Back when I was a little girl, before I operated — for one golden year — a movie palace (the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre to which this blog is dedicated), my mother, who’d been born in the early days of the 20th century, enchanted me with her tale of what movies were like before there were real theaters. Hard for a kid of the 1950’s to imagine, sitting on benches in an abandoned lot in downtown Toledo after sunset, watching a movie projected on a bed-sheet and waving “punk,” some kind of insect deterrent on a stick, to keep the mosquitoes away. As I recall, a woman played tunes on a beaten-up piano. By the time of this pop-up, Nickelodeons, which had been bare-bones storefronts, had already had their day; and Toledo didn’t have a bonafide movie theater — yet. By 1919, that would change, as the Empire on North St. Clair, a burlesque house, morphed into the Palace. That back lot with the bed sheet Mother recalled was precious to her. “The birth of the movies,” she called it, and so it was.

We still have improvised cinema... Just Google “pop-up movie theater,” and see what you get: everything from a glorified cubicle in the middle of terminal 4 at Kennedy Airport, where you can kill a few hours, to the charming and endless European summer outdoor theaters, that proliferate in the warm months. Many fill historic plazas such as the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna or Sala Montjuic in Barcelona, a festival held each year within the walls of the Montjuic castle. No wonder Europeans (except the Brits) don’t bother with drive-ins! Who needs ‘em! Or, for that matter, who needs a movie palace, when you’ve got a real castle to snuggle up next to! 

There are, of course, roof-top cinemas and hot-tub cinemas from London to L..A. You can even check out Pop-Up Magazine’s goings on at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in L.A., which is multi-media. 
Then there’s the ultimate pop-up, my husband’s first theater. If you’ve been following this blog, you know about his second theater, the aforementioned St. George, which I had a hand in running with him for a year, but you may not have heard about the one he invented from scratch.

So here’s the story of the St. John’s Terrace Cinema, in Dean’s own words:  

"Well, it was a drive-in of sorts. The vehicles that were admitted for five cents each per rider (no carload rate) were bicycles, tricycles, Radio Flyer wagons and, of course, walk-up fare. And true to your mother’s story, there were benches, but also folding chairs, blankets, and the occasional crate. The screen was, indeed, a bed sheet, clipped to  a clothesline at the far end of Lester Lloyd’s backyard (Deer Park Ohio). Unbeknownst to me, I was in violation of the 1948 law which banned any entity from owning a studio, a film distributorship and a theater. With the exception of an 8 mm cartoon short, which we’d signed out of the public library, feature films were the product of my hastily-organized company, Big T Productions. They included such stellar titles as Bombing Attack Over Berlin, Bombing Attack Over Japanese Fleet, and The Attack of the Giant Invader. All three films were ten-minute silents, featuring plastic models of the planes and ships our fathers maneuvered throughout WWII, which, at that point lay just ten years in the past.    
      
On the third film, which, as I recall was supposed to have been a re-enactment of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the cinematographer, me, behind a hand-held Brownie 8 spring-powered movie camera (see photo above), caught most of Phil Tabaco’s wrist and all of his hand as he held the wing of a model Japanese Zero, dipping through our basement studio on its way to bomb a plastic model of the USS Arizona, tethered to a cardboard dock. 

We stopped production immediately. None of us understood the concept of film editing. At ten, we simply assumed films were shot scene-by-scene in order, same as we saw them in real theaters. We had promised the crowd at our recently-contrived St. John’s Terrace Cinema a brand-new feature for August, 1956, and so we had to figure out how Phil’s hand and wrist might enter into a Japanese attack. No problem--just change the genre from a war film to a war/horror film! Phil became the giant monster who rose from the Pacific to somehow defend the American fleet from all comers. 
Our crowd of just under twenty kids from the block loved it.  We re-wound and showed the film three times, no additional cost. 

And there was music! Just as your mother recalled a lady at a piano in that lot in Toledo, we had musical accompaniment. Lester sat at the upright in his parents’ dining room his back to the window that opened on the backyard. We had moved the mirror from his dresser and placed it on the piano, so Lester could watch the film and play appropriately along with the action. 

As I recall, the theme from the black-and-white TV series, Superman (dump de dum, dadada dump de dum) was repurposed often. Phil tore tickets at the gate; and yes, the producer /  director / cinematographer / projectionist (me) also ran concession. Popcorn, prepared by Mrs. Lloyd in the “theater kitchen” adjacent to the “music studio” went for two cents a bag, and drinks were various flavors of Kool-Aid, sold in sterilized soda bottles for four cents each. 

