Once upon a time people lived at their local movie palaces, well almost. In the nineteen thirties and forties, citizens  of the U.S. of A. saw roughly 3 movies a week in a theater, but that’s not all they saw. According to Manuel H. Rodriguez, who grew up in the thirties on Manhattan’s East Side, “Going to the movies typically meant seeing two movies, a cartoon, occasionally a short subject, and, if we went on Saturday afternoon, a serial that continued week to week for 12 weeks... ” There was Keno Night (a gambling event involving luck and a big wheel) and/or Dish Night, when you could get the gravy boat for that china set you were slowly collecting. The local theater, palace or otherwise, functioned as a kind of babysitting service on Saturday afternoons; you could drop the kids off with enough money to cover the shows and candy. Sometimes an organist rose on a lift from below the stage and played songs everyone could sing along with, aided sometimes by a bouncing ball and lyrics on the big screen.

I've mentioned cartoons, Mickey and Donald and Bugs and their kin, but an important preparation for movie-watching was newsreels, Pathe and Movietone and their British counterparts. There was no nightly news waiting on a screen at home. Though you could listen to nightly radio, and the president’s special fireside chats, or New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia reading the funny papers on Sunday morning, most of the information you got for the week, at least the imagery — soldiers taking Guadalcanal or the blimp Hindenburg blowing up in Lakehurst, NJ — was contained in Newsreels, America’s (and Britain’s) first  ever documentaries. 

A friend I mentioned in a recent post, grew up in the theater I later had a hand in running, the St. George, a 2,672-seat palace in Staten Island, New York. Last month, the New York Philharmonic played a free concert there, and she recalled, while we sat in the balcony, everything she could, from the perspective of her eighties, about growing up at the St. George Theatre. For her and others born in the thirties, the St. George, and its smaller Deco sister down the street, the Paramount, were full-service institutions, almost womb-to-tomb. 

Womb-to-tomb, really? I did find a bad video of a woman in the act of giving birth at a multiplex, but you wouldn’t want to see it. People do begin bringing children to movie theaters very early in their lives (check out Fandango’s Stars to Strollers program). I myself was introduced awfully early (aged two) to rom coms, thanks to an adolescent sister. 

Conversely, since there were movie theaters, people have died while watching in the dark, and are still doing it. Fuller details on this interesting if morbid movie theater occurrence can be had in the “Afterthoughts,” at the end of this post, but I will stop long enough here to note that, from 1933, when the movie Freaks caused a miscarriage, through, over the years, a series of heart attacks, strokes, and alcohol poisoning, at least 11 people have been taken out of one or another theater feet first, mostly after viewing horror movies. One interesting exception is the death of Ole Bentson, a Belgian, who died laughing at A Fish Called Wanda in 1989, the year of its release. But I digress.

It was not uncommon in my 1950’s childhood to walk in on a movie fifteen minutes late, planning to sit through the end and, after the cartoons and previews (yes, and MovieTone News) watch the beginning of the movie, until you recognized the part where you’d come in. That was because we weren’t so much going to a movie as going to “the movies;” the film or double feature was simply a phenomenon that capped the experience of visiting the movie palace itself, with its various diversions.

While we were running the St. George, in 1976, certain neighborhood kids, enamored of the stained velvet seats and craving an endless supply of Snickers, tried really hard to live at the St. George all night long, sneaking upstairs and hiding under seats. No one ever achieved this fantasy, thanks to the vigilance of our ushers and “bouncers” who knew the kids by name, but the dream persisted, testified to by the sound of sneakers retreating on the fire escape stairs outside the balcony. Good thing too: what if somebody had died? — perhaps of sugar poisoning?  
 
Afterthought 1:
As opposed to the figure cited in the beginning of this piece (patrons of the 1930s watched approximately three movies a week), current movie house patrons watch roughly three movies a month – quite a fall. 

