A narrow, often elevated walkway, as on the sides of a bridge or in the fly loft or dome above a theater.
 
Outside the projection booth, six stories above the stage of the St. George Theatre, a Staten Island movie palace I helped run in 1976, was a world of iron lace, the skeleton of the dome. The catwalk. Yes, it was possible to walk — or, catlike, to crawl — inside the dome, a feat I never attempted. One of my colleagues did, managing to unscrew all the dead lightbulbs in sockets around the lip of the dome, some of which might well have dated to World War II. Bulbing the recesses of the dome, was a perilous activity. The dome leaked on rainy days; who knew if the ancient iron walkway would hold? 
 
Access to the catwalk was possible via a door at the back of the projection booth. Opening that door revealed something which, at first, seemed unlikely: a graveyard of old televisions. DuMont Philco, Motorola, Muntz, RCA, Admiral, Zenith, were  piled on the ironwork all around. Some probably dated back to the late 1940’s, the infancy of television.
 
TV was the movie theater operator’s adversary, our entertainment enemy. On the catwalk of a failing movie palace, these discarded televisions, seemed like the other side’s dead soldiers, remnants of a fierce battle. What were they really doing there?
 
The answer lies in the ennui that confounded the art of movie projection. In our digital age, the job more often than not involves computers and drives, making it possible for theater operators to dispense entirely with the services of a projectionist. But In 1976, in New York and other major cities, projectionists ruled. They couldn’t (easily) be fired; their jobs were shielded by an iron-clad union contract that guaranteed more money ($13.75 an hour) than we poor theater managers could ever expect to see if, by some accident, we suddenly began to break even. His hourly rate, BTW would be  approximately $58.00 by today’s standards.
 
Local 306 took care of its own — but the job was pretty boring. Most of the work came in the first half hour: spooling the film onto the take-up reels of both projectors, cleaning and trimming the carbons, waiting for a well-publicized showtime, hitting the switch on the first projector. Assuming no broken film, no mechanical malfunction, there was nothing much to do after that until the first projector’s reel had exhausted itself, at changeover time. Changeovers required some finesse — or at least competence — and careful attention. You had to line up certain cue-marks on reel one that roughly corresponded to marks on reel two, loaded and ready in the second projector. After the first changeover, and the reloading of projector one with the third reel, there was very little, if anything to do again for about twenty minutes. If you happened to have a small (contraband) TV, time might pass a little faster.
 
A clause in the projectionist’s contract clearly stated “No television or radio in the booth.” In addition to making the projectionist more likely to miss a changeover (resulting in a blank screen and audience ire), Hawaii Five-O can actually upstage a movie. 
 
The second week we were open, our announced double feature was Smile and The Sunshine Boys —showtimes listed in the papers. But folks who attended the six o’clock screening were treated on several occasions to a triple or quadruple feature, the audio from McHale’s Navy or Gilligan’s Island which Gabe happened to be watching in the booth — filtering through the movie’s soundtrack. These discrepancies were less obvious later in the evening, but at six the house was often nearly empty, and sound traveled. Long past his prime and just coasting until retirement, our grizzled projectionist hardly cared.
 
How many of those TVs on the catwalk were his — and how many the cast-offs of projectionists long gone? The researcher I am today would pay some attention to their relative ages. Why had numerous projectionists disposed of them on the catwalk?  Better to toss them into the theater’s voluminous attic than risk carrying them out the front door.
 
I only ventured onto the beginning of the catwalk one or two times. It was a dream space in iron, like the habitat of an aerialist. These days, whenever I’m under a dome, I wonder if it has a catwalk. One of my favorites, Grand Central Terminal has something a lot more glamorous than a catwalk. From all appearances it’s a lot more solid than the one I remember at the St. George — bet there are no TVs.
 
Afterthought:
 Most movie palace domes, I recently learned, are even more provisional than the St. George Theatre’s, if you peek beyond the plaster, just lathe! A catwalk, it turns out, is fairly special after all.

