I’m fixated on the word ODEON. You’re likely to have seen it on some or another marquee. The word sounds Greek, and it is:back in sword and sandal days, an odeon was a space dedicated to sports, singing, or poetry (think “ode”); not quite a theater, but almost. Greek theaters were roofless, but odeons were enclosed, and some of the roofs were pretty fancy, supported often by the masts of ships sunk in battle, or elaborately carved beams.The most magnificent odeon in all of Greece is rumored to have been the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on the southwest cliff of the Acropolis at Athens.  Built around 160 A.D, it held 4500/5500 patrons, under a ceiling constructed of beautifully carved beams, actual cedars of Lebanon, and was elaborately decorated with various works of art.

Sounds kind of over-the-top, like a movie palace...!

As you know from reading this blog, I have a mystical link to such a palace, a 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque house, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I had a hand in running, in 1976. The word ODEON appears nowhere on that theater’s marquee, but the St. George does have a soaring dome, and, like the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, our palace has statuary, paintings (of bullfighters and senoritas), and elaborate carvings. The Athens venue seated nearly twice as many spectators, almost as many as Radio City Music Hall, way before there were microphones. The acoustics must have been awesome. 

The first odeons on the American continent happen to have been sad little affairs, “nickelodeons,” store-front theaters that cost only five cents, with rude wooden benches, seating a small number of people. There was an Odeon worthy of the name on 145th Street in NYC, a Thomas Lamb theater,  (listed as a “negro” theater as late as 1955). But the name Odeon never really caught on in America. There were, to my knowledge, no theaters named Odeon in my hometown, Cincinnati, and not many in the rest of the U.S. of A. In fact, of 256 theaters with that name that are standing and, in some sense, open worldwide, only around four are in the U.S.

Hopping the pond, you’ll find the reverse: over there the name is something like Loew’s or Fox, and you could say there is something very much in the name ODEON in Leeds, Leicester, Portsmouth, Surbiton, and a number of locales. in the UK and Europe. Oscar Deutsch, who scattered Odeons all over the English landscape, was certainly off the same bolt of theater tapestry as Loew, Fox, Graumann, Pantages and other U.S. moguls. His first theater in what was then the town of Brierley Hill astounded the local residents on opening night in 1928, but frightened them too: they had to be assured the balcony of this grand theater would actually hold their weight. Like many theaters of the day, the Brierley Hill sported a sawtooth motif borrowed from ancient Egypt — an architectural style reminiscent of Graumann's Egyptian, echoing the 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

There were some 257 theaters in the Brit Odeon chain, and perhaps what distinguishes them is the fact of their existence in a very industrial landscape, with an eye to details that would survive that landscape. What poet William Blake called “the dark satanic mills” had had a lasting effect on the  towns Oscar Deutsch traveled through. Deutsch was a blue collar lad himself — son of Birmingham scrap-dealing immigrant parents from Hungary — so he knew his theaters had to withstand pollution of various kinds. Accordingly, he utilized various materials that would resist smudging, such as faience. with rounded Deco corners, presumably for easy cleaning. These  “picture palaces,” as they’re called in the UK, reflect a variety of styles, from Assyrian/Egyptian to Art Deco and Moorish. 

The second theater Deutsch opened, and the first to actually bear the Odeon name was 
in Perry Barr, a suburb of Birmingham. The name Odeon had been a quick choice, suggested by an employee returning from a vacation in Greece. Certain representatives of the chain over the years claimed it as an acronym for Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation, and, who knows, some people probably believed that! There might have been even more Odeon picture palaces, if Deutsch hadn’t died of liver cancer in 1941. Then, so true of chains everywhere, the Odeon family of theaters went through a series of owners. In the bad old seventies, when so many palaces and neighborhood theaters were demolished here, almost half the Odeon chain went down. It’s then owner, aptly named Rank Leisure, fought like Ebenezer Scrooge for their rights of demolition. 

Much of this info comes from an excellent if sad article in The Guardian, “Closing Credits: the Battle to Save 1930s Odeon Cinemas,” For me as an American movie palace enthusiast, reading about the fall of the Odeons is a Ground Hog’s Day experience, which is to say, Deja Vu: this cinema’s turned into a Bingo Hall, that one’s a supermarket, or car park, or Jehovah’s Witness Hall — just like here, where churches, warehouses, storage facilities, and even basketball arenas house the remains of what Ben M. Hall referred to as, The Best Remaining Seats. 