Afterthought 2:  
Apropos of people dying in movie theaters, here’s a list, cobbled largely from the very interesting blog, looper.com:  

1933, Freaks, a movie about the real lives of what were then called “midgets” (now Little People), a movie so upsetting to so many that it was withdrawn from circulation. A woman at a preview is reputed to have had a miscarriage while watching it. 

1955, at The Creeping Unknown a 9-year-old boy suffered a ruptured artery.

1973, during the Roman premiere of the famously haunted Exorcist, audiences had to fight their way through a torrential downpour, accompanied by thunder and lightning, in order to get in to the theater. Many inside claimed to hear a horrific, almost demonic cry, coming from outside once the film started rolling. At one showing, a woman was so frightened she passed out in the theater and broke her jaw when she fell. She later sued the filmmakers suggesting that subliminal messages caused the accident. Warner Brothers settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. 

1975, Jaws. On September 9 of that year, a forty-five-year-old man in Chicago had a heart attack, despite the efforts of two doctors attending the movie to revive him.

1986, Aliens. A man in India died of a heart attack.

1989, A Fish Called Wanda.The aforementioned Belgian died laughing while watching Kevin Kline shove french fries up Michael Palin’s nose (an admirable way to die, in my opinion!). That scene in the movie apparently resembled comic dining room antics familiar from his own family...

2004, The Passion of the Christ. In Wichita, Kansas, a woman died during the crucifixion scene; while in Brazil a pastor, who had rented the movie and theater for his congregation, slipped away peacefully.

2009,The Avatar.In Taiwan, a man died of high blood pressure. 

2010, The Twilight Saga. In India, a 27-year-old man was found dead clutching an empty whiskey bottle. (This and the death of the nine-year-old boy are the saddest of all, I think.) 

2015, Gari Gadi. A man died of a heart attack in Hyderabad.

2016, The Conjuring II. A man in India died, after being sent to a local hospital. His body was “remanded” to a second hospital, perhaps for an autopsy, and then it disappeared, having been sent in a cab! Weird! Sequel?

Recently in Thailand, a 77-year-old British man passed away quietly while watching a horror flick, Charlotte Comes Home.

Last but not least, beware of fancy recliners in theaters nowadays; a patron in a theater in Birmiingham, England, died after getting his head stuck between the footrest and the seat; he was trying to pull his cellphone out from between seats and suffered a heart attack. No movie was mentioned.  
 
Not counting the thirteenth example (which was clearly a mechanical mis-hap) and the one that involved an empty whisky bottle, heart attacks, high blood pressure, miscarriages, compulsive laughing that dangerously raises the heart rate, and burst arteries all seem clear indicators of emotional response to what’s on screen. What is a movie, after all, if not a shared dream?   

The father of the midnight movie is dead, that’s right, Ben Barenholtz. In case you never heard of him, he managed the Elgin Theatre in the seventies, a once-cherished art house in Manhattan. Berenholtz saw a 1970 screening at MOMA of the then-obscure El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid Western (with Christian and Buddhist overtones). He was blown away and booked it immediately for midnights at the Elgin. This may sound normal enough to  post-Rocky Horror generations; but midnight wasn’t in the theater time clock back in 1970. Who would come to a movie at such an hour? Well it turns out, residents of the city that never sleeps were happy to fill the Elgin’s roughly six hundred seats, many of them repeat patrons of the film, lining up under the Elgin’s Deco marquee every single night. Then the limo crowd appeared, despite (or because?) Berenholtz hadn’t done a lick of publicity. His strategy was an early example of going viral, all word-of-mouth.

A few weeks into El Topo’s successful run, none other than John Lennon, already a fan of the movie, bought the rights to it, and Berenholtz lost his plum. No problem: he’d created a need and he found ways to continue to fill it, with John Waters’s gross-out classic, Pink Flamingos (’71) and, when that had exhausted the audience, Perry Herzell’s The Harder They Come (’72). Other theaters began to copy-cat: The Waverly with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, for instance. That movie had been around for a while, since ’68, but Flamingos and Harder had arrived entirely via the midnight bracket, a slot that was ideal for the oddball, the surreal, or any movie that paired well with reefer. 

