Quick! What movie palace was a setting for that 1958 classic sci-fi, The Blob?  You’re forgiven if you didn’t know it was The Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pa., still standing and, in these Covid times, making its way slowly (but not inexorably, like the blob) back into business. Here’s a Wikipedia description of the blob’s acting debut at that theater, “the creature enters the Colonial Theater and engulfs and devours the projectionist before oozing into the auditorium. ...screaming people leave the theater in blind panic.”  

The Colonial, like most old movie houses that are still standing, has undergone a couple of narrow escapes, and not from extraterrestrial ooze. It was nearly torn down a couple of times, then saved and lovingly refurbished by local enthusiasts. Same as my own local movie house, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island (New York), which I co-ran in 1976. It’s closed right now, NYC being a more urban setting compared to Chester county, Pa.,  where the Colonial had its “soft” open on July 3. According to the facilities manager,  things went fairly well.  People are still uncertain; some say “...see ya when there’s a vaccine,” but others seem ready for socially-distanced viewing. 

Currently showing: Deadpool, Star Wars: Episode VII — the Force Awakens, and, for kiddies, The Jungle Book. The historic original auditorium seats 658, but state Covid guidelines indicate it can’t contain more than fifty percent capacity, spaced a socially-distant six feet from each other. So you don’t have to wear a mask all the time, as, for example, when you’re munching on popcorn. When you’re coming and going and, of course, in the bathroom, you’ll have to look like a bank-robber, but otherwise you’re free in the dark. Cleaning with a very heavy duty product between screenings. Sounds good, huh?

The Colonial started its theater life as a vaudeville house, in 1903. Then, like so many live theaters, it got the movie bug and, from 1915 to the present, remained a cinema. Jim Breneman, a pipe-organ restorer took it over in the eighties, installing a Kimball organ. His death in 1992 threw everything into question, and the Colonial had to be rescued from the wrecker’s ball, by the community itself, which rose up, saved, refurbished and reopened it. Like other such operations, it’s a not-for-profit, which is why they can risk opening at 50% capacity. At the St. George in the seventies, we were theoretically “for profit,” but hardly more than a quarter full most of the time. We’d have been a great model for Covid re-opening!

Marketing director, Bob Trate, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If [patrons] don’t [follow the rules], they’ll jeopardize not only public health but also the shared sense of escape that comes with seeing a film on the big screen. You just want to go and turn your brain off and watch a movie,” he pointed out, “and not worry about somebody coughing behind you.”

Good as binge-watching Perry Mason can be, or signing up with Disney to finally catch Hamilton, or viewing a Netflix premier, there ain’t nothin’ like sitting in the dark with strangers — as long as they’re at least six feet away. Oh, and if there’s popcorn.

Afterthoughts:
1. Each year at this time, the Colonial hosts a BlobFest to commemorate its role in the iconic Steve McQueen movie. It’s big business for a small town, which usually involves a screening and street fair.  At a given moment (see the movie’s trailer, if you haven’t already) , everyone in the theater gets up and bolts for the street in a “panic.” For obvious reasons, the festival will be virtual this weekend, giving the enterprising theater an opportunity to reach out to a larger Blob audience. Teeshirts available! Oh, and by the way, for those interested in the inner workings of a projection booth, circa 1958, the aforementioned trailer is not to be missed. Wow did that projectionist miss his changeover!

2.  Casting about for things to do during the shut-down, the Colonial, on April 6, ran a “Punny Marquee Title Contest,” and got over 400 submissions. The winner, “The Day the Earth Stayed Home,” was posted on the marquee. 

3. Here, for your perusal, are the rules and regs of movie-going for the future, as cribbed from the Colonial’s site. We’re all gonna hafta get used to this, so read up...

