Back when we ran a movie palace — the St. George Theatre— in 1976 and part of ’77, we complained a lot about bad bookings — the second or third-run movies our agent forced on us, because we couldn’t afford to bid for first-run product; after all, we were a “buck fifty” house (a dollar fifty for adults, 90 cents for children under twelve). What came our way was either a box office failure already or something ancient — if  noteworthy or classy. Recently I’ve done a deal of research into what we actually did run, culling the microfilms of the local paper for the movie time clock ads we placed forty years ago each week. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Blazing Saddles, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist — I remembered those titles, but had conveniently forgotten The Giant Spider Invasion, The Dragon Dies Hard, and Don’t Open the Window. Some of those flicks, arguably all of them, are cult films of one kind or another.  What exactly IS a cult film? The definition is up for grabs — highly subjective — and since the ‘net has a way of building cult-like enthusiasm around the least thing, we’re all better off making a personal cult movie list of our own.
 
I think everyone would agree that a true cult movie has to prove itself by surviving its own time. Some films — like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which we held over for a second week in June, 1976 at the SGT — were already showing evidence of doing just that. By the time we got ahold of Chainsaw, it was two years old. Leatherface had a permanent rep, and Tobe Hooper’s low-budget  ($300,000) thriller was already on its way to cult status. Banned at various times in a long list of countries, including Canada, Britain, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and West Germany, Chainsaw initially caused audiences in several U.S. theaters to walk out in disgust. The movie featured unknown actors and had the distinction of being panned — for gory content — by important critics, some of whom simultaneously praised it for its direction, cinematography and acting.  Ultimately, the film garnered $30 million in profits. In old box office parlance, it still “has legs,” which, whatever you say, has got to be part of the definition of a cult film. Experts seem to disagree on which films actually are cult films, but Chainsaw is on all the lists.
 
To quote Tim Dirks, cult films “....are... [often] strange, quirky, offbeat, eccentric, oddball, or surreal, with outrageous, weird, unique and cartoony characters or plots, and garish sets. They are often considered controversial because they step outside standard narrative and technical conventions. They can be very stylized, and they are often flawed or unusual...” Sounds like Chainsaw, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead to me. Wikipedia’s list of cult films, numbering some 1, 535, is way too inclusive (Being John Malkovich-—are you kidding?). Most of the films are clustered in the 1970‘s and forward — when, in all probability, the notion of cult films commenced. A handful of 1930’s films (Blonde Venus, for instance, or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Bedtime for Bonzo are cult items. There are other lists, readers’ polls and so on, which often include a small number of films from the 1970’s and the bulk of entries from the eighties and beyond, when readers were growing up. Obviously, when you were born has a lot to do with what you include on your list.
 
Eleven of the films on the Wikipedia list played at the St. George in 1976 and the early part of ’77, while we were tearing tickets at the door:
Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971)
Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 19 74) 
Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)
The Giant Spider Invasion (Bill Rebane, 1975)
Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier, 1936) 
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
 
Other films we ran which have, arguably, generated cult followings include: Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and Don’t Open the Window, aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974), Smile (Michael Ritchie, 1975), a gem starring among others a young Bruce Dern, ought to be a cult film, if it isn’t.
 
We almost ran Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1976) — which is on the Wiki list, but we ended up with Cooley High instead, arguably a cult film if there ever was one; Spike Lee features it on his “List of Essential Films.” We can all learn a thing or two from Spike, whose movies, alas, didn’t come along until after we went bankrupt at the theater. To have seen Do the Right Thing on our screen — now that would have been something. 

It was a reckoning year. Our run as theater operators at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island ended abruptly in March, removing us permanently from further agonies of back room dealing, those increasingly desperate attempts to book the next movie. Who would get Smokey and the Bandit?  Or Saturday Night Fever? Not us, though we might have screened them second-run, if we’d hung on a little longer; but that year was bigger than our solitary crisis. 
 