My favorite double title, glimpsed briefly in downtown Cincinnati where I grew up, was on the marquee of the Royale, Cincinnati’s only porn house:  BOX LUNCH followed by THAR SHE BLOWS. Meanwhile, back home in Staten Island, at the movie palace I was going bankrupt running, our marquee offerings that week might have passed for at least half a porn double feature: Texas Chainsaw Massacre plus Torso. Both featured bodies, after all...
 
The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace, was on the “buck fifty” circuit in the year we ran it, which usually guaranteed the movie patron two movies for one “low low” price. There was always an “A” feature, for which we paid at least a modest percentage of tickets sold, and a “B” which cost a flat fee. Among a number of pairings, we ran:
 
The Devil Within Her and Embryo  (for marquee value, I love this combo)
The Man Who Would Be King chased by Cops and Robbers
At the Earth’s Core and (if you can dig it) The Land That Time Forgot
 
But my personal favorite, almost a found poem, was The Giant Spider Invasion paired symbiotically with The Legend of Bigfoot. This last always conjures an image for me of a gargantuan foot grinding into dust a colossal spider.
 
There is (or used to be) a fine art to creating double features. It’s a great “buy one, get one free” marketing concept, that probably saved the nascent movie business of the 1920’s during that plunge from the cliff of financial ruin we call The Great Depression. There’s a myth that the entertainment business prospered after Wall Street crashed in 1929, but it just ain’t so. Do the math: national income in 1929 was 85 billion, but by 1932, it was 41 billion. Eighty-five thousand businesses failed, and some of them, you can be sure, were movie theaters, whose owners watched admission sales fall 27 percent by 1932. (actually modest by today’s Pandemic figures...) 
 
But the Depression wasn’t a health-created crisis; it was more absolute, with little hope for an upward spiral. Some theater operators were actually taking items in barter, even food, in exchange for tickets. That’s no way to run a business, so what to do? Raffles? Sure. Dish Night? Definitely. 
 
The most reliable hedge against massive box office losses was, it turned out, the B movie, made quickly at minimal expense. Episodic movies in a series — like The Thin Man  for instance — could be paired with the more costly A feature. Who could resist Myrna Loy and Asta? Often a B was just plain lesser, as with The Rawhide Terror, paired with John Wayne in West of the Divide. Which is not to say a big name actor was never in a B flick. Wayne also starred in the B pic, Ride Him, Cowboy (1932, Warner Brothers) and The Man From Monterey (1933, also WB).
 
In our brief time at the St. George, John Wayne briefly graced our large soda-stained screen in the company of the notable Katherine Hepburn,  both starring in Rooster Coburn, part of a lamentable double feature with Gable and Lombard (Jill Clayburgh and James Brolin). Rooster was the second-to-last movie Wayne would make. As for Gable and Lombard — which Roger Ebert called a “mushy, old-fashioned extravaganza” — what was our agent thinking? Couple movies? Two more disparate couples there never were. Rooster ought to have qualified as the A picture, but by 1976 John Wayne, and westerns, were so over, possibly even more intolerably so to our urban mostly teen and largely Black audience than a re-hash of thirties Hollywood.
 
Double features were in their twilight phase by then. Except at drive-ins and on the “buck fifty”  movie house circuit which was all an aging movie palace could hope to qualify for. Everything was second or third-run. We rented one A pic for, generally, a third of the gate and one B for fifty dollars flat. (Once we tried to book two Bs from two separate distributors — which would have allowed us to rely on candy sales for a living — but Warner and UA checked with each other and squashed our effort).
 
For a six-hour projection shift, we usually scheduled three films: A B A (the A picture twice, the B feature once), although it was tough sometimes determining which movie we ought to consider our A, since everything was basically shop-worn. We opened the theater with Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and Woody Allen’s Bananas — a good pairing — with Bananas clearly the B in every sense, by virtue of its greater age (already six years old). Looking back without the benefit of my check ledger, I find it difficult to tell in some cases which movie we only paid a flat fifty for, showing just how short of product the industry really was.
 
