a form of redemption? 

The lesson I’ve taken away from the Valencia is that there are all kinds of salvation.

Afterthought 1: Enjoy the slide show! Robin Locke Monda, an artist of considerable talent and a close friend, whose work in graphics and design frame this blog, discovered the tour we took of the Valencia last weekend. The pictures, except when otherwise indicated, are hers.

Afterthought 2: Note from the slide show that the faux “buildings” left and right of the proscenium are not at all symmetrical! This would, of course, be true for a real cityscape, which Eberson sought to capture.

Afterthought 3: Constructed in just six months, the Valencia was the first of the five Wonder Theatres to open, in 1929, with Monte Blue and Racquel Torres, in White Shadows on the South Seas. It screened its last film in 1977, The Greatest, starring Ernest Borgnine.

​Afterthought 4: Thanks to 

The St. George Theatre, which, in 1976, I had the distinct privilege of going broke running, is — eighteen years into the new millennium — still standing. Not only that, it has a new marquee! Thank God. The old one, crusted with inappropriate stucco and leaking badly, worried me when I worked there, before the stucco was added and for years after that, as I walked uphill under it. I’m not entirely entranced by the curved front of the new signage; and I’m sure I’m not alone in finding electronic signboards sterile, but no matter, life goes on, and the theater is a working house. This does all of us, who struggled once to keep it going, proud. We ex-theater entrepreneurs are part of the coral reef of the theater’s survival. One day a month ago, a truck turned left and parked under the marquee, bearing giant electronic letters, to be mounted on the new marquee’s curved front: ST GEORGE THEATRE. Well, I thought, that’s the closest we’ll get to anything resembling actual marquee letters now.
 
You know marquee letters: the older ones were cast black aluminum, and the newer 1950’s variety, black or clear red plastic. On changeover night, in most cases Tuesday, an usher or other able-bodied teen got up on a ladder and pulled down the old letters that spelled out the movie about to depart, then slid the new ones, announcing the feature yet to arrive, onto the metal tracks that covered the glowing white plexiglass surface. 

Several years ago, back when the old leaky marquee was still barely hanging on, I wrote a blog post about the ritual of changing marquee letters. The theater was open under its current management as a live working house, but had no functioning marquee. A pause I made in my car under the marquee generated the post that follows, and there’s a little something else at the end:

I’m sitting in my Volvo directly beneath the marquee of what was once our theater, despite the fact that around fifteen years ago someone chose to cover it — like a badly iced cake — in beige stucco, which always makes me afraid the whole thing will come crashing down. Although it’s been forty years, I can blink my eyes and see the steel tracks that used to run on two sides, and the erratically flickering St George Theater in curved neon centered above.

My original intent today was to get a cappuccino. The space to the right of the theater — a failing barbershop when the marquee still had its tracks — is now a coffee bar. I’m waiting in my car beneath a red NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, just long enough for the barista to make my double shot. When it’s ready, she gives me the signal. I dash in, slap a five dollar bill on the counter, grab my drink and run back to the car. I’m late to leave for my next appointment, but sitting beneath the marquee for even a brief time is a kind of transport, like falling down a mine-shaft in time. I sip my coffee and tumble. 

It’s 1976. Jim, a senior usher, is teetering on a 15-foot ladder on the downhill side of the marquee. A dangerous wind threatens him, as he tries to keep his balance while hanging that most fragile of items, black-painted aluminum marquee letters. It’s Tuesday night. A new movie starts on Wednesday. It’s Jim’s job to spell out, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, for all to see. It’s an impossibly long title. He has to substitute an upside-down M for the W, and two capital I’s for the L’s. We inherited our incomplete set of letters — and not much else — from the previous theater manager, who pulled out in the dead of night. At least he left us the means, more or less, to spell out the names of the movies that would break our hearts, week after week, failing, one title at a time, to fill our cavernous auditorium. A gust of wind causes the ladder to sway, and Jim drops a precious capital G. There is no sound quite like the sound of breaking cast aluminum, a surprisingly brittle material. Almost like glass but not quite. What’s a substitute for G? 

I shake myself back to the present, press the button that starts my Volvo, and pull out from under the marquee’s shadow. 

