I’m not the only one with room in her imagination... and heart...for the perilous careers of old movie houses. This from a friend:

Vicky --
I came across an account of a 1930s Art Deco movie palace in Queens, the Earle. In time it showed porn films (sound familiar?), and by the 1980s it was a Bollywood theater whose new owners renamed it the Eagle by changing one letter, the r.  Since the neighborhood had many Asian immigrants, it did a good business until a nearby video store began selling copies of the films the theater was showing. When a successful Bollywood film director went into the store and asked for pirated copies of his films, and found they had lots, he started yelling at the owners. Unperturbed, they invited him for tea, said they were honored to have him in their store as a guest, told him that his films were very popular, and that he should take this as a compliment. They kept on selling his films. What is that old movie palace today? A food bazaar called Ittadi.
So it goes. 

Thanks Cliff. 
​
Movie palaces that aren’t lucky enough to be saved either meet appointments with a wrecker’s ball or they find themselves still standing but transformed — as in the fairytale, going from coach to pumpkin. Transformations can be kind of fascinating: a parking garage in Detroit, a basketball court in Brooklyn.  So many are churches, like one NY “wonder theater,” coincidentally also in Queens, the Valencia, its “naked” proscenium statuary swaddled in angels’ robes.

What intrigued me about Clifford’s tale of the Earle was the details of its slow descent, the makings, perhaps, of a good short story — a name change varying by one letter, and those unscrupulous/ingratiating video store entrepreneurs. 

Let’s start with the theater’s Bollywood owners, who  chose to re-create the Earle as The Eagle, in their name choice varying only one letter, obviously wanting to start fresh. The why of this decision is lost to time, though perhaps they were making a money-saving signage move. Wow do I get that! As a former theater operator (The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, 1976), I can attest that we were often forced to be creative with signage, using upside-down W’s for missing M’s on the marquee, for example. 

Deep into the Bollywood career of the Earle/Eagle, the arrival of the neighborhood video store with it’s pirated movie copies, and desperate clever store owners, offering the Indian fat cat tea and adoration, is a tale within a tale. 

Assuming this story is accurate, the Earle’s descent parallels the rise and fall of video itself — not surprising, given how many technologies and techno-based industries have come and gone since motion pictures were created (silent films, newsreels, network TV, single-screen theaters, movie palaces...).

Fact-checking has yielded few specifics of Cliff’s story. The Earle makes a cameo appearance in the last paragraph of “Closing of a Gay Theater, the Site of High-Risk Sex, Is Upheld,” a 1995 New York Times piece focussing on the shuttering of The New David Theatre on West 54th Street in Manhattan. “The Earle Theater, 73-07 37th Road in Jackson Heights, was closed on Feb. 8 and allowed to reopen under a stipulation calling, among other things, for the hiring of two uniformed guards to monitor sexual activity and eject anyone caught in high-risk sexual activity.” 

In all probability the theater’s name change had something to do with its naughty bawdy former career. 

There’s not much to glean on the Earle/Eagle in Cinema Treasures, often a trough of information. Here is the theater’s entire CT entry: 

“Located in the Jackson Heights section of Queens. The Earle...was an Art Deco theater, similar in style to the Lane Theatre in Staten Island. This one-time porn house was shuttered for a while and later resurrected as the Eagle Theater. It continued to operate in later years, showing a healthy dose of Bollywood films. However, it was closed in May 2009, due to a strike at the film production studios in Mumbai.”

Well that last bit is a fitting finale: a film strike in India triggered the demise of a Deco movie palace half a world away, in Queens. As Cliff says, so it goes.

Afterthoughts:

1. It’s interesting, to this Staten Islander, that The Lane, a small Deco treasure in my borough, living out its landmarked life as the Crossroads Church, is somehow reminiscent of the Earle. Church beats food bazaar...
2. Sometimes, the comments column in Cinema Treasures is almost more interesting than the actual entry: On February 6, 2012, Michael Kaplan reflected, “The Earle was the premier 'art' movie house in Jackson Heights, always showing the finest independent and foreign movies. Here’s a list of what I remember seeing there: Hiroshima Mon Amour, And God Created Woman, Medium Cool, Alfie. And God Created Woman featured Brigitte Bardot and you had to be at least 16 to see it. I lied about my age and the eager ticket seller let me in. Not a bad movie, actually, very daring for its time. The theater was a beautiful deco piece and very well maintained. That all changed when it turned into a porn venue; it was probably the raunchiest movie house in the neighborhood, the Fair and Polk running close.
   