1977 was pivotal, both for Hollywood, and for single-screen theaters wherever they were straggling out their existences. In New York City and Gallup, New Mexico; in Detroit, Cincinnati, and Youngstown, Ohio; even in L.A., the darkness that, for a decade, would seal the St. George, brought wrecking crews or conversion to formerly glamorous theaters, some of which morphed into warehouses or churches, parking garages — even, in one case, a basketball court.
 
The strip mall 'plex was hot, a trend famously begun by a man named Stanley Durwood back in the Sixties, who reasoned he could sell twice as many tickets and pay only one staff. It worked. His chain became AMC.
 
Still, there were problems from the distribution perspective. By '77 there were too many screens, all competing for fairly scarce product, from a Hollywood that was undergoing its own transition, still having not quite risen from the ashes of the studio system.
 
Released on Memorial Day weekend, two months after we popped our last corn, Star Wars was about to change the whole game, but nobody knew that. There were a lot of back room shenanigans going on, a bidding war of the giants, over George Lucas’ third movie. You might expect everybody wanted it, but if you did, forgive your hindsight. The war was of an inverse kind. You know how in baseball, when you get chosen last to play on account of the fact that everybody thinks you’re a nerd who can’t hit or field? Nobody wanted this quaint epic involving robots and lightsabers and a princess, when they knew The Other Side of Midnight was going to be the blockbuster of that summer. (Remember it? I don’t). Arguably the biggest box office behemoth since GWTW sat on the horizon, but nobody could see it. Star Wars would have been perfect for the St. George; though we would  never would have gotten it, even before the big guys knew what they had. It’s nice, anyhow, to imagine filling all 2,672 of our seats, the way we did just once in July of '76, for the re-run of The Exorcist. Ah well, such are the wistful dreams of ex-theater operators, even forty-plus years later.   
 
For palaces, 1977 was a demolition derby; and for Hollywood, conceptually, at least, it was a hard right turn. Before Star Wars, the studios aimed for the dating audience, with a tilt towards what pleased guys (women would come along willingly enough it was assumed). I’d been part of the generation they aimed at, in movies like The Graduate, Alfie, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver; so much for college dating. Star Wars would be all about teen audiences returning again and again, and, while they were at it, buying the accoutrements, the dolls and regalia Lucas was smart enough to keep the rights to. Star Wars “...is modern pop cinema’s very own Big Bang: traces of it are to be found in every blockbuster thundering its way into your multiplex.” After Star Wars, in December of '77, came Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we were on our way.
 
Sci-fi was suddenly cool, if not intellectual, and it was chock full of special effects. The force, if you consider Tenet or The Shape of Water, is still with us today. 
 
Roger Ebert, looking back in 1999, said it best:
Star Wars effectively brought to an end the golden era of early-1970s personal filmmaking and focused the industry on big-budget special-effects blockbusters, blasting off a trend we are still living through. But you can't blame it for what it did, you can only observe how well it did it. In one way or another all the big studios have been trying to make another Star Wars ever since (pictures like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and even Independence Day are its heirs). It located Hollywood's center of gravity at the intellectual and emotional level of a bright teenager. (See the review here.) 
 
It was 1982 — coincidentally the year of E.T. — I went alone to a movie, L'Étoile du Nord, starring Simone Signoret and Philippe Noiret; it was what I then called an “after therapy” flick. Having poured out my tale of a fractured family to my shrink, I indulged in a movie I’d chosen in advance, something with good writing (based on a Simenon novel) and character actors you could lose yourself in. The movie delivered. I was just getting up to leave as the lights came on, satisfied by a story that ends as an older woman recognizes her love for a man sent into exile in a penile colony. In the next row two slightly younger patrons shared their impressions, “That sucked! Where were the special effects?” 
 
Afterthought: 
In case you skipped that earlier link, here’s the back story of how (Mann’s, now TCL — but always Grauman’s) Chinese Theatre grudgingly agreed to take Star Wars for two weeks, then rushed afterwards to refurbish another fleabag theater it owned to hold onto that suddenly-hot flick — check it out.   