Paulie Plonski (concession staff, usher, and all-round crew from our year at the St. George) is someone I hear from every once and a while. He wrote this reminiscence of changeover night, in response to mine:

For a moment I was in the car with you in front of the theater. I could see the ladder. The sidewalk in front of the theater was on a hill, making the right side of the marquee a much higher climb than the left. The ladder was on the right, a formidable height. A blonde high school kid was next to the ladder. He was quite energetic and a little nervous, as he steadied the ladder at it's base. The wind was blowing, black cast aluminum letters were being passed up the ladder and others were being passed back down. There were a lot of voices, and then a quick yell to watch out, as the G came crashing down, then some more yelling, much louder this time, followed by a period of calm. The wind again. The high school kid was at the base of the ladder, steadying it, but cautiously looking up. There was an unusual movement above, and suddenly the edge of a white panel popped out. The wind had quickly gushed underneath, extracting it from the marquee. Flipping erratically, the panel fell towards the ground. The blonde kid moved quickly, but the edge of the panel caught him on his nose and mouth. 

There was a sudden pain in my upper lip, I couldn't help, later, looking in the mirror: everything looked fine. Good. I smiled. It was a slightly crooked smile, a smile that has brought, perhaps, character and many compliments to my life ever since that windy day. I am not sure what a substitute for G is, but after watching Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles in that film, I certainly figured out why that sailor fell from (  )race with the Sea.

Afterthought 1:  
I love his description of the letters being passed up and down the ladder. It seems magical to me now.  In the light of electronic signboard marquees, the whole analogue ritual of spelling out words in aluminum seems medieval, like a hand-lettered text. I am also in awe of Paulie’s cheerful acceptance of something which apparently altered his smile permanently. What a smile it was, and is!

Afterthought 2:
Believe it or not, the leaking, barely functioning marquee was subject to a tax. Isn’t everything?

Afterthought 3:  
Other movies were hard to spell out too...

Afterthought 4:  
Part of the Tuesday evening ritual was figuring out what the five precious lines of the marquee would say, Dean recalls. “I forget how many characters per line, but I remember the problem of having only one G. (Hence, John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be Kinq on the uphill marquee side).

It's a new world we’re living in, and I don’t mean the one Cristoforo Colombo (aka Columbus) is said to have discovered. I’m writing this on what many cities now call Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the national holiday originally named for Columbus. The fact of this switch made me think about that movie palace in Albuquerque, the one with with Pueblo architectural flourishes. It makes sense that a theater with Native American themes would be primarily Pueblo: the cliff-dwelling peoples are and always were agricultural (as were their ancient ancestors, the Anasazi. Farming is not nomadic; it results in permanent structures, and so a style of building, one that, in Albuquerque’s KiMo Theatre, has resulted in the natural blending of Pueblo style and what some call Art Deco. 

The interior of this theater is designed to resemble the inside of a ceremonial kiva, with log-like ceiling beams depicting dance and hunt scenes. The skulls of Buffalo I mentioned function as variations on wall sconces throughout the theater. Unsurprisingly, rumors abound that the theater is haunted. Beyond the skulls, the death of a small boy in the 1950’s adds credence to this myth.     

There were no skull-sconces or ceremonial effects at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat palace in Staten Island, which I helped to run back in 1976, nothing to remind the patron that the Lenape once paddled their canoes across New York Harbor, before there was a Staten Island Ferry. Sadly, you have to go to the local museum to learn about them. Well, it is New York, and indigenous culture is buried a layer deeper than in the west. 

So I give you the KiMo, possibly the only Native American-themed movie palace on the continent (if there’s another one you know of, be sure to drop that info in comments; I’d love to know about it too).
Oreste Bachechi, an (Italian) immigrant, as so many palace entrepreneurs of the twenties were, made his living in dry goods and liquor, dabbling briefly in a local theater enterprise. But he wanted to build his own movie palace, a building "that would stand out among the Greek temples and Chinese pavilions of contemporary movie mania." It is also said that his family, especially his wife, had close ties to local citizens of Pueblo descent, a very American story, the newly-arrived embracing a culture whose roots go back to the first millennium. Accordingly, Oreste hired an architect, Carl Boller, of Boller Brothers, out of Kansas City, who had already built an impressive number of movie theaters in the west and midwest. This was a sizable commission for Carl, who didn’t just dream up Native American flourishes, but traveled extensively, visiting the pueblos of Acoma and Isleta, and the Navajo Nation in search of inspiration. 