3. Cliff tells me that some of the details from his account come from a NYTimes article, "This Neighborhood Contains Multitudes," by Michael Kimmelmann, appearing August 30, 2020, on Jackson Heights, which certainly does deserve a Walt Whitman tip of the hat for its diversity.
   

How’d you get into the movies when you were a kid?  Ever sneak in?  I remember a guy who waited till the crowd was emptying out, then walked backwards, heading past the ticket tearing box. We caught him, then showed him the door, but he almost made it.... That was at the St. George, in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat movie palace a group of us struggled to run, back in 1976. 
 
Most kids weren’t that nervy — they paid their way, also true when I was growing up, you might have to collect the money piecemeal, if you didn’t have the price of a child’s ticket. Then there was always popcorn; how could you live without that?  
 
Here’s the story of one underage entrepreneur earning his way into his hometown movie theater; it’s in his own words:
 
We moved to Deer Park  (Ohio), a tiny city, exactly one mile square, in 1955. Tract houses, shoulder-to-shoulder on quiet tree-lined streets. There were four centers of activity for a kid  under fourteen — K through 12, Chamberlain Park with its four baseball diamonds and swimming pool, Gabby’s Pony Keg and, the center of all life, our own Deer Park Theater.
 
My sole source of revenue beyond the quarter I got for my allowance, was “Gabby’s Pure Oil Service Station— and Pony Keg.” In case you never lived in Cincinnati, there’ a good chance you don’t know that a pony keg is a drive-through pick-up station for beer. Anyhow, Gabby’s was a few blocks down from the Deer Park Theater.
 
The theater stood across a four-lane street, its raceway marquee flickering in afternoon light. My first memory of that marquee is THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA, a 1949 WWII flick starring an impossibly young (by my current standards) John Wayne. I realize now that the movie was six years old, almost as old as I was the summer we moved in, but who knew — or cared about that? What else do you do on a Saturday in August but revisit the war your daddy and everybody else’s daddy fought in? I was eligible to purchase a child’s ticket for the low, low price of 35 cents, but, alas, I was ten cents short. My allowance had been raised to 25 cents on my birthday, so I knew I couldn’t ask for more.
 
No problem! Sodas at Gabby’s came in glass bottles. Size didn’t matter, they were all ten cents, and if you had an extra empty to turn in, you got 2 cents back. You could walk around the neighborhood looking for those empties, and if you got as many as six, your next soda was free! Or.... you could add twelve cents to a quarter in your pocket and watch the sands fly and John Wayne as he dodged the bullets.
 
I wasn’t alone. Up and down the railroad track, boys my age and even some girls, spent their free time trolling for empties. Under the bleachers in Chamberlain Park, down at the Dillonvale Plaza parking lot. I didn’t get enough to see the movie that first Saturday, but a week later I was ready. With a little more than two dozen empties, I headed for the pony keg.
 
Gabby was a man of few words. A WWII Marine Vet in his late forties, he sat resolutely on a stool inside the station, watching over his two coolers, one for sodas, one for beer. “Don’t be touchin’ that cooler on the right, boys...that’s for your dads!” was the extent of his repartee.
 
I turned in my treasure, got my half dollar, thanked Gabby. He nodded. Walking out of the pony keg just before noon, with a 5-cent Snickers, a 5-cent Hollywood Bar, and a dime package of Twinkies Snowballs, I made my way down to the theater, with 30 cents from scrounging and a quarter allowance, to spare. Concealing my candy purchases, I bought a child’s ticket and spent the rest of my loot on some Good n’ Plenties and a dime’s worth of popcorn. Mrs. Weigel at the candy counter was a real crab apple,
 
“Popcorn? ...it’s a dime, a DIME!!! Don’t count out all those pennies!” She gazed down the bridge of her nose, past her glasses, suspended from her neck by a silver chain. Everything was a rebuke.
 