Here’s one pairing where the A pic is obvious. How could we have run the great Dog Day Afternoon with the deplorable (Borgnine/Carroll) Law and Disorder? Some marriages were never meant to be.
 
Afterthought 1: 
Double features may have faded in the age of the multiplex,  but, as Siri says, “Here’s something I found”: Double feature: The act of seeing two movies for the price of one at a public movie theater. You watch the first movie, take special notice of when the next movie will start, hang out in the restroom until the appropriate start time, and then mosey on over to the correct theater. It causes undue stress for only saving 10 bucks, but it can make an afternoon fly by. —Urban Dictionary 
 
Afterthought 2: 
Towering Inferno and Earthquake were our “Shake and Bake” special, a fave if just to see the letters on the marquee.
 
Afterthought 3: 
Hang in there! If you’re afraid still to go to an indoor movie, just remember spring is here, and drive-ins are in a renaissance! This summer for sure I’m off to the Mahoning in Pennsylvania, to catch at least a double feature! 

All box offices in movie palaces are glam. Some are like rockets or fortune-tellers’ booths, sitting outside under the marquee, completely detached from the theater’s inner sanctum. Others, like the main window inside the copious marble lobby at the St. George Theatre, are more traditional, with grillwork and a fancy sign. The St. George Theatre — which I helped keep afloat for one glorious if often catastrophic year — had 2,672 seats, most of which were empty in 1976. No pandemic then, just a lot of folks home watching TV. 
 
There were actually two box office windows inside our lobby, but only one, with  a non-functioning sign — TICKETS — was open for business. A noticeable groove in the marble floor in front of this window, testified to decades of patrons who had paused, paid, and pivoted on their way to see a movie. 
 
Perched on an iron stool in front of a machine — with black and cherry-red buttons embedded in a steel plate — Brenda (hoop earrings, chewing gum) or Diane (afro, big round eyes), or some or another member of management, made the judgement call about who was really entitled to a child’s ticket. 
 
“Quick — what year were you born?”
 
If the interviewee stammered, looked down, or appeared to be doing mental calculation, the jig was up. More than once, a box office staffer spotted someone carefully waiting — until patrons from the last showing were walking out — for a crowded moment to walk in backwards. Near as I know, they always got caught.
 
We were privileged, given the toughness of the local streets in 1976, to have interior box office windows at the St. George. Many theaters were built with external brass or chrome booths fronting on sidewalk. 
 
Such was the case at the Mt. Lookout Theatre in Cincinnati where I grew up. My sister Cris had a job there when she was sixteen, selling tickets in the glass booth. I was seven, privileged to a free ticket on Saturdays and all the popcorn I could consume. 
 
When I wasn’t watching Earth Versus the Flying Saucers or whatever else was showing, my favorite pastime those Saturdays was hanging out with my sexy almost-grown-up sister, with hair short and in bangs, just like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina. Cris could be found at the outside chrome booth, which she occupied with the sophistication of a sybil.
 
Mother didn’t approve of Cris’s theater job, mostly because her study habits were abysmal. Our mother also thought the theater a little seedy; but had she known! 
 
Years after she died, Cris confessed to me that on New Year’s Eve, 1956, she’d been sitting in the glass booth when a car careened suddenly around the corner on two wheels spitting out a single bullet, which penetrated the glass just above her head. Mother never knew, of course. My nephews and niece, and generations to follow, might never had existed, had that bullet taken a lower trajectory...
 
I thought of this episode later at the St. George in those crazy mid-seventies, and  took heart that our ticket sellers were reasonably safe inside a recessed lobby.
 