The name Odeon still survives in what’s left of the original chain, a list added to, with theater acquisitions all over Europe. These days the whole kit and caboodle belongs to AMC. Well alright, the name persists, if referring largely to ‘plexes and the like, so, I agree with Juliet (Act 2, Scene 2)

What’s in a name? 
 
The rest of her speech — A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — happens to remind me of its inverse, just how much the destruction of gorgeous old picture palaces really stinks. 
. 
Afterthoughts:
1. In some respect, I think we fare better on this side of the Atlantic, when it comes to saving palaces; so many, like my own St. George Theatre, have been rescued by local groups of entrepreneurs or fans or simply determined individuals. For an inspiring example, read why Marcus Loew was, after all, right!  

2. The Odeon of Herodes Atticus, mentioned at the beginning of this post, rocks again — has for several decades, as a matter of fact. It was revived as a performance space in 1950. Check out the above link for a list of people who’ve held forth there including among hundreds of performers, Maria Callas, the Bolshoi and Sting.  

3. Read this fascinating blog on the deaths of so many of Deutsch’s Odeons.  
 
4. Other “What’s in a Name?” posts on different common theater monikers:
What's in a (Theater) Name? "Roxy" and Its Evolution
and
Odeon Theatre, Tucumcari NM  
Odeon Theatre, Mason TX
Odeon Theatre, Glenwood Springs CO

On December 26, 1933, The Staten Island Advance ran an article headlined, “Actors Robbed at St. George Theatre”  “...the robberies must have been committed between 9 and 10 P.M., while ... vaudeville was in progress. The thief is believed to have calmly walked in the stage door and entered in turn each of the dressing rooms being used by the artists.” Performers’ wallets, handbags and jewelry were apparently never recovered.
 
Those dressing rooms were stage left; I remember them well, though by the time I saw them, they were strewn with rubble. The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I (and some other unlikely entrepreneurs) took a hand in running in 1976, was built for Vaudeville every bit as much as for movies.  

Not every surviving movie palace had this dual purpose, and the difference usually shows in the acoustics. The St. George is a “stacked” house, with acoustics so “sweet” you can stand center stage without a mic and be heard in the last row of the upper balcony, sans echo. 

Sweet though the space is and was for live presentations of various kinds, by 1929, when our theater opened, the actors, mimes, comics, trained animals, jugglers, and magicians who might once have been the main show had already become a shabby and depleted lot. The great Vaudeville circuits had been broken up by then, and it was movies, the talkies, everyone wanted to see. Ironically, the robbers chronicled by the local paper probably didn’t get much of a haul from down-at-heels actors that chilly night. 

Vaudeville had had a good long run. Orpheus, a musical demi-god in Greek mythology, had kindly lent his name to the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit. Essentially founded in 1886, it was a West Coast/Midwest enterprise initially, tremendously successful until “picture shows” finally kidnapped and hauled away America’s heart. There were 45 theaters in the Orpheum Circuit by1920 (after the smaller Vaudeville circuits and East Coast and West Coast circuits had combined), down from several hundred the decade before. Live shows of fourteen or fifteen acts a night had been reduced to seven or eight, just enough to window-dress whatever moving picture the house had to offer up. 

One more circuit merger formed KAO, Keith-Albee Orpheum, offsetting the fact that the movie business kept grabbing more and more slices of the audience pie. Then, in 1927, a snake-in-the-grass named Joseph Kennedy (yes, that Joe Kennedy, a Prohibition rum-runner and the daddy of future prez, JFK) pulled a slick one. Joe is known in some circles as “the man who killed Vaudeville,” and here’s how he did it; Kennedy managed to get a majority of KAO, which he promptly sold to his buddy David Sarnoff who formed RKO, (Radio/Keith/Orpheum), a company devoted entirely to the movies. Kennedy then got the sadistic pleasure of firing the head of KAO, Edward Albee (the “A” in KAO, aka “Mr Vaudeville”) telling him, “You’re washed up, Ed. You’re through.” 