Quentin Tarantino wasn’t always the bad boy director we know; once he worked as an usher in — what else? — an adult movie theater in Southern California. Later he reflected, “...the greatest job a person could ever have was being an usher...you know. You get to go to a movie theater all day long, and then you get to see all the movies for free.” Whatever my periodic objections to all things Tarantino, I agree with him about working in movie theaters, having spent a year myself ( 1976) trying to keep the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat movie palace, open, with something on-screen.
 
You see movies differently when you’re selling tickets or popcorn or just trying to pay the bills; you see them in fits and starts, each time you pass through the lobby; that is, if it’s the kind of lobby the St. George has, with mahogany pillars framing glass, so that the movie is visible, even if it isn’t audible to people standing just outside. Thus I saw the shark in Jaws pull the moonlit swimmer under, but didn’t hear her screams. I ducked behind the popcorn warmer anyway.

Tarantino isn’t the only famous person who got his start while working in a movie theater. Sylvester Stallone, (Rocky, Rambo) had to keep body and soul together somehow while auditioning for parts in NYC back in the seventies. He tried a lot of things, including cleaning lion cages at the Central Park Zoo; he also worked briefly as an usher at the Baronet/Coronet, a Walter Reade theater. I say briefly, as he was fired after about a week, for scalping tickets and selling them privately to late arrivals at several times face value. The last patron he approached happened to be none other than Walter Reade himself, who fired Stallone right there on the pavement. Well, as Shakespeare pointed out, “All the world’s a stage...” 

But even if you never worked at the local movie house, just going there counts for something, in forming the later you. Case in point, Rosemary Clooney, singer, actress, was a native of Maysville Kentucky, a tiny town on the banks of the Ohio River, not too far from Cincinnati. Rosie was a teenager in the nineteen forties, when she got lost in movies at the Russell, Maysville’s movie house, with her best friend, Blanche Mae Chambers. Since segregation was the rule then, Blanche had to head for the balcony, and so did Rosie, who never missed an opportunity to sit with her friend. In 1953, Rosemary returned in triumph to Maysville, a brilliant popular singer and a movie star by that time.  She’d selected the Russell for the world premiere of her first movie The Stars are Singing, with co-star Anna Maria Alberghetti, “a grand affair of Hollywood magnitude.” The Russell was still segregated in 1953, but Rosemary insisted Blanche be seated with her. She and Blanchie Mae remained best friends until Rosie’s death in 2002.

Rosemary Clooney actually made her first stage appearance at the Russell, when she was just three years old. Gazing at the twinkling electric stars in the theater’s ceiling, she sang, “When your hair has turned to silver, I will love you just the same.” Odd lyric for a three-year-old, but you gotta start somewhere!

Afterthoughts:
1. Around the bend of the river from Maysville, and on the Ohio side, is my native Cincinnati, where 17-year-old Rosemary started her career, singing with her sister Betty on WLW Radio; many Cincinnatians consider her one of us, though serious Clooney fans know her quieter roots. In the 1980’s I was privileged to hear her each February at Rainbow and Stars, in New York City, the nightclub then at the top of Rockefeller Center. She’d made an admirable comeback after years of addiction, a girl who hit the road at 17, now a portly but charming older woman with a lot of character and her unmistakable “whiskey” voice. One February, as we were waiting for the down elevator at Rock Center, she emerged from a dressing room in the most ordinary of beige raincoats. We talked briefly. That’s how I’ll remember her, just folks. 

2. The Russell Theatre in Maysville has recently been refurbished and is as open for business as any movie house in the U.S., which is to say, “not now.”  Built in the Spanish Colonial style with a Moorish influence, by a Maysville entrepreneur, the successful grocer, Colonel J. Barbour Russell, it features elements of terra cotta in its facade. “What the Roxy is to New York,” the prosperous grocer boasted in 1929, “The Russell will be to Maysville.”  The Russell is an atmospheric theater, as indicated by the twinkling stars three-year-old Rosemary Clooney sang beneath.  