On one Saturday night in August, Lester, Phil and I divided the combined gate and concession: nearly two dollars three equal ways.  What did we do with all the money? What else? we went to the Deer Park Theatre two nights later! Twenty-five cents admission left us plenty of money to gorge on candy and popcorn."

Afterthought: Lester Lloyd spent most of his life as a professional musician; Phil Tabaco became a writer and lecturer on Sci Fi, and Dean (Thompson), as you know, went on to run a movie palace and then produce and direct television.

Quick! What’s the world’s oldest continuously operating movie theater?

If you were thinking it was San Francisco’s Victoria Theater — that would have been my guess — you’d be wrong. You might have thought it was the Plaza Grill and Cinema in Ottawa, Kansas. Now if you happen to live on the other side of the pond, near Marseilles, you’d be quick to point out that the Eden in La Ciotat, opened in 1895. But the crucial question is, “did it stay open?” Nope, having fallen into hard times, as so many theaters did in the seventies, its marquee was dark for a long time. The theater this site and blog are dedicated to, the St. George, in Staten Island, New York, a 2672-seat palace built in 1929 that I helped run in its last cinema year, 1976, would never have been in the running for oldest or longest continuous, having opened in the twenties and closed in ’77. 

Short drumroll.

The oldest continuously-operating movie theater in the world is, according to the Guiness Book of World Records, the State Theatre in Washington, Iowa, which showed its first film in 1897, via the beam of a cinematographe. This was a hand-cranked affair invented only two years before by those fathers of cinema, the Lumiere brothers.

But wait (as Ron Popeil, himself a showman, would say), there’s more!

Not only did the State (once the Graham Opera House) stay open all those years, it’s connected intimately to the very birth of cinema. Did you wonder what a cinematographe — there are fewer than 500 in the world — was doing in the middle of Iowa? 

Ever heard of William Franklin Brinton? A sort of Barnum and Bailey of early film, “Brinton,” according to The Guardian, “crossed the Midwest with his wife Indiana and his traveling show, welcoming locals for a ticket price of just a few cents. At first he showed magic lantern slides, some of which 'dissolved' between two static images to create an illusion of movement. When moving pictures arrived, Brinton jumped aboard, ordering many films from distributors in France, one of the most prolific and creative producers in the early period. He also became the manager of the Graham Opera House in Washington, Iowa...now known as the State Theater...Brinton’s programme included trick films such as those by Méliès, which used in-camera special effects to create fantastical spectacles, and many hand-coloured movies where the dye is applied directly to each frame.”

Flash forward the better part of a century to Michael Zahs, a retired Iowa history teacher, who like many of us, is a pack rat. He collects everything. The Brintons are long gone, but their collection is still very much alive, thanks to the fact that it fell — lantern slides, film, equipment and all — safely into the hands of Zahs. Phenomenally, it was stored until 2014 in a shed on Zahs’ property, where he repaired periodically to withdraw one curiosity or another, to show in various venues. Something of a showman himself, he’d picked up his predecessor’s habit of traveling with films from town to town. Seems Brinton’s original collection included a lot of lost work by George Melies, some of it on dangerous nitrate film. There was some back and forth with the Library of Congress over the years, mailing packages that had been duplicated, some, unbelieveably, labeled “explosive,” via the USPS. A lot of this stuff is unique, meaning no copies anywhere else in the world.

And now?

Thankfully, the shed on Zahs’ property will now probably not catch fire, at least not on account of volatile film stock. The University of Iowa is, since 2014, the new home of what’s being called The Brinton Entertainment Company, a collection of films, slides, projectors and other odds and ends, all donated by the industrious Michael Zahs. It’s now the subject of a documentary, Saving Brinton, which just aired on PBS, January 1, 2019. 

It’s an Iowa story, and the best part is that the documentarians, Tommy Haines and Andrew Sherburne, are Zahs’ neighbors.

On November 5, 2018, Saving Brinton, studded with awards, returned home for viewing at the State, after having toured four continents. 

There was a live act that night on stage at the State, The Pines, a local folk trio, two of its members former students of Zahs’. One of them, Alex Ramsey, said of performing on stage at his hometown movie house, that it was “Just an absolute honor and kind of a dream come true...” It was The Pines‘ first gig in Washington, Iowa. As for Brinton, he’s just come off the road one more time. 