There’s no business like show business.

It’s tempting to feel sorry for Albee, but let’s not forget he got his start palming tickets at a circus to which he’d run away as a young man, going on to join B.F. Keith at his less-than elegant Gaiety, a “dime museum” in Boston, which displayed such delights as Baby Alice, a dead premature infant, and a chicken “with a human face.” Using, at the outset, pirated versions of Gilbert and Sullivan. Keith and Albee left the dime museum business and went on to form the beginnings of what would eventually become KAO, with Albee the engine of the enterprise.

Two years after Kennedy told him he was “...finished,” Albee died, but he was hardly a broken man. He expired at The Breakers in Palm Beach, leaving an estate valued at two million dollars (nearly thirty million by today’s standards).  

By the time we came along in 1976, the St. George’s stage may have been vacant, its dressing rooms filled with rubble, its copious fly loft devoid of all but a dress curtain and an asbestos fire curtain; the organ had been sold off for parts to a pizza parlor in Texas, and the orchestra pit stank of urine; but the acoustics were, and are to this very day, impeccable. 

From the vantage point of 2019, the Twenties are just about a century behind us, though in 1976, that gap felt like the half century it was. Ghosts of the actors whose purses were stolen have no doubt finally vanished, though in my time the dressing rooms seemed completely haunted. Sly Stone, the only live act of any stature we managed to present at the St. George, inhabited a hastily-cleaned dressing room briefly. He was, of course, in an altered state, but that’s another story, part of the book this blog was built to support; you’ll read about it in due time. 

Afterthoughts:

1. Isn’t it strange and wonderful that the new model of business for movie palaces and 19th century theaters that have survived is a return to live theater?  Not exactly Vaudeville, the St. George and other palaces support themselves these days on a variety of entertainments, from Doo-wop to Asian circuses. The dressing rooms are full again!
2. The relationship between Vaudeville and the movies may be the subject of another post, but suffice it meanwhile to say that an amazing string of stars got their start playing the circuits: Fred Astaire (as part of an act that included his sister), Burns and Allen, W.C. Fields, Mickey Rooney, Mae West, Jelly Roll Morton, to name a few. 
3. Edward F. Albee's grandson by adoption was the playwright, Edward Albee.

 

Once a week, back in the nineteen eighties, I had a good thing going that involved the Gramercy Theatre. This will definitely reveal my age, but hey, by now you’ve probably done the math, since I keep talking about running a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, for one year, 1976.... Anyhow, some nine years after Dean and I bombed out as theater operators at our 2672-seat movie palace, I found myself working as a cook, going to school and, on Wednesday afternoons, seeing a psychotherapist on 23rd Street; I needed her, after our spectacular failure, and while I was at it, there were some other issues. Therapy was scary, useful, but depressing, if not without its reward. You see, there just happened to be movie theaters all up and down West 23rd Street in those days, and, thanks to Local 306 — the union that had a lock on projectionists’ contracts in all five boroughs of NYC — Wednesday matinees were everywhere. As an ex-theater operator, I knew all about the matinee shift, that usually sold only fifteen or twenty tickets max; you actually lost money, but the projectionist was getting paid anyhow, so you opened. Wednesdays in the mid-eighties found me, oftener than not, at the Gramercy, a single-screen house, alone in the dark with popcorn, keeping the faith with what I called the “after therapy movie.” 

Far as I can figure, I invented this institution, which died when I stopped seeing my therapist, Leonora. I was learning a lot about my mother and boundaries, and what the weak points were in my marriage; but I was also learning it’s alright to go to the movies alone.

I’d been brought up, you see, to think of movies as something social: a date, double or otherwise; lunch and a movie with a friend in downtown Cincinnati, perhaps at the Albee, to see Cleopatra; a carload of folks at the Oakley Drive-In to witness The Day the Earth Stood Still. With the exception of when your sister, who worked the concession stand at the Mt. Lookout, got you in for free, with unlimited refills on popcorn, in the Midwest of my childhood, you just didn’t go to the movies alone.
This impression had been reinforced the year we ran the St. George. Mostly our patrons were roving gangs of kids, hoping to pass for adults so they could see Taxi Driver, or, the other ruse, longing to pass as children and pay just ninety cents. Dates came of course — and it didn’t matter that our balcony generally wasn’t open, sometimes they snuck up there anyhow — and if they didn’t, there were two thousand seats on the ground floor, so if you wanted to blow some weed and get it on, you could guarantee several unoccupied rows between you and the rest of the crowd. 