“Good n’ Plenties? Say it then.”
 
“Gooood n’ Pleeenties...?” 
 
Slam. The box went down on the glass.
 
It didn’t matter. I was in — with my contraband candy — and John Wayne awaited.
           
The Deer Park Theater was the center of my world well into high school. Then my tastes became more sophisticated, and, after bagging groceries at Kroger, my pockets actually contained some cash. You could get on the bus on a Saturday, go downtown and see a movie at one of the palaces, the RKO Albee or the Grand, something grown up, like The Apartment (that you didn’t tell your dad about). Soon guys got licenses, we discovered the Montgomery Drive in. Could the larger world be far away?
 
Afterthought:
 As for me, I had a slightly more prosperous childhood; my allowance, fifty cents, covered the price of admission at the Hyde Park Theatre, in another part of Cincinnati, where I grew up. The author of the above chronicle, my husband Dean, was and always has been a natural hustler. Who else would go into business as a theater operator, in a palace large enough to contain twenty Deer Park Theaters? Dean muses further about the demise of the Deer Park Theatre: The building still stands. Last time I was home, the marquee was gone, but the doorway of my neighborhood dream house is still at a 45-degree angle to the sidewalk, the home for a few years, of a company that sold potbelly stoves and fireplace inserts. Couldn’t bring myself to go inside.

Dear Governor Cuomo,
I’ve got a gripe. Its after Labor Day, and movie theaters of all kinds are still off-limits in New York. When I ran the St. George Theatre in 1976, a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque palace in Staten Island, we hardly ever sold more than a couple hundred seats. Drive-ins are enjoying a resurgence; why not give special dispensation to the few remaining movie palaces? Thousands of seats and only a few hundred patrons? Talk about socially distant!  
 
Or let’s not talk about it. The Governor’s got his metrics. Let’s forget 2020 completely and escape. How about 1920?  Movie Palaces were springing up like gloriosa daisies in a July landscape. Their styles were various. I’m thinking about Egyptomania, the craze that made 1920’s people fantasize going back even further, to 1320 (BCE). 

All that digging around the Valley of the Kings, the Victorians started it, looking for royal tombs that, down through history, hadn’t been raided. Two Brits, Howard Carter, and the ill-fated Lord Carnarvon got lucky and discovered King Tutankhamen’s gleaming still-intact resting place.  

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Sid Grauman was just a little bit ahead of them. The month before, October 18, 1922, he’d opened America’s first Egyptian-style movie palace, still standing on Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, which was — superficially at least — more opulent than Tut’s tomb. It was the first of its kind, entirely reflective of what is now recognized architecturally as “Egyptian Revival Style.” 

Theater styles were often not singular. Movie palace architects and designers stretched building style like taffy, to suit the fantasies of movie patrons.

Case in point: the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, a Thomas W. Lamb theater, one of the original New York Loewe’s “Wonder Theaters,” has been described as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco,” by David W. Dunlap (New York Times).  No Egyptian in there, but everything else... 

Returning to Grauman’s Egyptian (architects: Meyer & Holler), that theater started life on the drawing board as an “Hispanic-themed” design, before the architects were persuaded to alter their plans. Egypt and all things Egyptian were such a craze by then, the design simply had to be changed. All that remains of the original hispanic casting, some roof pans above the main entrance, were used, even though they’re not consistent with the sight-lines of an Egyptian-styled building.