Traditionally to mark the New Year, I run this reminiscence written by an original staffer, Paul Plonski, of closing down the St. George Theater before midnight, forty-two years ago.  Here it is, altered somewhat, with embellishments, and a series of “afterthoughts,” about the blog in general...
 
The movie had just gone off-screen at the St. George Theatre, our 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. Gabe, our grizzled projectionist (returned to the fold after being disciplined by his union for TV watching in the booth) wanted to get on our good side. His shift over, he strode to the concession stand and slapped down on the glass display case a rather ordinary box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies.
 
“Happy New Year!” He smiled at me, that crooked tobacco-stained grin of his. “These are for you and Dean. Yeah, yeah, I meant to give’m to you at Christmas, but I forgot...” He buttoned his peacoat and made for the street, his brief foray into sociability accomplished.
 
Paulie, who had the concession shift that night, was just shutting things down, counting change, locking the case. He pointed a pretend revolver at the back of the retreating projectionist, and fired a phantom bullet. I laughed, Dean patted Paulie on the back. Everybody knew Gabe’s hourly pay was $14.76. Rich as he was, the Entenmann’s seemed as puny as the gesture that had produced it. We hadn’t paid ourselves in months, and Paulie, worth eleven of Gabe, got minimum wage, $2.20 an hour. 
 
Dean stepped into the stand and grabbed Paulie’s Windex and rag.
 
“It’s almost midnight, and I imagine you’ve got other plans,” he told the kid, fourteen years his junior.
 
Thirty-eight years later, thanks to the internet, Paulie, in his fifties (these days an aeronautical engineer), found me via this website. We’re reacquainted as full adults since then, and I’m happy to say that his memory of that particular New Year’s Eve has become a traditional post for SW.
 
On that preternaturally cold night, we darkened the house, closed down the box office, locked the concession stand, threw the giant breakers to power down the marquee, and bolted the glass doors. We wished whoever remained good luck in the coming new year, 1977. Paulie jumped into his car, parked just below the marquee, and a few of us “management” folk straggled up the hill towards home and some eggnog I had ready. But Paulie’s night would be a little different:
 
You and Dean had made sure to get us out of the theater before midnight so we could make it home in time.
 
My ‘68 Pontiac Firebird was parked on Hyatt Street, right in front of the theater. At around 11:30 I got in, started the car, but could not get it into gear. So...at midnight I was still on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing.
 
[It was around 15 degrees F that night, with wind gusts off the harbor of up to 25 mph; in fact, New Year’s Eve in NYC, ’76 is tied with ’96 for the fifth coldest Dec 31st in recorded weather history].
 
Quiet, except for the wind. Then at the stroke of midnight, the ships in the harbor sounded their whistles and shot off fireworks. It was just me, the wind and the ships with the NYC skyline, a night to cherish forever. PS: The New Years party was still raging when I made it home (nothing missed).
 
Privation, exhilaration. These fit my overall experience of running the theater in 1976 and the first few months of 1977. It was going to be a cold cold winter; we’d be out, broke, by spring. But the theater, while it lasted, was itself a kind of fireworks, a lit spark I try to keep going, in these blog posts.
 
Thanks again, Paulie...and Happy New Year.
 
Peace to everyone... And in the coming year don’t forget to like us on FB, and don’t be shy about comments...and, if you can, find a local movie palace of your own to support.
 
Afterthoughts:
None of these thoughts has anything to do with New Year’s Eves past or present...
 
Afterthought 1:  Radio City Music Hall’s perils, mentioned in last week’s blog post,  raised some interesting responses from many dancers who worked at the Hall. I am  now pleased to number among my friends Rosemary Novellino, thefounder of The Show people’s Committee to Save Radio City Music Hall, and author of Saving Radio City Music Hall: a Dancer’s True Story.Comments from alumna rockettes have come in via FB Message, some of which I’ll be adding to the blog’s comments column, as I get permission. A lot of people breathed sighs of relief when the NYC Landmarks Commission ruled in favor of saving Manhattan’s only remaining palace below 175th Street. 
 
Afterthought 2:  A blog post on Shea’s Performing Arts Center Buffalo with, I promise, a fascinating sub-story of the man who slept in that theater to keep it from being stripped of its Tiffany-designed elements and its remarkable theater organ, is forthcoming.
 