There were some solitary exceptions, people who came in and bought that one lonely ticket, but they were generally eccentric. Old Doctor Oppenheim, a real MD, retired, lived in the apartments just up the hill. Using her market cart as a walker, on Wednesday afternoon she made her way downhill and under the marquee, regardless of what we were showing. All she really wanted to do was buy one of our exquisite premium hotdogs (all beef, Kosher, with dijon mustard on a real hand-made Italian bread). Usually, she just bought the dog and chatted with me on the other side of the box office cage; sometimes, rarely, she’d go in past the mahogany pillars and sit in the dark alone. Then there was the jazzman; I’ve described him before, a retired (sax player? bassist?) who dressed each Wednesday in some or another spangled suit (gold lame, shimmery scarlet, sparkly green, silver) then bought a ticket to the movie, and of course, a hot dog. He’d watch the movie through the glass that divided the theater from the lobby, all the time mumbling the names of women we presumed to have been his lovers.
 
Desperate for revenue, we ran a soft-porn triple feature once (Love under 17, The Sensuous Teenager, and Love times Three), and suddenly the whole auditorium was filled with solitary men of a ragged sort. Clean up afterwards wasn’t cheap or pretty, though it wasn’t anything like what the Variety in Manhattan must have been putting up with, or certain of the Times Square houses we occasionally borrowed projection supplies from. 

It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that I discovered that other kind of solitary movie-goer, more common on the Manhattan side of New York Harbor, the discerning movie buff, reading The New York Review of Books, a coffee in hand. I don’t suppose any of these Wednesday afternoon folks were refugees from psychotherapy like me, but I’ll never know for sure. Like our St. George in the seventies, the Gramercy was a third-run house, which had somehow recovered by the mid-eighties, having been bought by City Cinemas and turned into a very successful art theater. So those people I suspected of being reviewers might just have been Vincent Canby or some other rare bird.

The best movie I ever saw after therapy, and one of the best movies I ever saw period (wow am I glad it entered my psyche from a large pristine movie screen) was Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman. I cried all the way through, in part because, in therapy, I had just revisited my own childhood, and because Bergman was a contemporary of my then-newly-deceased mother, whose memories of growing up in the early part of the twentieth century included such things as magic lanterns, those precursors of cinema, one of which is featured movingly in the film.

I am grateful to the movies all through my life, for having given me the strength to go on when things were terrifying and for catapulting me out of unendurable reality. Other people have had their churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, shrines, sweat lodges; but I have had movie theaters, many of them more sumptuous than the holiest of houses. 

It’s hard now that the experience of moving pictures, cinema, what-have-you, is relegated, more often than not, to a stack of multiplex shoe-boxes, or to the big screen in your den or a laptop, or, worse, an iphone. 

 "Whither has fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”  Wordsworth gets the last say.

Afterthought 1: 
Speaking of churches and the like, “High Church” is what we used to call Radio City Music Hall, back when we were theater operators. We visited periodically, privileged to use the employees’ entrance, where we met our friend, Robert Endres, then the head projectionist of the place. You could have put several St. George theaters in the music hall... 

Afterthought 2:
Speaking of the still-much-discussed taboo concerning going to movies alone, get a load of numbers 5,7,8 and especially 12, in Buzzfeed’s list of reasons to overcome that taboo.

Yesterday, in a rebellion against watching the recent Academy Awards, I sat at the kitchen counter and listed all the movies I could think of that I have loved, and might want to see again. That’s what makes a great movie: that the second or third time you see it, you’re still discovering something, or, if it’s a comedy, you’re still laughing. My list is about twenty-five titles long and, not surprisingly, includes a generous selection of films I watched in 1976, when I was busy helping to run a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, to which this blog is dedicated. Not all the movies we ran in ’76 had been released in that year — we were a “buck fifty,” second-to-third-run house — but everything we ever ran was a seventies title. And so, trolling through a lifetime list of fondly-remembered movies, I find five that we ran at the St. George: Blazing Saddles (1975), Bananas (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), all flix I’d like to see again or have seen more than once. I think I loved Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie (1976), but can’t remember it distinctly. By that time, the theater was failing so spectacularly, and it was so cold (January) — the landlord having turned off the heat) — that my memories of the Brooks film are literally locked up in a kind of mental ice.
 