Grauman was, of course, onto something; and though he went on to open his Chinese Theatre, more famous, perhaps, than his Egyptian, Egyptomania, insured the opening of the Bush Egyptian Theatre in San Diego, a year later, followed by, among others, Peery’s Egyptian in Ogden, Utah in 1924, and The Egyptian in Coos Bay, Oregon in 1925. Here’s an interesting tidbit about the Coos Bay Egyptian:

Originally constructed in 1922 as the Motor Inn Garage and Service Station...the building was transformed into a movie palace after the easing of federal building restrictions. The discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 and excavations of the Great Hall of Karnak [Egypt] created a public sensation and inspired American movie palaces to move away from the Old World Renaissance and Baroque styles that previously dominated. 
​
There were approximately a hundred Egyptian style theaters when it was all over with, including two more in Utah, a state which seems to have gone all Egypto. There were theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada, including ones in: Bala Cynwyd (Pennsylvania), Concord (New Hampshire), Boise (Idaho), Quebec (Canada), Delta (Colorado), and DeKalb (llinois). These builders rode the curve of the fascination with all things Egyptian, until around 1929. The style — considered a subset of atmospheric theaters — peaked at that point, perhaps because its opulence was tinged with a bit of the macabre; The Fifth Earl of Carnarvon who had financed and fully participated in King Tut excavations, managed somehow to die a little more than four months after opening Tut’s tomb, while shaving the top off an infected mosquito bite, fueling stories of the “mummy’s curse.”

Egyptian style blossomed in the 1920‘s, but had its roots firmly planted in the 19th century, influencing a lot more than movie palace design style. Think: Art Nouveau (all those tendrils), and Verdi’s Aida, of course! — and even (arguably) the Washington Monument, which is, after all, an obelisk. And speaking of those, there are three original ones (all authentically Egyptian), sometimes called “Cleopatra’s Needles,” in Paris, London and New York City, all erected in the 19th century.

Just how Egyptian is Grauman’s theater? Here I’d like to shamelessly excerpt (with a tip of the hat to https://losangelestheatres.blogspot.com, who quotes Cezar Del Valle) — so that’s two hat-tips – here goes:

Cezar Del Valle notes in another Theatre Talks blog post that a month before the opening, the Egyptian was already inspiring religious fervor. He excerpts an article from the September 9, 1922 issue of the newspaper Holly Leaves reporting on a talk at the Krotona Institute on ‘Temples and religions of Egypt during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut’ by Captain Stuart Corbett, a ‘noted Egyptologist’:

Grauman’s Hollywood Theatre may not last a century [it seems, from this vantage point, it’ll make it!] but its art was old when the pyramids were built. The careful attention given to detail may be traced in the hieroglyphics on the walls. The reproduction of the cartouche from the royal scarab, bearing the inscription, 'O Let not my Heart bear Witness against me,' is wonderfully exact in detail.

Like so many gorgeous old movie palaces, Grauman’s Egyptian skated close to the edge of what might have been demolition, in 1993.  But let’s all serve up a sustained  round of applause for the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation, which carefully steered it in the direction of Historic Cultural Monument status, and saw it through to its current successful ownership.

​For a really great treatment of the Egyptian theater mania of the twenties, check out Bruce Handy's January 29, 2008 Vanity Fair article, "Watch Like an Egyptian."

Fifty years after the Roaring Twenties, artifacts from King Tut’s tomb toured the U.S. to rave reviews, reviving once more Tut’s (posthumous) Twentieth Century celebrity status (ironic, given the fact that his legacy in ancient times had been entirely obscured by his successors). “King Tut, Funky Tut,” sang Steve Martin in 1979, keeping the myth — and perhaps the curse? — alive.

Afterthought:
Lord Carnarvon, happened, by the way, to own Highclere Castle, the setting for Downton Abbey (think Lady Mary in an Egyptian-themed flapper dress!).

Through the freezing rain on the windshield of a midnight blue ’60 Buick Electra, I could just barely make out the cartoon that begins Blake Edwards’ classic heist movie, The Pink Panther. It was New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1965; I was on a double-date at the Oakley Drive-In. Did it matter if we couldn’t see the screen? We couldn’t even see the couple in the front seat, already lying down. 
December at a drive-in, in frosty Ohio? You bet. In those days outdoor theaters were open year-round, pretty much everywhere. The disappearance of the front-seat pair says a lot about the Oakley’s winter demographic in those days, mostly couples. 