Afterthought:
1. Cris lived to 81, as it turns out, producing all those children and great grandchildren, working for IBM and NASA, becoming in fairly late age a mainframe computer expert who traveled the world. She died this January, and this blasted pandemic — not, fortunately, the cause of her death, is nonetheless the reason I can’t yet fly home to Cincinnati. I miss her.
 
2. Lots of other stuff happened that a box office staffer had to keep on top of at the St.George.  Sometimes there was more theater going on in the lobby than in the auditorium itself. Check it out. 

What do the movies Animal Crackers, Blazing Saddles, Deadpool,  Annie Hall, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, and Space Balls have in common? The thread that binds these films is the flaunting of a broadly–accepted rule of theater. Their directors busted — at some point in each movie’s plot — clean through what has been called “the Fourth Wall.”  You may have heard of it, the invisible barrier separating  us, the watchers, from them, the actors/characters, who carry on blithely, as if we weren’t there. In traditional theater, it’s sometimes delineated by the actual theater’s proscenium arch. But in movies it’s metaphorical, the wall, like the “willing suspension of disbelief,” that makes it possible to read a novel. (You’re not in your life anymore, but living somebody else’s). In film, that most dream–like of fictions, the moviegoer, as a long–ago teacher of mine once observed, “...sits in the dark, forgetting the rent, a toothache, even a lost love.” If this is so in the mere act of watching a movie, it is doubly so in a movie palace, like the St. George Theatre, which I helped to run in 1976, where every on–screen character is two stories tall.  

To my knowledge, the only movie we showed at the St. George that flaunts the fourth wall is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. It achieved fourth–wall demolition many times, most notably in its ending, when the characters brawl their way out of their own set, spilling over into the set of a Busby Berkeley–style top hat movie, disrupting a cafeteria full of actors on break and ending up on the streets of Burbank. That the set’s wall is literally knocked over is half the fun.

Annie Hall came out late in 1977, after we’d left our temple of dreams, so I never had the privilege of watching it in the St. George’s cavernous dark, taking in Alvy’s (Woody Allen’s) confessions about Annie. Another movie I really wish I’d seen at the SGT, also a Woody Allen flick, The Purple Rose of Cairo, actually features a character coming clean through the movie screen in a fictional New Jersey theater, to have an affair with a movie–watcher. Is that a double breaching of the wall? The movie within the movie?  

If you stretch the definition of fourth–wall penetration just a little bit, you could say that, in the year we spent at the St. George, we woke the audience up from their collective dream a few times accidentally, when the sound head on a projector began “motor-boating” (The Exorcist) or when screams from behind the screen revealed pranks staff members were playing on one another (Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Could this qualify as performance art?

Fast forward to Matthew Broderick’s asides in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), so numerous they affect a kind of conspiracy between this truant teen and the audience. Fight Club is virtually narrated by the Edward Norton character. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan addresses us early and often, usually in a highly ironic tone: “Look, I know you’re not following what I’m saying anyway, right? That’s okay, that doesn’t matter. The real question is this — was all this legal? Absolutely fucking not. But we were making more money than we knew what to do with.” Without these confidences, I don’t think I could have stayed in my seat for the whole debauch.

Speaking of popping the bubble of credulity, assaults on and/or addresses to the audience have been going on a long time. Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought of the fourth wall as, more or less, a scrim, a flimsy one at that, with actors almost sitting in the laps of audience members, running the aisles, handing props to watchers and addressing the entire audience with an eye to advancing the plot. 

It is my lady. O, it is my love! (Romeo is telling us)
O, that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
(Juliet has no clue, we do.)

You may have been almost grown–up when Hamlet or Ferris Bueller or some other character addressed you directly, but animated characters (Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes) had been talking to you all along. Bugs Bunny chaws his carrot, twinkles at the metaphorical camera and confesses, “I’m a stinker.”  “It's wabbit season,” Elmer Fudd informs us, putting a gloved finger over his lips, “and I’m hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!”