In 1976, the St. George Theatre concession stand boasted the highest per capita sales in the five boroughs of New York City, including the grind houses on Times Square. Ticket sales? Not so much. We operated a candy stand with a theater attached to it, but it took us a while to figure that out.
 
In the concession-stand closet of our lovely old 2,672-seat movie palace, we found, on the day we moved in, a large stack of dirty popcorn cups. Why hadn’t the previous exhibitor just thrown them away? This remained a mystery for some time, though it was hardly first on our minds, consumed as we were with running a huge business already heavily in the red. It had taken only about two months for us to feel how cash poor we really were. How to pay for movies so we could show them? Like Michael Anthony of The Millionaire, that TV fable of the 1950’s, a well-dressed man named Phil showed up in the lobby one afternoon, just as I was pining away for a few thousand to put down on the next week’s double feature. His company — I forget the name now — was headquartered out of upstate NY, and offered us a whopping $10,000 — interest free and instantaneous — for the “temporary” rights to our candy stand. We grabbed for this oar with nary a thought. 
 
The terms were simple: Phil leased the stand until that halcyon day when we would ostensibly have paid off the ten-thousand-dollar loan. We supposedly split the gross income of the stand 50/50, but while the loan was in effect, our 50% went to pay it off. Phil’s company got the other fifty percent, and he paid for all the candy, cups, popcorn, hotdogs, soda. It was a slippery slope. We’d begin to pay the loan off, then need to borrow more to get film from Warner Brothers or MGM or another one of the big-guy distributors. The only real profitable aspect of our aging movie palace was the candy stand, and we’d sold that off to keep movies on-screen. In other words, we’d sawed off the legs of our own table.
 
Here’s a trivia question: A large soft drink in 1976 went for 75 cents; how much did it cost “Uncle Phil” to put sixteen ounces of Coke, Sprite, Tab or Root Beer in a cup on the counter? Two and a half cents.  As was and is true of the restaurant business, the profit is in the bar — in our case, in popcorn. 
 
Twice a month, Uncle Phil sent a representative to the theater, to spend a morning counting everything in the concession stand:  each bar of candy, hot dog, bun, or cup of ice cream. Popcorn and soda, however, sold by the ounce in a cup or a bucket, is only quantifiable by counting containers. 
 
It was our unspoken rule that staff could have unlimited supplies of popcorn and soda so long as they brought their own personal cups. Paulie’s soda cup, which stood at the ready for him on a low shelf in the stand, sported a giant painted PAULIE. He was fond of filling it to the brim with his own “private mix” of Root beer, Sprite and Coca Cola. “Swamp Water,” he called it. Some staff were really fond of popcorn, so they brought plastic soup containers from home.
 
Which brings me back to the subject of those greasy used popcorn cups we found in the back of the closet when we first moved in. Our predecessor — who seemed like an early believer in recycling — had actually figured a way to make some hidden money on popcorn from Uncle Phil, or some other candy man he’d been indentured to.  
 
In a post on the long-closed-down Victory Theater in Holyoke MA, you’ll find a picture Robin Locke Monda took of a tall stack of ancient less-than-pristine popcorn cups left behind who knows how many decades before? 
 
Well, it was a living...

When you run a  single-screen movie theater, you see whatever’s on the screen, most of the time in passing, in small bits. So it was with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie I was happy not to see all of, since I had a hard enough time sleeping at night. The year was 1976, the theater, the St. George, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island I was involved in trying to keep open. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were seeing the grand old place — dusty red velvet, gilded plaster goddesses and all  — to the end of its movie-exhibition career. The St. George was a sinking ship at that point, but while the ship was going down, a lot of singularly powerful movies washed across our stained screen. We showed mostly second or third-run, a number of movies that have since either become cult classics, or, in some cases, Taxi Driver, for example, have found their way into the Library of Congress. 
 