On September 19, 1927, the theater opened to a sell-out crowd of 1,321. Pueblo and Navajo citizens ("numerous prominent tribesman of the Southwest...”)  performed on stage that night: Isleta’s Pueblo Governor, Pablo Abeita, offered a name for the new theater, KiMo, is combination of two Tiwa words meaning "mountain lion," liberally interpreted as "king of its kind." 

The KiMo was then and is today three storeys in stucco, with the stepped characteristic of native Pueblo architecture, blending with recessed spandrels and  a strong vertical thrust reminiscent of Art Deco. Both the exterior and interior of the building offer a variety of indigenous motifs: a row of terra cotta shields above the third-floor windows, hand-woven rugs disguising air vents, and chandeliers shaped like war drums and funeral canoes. Wrought iron birds descend the staircases, and those garlanded buffalo skulls with glowing amber eyes are in full evidence. 

As part of the Paramount chain, the theater had a good run until the early sixties, when a fire destroyed most of the stage and the proscenium arch, and did other considerable damage. It’s a familiar story; downtown Albuquerque was enjoying its version of white flight, and the theater was reduced to showing “adult” fare. A brief flirtation with demolition (1977) ended when the City of Albuquerque and a group of concerned citizens intervened. An extensive renovation included many small singular efforts, including the matching of door handles that were original kachina dolls (a Hopi motif) and, in one notable case of delicate restoration, “The balcony railing in the lobby, composed of wrought iron bird figures, was 11 inches too short to meet modern safety codes. Harvey Hoshour [restoration architect] devised a novel solution to retain the railings' original look. Additional metal was inserted in the birds' necks and legs to make the railing taller. The talented craftsman who performed the work was none other than the grandson of the man who created the original railing.” 

Lobby murals of Southwestern landscapes that include cliff dwellings, by Carl von Hassler were restored in another phase. In a third and final (1999) phase, perhaps the most expensive,  “conservationists worked for months atop scaffolding far above the auditorium floor to restore the spectacular 'environmental' artwork [that had been destroyed by fire]. Vigas (roof beams) decorated with Pueblo Indian motifs seem to open onto a starry night sky,” a nod to atmospheric theater styles.

What happened to Oreste Bachechi? Sadly, he died the year after his theater opened, although his sons operated the KiMo for the intervening decades. Reflecting for a moment on the turtles, birds, buffalo, stars and other natural effects that grace his beautiful theater, I found this: “27 acres of fertile valley farmland,” the former Bachechi estate, is apparently on the verge of being developed by the City of Albuquerque, with hopes of turning it into a kind of wildlife preserve, a  “balanced master plan... that promotes non-competitive recreational uses and environmental educational opportunities such as wildlife viewing, hiking, multi-use trails, improved and dedicated equestrian parking, native landscaping, an expanded pecan tree orchard, a memorial rose garden dedicated to the Bachechi family, an expanded wetland, and an agricultural field to attract migratory water fowl with perennial crops of bluestem, sacaton, lovegrass, and ricegrass.” 

Now that the movie palace has been safely restored, what better way is there to treat the local movie mogul’s fertile acres? 

Afterthought:
Indigenous Peoples’ Day is really a flip-side kind of thing: when Colombo arrived, some ten million people were already living here, in what we have come to call America. (That our continents were named for another European adventurer, Amerigo Vespucci, underscores the point I’m about to make). History is like a twisted ribbon, whose surfaces blend. Despite centuries of bloodshed, native peoples (First Nations in Canada) are remarkably still around, and such miracles should be honored. Think Sherman Alexi, the poet/filmmaker/novelist or John Herrington, astronaut of the Chickasaw nation, or Charlene Teters said to be the Rosa Parks of Native American culture. Then there’s the heritage of naming: hardly a state in the lower forty-eight exists that isn’t woven through with Native American river names: Mississippi, Shenandoah, Ohio, Tallahassee, Missouri, Miami, Truckee, to name a few. I wonder how many movies that portrayed the old cowboy vs. Indian theme played the KiMo mid-twentieth century, before we could see the other side of American history?