Starting in the late sixties, drive-ins dwindled, until recently, to a few hundred nation-wide — from some 4,000 back in the day. A decade later, Dean and I (the back-seat couple from the story) had married and moved to New York, specifically to Staten Island, where for one year we signed the lease on a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre (1976). At that point, drive-ins were in steep descent, the result of an oil crisis which raised the price of gas and downsized cars (gone that Electra). Meanwhile, the value of vacant lots had made the land drive-ins were sitting on tempting for owners to sell off. Case in point, the 600-car Staten Island Drive-In which closed, in all probability, the year before we arrived, 1968; the land it had inhabited morphed briefly into part of a now-defunct airport, and finally, what else, a mall. 
   
Forty-four years later, Covid. With national chains of conventional theaters in serious trouble, drive-ins are suddenly the main-stay of the exhibition business. Forty-two states currently allow indoor movie attendance, but some big-audience states, New York and California, for instance, are still holding back. Hollywood’s not releasing much product, but drive-ins don’t care, they aren’t used to first-run flicks anyway. Going to the drive-in is not about the movie, but about the theater! — and about getting out. Drive-ins are  hot now...at least while it is hot, in the Northeast and Midwest. 

Until this year, northerly drive-ins had become largely a seasonal business, with the last movie hitting the screen in places like The Mahoning in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, on Halloween. “Our projectors start to have a harder time operating as it gets colder...” says Mark, who quickly answered my email. I can certainly imagine. They’re an amazing operation, the Mahoning; check them out whenever you can do it.

Who’d want to watch a movie through the snow anyhow?  Well, some will, we did, once-upon-a-time, and might again.You have to bring blankets, and run the car heater periodically – then there’s always body warmth!

Some older drive-ins in cold climes have made it a tradition to stay open year-round. As of 2016, in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington, some screens are lighted, if only on weekends, during bundling weather. The Ford Drive-In, so named for its proximity to Detroit, has been doing this, weekends only, for all seventy of its years. Valentine’s Day is a particularly popular weekend for them, despite the cold. This mention of V-Day plucked the strings of my heart, as two months after that New Year’s date, Dean and I returned to the Oakley on Valentine’s Eve, by ourselves, a heart-shaped cake and some flowers in the backseat.

I would think this winter weekend trend might actually accelerate, given the nature of our on-going health crisis. People are stir-crazy, and going to the movies is, traditionally, an activity that first comes to mind when you want to get out of the house.

If and when the big states do let indoor theaters open, the question will remain: how many people are willing to hazard being socially-distanced for several hours in the theater dark, in seats previously inhabited by other moviegoers? Meanwhile, you can always pack a picnic, and watch the flick through your windshield, iced or otherwise. Try it some time!

Afterthoughts:

1. The Staten Island Drive-In’s closing date is up for debate, which is why I said that, in all probability, it closed in 1968. That guess argues with the official text of its Cinema Treasures entry, but, if you hang out on Cinema Treasures, the comments are often illuminating.  One such commenter  mentions going to Rosemary’s Baby at the drive-in, a movie that came out in ’68.  Hmmm....

2. A link to a good piece on the drive-in craze, and a return to a familiar home drive-in, was sent by alert reader and dear friend, Beth Gorrie. The writer of the piece obviously pines for his youth... 

3. Walmart is making a play for the national drive-in market; pop-ups nationwide. Sounds alright, if hardly the real thing.

Reading HuffPost the other day on the question-of-questions that looms over the movie theater business — will it survive? — I was reminded of Mark Twain, who was supposed to have quipped once, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” 1897, Twain was in London, recovering from an illness, and rumors back home were rife. In actuality, he told the reporter, “...I have even heard on good authority that I was dead,” concluding “...The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Odd and wonderful — the incorrect quote, especially in its phrasing, was an exaggeration! 
 
Speaking of overstatements, is the time-honored practice of exhibiting and watching movies in actual theaters really gonzo?
 