I wish we’d run cartoons at the St. George, but they cost money, and we were always broke. There might have been some solace in watching Road Runner, whose forward momentum always got him over the cliff. Stylistically, we more resembled Wile E. Coyote — and you know what happens to him.
I’ll give the last word to Porky Pig, speaking directly to all of us:

“That’s all folks!” 

Afterthoughts:  
1.  There are many lists of fourth-wall breaking movies, but here’s the one that got me started. Check it out!
2.  Ironically, the title of this blog post is a famous line from Taxi Driver, in which DeNiro is talking well within the four walls of our collective imagination; actually, he’s alone in a room, in essence talking to himself. Fourth wall or no, it’s worth reliving this creepy cinematic moment. 

I have a sixth sense when it comes to identifying buildings that used to be movie theaters. Decommissioned churches are marked by their steeples and stained glass; but theaters that have become warehouses, boutiques, sporting goods stores, even parking garages, have their own traits: broad low porticos, with perhaps a marquee or the remains of it, ticket windows, balcony fire escapes at the back or on the side of the building. One other thing theaters, especially palaces, often exhibit is ornate decorative effects that refer in some way to the theatrical.
 
So it was one Sunday not so long ago, which is to say before the Pandemic, we walked up Broadway in Manhattan, headed for 175th Street and the United Palace of Cultural Arts; we happened on an interesting building at 165th St. There, on the East side of the street, was a fascinating structure, 3940 Broadway, with an arched inset depicting in great detail Neptune, god of the sea riding a magnificent oared ship. The facade is a mix of oxide green and teal, set in beige tiles. Decorative work surrounding the arch over the entryway features lyres and comic/tragic faces. Oddly, given all the sea imagery, faces of foxes line many of the windows. Foxes? Of course. We paused to admire what we later identified as Thomas Lamb’s Fox Audubon Theatre commissioned by none other than William Fox himself, in 1912, three years before he founded Fox Film Corporation in those bad old days when moguls both built and owned theaters and the movies shown in them. 
 
You probably know that my interest in — and ability to recognize — old theaters comes from the time I spent obsessed with one, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which for one fateful year, 1976, I had a hand in running. The St. George has, like the Audubon Fox, worn a variety of hats (in the case of the St George: flea market, roller rink, church). But the Audubon, functioning these days as a multi-use facility under the aegis of Columbia University, is famous or notorious in a whole other respect. Built with both an auditorium and an upstairs ballroom, it’s where, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was shot, and its life and uses after that event reflect, in part, that notoriousness. The Audubon appears to be the only one of the Foxes known as the site of an assassination. 
 
There were so many Foxes, most with less historical significance than the Audubon. Wikipedia lists around ninety theaters, some built by William Fox himself, others joining the chain when Fox West Coast merged with the original Fox Films. 
 
The Kingsport (Tennessee) Fox Theatre a small neighborhood house, celebrated its opening on August 22, 1940. According to local journalist Vince Staten the Fox first featured the film “...Alias the Deacon on screen, starring Bob Burns as a ‘hillbilly deacon who is actually a cardsharp in disguise’... The Fox was the first Kingsport movie theater to show movies on Sunday...” (and was subsequently raided for (what else?) showing movies on Sunday). The theater survived as a single-screen house until 1963 when plans were laid to convert it to some kind of off-premises cafeteria for the new high school. As it was determined that students would not be allowed to leave the school, renovation was subsequently halted, giving a local barber the opportunity to set up shop in the lobby. Eventually, the theater became a country music recording studio, lasting at that trade until the early nineties. Rumor has it these days it’s morphed into a beauty parlor.
 
The Bunkie Louisiana Fox is the kind of storefront I’d spot and instantly know as a former theater, if I were driving through town. Hideous though the black and white aluminum siding on its front may be, you can see that the black is disguising what once was a facade/marquee. The de-bunked Bunkie currently serves as, on the right, City Hall Annex/ Court and, on the left, the local Bunkie library. 
 