At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I was involved in trying to fill the seats of in 1976, we booked Reefer Madness as our first midnight title, then some tamer fare: Yellow Submarine and Woodstock. It was the year Rocky Horror would make its debut — as a midnight movie and performance vehicle across the harbor at the Waverly — but we couldn’t get our hands on that kind of fare in Staten Island. For one thing, we couldn’t afford the deposit on any kind of fresh indie. Then there was Gabe; paying the projectionist to stay past midnight cost time-and-a-half, a shocking twenty dollars an hour, and that was a full shift — till six A.M. — whether he went home at 3 or not. 

Despite the tameness of our midnight fare, just putting “12 AM” on the marquee as a start time caused concession sales to rocket. 

People already ate dinner at our stand, which had, I am proud to say almost a half-century later, the highest per capita sales in all five boroughs of New York City. The hot dogs were all-beef Kosher, the rolls individual Italian breads baked fresh daily, the mustard Dijon, the popcorn, fresh-popped with real butter. Add in the Good ‘n Plenties, Charleston Chews, Snickers (frozen and otherwise), the Haagen Dazs and whatever. Then factor in the midnight hour and pot smoke thick enough to induce a contact high in non-smokers, and you have munchie heaven. 

Case in point: a  large wide-eyed patron in a leather jacket stumbles up to the glass case and slaps down a ten dollar bill. “Let me know when this is gone,” he declares. That bill would be worth $43.08 today. Needless to say, he had to have assistance carrying back into the auditorium the groceries he’d purchased. God bless reefer and  Reefer Madness...

Midnight movies as a genre, the ones that lasted, wrapping lines around the block, were all cult films, building their campy reps on their late night success. There is no equivalent to the excitement they generated in the seventies, when simply going to a movie at midnight seemed illicit. 

The Venn diagram of cult films and midnight movies has a large overlap: so a Bruce Lee action pic and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (‘94) and Eraserhead (’77) share places on a list I found at Mentalfloss. 

The genre has mostly exhausted itself, but there are some exceptions, like The Room, 2003 (Tommy Wiseau) which the aforementioned Mentalfloss post cites as “a film so bad that you can’t help but be compelled by it.” Now that calls for forty dollars’ worth of concession stand groceries!
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Ben Barenholtz, whose obit appeared in this most recent Sunday New York Times, had an interesting life, before and after he managed the Elgin Theatre. That he survived the Holocaust in an earlier phase of his life is remarkable.

2. After its acquisition by John Lennon, El Topo fell from box office grace. If you want the full story on that, here it is, well worth your time, a short beautifully produced piece with interviews: Jodorowsky, Barenholtz and others — worth it for generous clips from the movie itself.

3.The Elgin lasted as a movie theater until 1978, when it began its transformation into The Joyce, a venue for dance performance. For a good shot of it in its Elgin days, check out the youtube clip in Afterthought 2.

​4. Just in case you have trouble getting your mind around the fact that going to a late-night movie was, back in the seventies, kind of edgy, consider late-night television. NBC’s The Tonight Show,which debuted on TV in 1954, had itself been a major experiment in programming. In his opening comments, Steve Allen thanked the viewing audience for being bold enough to stay up late on a week night and watch TV. It goes without saying, the streets outside were mostly empty.

1976, the bicentennial (200th) birthday party of American democracy, was a big deal. In New York Harbor, just minutes from the doors of the St George Theatre in Staten Island — a 2,672-seat movie palace I was then involved in running — a maritime party was underway, which included so many ships from all over the world you couldn’t see the water for the hulls. people were streaming downhill to the ferry landing, jostling each other to stay on the sidewalk, a problem for us, because nobody seemed to notice that our theater doors were open.

Our popcorn was popping, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea graced both the marquee and the screen, and an usher stood hopefully at the ticket box; but hardly a soul paused to consider the coolness of our marble/red and gold lobby. Who wanted to see a bad interpretation of a Japanese novel, when the big show just down the hill was live? Leading the parade was the U.S. Coast Guard training vessel, Eagle, a sailing ship (alias Horst Wessel) surrendered to the U.S. by Germany as war reparations following WWII. 