I watched the Academy Awards in March, 1977 with a deal of remorse. By that time we were out of business, the St. George shuttered, the dream over. But on our small screen at home, there were more than a few of the sixty-three movies we had run, competing for gold statues. Two of my favorites for the year, All the President’s Men (Hoffman and Redford as Woodward and Bernstein, a post-Watergate cocktail), and Taxi Driver (DeNiro as the infamous war vet, Travis Bickle), were up against Rocky (which won, launching Sylvester Stallone’s career). Bound for Glory (a romantic but not entirely accurate biopic on the life and times of folksinger Woody Guthrie), and Network (the ultimate condemnation of the corporate establishment and television) were the other contenders. Of these five, only Bound for Glory would not eventually find its way to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." That selection really means something, that, twenty or thirty years after the fact, so many Oscar contenders from a single year would have such lasting power. (If you look to the following year’s Oscars, movies nominated were Annie Hall — winner, The Goodbye Girl, Star Wars, The Turning Point and Julia. Only two of these, Annie Hall and Star Wars, were in the decades to come, deemed culturally significant enough for the Library to set aside.
 
1976 had been a pivotal year: in Hollywood, in the movie exhibition end of things, and in America. Vietnam was over and so was Watergate; as the recession tailed off, working class heroes everywhere needed to believe in a rags-to-riches story, and Rocky, the best picture winner, would do well enough. Hollywood released 148 films in 1976, more than in previous years, but since movie screens were proliferating virally, lowly “buck fifty” exhibitors, like ourselves, were hard-pressed to get our desperate little hands on anything new, or nearly new. Yet we occasionally did. From IMDB’s list of the ten most popular movies of 1976, we ran the top three and two more besides (see asterisks):
 
1. Taxi Driver*
2. All the President’s Men*
3. Carrie*
4. Rocky
5. A Star is Born
6. King Kong
7. Logan’s Run*
8. The Omen*
9. The Enforcer
10. Network
 
Our booking agent, while he lasted, had some chops.
 
Memories are fragmentary: I recall only bits and pieces of Carrie, which, as a feminist, I had a lot of objections to. Besides, it was February and too cold in the auditorium, since the landlord had turned the heat off, in what would finally be a successful campaign to close us down. 

Sad as this was, the warm months had been a sweet time. I’d relished every beloved frame of All the President’s Men, Watergate still fresh in memory. As for Taxi Driver, I watched it obsessively over and over again, burning the popcorn bag down to its grannies. It wasn’t just my crush on De Niro; Scorcese really had seventies New York down cold. Times Square, especially the porn district, where at least once I’d gone to borrow carbons for our aging projectors, was right there on our screen, gritty and dangerous and, of course, never boring. 
 
Afterthoughts: 
1:  De Niro actually took a few shifts as an NYC cabbie, just to get the feel of the role. What if I'd hailed  him?
2: I mentioned that some of the movies we ran at the St. George became cult classics:  Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes to mind first. Cooley High, The Omen, and the absurdly misnamed Don’t Open the Window (aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) have their own followings. The Dragon Dies Hard, a posthumous tribute to Bruce Lee, goes without saying.

It has been almost fifty years since I met the man I went broke running a movie palace with. New Year’s Eve, 1965, the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati: What’s New Pussycat was on-screen — a blur— it was raining. We talked until midnight, the first of many amazing conversations. Four years later we left together for New York City, where we settled into Staten Island, and, ten years after our first date, tried our luck at running the St. George Theatre. What was it about movies in the century of their supremacy? Indoors, outdoors, film demanded a specialized viewing space.
 