These previous two theaters are humble country Foxes, but there are some famous ones — still standing and otherwise — on that long list of ninety movie houses I just mentioned.    
 
Arguably, the “Super Foxes,” all palaces built before William Fox’s empire crumbled are: The St Louis Fox (aka “The Fabulous Fox”), The Detroit Fox (aka “The Magnificent Fox”), the tragically demolished San Francisco Fox, and the marvelously resurrected Atlanta Fox. 
 
The St. Louis and Detroit Foxes are said to be “twins,” built in Siamese/Byzantine style, whatever that is, and seating roughly 4,500 people. Here’s a brief description of the lobby of the St. Louis  house, clipped, I freely admit, from Cinema Treasures:
 
In the lobby, a pair of huge golden griffons flanked the grand staircase, and deep red faux marble columns ringed the mezzanine level. From every corner statuary peeked out—including a group of large gilt maharajahs. The cavernous auditorium was spectacular in scope, dramatic in its lighting and swirling decor, and when the Governor of Missouri appeared on its stage on opening night to dedicate it, he was nearly at a loss for words.  
 
The St. Louis Fox is (or at least was, until the Pandemic) open and active showing mostly live acts and some movies.The same can be said for its twin, the Detroit Fox. Both have remained theaters all their days, though they suffered steep declines in the dark ties of the seventies.
 
The Detroit, slightly larger, by 500 seats, continued, showing Martial Arts and Blaxploitation, and was landmarked and revitalized in the eighties. Like its twin in St. Louis, it opened with Janet Gaynor in Street Angel, in 1929.
 
The Atlanta Fox, was reputedly inspired by a combination of the Alhambra in Spain and Egypt’s Temple of Kharnak. It was begun by the Shriners organization in the late twenties, who were intent on building the most opulent temple possible, then (lack of funds) leased the half-finished structure to William Fox, who finished the job, opening in 1929 with a premier of Steamboat Willie, Disney’s first cartoon starring Mickey Mouse. As is usually the case with movie palace big beauties, it was saved by a local group starting in the mid-seventies, and brags that it has the only full-time restoration staff of any current saved theater. 
 
The San Francisco Fox, completed in that fateful year, 1929, is the only one of the four Super Foxes not to survive a wrecker’s ball. At 4,651 seats, it’s a near twin to the (smaller) Los Angeles Theatre, 1932 by S. Charles Lee, who imitated many of its design features. By 1963, the powers that be in SF saw to its demolishment, with (can you imagine?) a gilded demolition ball. Here is the saddest description you can imagine of its final moments as a standing hall:
 
The steel wrecking ball, painted a lackluster gold for the occasion, crashed through the west wall of the opulent Market Street movie palace at 10:33 a.m. high above some 200 generally disinterested bystanders. Inside, on the abandoned third floor, a wall-length mirror shattered in the cavernous ladies’ lounge. A stained glass sign, made in 1929 by Tiffany’s, swung violently in a corridor lined with faded red satin.
 
When the Fox opened June 28, 1929, at 1350 Market St., it was the largest theater west of Chicago. 
In a general sense, the story of the altered lives of Fox theaters is the story of what became of palaces and smaller neighborhood theaters nationwide, which have managed to stand for second and even third lives.
 
Sometimes they return to their roots, theaters, like our own St. George Theatre, not a Fox, but grand enough, and these days a mixed house, showing movies, welcoming magicians, local dance and theatrical troupes, comedians, solitary but still-famous rock musicians, you name it – and even the occasional major act. Well it’s a living, it’s show biz, it’s community and it’s what these giant fantasy castles were meant to do. 

Afterthoughts:
1. The Audubon, which, as I noted, contains the now-infamous Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was shot, has had an interesting journey from movie theater and meeting place/union hall to its current incarnation as, among other things, the Shabazz Center. Recognize the name?  Betty Shabazz was Malcolm X’s widow and fought hard to revitalize the building and memorialize her husband. She didn’t live to see the completion of this project, but it did finally come to fruition. 
 