​Whaddaya do with a marquee when there’s no movie to show?  Across the U.S., while some theater chains are opening, with masks and social distancing, smaller single-entrepreneur operations will probably remain closed for some time, aching, in many cases, for (even beyond income) the fellowship of the community. One clever operator, Jordan Perry, of the Lake Theatre & Cafe in Oswego, Oregon felt estranged from his patrons, so got out the marquee letters and crafted this message:  

Haven’t seen it, but it sounds good...  
 
Marquees can sometimes speak for themselves. At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace I had a hand in running in 1976, we never had an opportunity, or the inclination, to spell out anything but the feature or features we’d managed to get our desperate hands on. Still, the marquee seemed to have a life of its own, as when, one windy April day, I discovered. 

We’d only been open about a month, and things had not been going well. Too late, we knew we couldn’t trust the landlord. The feature advertised on the marquee, "SMILE" — an indie about teen beauty contestants that’s since become a classic — was drawing pathetic numbers, as had several previous features. Running a movie house? Who were we fooling?

I walked out of the lobby, heading uphill for home, still under the marquee. As I emerged, a gust of wind dislodged an unsteady letter, and most of the word, "SMILE" came tumbling down, rearranging itself on the pavement before me to spell out “LIES.” The big lie, of course, was that we could fill enough seats to keep the place open.

Returning to the subject of recent quarantine messages, Dan Wyatt, owner of the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver, Washington, has been doing a little quarantine marquee work.
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Dan is a Back to the Future enthusiast who recently reminded his patrons,

Speaking as a retired theater operator, that’s a lot of letters! If nothing else, it’s a fortune in S’s! Of course, the days of cast-aluminum marquee letters have passed, a good thing: if plastic letters fall off a marquee you’re walking under, they probably won’t give you a concussion. But more importantly, they won’t break, the way brittle cast aluminum letters did, shattering and considerably reducing your stock. W’s and M’s can work as substitutes for each other, but there is no replacing an S. We would never have had enough of those to make it through "REPERCUSSIONS," let alone the whole five-line message.
 
Had there been a pandemic in 1976, I’d have kept the concession stand open for socially-distanced carryouts. The message on the marquee, assuming we had enough S’s?  

And we did get it, by the way; that one week we filled all our seats.

Afterthoughts:
1. For even more Covid-era marquee creations, don’t miss the New York Times piece that sparked this blog post. Thanks, Julia Carmel.
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2. For a glimpse of what it was like on Tuesday nights, when we changed the marquee, back in the day...

Gone With the Wind is finally gone. Or rather, like D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, GWTW’s only surviving purpose in what is, hopefully, becoming a post-racist society, may ultimately be as a document of bygone atrocities. At the suggestion of John Ridley in the Los Angeles Times, HBO recently withdrew the 1939 epic from its video offerings, promising to return the film for viewing when it had been given context, that is, an expository crutch — allowing for viewing with explanations. 

​We never showed the movie at the St. George Theatre, the 2,672-seat movie palace I had a hand in running back in 1976; but oddly, we ran its trailer. Dean, my husband and partner, longed somehow to match the theater’s splendid red and gold interior with Hollywood’s biggest technicolor sensation from the golden age, even if only for a glimpse of the theater back when epics were epics. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

The grand staircases and elegant ballrooms of  GWTW were part of my own childhood. I’d been taken periodically to various downtown Cincinnati palaces — the Albee, the Grand — seven or eight times by an older sister infatuated for most of her teen years with the actor, Leslie Howard, who played Scarlet’s main flirt, Ashley Wilkes. As for me, while I was a little girl, I could focus on Scarlet and her hi-jinks, to the exclusion of almost everything else. As a young teen, I chose make-up colors — Revlon’s “Cherries in the Snow” (lipstick) comes to mind — in hopes of ravishing the boys — just like Scarlet.