The war that brought us that ship had been a "good guys' war" (if there is such a thing), but the war in Vietnam, which had just ended, had been a travesty that cost thousands of lives and pitted generations and social groups of Americans against each other. Two days prior to the Bicentennial celebration, Vietnam had become one nation, its capital in Hanoi. Still, Americans love a party; we also love to forget, so, from coast-to-coast, we did just that, celebrating our two-centuries-old War of Independence, ironically, the war Ho Chi Minh himself had studied, in hopes of modeling Vietnam’s battle on our own. 

There is some kind of party going on in D.C. this year, and for a lot of reasons, I won’t be there. I’m not even planning a picnic at home. Already weary of firecrackers — and the practice sessions in our neighborhood that lead up to everything seeming to explode at once  – we’re off to the movies. 
What better time to be in a darkened hall with popcorn than the night when gunpowder reigns? Pass it on: the movies are as American as a buttered ear of corn. So if you crave quiet, you know where to go. I’d even settle for Sailor Who Fell...that old doggie we showed to practically nobody forty-three years ago. I’m happy to say, however, that Yesterday,a fantasy about the Beatles, is on-screen in a theater I have two free passes to, and the dark beckons. Okay, it isn’t a movie palace; you have to hunt around here to find one that’s showing a movie these days. But the Loew’s Lincoln Square has pretty big screens, good enough for the likes of me on the 4th. 

I fished around to see who else might think of the 4th as a damn fine time to go to the movies, and happened on an article in Esquire.Justin Kirkland’s idea of “The Six Best Movies to See in Theaters on the 4th of July”isn’t mine, except for one movie, Yesterday.But I agree, more or less, with his opening statement:
 
While some good ol' Americans might celebrate the big day with cheeseburgers and fireworks, the best of us know that the real ticket to a laid back Fourth is inside a cold movie theater with a bag of popcorn bigger than your head.
 
Amen!  He lists as the other five movies he’d consider seeinG on the 4th: Spider Man: Far From Home, Midsommer (which does sound interesting, just not on the 4th), Pixar’s Toy Story 4, Child’s Play, and The Dead Don’t Die.

Other than Yesterday, possible movies I’d like to counteract the explosiveness of the 4th with: Amazing Grace, Halston, Late Night, and a Les Blank double-feature, Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazon, (two docs from the late seventies on Mexican American culture that are playing in Manhattan at the Metrograph).  

There are, however, movies that either feature July 4th or are simply saying something about what it is to be American, and someday it might be interesting to put together a personal film festival of them: Jaws (which we should have shown at the St. George on the 4th, but had already blown away in late May, a month too early), Glory, about a black regiment in the Civil War — the movie that introduced me to Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman. Of course, there’s good old Yankee Doodle Dandy — worth it just to see James Cagney dance his way up the proscenium walls of a theater on both sides of the stage, Hidden Figures — about black women mathematicians who put NASA into space, Independence Day (even though it is an Oliver Stone flick), and Saving Private Ryan.There are so many possibilities; add your own. Of the above, I wish I could have shown Glory on the big grape-soda-stained screen at the St. George, but it came out in 1989, more than a decade after our time as theater operators. So it goes.
 
Have a good (noisy or quiet) 4th, you guys, whatever your preference is...

I’m giving the last word to our second president, John Adams, one of the signatories of the document that severed our ties with King George III, across the pond. Adams was writing his wife, Abigail:
 
I am apt to believe that it [independence] will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
 
Afterthoughts:

1. Adams, in his letter to Abigail, was actually referring to the 2nd of July, since it took about two weeks for all the signers to sign, and the first ones had done so on the 2nd. Still, we can blame and praise him, for our noisy carryings on. The violence implicit in his statement might have something to do with the risk each signer was taking in a perilous time; as Benjamin Franklin remarked back then, “...gentlemen, we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” And so they did hang together in the collegial sense, giving us the opportunity to do that, as well as to pursue happiness, and to expand our numerous tribe.
 