Calling on my ancient experience of theater management, I’ll hazard that, if movie exhibition could survive the seventies, with its lean product and encroaching new technology (home video!) then the likes of streaming and a pandemic probably won’t kill it off. We spent just one year, April 1976 to March, 1977, trying to keep a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, alive and gleaming, its doors open, its popcorn popping. By “we,” I mean myself, my husband and a group of dedicated investors/staffers, all insanely in love with a red and gold six-story anachronism.   
 
Spring of 1977, the end of our adventure, was probably the darkest season of my entire life. We’d washed out, and first wash-outs hurt in a primal way. Dean and I were head-over-heels in debt, pursued by the likes of Warner Brothers, United Artists, Paramount; you name a distributor, we owed them money. I asked Dean the other day his opinion of the possible coming demise of the movie business. Dean thinks in conversations, past and present. From his amazing memory, he called up a conversation he’d had in ’77, a few days after our departure from under the marquee. 
 
Our sometime booking agent had called him at home to offer condolences. Rick probably felt a little guilty; we’d been his side-hustle (a direct conflict with his regular job, booking theaters for the mogul, Ted Mann), so he’d had to quit us. His departure had been a considerable nail in the coffin of our demise. If it had been hard for Rick to get us film in a product–lean year, it was nearly impossible for us to do it alone. Born and raised in Flatbush (Brooklyn), Rick loved our movie palace--reminded him of his boyhood palace, Loew’s Kings, at that point, already dark and in danger of demolition.  
 
Here’s the conversation, direct from Dean’s archive, which is to say his memory:
 
Rick: Hey buddy boy! [He always called Dean “Buddy boy”]. Don’t be down. Gotta tell ya, I mean this is true, movie exhibition just might be a dyin’ business. I mean, looks like my boss (a major mogul of the day) might even hafta close a few screens, or sell ‘em off.  Product...new releases look thin for the summer, and then, of course, there’s this new disease...video, something called BetaMax. 
 
Dean: Yeah, I know... 
 
We knew about the advent of videotape for home use; a management staff member/investor had actually suggested we might sell videotapes from the lobby! theorizing that if you can’t beat’em, join’em..
 
Rick: I mean, what are there right now? Ten, maybe twelve thousand screens nationwide?  I’m bettin’ that in five years, seven or eight max, that’ll be like half. An’ don’t buy off on this multi-screen thing, or cuttin’ theaters in half or even thirds...it’s a short-sighted attempt to stay viable, ain’t gonna work.
 
Rick was partially right. “Twinning” and otherwise subdividing existing theaters, for the most part, didn’t work. However, that multi-screen fad he’d derided so roundly had already caught on with a vengeance, changing exhibition forever. Started, arguably, by Stan Durwood in Kansas City in 1963 the “Twin” phenomenon was full-blast by 1976. Only ten years after Rick’s chat with Dean, there’d be something like eighteen thousand screens across the U.S., with more opening every month. Twinning became multiplexing, and that morphed into megaplexing.  
 
And in the following 30 years, the total screens in America, including drive-ins, would more than double — almost 41,000 screens coast-to-coast, heading into present times. 
 
“Well,” Dean concludes. “Rick’s probably no longer in the business — but of course, neither are we.”
 
All this is by way of saying, that nothing ever completely dies, it just changes into something else. Or becomes a niche-audience thing; think drive-ins! 
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Rich Gelfond, CEO/Imax, observes, “I know it’s popular to say the world is forever changed, but I don’t think that 100 years of history gets changed in five months. Just like people have kitchens in their houses, they like going to restaurants. Just because people have a streaming service, I think they’re still going to want to go to the movies.”  This from the Huffpost piece I read, which you shouldn’t miss. 

2. Speaking of change, if you’re wondering what Betamax was, or even if you actually remember the Betamax/VHS wars, check it out. It’s the only major battle SONY ever lost.

Ever want to warn somebody in a movie? I mean warn the character, like Wendy in The Shining about to be chopped by her husband? Or Pam and friends in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who should definitely have aborted the trip to the farmstead after picking up a psychotic hitchhiker. You’re the audience, munching nervously away on popcorn grannies; you can only watch while the hapless victim ends up in, say, a garbage disposal. 