1966 overthrew these fictions. I was about to graduate from an inner city high school, whose one-third black population were largely bused in. A knifing on campus, in which a boy was thrown off the bridge, and other tensions, grew me up fast in the light of de facto segregation, which kept  my program, “College Prep,” almost completely white. I’d flirted briefly with Jim, who was black, in 11th grade art class; he planned, despite poverty and what I was coming to recognize as discrimination, to be a doctor. 

On a date my freshman year in college, I saw GWTW again on a big suburban screen, at the Valley Theatre. The uneasiness I’d felt before increased; I wondered for the first time what it would be like to see this movie and not be white. Now, resting my head on my date’s shoulder, I thought of Jim. I imagined him  watching with his blazing intelligent eyes, taking in all these paper doll black characters, dumbed down to please followers of what I suspected of being a horrific myth, the story of “Dixie.” 

White embarrassment has cost America dearly; like scales on a poorly-cleaned fish, embarrassment can cut. Think of Thomas Jefferson, so brilliant; how could he not have been embarrassed? The man who wrote, “all men are created equal” never freed the enslaved woman by whom he’d fathered six children! For almost two hundred years, this distaff family was denied, but DNA testing has finally brought Sally Hemings’ descendants into the Jefferson family. Some still protest that it may have been, after all, his brother who fathered her children, but evidence suggests otherwise.  

If, as historian Jon Meacham suggests, slavery is our original American sin, how does that play out in everyday life? European-descended Americans are slow to own the mistakes of forebears — Not my fault. Which boils down to I don’t care, and ends up ultimately in the hunting down of an innocent runner or the jamming of a cop’s foot into the neck of a man accused of passing a counterfeit bill. What started out embarrassment is reduced to fear, and solidifies into hatred, which kills. 

What will happen to Gone With the Wind?  Its time as a myth is finished. As statues of Civil War generals are smashed or dragged away, Selznick’s epic will join D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), another racist technical marvel, in an imagined museum of cinema’s horrors and curiosities. 

Afterthoughts:
1. Another oddity in that museum would be Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will — a 1935 Nazi propaganda film starring Hitler and crew. It’s shown, along with Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, in film classes, mostly to highlight the early brilliant use of technical innovations. In Riefenstahl’s case, these would include: moving cameras, dramatic lighting, aerial photography, the use of long-focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, and a novel approach to the use of music and cinematography. Riefenstahl made an early and morally unsupportable career decision to stick with the Third Reich. To paraphrase Jon Meacham  (in reference to certain racists), she sold her soul, but the check bounced.      
 
2. In 1939, The Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the American Communist Party, had the temerity to fire its movie reviewer, who refused to outright condemn GWTW. The paper then took a stand against the movie. This may have been a bit like a mouse facing down a lion; it took a lot of what was then called “moxie” to object to depictions of slavery in a film that was so trend-setting , technologically innovative, and wildly successful.    
 
3.The Orpheum Theatre in Memphis, Tennessee has had a herky-jerky history concerning GWTW lately, first banning it, then reinstating it.

People buy tickets to theatres, not movies.  —Marcus Loew

Cautiously, like Auntie Em after the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, we’re beginning to emerge from months of sheltering — not from the twister that blew Dorothy away, but from an invisible enemy, one likely still everywhere (be careful everybody, especially you protestors). I sometimes imagine the grim reaper, or franchises of same, wandering up and down the streets of my neighborhood. That’s about right: better than a hundred thousand fewer Americans are alive because of Covid-19. Who knows whether we’ll have to duck back inside by the fall, but for now (intermission?) there are forays to be made into the wider world. Once out, where will people want to go?  I’ve been musing a lot about drive-in theaters, which are in a resurgence now, but actual sit-down movie theaters, those dark caves of fantasy, will open sooner or later, if at fifty-percent capacity. (In Texas they’re close to opening five theaters right now).  