2. In a spooky coincidence, John Adams died on the 4th of July, fifty years after he and his colleagues signed the Declaration, in 1826. He and Thomas Jefferson had had a life-long rivalry, though they respected each other immensely. As Adams was dying, he is reputed to have whispered, “...Thomas Jefferson still survives...” Alas, Jefferson (who hoped Adams was still alive) had died a few hours before, on that same July 4th. Odd and wonderful: they went out together, two remarkable firecrackers.
 
3. For a sense of how desperate NYC was in the mid-seventies, and what it was like to view the tall ship parade on July 4, 1976, check out these narratives.  
 
4. Here’s the Esquire article on going to the movies on the 4th of July: 
 
5. And finally, a clip of James Cagney as George M. Cohan, dancing his way up the proscenium walls. Apologies for an ad you’ll have to skip...Cagney was an old hoofer from Vaudeville, before he played tough guys in gangster flicks. 

The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.  
Time, May 14, 2015

In 1976, while a group of us struggled to keep the doors of a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, open, we feared all the while that movie-going as an American social activity was going, going... Gone? But we would never have blamed attention span. There were understandable reasons for our fear of the movies’ demise, back in the seventies: low box office revenue, empty seats. Our cantilevered balcony was almost permanently closed, the home of random kids who snuck up there, hoping to do some drugs, do each other, or just go unnoticed until we’d closed down and left for the day. Movies that drew an audience in our troubled urban neighborhood were hard to find and difficult to book, and the distributors of those flicks typically took two-thirds of the meager receipts. However, what was actually done-for in the mid-seventies wasn’t movies per se; it was single-screen theaters, especially palaces. We learned that lesson the hard way, losing money hand-over-fist and closing just shy of the one-year anniversary of our opening.
 
A lot of things have come and gone since I sat behind the bars of a box office or shoveled popcorn into buckets: VCRs, for one thing, and video stores for another. Network television, the snake that seduced our audiences away, has been flattened in its turn, by streaming services and cable networks.  
Are the movies themselves really wasted this time? A group of directors, producers, actors and etc. in Sunday, June 23’s New York Times seem to think so, or at least they’re very confused. The fault, according to actor Kumail Nanjiani lies in YouTube and other platforms, since teens and slightly older young adults usually can’t devote time to a two-hour narrative in a communal setting. Implicit is the suggestion that platforms deliver in bite-size morsels millennials are used to. Or does low movie attendance (the average American sees a movie in a theater four times a year) have to do with content itself? 

When I was a Girl Scout, we made fun of the Brownies, the (then) youngest members of GSUSA. We fourth graders in green uniforms accused our peers who were not paying attention of having a short “Brownie Interest Span,” a phrase we’d picked up from our troop leader who’d received it in G.S. training. It really meant, “She’s just like a Brownie — can’t follow the plot of a long story, can’t take directions, can’t even sit still.”

So what makes a number of us adults, these days, less attentive than a goldfish? It isn’t attention span we’ve got to worry about, but (Brownie) interest span. Robert McKee, a prominent teacher of screenwriting, reflects on interest, “...story has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.” He also credits “empathy” for getting us to pay attention. 

How many narratives have you watched lately which stir feelings of empathy? Even when trying to find something to binge-watch at home these days, my husband and I go through ten or fifteen serialized narratives before we find one that can make me forget I’m in the bedroom watching on a flat screen.
Attention span or interest span? What about the fact that the CDC, in a 2015 report, notes Americans (adults as well as children) with ADHD are increasingly more numerous, rising from 7.8 percent in 2003 to 9.5 in 2007 and 11 percent in 2011. As a former tutor of learning disabled children, and an unofficial (never diagnosed) member of the ADD community, I can say that all of us — attentionally challenged and otherwise — share the problem of too many things vying for our attention. For some of us, it is harder than it is for others, to cope with a fragmented, high-pressure world, that makes too many demands on attention; and if you’re not interested?  Well then... 