A litmus test of how much I liked a movie was whether or not I watched the whole thing. If I felt drawn to a movie, I either watched it in patches, when I could spare the time from juggling the books of a failing business, or if I couldn’t resist, and was profoundly depressed, I just plain sat down and watched the whole damn thing. As winter approached, sitting down had a lot to do with how warm it was, hence my sketchy memory of Silent Movie; how can you laugh when you’re freezing? 

Prints of the movies we showed, even the newer ones, arrived in our lobby in film canisters Wednesday mornings, scuffed and scratched, but still watchable at half-price. Remarkably, a number of the sixty-three films we projected in our year running a movie palace have since been inducted into the archives of the Library of Congress:

All the President’s Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Taxi Driver
The Exorcist
Blazing Saddles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Jaws 
Woodstock

A Venn Diagram of this list and mine would show more than a sliver of commonality. It’s alarming how many movies I don’t remember that we ran at the St George that year. Until I resumed the painful process of scrolling through microfilms of The Staten Island Advance circa 1976, looking for the movie ads we ran (interspersed with ads for flared pants and unbelievably cheap steaks), I had nearly forgotten  — or blocked — a number of titles. One was an Italian thriller, easy to forget the title of, as it had aliases. We advertised it on our marquee as Don’t Open the Window, while in England it was known as The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, having started its Italian career as Non Si Devi Profanare il Sonno del Morti, roughly, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. Then there was the naturally forgettable Cops and Robbers, and the meant-to-be-hilarious Mother, Jugs and Speed — whose Harvey Keitel and Racquel Welsh are so young you hardly recognize them (Cosby’s in this one, still looking innocent). The St. George Theatre low-budget list is lengthy. I have absolutely no memory of: Death Machines, The Legend of Bigfoot, Food of the Gods (based on H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel) or At the Earth’s Core (from a work by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914). Did we really spend precious projector carbons on the likes of The Giant Spider Invasion, a 1975 release that apparently features huge spiders descending on the town of Merrill, Wisconsin? 

Though I don’t remember these one-week wonders, a lot of people post-millennium seem to revere some of them. In fact, a few of the less-memorable titles cited above have emerged as cult films. Don’t Open the Window — or whatever you choose to call it — is a 1974 fiction zombie horror film, which has made it to Blu-Ray. Likewise The Giant Spider Invasion, has prospered over the years, raking in approximately $15,000,000. How low-budget was Spider Invasion? The giant spider was a Volkswagen with artificial black fur and fake legs, operated from the inside by seven members of the crew. I haven’t included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) in this list, because I actually sat down to watch it. Normally I am not one for blood and gore, but Texas Chainsaw had a visual elegance to it, somewhat like Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Chainsaw is now the cult film to end all cults.

It’s been forty-three years since I ran a movie palace. The trouble with imagining a “favorites” movie list forty-three years in the future, is that presentation in theaters is what made even the lowly Death Machines into something of a cult. Theaters, especially single screen houses like the St. George, may also be why Taxi Driver is in the Library of Congress; and why the number of people watching the Academy Awards is slipping year by year, with a modest uptick the other night, that still yielded the second-lowest attendant audience in Oscar history.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma did very well, but here in New York City, its presence last fall on release in an actual theater, the IFC, lasted only about two weeks. Of course! — it’s a Netflix property.   

Since I was a child, we’ve gone from “Where’s that showing?” to “Did you see it in a theater?” Now we’re headed for, “Nexflix... or Amazon?” That said, I notice Roma is showing post-Academy Awards, at the Nitehawk on Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where, while trying to comprehend non-subtitled phrases, a patron has the opportunity to down a Barry Lyndon (pink peppercorn-infused Perry’s Tot Gin with Combier Pamplemousse, lemon, and Earl Grey) — who cares if a phrase slips away? The 1974 Kubrick movie the drink is named for was a technologically brilliant piece based on a Thackeray novel, notoriously slow, but beautiful. I wish I’d had a grapefruit-laced drink back then to settle me into my seat...