3.  A dance review on December 24, by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times, “E Pluribus Nutcracker,”  turns out to have been, among other things, a hymn to my beloved St. George Theatre, and I quote:
 
The St. George is a marvel too little known outside Staten Island. The 2,800-seat theater, built in 1929, was intended as a home for vaudeville and cinema to vie with those across the water on Broadway. After coming close to demolition at the start of this century, it has been lovingly restored. The foyers and balconies are fabulously ornate. Auditorium, front-of-house areas...are spectacular.
 
Sailing past the Statue of Liberty on his way home, Macaulay seems to be making the point that the whole trip, to and from Manhattan, is part of the adventure, 
 
On the way back from Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty seemed a perfect part of a “Nutcracker” day. Like the Sugar Plum Fairy, she welcomes strangers and embraces diversity.

A friend who lives near Philly mentioned the other day that he’d come up to NYC to see the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall; don’t believe he even spent the night, just came and went, mesmerized by the mechanics of the show, the elaborate stagecraft, the appearing and disappearing orchestra, and no doubt the iconic Wooden Soldier Fall, a dance move dating back to 1933, that mimics falling dominoes, as each dancer/soldier falls on the next one. This year’s show, I’m told, includes the falling soldiers and, of course, the usual camels, part of the traditional “Living Nativity” — also dating back to ‘33. There are other post-millennial wonders of course, including a finale with overhead drones. Where are there NOT drones these days? I live in the five boroughs, so of course haven’t been to the Christmas Show in years. The last time was about fifteen years ago with my sister, who’d come north to see me through a knee operation. I was on crutches, barely able to walk, so the sight of all those perfectly proportioned bodies, their parallel legs raised six inches above their heads, seemed surreal. But then, I’ve always found chorus lines dream-like...
 
It all started on December 21, 1933, the year after the Music Hall opened. That first Christmas Show was accompanied by the movie Flying Down to Rio (strange choice, perhaps) and The Night Before Christmas, a Walt Disney Silly Symphony — an animated short film. The show, created by the Music Hall's stage producer Leon Leonidoff and none other than Vincente Minnelli, (then Radio City’s music director) lasted just two weeks.
 
Fast forward to the 1970‘s: the nearly six-thousand-seat Radio City was still showing movies and presenting a stage show, but drawing scant audiences, something I failed to notice that year, busy as I was, running a movie palace of my own. (Well, not my own, because I didn’t own it, just the right to go broke paying its rent). That would be the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat hall in Staten Island, seventy blocks south of Radio City and a ferry-ride away. We had no Christmas Show at the St. George in 1976, just a four-wall “deal” involving a little-known movie called In Search of Noah’s Ark, which purported to prove that pieces of Noah’s original ark had been found on Mt. Ararat. Well, it was a living, at least for that month, and because it was a four-wall, we didn’t have to do anything but turn the theater over to  Sun Pictures, and pop some popcorn. Towards the end of the Noah’s Ark run, we managed to get a local teen escape artist/magician onstage between showings, to take the chill off.  
 
As a result of running the St. George, I met Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City and, the following year, got a private tour of our big sister theater, including a private showing of some or other forgettable movie (Pete’s Dragon?) and a rehearsal of the Rockettes. A private showing in a nearly six-thousand-seat hall really is a little unnerving... By that time, I was an ex-movie theater operator, and could see just how much trouble big theaters were in everywhere. There was talk, that year and the year after, of the demise of Radio City, the last of the Manhattan behemoth palaces; which brings us to January 1978, when the end nearly did come for the music hall. 
 
“Nostalgia Draws Music Hall Crowds, Despite Cold”
 
The headline could have come out of yesterday’s New York Times, but it didn’t. The date at the top of the column is January 8, 1978. Radio City, Roxy Rothafel’s great gold Deco clamshell of a theatre, occupying — since 1932 — several thousand square feet of prime NYC real estate, about a half-block of Midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was in trouble. Everybody knew about it; 5,690 mostly-vacant seats in Midtown? "Vacant" anything is a no-go in Manhattan. Management promised to keep the doors open till Easter. Then the Rockettes — once upon a time Russell Markert's Music Hall Roxyettes — and the whole shebang would be gone. Folks from as far away as Minnesota braved the frostbite of forty-one years ago, in lines four deep around the corner, compelled by the notion that the Music Hall was going the way of so many palaces. It had been “curtains” (pun intended) for the Roxy, Radio City's sister theater only a few blocks farther downtown (demolished in 1960) and on the other coast, for the 3,387-seat Paramount (aka Graumann’s Metropolitan) in L.A. (torn down in 1961), just to name two spectacular demolitions. By 1978,  it seemed there might be more movie palaces down than standing.
 