Going into the lobby of a movie theater, paying for a ticket, buying a popcorn and surrendering to a mutually-shared dream in the dark (when it’s a well-crafted movie) is  an excellent way to train the muscle of attention, or the elastic band of interest span, that needs to be stretched by stories that juice empathy. 

In the future, will all movies go directly from Sundance to streaming? Will binge-watching a story in small segments on an iphone or laptop replace the pleasures of watching a screen larger than the poster cases in the lobby of the St. George Theatre?

“If I had grown up watching YouTube, I don’t know if I would like movies,” Kumail Nanjiani admits. But we aren’t goldfish; and Americans still go out to specific movies, or theaters, like one of my beloved haunts, the United Palace of Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan. Roughly once a month, it shows a big-screen wonder, like Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, or (coming soon) The Matrix.

Paul Feig, in the NYTimes piece that sent me off on this chase, gave my tear ducts a workout by evoking that great moment in Lawrence of Arabia when a tiny dot on the horizon slowly becomes a man on a camel. It takes at least a minute, perhaps a minute and a half. That’s one of my favorite moments ever in film; you need a wide, wide screen to show it. As a director, Paul observes, “there are moments when you want to do a cool shot like that, but you go, When people end up watching this on their phone, they’re not going to see anything.” Being forced to think that way is, I think, very much the tail wagging the dog. Fortunately, there are movies like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight still coming out, and how about the one that almost won the Oscar that same year (2016), La La Land? Dunkirk was built for a large screen too, so it ain’t over, not yet, and maybe never will be. We are, after all, human beings, whose DNA came from storytelling around the campfire’s flame. Campfire, cave: what else is a darkened theater?  
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Try this interesting read on big screen movies. 

2. I mentioned “cantilevered” balconies, of which the St. George’s balcony is one magnificent example.  Here’s a little more on what that’s all about. 
​  
3. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru mentioned in the NYTimes panel, is an interesting dude:  get a taste here...

Four Operas for Three Dollars! boasts the sign I rescued from the “Sign Room” at the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat movie palace we ran for one year, 1976, in Staten Island, New York. A brave band of young ignorant entrepreneurs, we were trying with all our might to make a combined live house and movie theater out of this Eugene De Rosa architectural gem. Alas, it was all movies for us, with a few exceptions; we never booked anything as elaborate as an opera. The price on the “four operas” sign, even then, seemed ridiculous. However, I’ve done some checking: across the harbor in Manhattan, the New York City Opera — deemed “the People’s Opera” by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia — sold tickets in its inaugural (1943) season for exactly 75 cents. A subway token cost you a dime that year, and a movie ticket around 29 cents. I think I know enough from various sources to conclude that the bargain operas being offered were a small package deal — not a whole production — probably medleys from “Carmen” or “Madam Butterfly” or whatever — including some rising talent from Manhattan.

I was thinking of this sign yesterday, when the New York Philharmonic played on the St. George Theatre’s hallowed stage-boards, not an opera this time, but the brass section of the NYPhil, dispatched on a grant to play for free in the city’s fifth and still least-regarded borough. They usually do these concerts in a park, but our Staten Island mosquitos are heavyweight champs of the world, so someone wisely opted for an indoor concert.

I harbored various fantasies as a theater operator, back in ’76, of what it would be like to hear one of the big-guy orchestras from the other side of New York Harbor, in our sacred space, with its perfect acoustics.
 
I was not disappointed on Sunday, and there were other rewards.We’d been lucky enough to get our hands on six of the free tickets, so brought a slew of friends along, one of whom just celebrated her eighty-first birthday. Despite the fact that she’s lived in Staten Island most of her life, I strongly suspect she hadn’t been under the graceful dome of the St. George in at least forty years, and being in the theater awakened plenty of memories. It’s that way with the old palaces; they’re memory sponges.