Having survived running a 2,672-seat movie palace in 1976, I know a thing or two about movie theaters at less than fifty percent occupancy. In our case, it was less than one-fifth occupancy. Due to a fire-code issue that involved an on-going war with the landlord, we never did get our official certificate of occupancy; but in a way we hardly needed a C of O. I do remember one Wednesday matinee, when the only person to buy a ticket, a quiet balding man, asked for his money back, “...I’m sorry, it’s just too lonely in there!” Would he say that now?  Or, in these Covid times, would he be used to isolation? — and perhaps even grateful for all the empty space around him? 

Movie theater attendance has been dwindling for years, generating numerous gloomy forecasts of the end of movie-going altogether; though not everyone agrees. I’m with Marcus Loew about going to movie theaters for the experience of the theater itself. After quarantine, the most mundane multiplex seems a little bit like the Roxy! Marcus knew his palaces well,  like the five New York “Loews Wonder Theatres,” defined by their Robert Morton wonder organs. That they are all still standing is something to remark on, due largely to tenacious folks in their neighborhoods, the vision of some specific individuals, like “Reverend Ike,” and, in several cases, church congregations. Of the five, only the Jersey in Jersey City defined itself largely as a movie house until the pandemic; so I’d like to focus on their recent efforts at being of service during the pandemic.

Okay, so they can’t show Bogie and Bacall, or pull out all the stops on their wonder organ, played Saturday nights until recently by a partially-retired projectionist. They can’t even host graduations — yet. But here’s what they’ve discovered: why not let those high schools use the outside of the theater and the marquee itself?:

Pomp and circumstance . . . outside the Loew’s Jersey City. Even though COVID-19 has caused commencement ceremonies to be cancelled all over our region, members of the Class of 2020 from Jersey City's Infinity Institute got to show off the caps and gowns they worked so hard for in their high school careers. The congratulations shout-out to Infinity grads will stay up on the Loew's marquee thru tomorrow morning.

Then Innovation High School will be up. For the complete schedule of when each Jersey City  High School will have its moment to shine — literally — outside the Loew's, check our Facebook Events page. You can make a wonderful memory, and take a great graduation picture from across JFK Blvd...
The Jersey is one of the two original Loew's Wonder Theatres, I’ve never managed to get around to visiting, and especially now that I see what they’re doing for their community, I can hardly wait to go there.  The Jersey is the only one of the five wonders that defines itself as a movie theatre first and foremost (others, like the United Palace of Cultural Arts, show movies part time, if at all). 

At the St. George Theatre (still standing in this harbor-side neighborhood, St. George, Staten Island, where I still live), we hosted Curtis High School’s 1976 Graduation. It was one of the few times we actually filled all 2, 672 seats (the other time was when we got our mitts on film canisters containing the director’s cut of The Exorcist, then only two years old).  I’d like to think we’d have been as enterprising and civically inclined during a pandemic as the current folks at the Jersey, who seem to have a whole bunch of high schools lined up.  Good for them! Good for Jersey City!  And may their marquee list a movie soon...

Afterthought:
The other four NYC Wonder Theatres, show less entrepreneurial energy. The Kings on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn has cancelled or rescheduled everything, but then they’re entirely a live house, and NYC won’t schedule sitting down in the dark together till Phase 4, which seems a ways off. The Paradise in the Bronx is a church, operated by a prosperity congregation, so out of the theater game. Ditto for The Valencia in Queens. The United Palace in upper Manhattan appends TBD to most of its calendar events. It continues, however, to serve its spiritual mission, the legacy of Reverend Ike, with,  among other offerings, “the world’s first online Sanctuary of Spiritual Artistry.” Get a prayer ready if you’re moved to do so,  “Each month, on the full moon, all prayers will be released into the Universe in a sacred ceremony performed by the ministers of the United Palace of Spiritual Arts.” In these troubled times, we need all the prayers we can get... 