I’d read the headlines too, and had felt the despair. I was still grappling with my own severe depression: less than a year before, my team had crash-landed, after trying and failing to keep the St. George open as a movie palace. The year after our failure, my old favorite hometown palace, the RKO Albee, had finally been reduced to a pile of marble and plaster dust in Cincinnati, despite a vigilant Save the Albee committee. My friend and colleague, Robert Endres, then still head projectionist at RCMH, recalls the shock of hearing that Radio City would close:
 
I guess you could say I was ‘stunned’ at the closing announcement as was everyone else. I had been out in Illinois with my parents over the Christmas holiday.... I walked into work that first day back to be told there was a meeting in the large rehearsal hall and we were told to attend. When I got there the Music Hall executive staff was there, as was Marshall [president of Rockefeller Center] who made the announcement. The mood was pretty grim.
           
It was a time, the late seventies, when hardly anybody could see far enough into the future to imagine how the great halls could ever be useful again. Across America, in most cities, suburbanites hardly ever went “downtown” anymore: derelict palaces in badly-lit urban settings made downtown movie-going seem a lonely, even dangerous experience. Even inside the theaters, there were incidents. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb. Such was the life of the urban movie-goer — and exhibitor.
 
The Music Hall had an entirely different problem. Manhattan is the ultimate “downtown,“ so even in the dire seventies, there were plenty of people on Midtown streets, and the Music Hall was certainly safe, if hardly populated. But with nearly six thousand seats, a dwindling NYC tourism couldn’t begin to support Radio City; and New Yorkers didn’t think of the Music Hall as a place to go for movies. To quote New York on the subject of moviegoing in 1978, “ You consulted one of the foldout sheets everyone had tacked above their desks or in their kitchen, from the revival houses, blessed be their names—the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Regency, Theatre 80 Saint Marks, the Bleecker Street Cinema.” These were the theaters of the day. Ironically, it’s these very art houses that are mostly gone now, while among other refurbished movie palaces, Radio City stands. 
 
It was — who else? — the Rockettes who finally saved Radio City. Two days after Alton Marshall made the announcement that the theater’s last day would be April 12, Rosemary Novellino the dance captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company and Eileen Collins, the Rockettes' union rep, founded The Showpeople’s Committee To Save Radio City Music Hall, with the Rockettes at the movement’s core.
 
While all those patrons were standing in lines four deep on the cold pavement, Rockettes were entertaining them! The committee, meanwhile, launched its letter-writing campaign gathering better than 150,000 signatures worldwide, an impressive feat pre-internet. This and a number of efforts at publicity – including some guerrilla theater, in which committee members gathered signatures while dressed in suits of armor (to highlight their “war” to save the Music Hall) – could not be ignored by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the morning of March 14, the day of Radio City’s Commission hearing, the committee organized an “impromptu” Rockette kick line on the steps of City Hall. 
 
Two weeks later on March 28, the Music Hall's interior was declared a landmark, and not a moment too soon, given Marshall's deadline. Six weeks after that, on May 12, 1978, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. 
 
A little more than forty years after the Rockettes danced in the cold — for all those people who assumed they were getting a last look at Radio City — the hall is still standing, a live house featuring occasional film.  
 
As are many grand theaters across America, including my own St. George. Despite our failure to keep it alive as a movie house in 1976, and a number of failed subsequent efforts by entrepreneurs at repurposing the St. George (roller rink, dinner theater, antiques venue), it’s alive and kicking; and I mean that literally, with a children’s corps of dancers onstage many afternoons. This story can be had via the recent PBS Documentary, Treasures of New York: St. George Theatre starring our theater’s eventual savior, Rosemary Cappozalo, and her family. Rosemary, or "Mrs. Rosemary," as she's known in Staten Island, was a Julliard-trained dancer and veteran teacher herself. What is it about dancers? In the cold, on the sidewalk, or in a deserted theater, they just keep moving!
 