My mother, who grew up with the movies, remembered seeing her first silents projected on a bed sheet in a vacant lot in Toledo, Ohio. Oddly, the first drive-in involved a bed sheet: Richard Hollingshead, who invented this variation on movie-going, was said to have had an obese mother who wanted to go to the movies. Accordingly, he put a 1928 projector on the hood of his car, settled her in the front seat, and tied a sheet between two trees. Five years later, he opened the first drive-in in Camden, New Jersey, charging 25 cents a head to watch movies under the stars, with the slogan, “The whole family is welcome, regardless of how noisy the children are.” Shankweiler's Drive-In Theater, opened a year later in Orefields, Pennsylvania, followed by the Drive-In Short Reel Theater in Galveston, Texas, and the Pico at Pico and Westwood boulevards in Los Angeles.   
 
With RCA’s invention of car speakers in 1941, the novelty of outdoor viewing  became a commonplace (before that time, speakers on towers near the screen blasted cars in the front row). By the time I was in fourth grade (1958), there were better than 4000 open-air theaters in the U.S. That year, in the back seat of my best friend’s mother’s boyfriend’s Buick Elektra (what tail fins!), I waited until 1 A.M. to watch the “adult” films (The Long Hot Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Vertigo), while everybody else slept. Management programmed family fare for early in the evening, then showed the arty flicks after most people had either left or gone to sleep.
 
Time for a trivia question: What caused the decline, in the 1960’s, of drive-in movie theaters? Answer:  shopping malls; land was just too valuable. Take the previously mentioned Pico, at the corner of Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles. It survived as a drive-in until 1947, after which the Picwood, an indoor theater rose on that spot. Today at that same corner the Landmarks Theater in the Westside Pavilion, a shopping plaza, boasts twelve screens with a wine bar and reserved stadium seating.  Indoor or outdoor, it’s been all about movies at that street corner for better than 80 years. In Staten Island, where I live, Fabian Theaters, the same chain that originally owned and operated our movie palace, the St. George Theatre, also owned NYC’s first drive-in on Staten Island, in 1948, which closed in the 1960’s, to make way for Staten Island’s first shopping mall.
 
Sometimes drive-ins just closed, their screens blank as tombstones until somebody bought the land. As of 2008 in Cincinnati, the Oakley Drive-In’s screen still stood, in a field of weeds. Dean and I had planned to visit that hallowed spot on the last day of 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of our first date. But, alas, the best we could do when that night came around was to wander the grounds of the newly-built Barrington of Oakley, a retirement community which stands on the spot.  
 
If you, dear reader, get the wanderlust, bear in mind that, despite the Pandemic — which spurred the opening of a number of drive-ins — there are roughly 340 such theaters currently operating in the U.S.A. The advent of digital movie projection has cut the ranks of these mom-and-pop businesses, since it costs around $70,000.00 to convert to digital projection. One of the surviving locations, thankfully, appears to be the second such theater to open, the historic Shankweiler’s, in Oresfield, Pennsylvania, mentioned earlier in this piece. You’ll pay nine dollars per adult, six for every child under twelve. The Mahoning, which decided to ignore digital projection, is a prime example of a niche business, specializing in cult festivals  and cutting-edge events. Check it out!
 
I remember when drive-ins charged by the carload, a dollar twenty. If only I’d known Dean when he and his buddies hung out at the Oakley’s rival, the Montgomery Drive-In. One of his friends had a dad who was a mortician. Just how many teenagers can you pack into a hearse?  
 
Afterthought:
1. An earlier version of this post appeared in 2015. Here’s  a comment from Elizabeth Leslie:
You didn't mention the 1940 teenager's favorite entrance to a drive in — at least one person in the trunk. I never did it but I had friends who fought over the privilege of potential suffocation — all to save $2 bucks and be considered really tough!

2.  Drive-ins were often thought of as “passion pits”; one Cincinnati DJ I knew of made up the following fake ad: Make it out to the Make-Out Drive In! No cover, no minimum — no movie! — might as well have been true.

I once helped run a theater 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 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, 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 burger joint 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 the theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.
 
It’s sad that several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur or The Wizard of Oz in 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 own a TV, hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions!  In New York City The United Palace,  thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, has a pristine giant screen. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.;  they have so many restored single screen 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.
                                                                                       —​ # --
[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.