​The first thing she wanted to tell me about was the organ, long absent from its “elevator” hidden in the stage. I was glad to hear anything she had to say about that long-absent instrument. I wrote several posts about it, a 3/30 (3 manual/30 rank) Wurlitzer, sold off to a pizza parlor in Texas, in the early seventies, before we came along. We had found the elevator in the stage, so I knew there had been an organ, and researched what became of it; but I have no personal experience of the instrument. Though the organist was let go in 1935, from time to time the theater presented a little musical entertainment before movies, and my friend remembered several of these interludes. From our seats in the upper balcony, she pointed to the exact spot on the stage where the “lift‘ had been, “They darkened all the lights, and then, there he was, [the organist] rising out of all that blackness, sitting on his bench.” He must have been dramatically lit: a follow spot whose beam no doubt descended six stories from the projection booth would have added drama. I know those old carbon-arc spots well, having watched our friend Bob Endres, a projectionist of considerable chops, operate them back in 1976 for one of our modest attempts at live entertainment), probably Chaka Khan, who sang at the St. George in a disco night number when nobody knew her. I asked my friend where the organ pipes had been; as I suspected, they’d inhabited part of the alcove stage right, whose sole resident for some time has been a giant gold Greek goddess. “I’m going to ask some people I know if they remember any more details,” she promised.

Simply sitting in the space seemed to have pierced my friend’s memory in several ways: she had a darker recollection of her times at the St George, a newsreel, towards the end of WWII she’d seen in the theater, back when going to the movies was how you got your news. “Nazi Murder Mills, April 26, 1945;” I googled just enough of the newsreel to find that headline. You can access the actual film under that title, if you’d like; but I can’t bring myself to subject it to an ordinary link. This horrendous (now infamous) footage of the Bergen-Belsen camp, shown just days after it was shot, in American theaters across the continent, reveals the bulldozing of thousands of emaciated bodies. My friend would have been seven. “How could they show this to young children?” she wondered last night. 
I thought of the transfiguring qualities of cinema, the effect of that black-and-white imagery blasted on the St. George’s giant screen. Under the sheltering recess of the theater’s cream and pink dome, my friend learned very quickly that if this could happen to people in Germany, it could happen, as she pointed out, “...even to my family.” She was seven in April, 1945.

Our visitors from the New York Phil played on. They honored D-Day with Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis,” and Meacham’s “American Patrol.” They played an arrangement of Gershwin’s “Blue Lullaby.” That’s the second time I’ve heard Gershwin rising to the recesses of the dome. The first time, was almost fifty years ago, in 1976; a friend played “Rhapsody in Blue” from an upright piano we hauled center stage. It was late in our theater year, and our contentious landlord had seen fit to cut off our heat; it was so cold you could see the pianist’s breath, just above the keys. These and other flashes of light or fragments of sound are my own memories, decades younger than my friend’s, but keeping company with hers, in the plaster recesses of a theater I am grateful to say still stands. 
  
Afterthoughts:
1: Philip Smith, the conductor, a 37-year veteran of the Philharmonic, made the Sunday concert at the St. George into a lesson in brasses, playing along at intervals with the 3 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 percussionists, solitary tuba and equally solitary euphonium that comprised the group, quite enough to make the dome ring as if heaven itself were opening! 

2. My friend’s memories of the camp footage were underscored by her distant memory of having just escaped Denmark, her father’s land of birth, on one of the last liners to sail before WWII broke out. Subsequent ships, tankers, liners and otherwise, were targets for German torpedoes. So those bulldozed victims must have had additional meaning for her...

3. I mentioned the architect of the St. George Theatre early in this post; here’s a little something about him (also the architect of the more famous Apollo Theatre). 

It’s easy to say that, as a white middle-class child in Eisenhower’s America, I was about as safe as a person could get, but I didn’t know it, and that’s what counts. One afternoon at the Mt. Lookout Theatre in Cincinnati where I grew up, I ducked under the seat-back in front of me one Saturday afternoon. There had  been other bouts of movie hiding, but this particular moment was when a flying saucer sliced off the dome of the Capitol Building, in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and I just couldn’t take it. I wasn’t alone. The grown-ups — back in that gilded decade — always seemed a little jumpy, despite mammoth steaks on the grill and cars with tail fins. Ordinary people had begun building fallout shelters in their backyards. At school we ducked under school desks during drills, so why not hide on the floor of the theater where I went each Saturday, to spend my free ticket?