Afterthought 1:
Here’s the original list of movies I can’t quite forget. I’m tempted to add to it, but then the whole point was to generate a list of movies in one moment, off the top of my head:
Two for the Road (1968) Stanley Donan (he just died, BTW)
Cinema Paradiso (1988) GiuseppeTornatore
Fanny and Alexander (1982) Ingmar Bergman
Taxi Driver (1976) Martin Scorsese
Dr. Strangelove (1964) Stanley Kubrick
Metropolis (1927) Fritz Lang
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Sidney Lumet 
Blazing Saddles (1974) Mel Brooks
The Graduate (1967) Mike Nichols
Bananas (1971) Woody Allen
Tin Men (1987) Barry Levinson
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) David Lean
The Atomic Café (1982) Jayne Loader
Do the Right Thing (1989) Spike Lee
Casablanca (1942) Michael Curtiz
Murder on the Orient Express (the original Sidney Lumet version, 1974) 
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) John Huston
Moonlight (2016) Barry Jenkins
The Dead (1985) John Huston
Chinatown (1974) Roman Polanski
My Brilliant Career (1979) Gillian Armstrong
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Peter Weir
Executive Action (1973) David Miller
The Piano (1993) Jane Campion
A Passage to India (1984) David Lean
12 Years a Slave (2012) Steve McQueen
 
So few women! This exercise has left me determined to look for more work by women directors. 
 
Afterthought 2:
It’s interesting to note that Dog Day Afternoon had already won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, while Blazing Saddles was nominated in its time, for three Academy Awards. Bananas never won anything apparently, but I treasure it because I liked Woody Allen best before we knew he was a perv and when he was sticking to his natural genre, slapstick. Taxi Driver won the Palme D’Or and was nominated for four Oscars, none of which it was granted. Silent Movie was a Mel Brooks throwaway, brilliant, with an amazing cast of walk-ons

 Quick! what was the first uninterrupted feature film you ever saw, and where did you see it? Your answer will, of course, reveal your approximate age. If you’re over forty, chances are decent you saw it in a movie theater. If you’re over fifty, you probably did see it in a theater, and, if you’re sixty-five or above, that theater was likely to have been a movie palace, or at least a modestly-ornate neighborhood house.

Proceeding backwards, if you’re thirty or below, it’s possible or even likely that you saw your first  serious movie on Cable before you saw any such thing in a shared public environment. The generation that might eventually answer this question “...saw my first movie on Mommy’s ipad,” isn’t old enough to take this survey, and may not be given to reading blog posts about movie palaces, when they grow up. Life goes on, and nothing lasts forever.

I remember well Cincinnati’s movie palaces, (Cincy is where I grew up), and the local single-screen theaters in my immediate neighborhood. In 1976, newly-arrived in New York, I took a hand at running a palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat house on the lip of New York Harbor. The first movie we ran at the St. George was Blazing Saddles, but the first movie I ever saw, twenty-six years before that, was Tea for Two starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae a dream couple in fifties hetero America. This dreaminess is what attracted my sister, then fifteen, to the movie in question. No, the movie hadn’t been my choice (at two, who has a choice?) but my sister had to babysit me, and so off we went with her friend Madge, to watch the first of MacRae and Day’s “...genial, old-fashioned musical films...” The West Point Story, On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon would follow, causing the New York Times to reflect that “...these two [Day and MacRae] complement each other like peanut butter and jelly.” That was sex in fifties middle-class America. Not only was the movie not a PBJ to me, I didn’t like it at all — I screamed through it, as a matter of fact, causing my sister to tie me to my seat. 

Sad as this tale of my passage through the “terrible twos” may be, it was the beginning of my long movie-watching career spent happily in the dark, tickling the bottom of a bag of popcorn for the half-opened “grannies” of corn I still love best. Most of the movies I saw growing up really were my choice. Who could forget Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? — the tentacles of the giant squid  — or Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, with its then-high-tech special effects; a black-and-white saucer cutting off the dome of the Capitol building, demanded I hide my eyes behind my cupped hands. Saw those at the Mt. Lookout where my other sister, a Bobby-soxer with multiple boyfriends, had a job popping corn and staffing the box office, a glass and chrome single room on the street outside. (She was nearly killed in that box office by a  stray bullet fired one New Year’s Eve that went through the glass, but that’s another story). 