2. Interestingly enough, the facade of what was once the Audubon Fox, with its amazing depiction of Neptune in the prow of a trireme (ancient Greek ship), shows to better effect, now that it doesn’t have to fight with a marquee and blade sign, which utterly obscured it when it was actually a theater. 

While I was busy going broke running a movie palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre, there were moments when some of us involved in that adventure, gave it all up and took the ferry into Manhattan — a 23-minute crossing, then a hop onto the subway and you could lose yourself for a while in the East Village. Once or twice we ended up on Second Avenue and 9th Street at Veselka — a 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant which still serves the borscht of the gods, or in the seedy Ukrainian National Home, a cheaper bowl of soup. How I wish I’d caught Springsteen at the Palladium on 14th Street, but we were just too poor. 
 
Mostly I wandered the streets, dipping in and out of head shops, passing by places that intrigued me. One such was Variety Photo Plays, a theater whose marquee I can easily say was the exhibition equivalent of a high-end dessert, something on the order of meringue glacee, red and white by day, glowing red/orange at night. I never went inside, which saddens me now that it no longer exists.
 
The Variety was, until its demise in 2005, one of the few original nickelodeons  still standing. By 1976, it had morphed into a porn house, if one with an interesting history. That year, we showed Scorcese’s Taxi Driver on our Staten Island screen. Little did we know that the Variety had served as a location site, the scene in which DeNiro’s character first meets Foster’s; and around the corner from the Variety, the movie’s final shootout actually took place. In our outer borough movie palace, we’d created a mirror for the funky streets of the East Village just across the water.
 
What exactly was “Variety Photoplays?” Why “photoplays” and not “movies?” According to The New York Times (1989) the original owner, a man named Valensi, an early Nickelodeon entrepreneur who built the theater, probably “sought an association with legitimate theater endeavors, of which 14th Street had been a center since the 1850's.” Nickelodeons, which Variety initially was, were cheap (a nickel); in the eyes of the tonier crowd who enjoyed opera at the 4000-seat Academy of Music on 14th St. just around the corner, motion pictures were, well, too vulgar. 
 
This of course would change rather quickly; in fact, the great movie palaces were built explicitly to compete for the entertainment interests of the opera crowd. In the Union Square area, these high-brows dined afterward at August Luchow’s palatial restaurant on the south side of 14th Street. Accordingly, close to Luchow’s, in 1926, a lavish Thomas Lamb movie palace rose up. The old (Academy of Music) opera house had by this time been demolished, so movie palace mogul William Fox, took the opportunity to christen his new theater (what else?) The Academy of Music. (It kept this name until the 1970’s, when it morphed into the Palladium, a Ron Delsener rock venue, where I could have caught the Boss, if I hadn’t been broke).
 
I could do an entire history of the evolution of entertainment in New York, concluding with the birth of movie palaces, and never leave the corner of 14th and Third!  The humble Variety Photo Plays (formally opened in 1914) was, a little more than ten years later, already an anachronism. “Designed by Louis Sheinart, the exterior...was in plain brick, generally unornamented except for arcaded piers projecting above a sloping tiled false roof....Inside, the auditorium was fairly plain, but did have a slightly pitched floor and fixed seats, still novel touches in an industry that had started only recently with plain benches and sheets hung on a wall.” (The New York Times).
 