Fast forward to 1976, when, as a young adult, I helped run The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. I was grown-up, but still afraid. The fall of Saigon, that finally ended the bloody war in Vietnam, was only a year behind us; the recession was slowly winding down, but New York City’s near-bankruptcy was still fresh in everybody’s memor; and the Cold War was hardly over. Watergate had sent a president into exile, reminding me of the Goya etching I’d seen at the Met in Manhattan, “The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters.” 

Grown-ups don’t hide under seats, but there are other ways to avoid the assault on your  eyes and ears (and nervous system) that sitting in the dark watching a movie with strangers offers. We ran plenty of scary stuff the year we worked as theater operators; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) comes immediately to mind. Based on a presumably true story of a mentally-disturbed man, Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, Tobe Hooper’s early slasher film did as well as many movies in our single-screen palace. As a theater operator, I had plenty of opportunity to observe its effects on the audience: concession sales were heroic, a sign that people felt the need to get  up and move out of the darkened auditorium for a moment, nervously grabbing another popcorn or seeking the comfort of Snickers, standing outside the glass that separated lobby from theater, for a few moments of rest. You could see but not hear the movie from there. Those who stayed put in the auditorium were a little bit jittery, jiggling around and poking each other. As for myself, I sat through the better part of the movie one afternoon, shading my eyes at intervals and pulling my long hair tight over my ears. 

Ever wonder why people pay to ride fast dangerous rides? Roller coasters are hardly for the faint-of-heart, in the literal sense. They increase heart rate and trigger fight-or-flight responses involving adrenaline and cortisol; but as long as your heart can take it, you may get a dopamine/endorphin rush, fun, if your particular physiology is set to run that way. Horror and/or slasher movies are one cheap-and-safe (think virtual) way of getting those same roller coaster highs, without being hung upside down high in the air.  

One movie that did draw all the thrill-seekers out and into our baroque cave of wonders was The Exorcist, the only movie we ran in our theater year that sold out the house (four times, to be exact). I remember it well, counting out $13,000 in receipts on the old piano in the office. The fact that we had to turn most of that money in to Warner and his brothers, is, perhaps, the thing that makes my memory of the movie truly horrifying. As for what happens on screen, call me an oddball, but I’ve never found Exorcist particularly scary! I was not raised in any church, and priests, even ones who act nobly, leave me cold, that and I have difficulty with suspending my disbelief, when it comes to “possession.” Here, for your perusal is an excellent treatment of why The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time according to one watcher. Others don’t agree, putting the original Exorcist at the bottoms of long “Exorcism Movie” lists (if you wait long enough, everything becomes a genre!).

Other “scary” movies we ran:  Carrie (yes, thoroughly frightening, but also objectionable from a first-wave feminist perspective); Embryo (too improbable — a scientist figures out how to turn a fetus into a full-grown miniature human); The Devil Within Her and Burnt Offerings (both about possession), and Don’t Open the Window, (aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, depending on which country you see it in). That’s a movie with more aliases than the average con artist.  
Interestingly enough, I find One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which reveals the horrors of a psych ward, the scariest movie we ran that whole year! (It figures prominently in last week’s post about crying at the movies). Crying, cringing in fear, how close? 

Afterthought: 
1. On last week’s emotional reaction to movies (crying) I’ve had a few comments back from readers. One is from Betsy Baltzer, an old friend, who recalls crying at Casablanca (at the exact scene you might expect, when the more or less homeless French drown out the Nazis by singing La Marseillaise). Betsy had a friend who was kicked out of a local neighborhood theater for crying at the end of West Side Story. The end? Why? It’s all pretty much over by then.
 
2. Here’s a little something on movies that reflect our fear of the Internet; that’s something we could never have imagined in the more brutal, hardly virtual 1970s.