Dating at The Hyde Park Art, a local Art Moderne stadium theater, in the summer of ’64, I alternated between two terrors: 1.) fighting off my date’s clammy hand and 2.) watching Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove, ride the bomb out of its bay cowboy style, sparking the nuclear war we all feared. There were plenty more movies before I made it to New York to run a movie palace: Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road at the modest neighborhood Ambassador Theatre, later torn down to make way for a parking lot, and Barbarella: the last movie I saw at the much-beloved grand (and then still pristine) Albee downtown. After Jane Fonda strutted her stuff that night, three drapes (two valences and a formal house curtain) lowered, as the lights came up, and a solitary uniformed usher swept the nearly-empty gilded palace, from the top of the main aisle, down to the orchestra pit. The Albee was demolished eight years later, the year after we opened with Blazing Saddles, at the St. George in Staten Island. It was the seventies, and nobody but nobody was going to single-screen palaces anymore; but we didn’t know that.  

Along with my husband Dean, also something of a renegade and nostalgist, I’m a sucker for a challenge, and I always want to save what’s nearly past but still somehow beautiful. It wasn’t a waste, because the St George, which we tried to save as a movie palace, morphed finally and beautifully into a live local theater, cherished by its community. 

Note: If this blog post feels more reflective than others you may have read in Starts Wednesday,it’s because I am on the cusp of another birthday, thankful for having survived this far, curious as to what’s next. What is life if not the sum of all your mistakes and victories, your noble and ill-advised adventures?
  
Afterthoughts:

1. Given the racial tensions we experienced at the very urban/suburban St. George, it was prophetic that we opened in April, 1976 with Blazing Saddles, a movie that’s even more controversial today than it was in the seventies. Mel Brooks recently confessed that, while it could never be made today, at least not by a white American, even then there was one controversial thing left on what used to be called the cutting room floor.  

2. After a long career of movie-going, I still come out, when I can, to movies on screen, choosing the theater and its screen at least as carefully as I choose the movie. Case in point, Lawrence of Arabia last summer, in the 70 mm format it was intended to be seen in, at the incomparable United Palace of the Cultural Arts, one of the original Loew’s Wonder Theaters, on 175th Street in Manhattan. Movie palace viewings are rare, so I make do, most of the time, at Loew’s ‘plex of giant-screen theaters on 68th and Broadway; I still adore the Cinema Village, where I’m planning to see some of the 8th Annual Winter Film Awards/Festival soon...and the Paris is a cherished anachronism just off Central Park, when I want to pretend it’s the old days. Movies in Philly, where I visit my sister, are best had at the Ambler, a nicely-restored old house. No, she doesn’t tie me to my seat anymore...

The movie palace I proudly went bust running in 1976, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, has, these days, a sparkling new marquee. Finally. The one I remember, a conventional rectangular affair, leaked badly from before our time through its dismantling in 2018. Somewhere in the nineties a temporary owner sought to hide this defect by covering its rusted neon and crumbling illuminated tracks in thick stucco, leaving only a small script “St George” in the front, whose neon was almost always dark. For years afterward I worried that the weight of all that plaster on a rusted framework would bring the whole thing crashing down on some unsuspecting pedestrian, but thankfully it never did.

I can tell you myriad stories about the old marquee,  come to think about it, I have already: what it was like to power it up from a Frankenstein-like Buss fuse panel in the box office which arced when you threw the switches and could easily electrocute the person holding the wooden handle, should her hand stray onto bare metal. And how perilous it was changing the letters, dangling from a fifteen-foot extension ladder balanced on an uphill pavement that slants at about a twenty degree angle. Whatever its dangers or condition, the marquee was there for a reason, to let the world know what we were showing, and, if we had enough unbroken aluminum letters, what was coming soon. There was a moment  recently, just after the curvaceous new marquee went up, when it seemed current management only wanted to show off pictures of the interior. Gorgeous as that baroque cave is, where were announcements of acts booked next month or next week?