In 1923, to compete with the onslaught of movie palaces, Variety treated itself to a marquee designed by Julius Eckman, re-embellished seven years later, by Boak & Paris. Oh, that marquee. Until the day in 2005 when the little theater was finally demolished, the marquee spoke to me and to other passers-by, of an era long-gone, the infancy of film itself. Boak & Paris hadn’t altered its underside, “a coffered field with regularly spaced bulbs,” according to the Times, but had stitched on “a zigzag Art Deco fascia in enameled metal and neon lighting.” The fascia gave ...“the theater's, rather than the show's, name...” recalling  “...the period when movies were more of a generic product. The lights buzzing on the underside of the marquee, when they were on, enveloped the passerby in a warm, glowing field.” That field, as I remember it, was a dazzling Tequila Sunrise orange at night. Film fare at the Variety was already grade B by 1930, and would gradually slip over the decades to what the Times finally describes, in 1989, as “raunchy to naughty to pornographic...” adding  “...a slightly forbidden, Coney Island spice to the building.”
 
You can find a bit of that Coney Island spice in a fine reminiscence, by Mykola Dementiuk (Lambda Literary). His tribute to the gay porn days of love in a darkened theater is as much about the book Variety Photo Plays by the poet Edward Field, as it is about the theater itself. Here’s some of what Dementiuk has to say about nights there:
 
“The Variety Photoplays...showed corny girlie films but was better known for being a faggot pick-up place—a place where you could get a handjob/blowjob, with no need of knowing who was giving it to you.”
 
If Jack Stevenson in Bright Lights Film Journal can be believed, the above description is an understatement. Here’s his unvarnished observation from a 1980’s visit:
 
Upon entering the auditorium, I saw the movie was playing upside-down. This lasted a good fifteen minutes. Nobody complained or perhaps even noticed....Among the clientele that afternoon were trashy drag queens and what William Burroughs refers to in Junky as “rooming-house flesh;” the old, the infirm, the pallid-complexioned occupants of the neighborhood’s cheap residency hotels. There was a preponderance of fat unshaven duffers dressed in dirty woolen caps and multiple layers of T-shirts and coats, dressed for the middle of winter on this sweltering afternoon. Two old floor fans clanging away up front did nothing to cool the place down.
 
It was like stepping into a time capsule. I noticed four large globe-like lighting fixtures that had somehow survived the decades. The walls were an unremarkable (patched) plaster, but the ceiling was special, composed of patterned pressed tin. There was a single modest balcony. My main memory was of patrons moving about the theater in a constant bustle and streaming into and out of the toilets oddly situated down front below the screen and surely a distraction for anyone trying to watch the film. The room was filled with the continual rustlings and creakings of people on the move. It was more like a mass happening than a movie screening, and in fact I have no recollection of the film at all. 
 
When I came into the city for a bowl of borscht and a look-around, I gazed longingly at Variety’s marquee, knowing that if I passed through the doors, gender would make me an outlier. Besides, we had run a soft-porn triple feature at the St. George, so I knew more or less what these audiences, gay or straight, did in the dark. At any rate, I never went inside. The Times observes — with a bit of nostalgia I find suspect —  “People going past the theater, even in the daytime, got a whiff of vintage celluloid, and at night it was intoxicating.” How could I have failed to smell the lovely film stock? Famously flammable, celluloid had actually been out of production since the 1950’s. So much for nostalgia. 
 
Variety took a brief curtain call as an Off-Broadway theater before it was, sadly, torn down, replaced by the inevitable luxury apartment building. For more, read Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York A.K.A.The Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct. I love the spirit of this title, nostalgia well placed.
 
Afterthoughts: 
 1.This post is a re-run from 2018; another post from about that time was about Deco theaters, aided by the fine book, Popcorn Palaces: The Art Deco Movie Theatre Paintings of Davis Cone. One of Cone’s paintings — of Variety Photo Plays in the 1970’s — triggered my memory. Thanks again to Cone...

2. Unrelated afterthought: New York City is finally reopening movie theaters! They’re springing up (no pun intended) like daffodils!  One theater that has had a long continued life is the Village East, now under Angelika’s banner. It has a history as a Yiddish theater, surviving since the era of Variety Photoplays. As a matter of fact, it’s showing Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in 70 mm. What a way to re-start your movie-going, by seeing actual film.  If you’re in or near Manhattan, here’s what’s open.