As you may know, this blog is dedicated to a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre I had a hand in running back in the day. That day would have been 1976. I got roped into the desperate enterprise by my husband, a show-biz guy if ever there was one. The history of his desire to run a theater went all the way back to his childhood, when he and a buddy opened a “drive-in” of sorts to show the movies they’d been making with a camera he’d gotten for Christmas. Here’s the story in his own words:
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We called it the Terrace Theatre; I lived on St. John’s Terrace, a dead-end street. The site of the theater was my buddy Lester Lloyd’s backyard. On a clothesline in the middle of the yard we hung a bed sheet. Nearer to the house on a card table sat the Bell & Howell 8 mm projector. The card table also doubled as ticket booth and snack stand. Though some kids walked in, the Terrace was conceived as a drive-in. Indeed, many of our patrons “drove” on their tricycles and bikes; one kid lugged a “carload” of siblings in his  battered red wagon. Admission was a nickel. Candy had been marked up slightly from a trip to Kroger’s, while bottled Kool-Aid served as “pop” (for you non-Midwesterners, that’s “soda”), 2 cents plus deposit. We started the show with two cartoons, checked out of the Deer Park Public Library, and then came the main feature, Bomber Attack, the latest one-reeler I’d directed, a war movie that somehow involved a monster (a by-product of my inability to grasp the concept of editing). Our company logo, Big T Productions, painted on a Wheeling Steel garbage can lid, was our answer to the MGM lion. We always sold out. As I recall, I don’t think it ever rained on movie night.

In the midst of a world-wide health crisis, we could use the Terrace Theatre right now. But we have it! Dean’s effort was a kind of pop-up, something that’s having a moment of glory in the drive-in theater business. It started, perhaps, in Queens, where a diner, the Bel Aire, decided to make some use of its copious parking lot.

Meanwhile, in Warwick, NY,  operators of the more traditional Warwick Drive-In had to turn carloads of patrons away, after admitting the first 300. In steep decline since the 1950’s, who knew the drive-in movie business would celebrate a rebirth, rising meteorically above its “retro” status? It’s a business model made for a pandemic, at least in summer and fall, if not, in warmer states, year-round. 

Older drive-ins are coming back to life, while the pop-ups, like Back to the Movies, a New Jersey company, are, well, popping. At each of its six sites, Back to the Movies plans a food truck that will feature on-line ordering; movie sound is via closed circuit FM radio, and, as for bathrooms, they’ll be completely sanitized, but if you drink sparingly from those 2-liter bottles till you get home, there’ll be no need to leave the safe social distance of your car. 

I’m pleased to say that the Mahoning over in Pennsylvania, which I’ve been following since I watched a documentary about its revival is scheduled to open Friday, June 5, with its time-honored double feature:  The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory “in glorious 35 mm film.”  All sold out!  I intend to take a road trip to the Mahoning as soon as its campground re-opens.

Let’s return for a moment to the subject of movie palaces. Our theater, the St. George, was, during our tenure, only full once briefly, though we tried hard to sell it out. every single week Now I’m wondering: would a pandemic have had much of an effect on our business model? We seldom managed to sell more than five hundred seats, leaving 2,172 seats entirely vacant. How easy, in a time of quarantine, would it have been to space people six feet apart! We’d actually have had an excuse to open the balcony!
  
And now? Perhaps, surviving movie palaces, this is your moment! Anyone with a hall of mammoth proportions might just, in these difficult times, open the gilded doors. With all those seats and nothing much to do, feel free to spread your audience as thinly as the moment requires. Your only problems are restrooms and concession. At least one of these can be solved via pay-in-advance strategies for ordering via cellphone. Take a cue from drive-ins, your outdoor theater cousins. Movie tickets are routinely sold in advance via app anyhow, and snack stands could close to all but advance orders.

So here’s to space and glamor and the big screen, like the one at the United Palace in upper Manhattan, saved in another dark time, the 1970‘s, by Reverend Ike, then retro-fitted post-millennium, to its current  purposes: to, “Uplift. Educate. Unite.”  Or Graumann’s Egyptian in Hollywood, these days American Cinematheque reduced temporarily (and of course ironically) to virtual screenings. This too will pass...