The entrepreneur in me was troubled, but I’m pleased to report that “Kool and the Gang” flash by on the electronic signboard if you pause long enough. Gone are those breakable letters, whose disappearance forced us to use upside-down W’s for M’s and deliberately misspell a number of words. We’re post-millennium now, no time for analogue tech. And the show must go on.
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In some places, the show doesn’t go on anymore , but the marquee still does. For instance, in Mount Morris, New York, the New Family Theatre’s marquee, last time I drove through, bore on it’s tracks the following message,

According to Cinema Treasures, the New Family, which opened in 1939 with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,was demolished, although the marquee was preserved. Whoever owns the marquee has turned it into a giant local greeting card.

In New York City, the new owner of a closed-down movie palace or neighborhood cinema is allowed to use the defunct marquee, as long as she or he has a marquee-use permit. A couple of years ago on the Upper East Side, I spied the marquee of the Clearview Cinemas, a six-screen theater, now defunct, repurposed as one of the sites of Manhattan Mini-Storage. I imagine that pretty soon there will be more mini-storage units in Manhattan than there are apartments.The new owners of the building had seen fit to list a number of phony movie titles on the marquee: Lost and Out of Space, Space Hunter, and other wonders.

On New Dorp Lane, not far from where I live, the excellent neon Art Deco marquee of the Lane, a stadium theater that was landmarked some time in the eighties, has become the signboard for its new resident, the Crossroads Church, now advertising God instead of Rodney Dangerfield. There are other more stellar examples of theater churches. The famous former Loew’s 175th St. these days the United Palace of Cultural Arts, was originally one of five “Wonder Theaters,” in the Greater NYC area, but morphed, in 1969, into Reverend Ike’s United Church Science of Living Institute. The exquisitely restored "Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco” Thomas Lamb theater is also now a cultural center, as well, detailing that whole enchilada, church and showplace, on its wraparound marquee. 

In 1977, a year after we left the movie exhibition business, our rival Staten Island movie palace, in the nearby neighborhood of Stapleton, advertised its own demise, FOR SALE, on the marquee. The Paramount operated as a nightclub, then as a rock venue, and finally, for a decade or so as a warehouse for neighboring Steckman’s Sporting Goods. These days its magnificent crumbling marquee advertises itself once again, this time not for sale but for lease. Like so many American movie palaces, it has an uncertain future.

Afterthoughts: 
1. Recently, Atlas Obscura invited anyone who treasured a theater marquee to send in their pix. I recommend the whole tour, but my faves from that collection are: The Grand Lake in Oakland, Ca., a listing which editorializes,

WE WILL NOT ENFORCE THE R RATING ON FAHRENHEIT 11-9
POLITICAL DISCOURSE MUST NOT BE STIFLED

In Marquette, Michigan, the Delft Theatre invites us to

BELLY ON UP TO OUR BRUNCH & BLOODY BAR
SAT 7 SUN 10 AM

2. “The business of America is business,” as Calvin Coolidge famously quipped, so it shouldn’t be surprising that some marquees have nothing to do with theaters, or even churches. An (out-of-business) ice cream parlor in Newark recently trolled for business with:

I SCREAM
YOU SCREAM
THE POLICE COME IN
IT’S AWKWARD. 

In Newcastle, Oklahoma, a dental practice boasted,

BEST CAVITY SEARCH EVER.

These aren’t really marquees as such, but free-standing signboards with track lettering. I include them, because the definition of “marquee” is enormously elastic anyway, which brings me to:

3. The definition:
“marquee (n.)
1680s, "large tent of unusual elaborateness," from French marquise (mistaken in English as a plural) "linen canopy placed over an officer's tent to distinguish it from others,' " fem. of marquis and perhaps indicating "a place suitable for a marquis."

By 1812 the English word was used to denote large wooden structures erected for a temporary purpose (a concert, dinner party, etc.). The extended sense of "canopy over the entrance to a hotel or theater, etc." is recorded by 1912 in American English.’ [underlining mine].
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It so happens, that if you want to rent a tent (for a wedding or whatever) in the UK, apparently you ask for a marquee, but there isn’t a wedding planner on this side of the pond who’d know what you were talking about!