This happens to me: I’m super-sensitive to movie character vulnerability. In Jaws, I wanted to warn Chrissa not to go for that moonlight swim. She did, of course, so I busied myself behind the popcorn warmer, while she was devoured by the inevitable white shark (one of Spielberg’s faulty mechanical models, of course, though it seemed real enough to me). 
 
I’d been watching from my perch at the concession stand in the lobby of the St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, that a group of us were busting our chops to run in 1976. We showed a lot of duck-under-your-seat movies in our theater year: the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw, but also The Exorcist. There was no character to warn in that movie, since the priest, played by Max Von Sydow, voluntarily jumps out the window, taking the demon with him. Is it worse to have nobody to warn?

In my childhood, at Cincinnati’s Mt. Lookout Theatre, a small Deco-themed house I frequented in third and fourth grades, I wanted to warn dozens of people about the flying saucers that eventually sliced through the Capitol dome in Washington D.C. (Right now it’s the senators and congresspeople I want to warn, and not about saucers...). Earth finally triumphed over the imagined aliens in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, but my impulse to duck under the seat remained.  

I suppose it’s the Pandemic that’s bringing these movie crisis moments to the small cinema of my pre-frontal cortex. I’ve been having what I call “Covid dreams” lately. I’m in a theater, all the seats full. Nobody’s wearing a mask. That used to be a joyous thing, a packed theater (we only packed the St. George once); but it just doesn’t feel normal anymore. This sense of wrongness is so all-pervading, that when I watch a movie or show that features the old ways — people clustered happily in a dark bar, or high-fiving each other on some playground, or, God forbid, making love, I get that uneasy feeling. If they’re riding cheek-to-jowl on a crowded train, or tackling each other in football, I want to scream, “keep apart! Six feet at least!!!”

Will there be Covid movies when this is all over? Covid novels? Shakespeare lived through several plagues, but set no plays in plague time, though he used the pestilence metaphorically, or as a plot-hinge (Romeo and Juliet). It may be enough simply to have survived Covid. My favorite thing to watch recently on Brit Box is the old BBC series, Foyle’s War. Foyle and his buds are all chummed up together having a double malt whisky in a pub or sitting around the detective’s desk fingering the murder weapon; or they’re right next to each other in that gorgeous car, a highly-polished 1938 Wolseley. They’re not wearing masks, of course, but somehow it’s alright, because, perhaps, the enemy is other than disease. What they’re fighting is beyond even the Germans, it’s human greed, against a backdrop of unexploded bombs and rickety air-raid shelters. People are still murdering each other or stealing each other's rations and selling them on the black market, but Foyle is calm; he straightens it all out somehow, and he’s not even wearing a mask...

If we all have to be wearing one, I long for the other kind... Not the mask I wear to the farmer’s market, that covers my nose and mouth, and makes it really challenging to breathe, but the kind Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, or even long-ago Zorro are wearing. They’re hiding their identities against the forces of greed and evil. They’re sexy. 

Who was that masked man? Pass the popcorn!  

Afterthoughts:
1. We ran a little-known flick  at the St. George, that actually included a warning to one or more of its characters in the title:  Don’t Open the Window. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3NDBSh-gdw] I read through the plot summary recently, looking for some evidence of a window, but never found one.  Who knows?  The film had a strange career, traveling under several aliases: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue. It’s a cult film for zombie flick fans. 

2. Who wears a mask? Besides the aforementioned heroes, there are:  Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Leatherface, the Phantom of the Opera, etc. In fact, you can buy a Lecter Covid mask, if you want to make some kind of statement. And, BTW, Leatherface (actor Dan Yeager), from Texas Chainsaw, encourages you to wear yours (not his). Here’s his take: People bitching it’s hard to breathe in a mask. Try chasing some punk who comes on your property while breathing chainsaw smoke and with a bad leg, all while wearing a mask and a leather apron. I’ll grant you you’re not going to be able to scale any chainlink fences, but that’s why you have a chainsaw. It ain’t easy, but you’re no p---y. Wear your mask, killer.
Hey Leatherface: you talkin' to me?