Afterthoughts:  
1. Coming Soon: the story of Shea’s Buffalo, the only Tiffany-designed theater still standing, a theater-rescue story to follow the near-demise of Radio City.
​
2. The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York City would never have existed if the city hadn’t demolished one of its most glorious buildings, the old Penn Station, and felt a deal of remorse about that fact, passing the Landmarks Law in 1965. So without the loss of that fine Beaux Arts transportation hub, Radio City Music Hall (and a number of other buildings, including Grand Central and large parts of the Broadway Theater District) might never have been spared.

3. Something anecdotal: a story in my husband’s family involves a friend of his father’s, a WWII G.I. who was in the vanguard of American troops that liberated Paris in 1944. Story goes, he was riding on a tank in the liberation parade when a woman tossed him some flowers, exclaiming, “Vive les americaines!” In return, the soldier shouted, in his best high school French, “Vive la Arc de Triomphe.” Determined to have the last salute, the smiling woman sang out, “...et vive la Radio City Music Hall!”

​4. Bob  Endres (formerly of RCMH) gets the last say:  “I heard one interesting story from a former vice president who, after he retired, had lunch with Alton Marshall...President of Rock Center. Marshall apparently told him that they really didn't want to close the Hall, but...had to do something about the format, so they put the story out that they were going to close...to get enough attention to be able to restructure...”  

Now that the St. George Theatre, our local palace, has a movie screen for the first time in forty-one years, I’m thinking wistfully about the old one. I remember it well, having run the 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque theater, in the last full year of its cinema career (1976). After serving briefly as a flea market and a dangerous dark period of near demolition, the St. George is, these days, largely a performance space, as so many surviving movie palaces are. But film is finding its way back into the palaces of yore; think the United Palace of the Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights) and the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, N.C. among so many across the U.S. So the St. George has caught a ride on the film series band-wagon.

Descending on a pipe from the fly loft, the theater’s current screen is a relative postage stamp, compared to its predecessor, a classic of the 1950’s, mounted on a giant curved stretcher. Consisting of a huge piece of heavy white perforated material, the old screen had tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual metals embedded in their surfaces. Designed to accept Cinemascope, our screen had a good “gain” — or reflectivity — and was “pearlescent.” Black tones came across as very dark gray, and the overall image was bright — if you ignored the grape soda stains in the lower left-hand corner, from some impulsive long-gone patron. 

The screen curved slightly outward at the left and right edges. I always thought the curve had something to do with wrapping the audience in light, and I was partially right. A flat screen makes light travel farther to its corners, encouraging a slightly distorted image, the so-called “pincushion effect.” Godzilla battled Megalon on our screen with no distortion, the grape stain hardly evident, once the battle was underway.

Everything I know about the screen and screens in general, I have learned in retrospect. In 1976, we were just trying to stay alive, relieved if more than a few hundred people paid money to sit in the dark and watch, and grateful that we had a screen at all. Although we could hardly afford a new one, our buddy, Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall conspired briefly to get us a “used” screen at no charge. Radio City, then primarily a movie theater, traditionally replaced its pristine screen annually (no soda stains for them). Theirs was better than twice the size of ours; so half of a discarded Radio City screen would have been plenty. Alas, our stint at the St. George was over before we could take advantage of this bargain.

Certain ushers liked to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. Little did our audience know that, while they were watching, all sorts of antics were going on behind the screen. Each night an usher went into the shadows back stage to engage two switches: one to bring up the red and blue footlights and another to light the house sconces, as the film ended. Leroy — scrawny, barely 5’5” and 130 pounds — was always reluctant to go into the dark, even if only a comedy was showing. 

One night during the last reel of The Exorcist it fell to a reluctant Leroy to do this duty. One priest was already dead and another would soon hurl himself from a window, possessed by the Devil. Add all of this to the soundtrack of tubular bells — indeed creepy. Unbeknownst to Leroy, Cheri, a bit of the devil already in her, lurked in the shadows, stage right. As he approached, she pushed a flashlight beneath her chin and rasped out, “I willlllllll possess you!”

The blood-curdling scream and pounding footsteps that came easily through the perforated screen, probably seemed just one more chilling movie sound effect to folks still seated in the house. Who knows if some long-ago patron of ours hasn’t downloaded the movie recently and wondered as the credits rolled, Wasn’t there a last scream?

Afterthought: In last week’s post, I recounted an evening spent at the first movie to show at the St. George in decades, Working Girl, on the new small screen I mentioned. Heading for the balcony, I felt a bit like a returned working girl myself, glimpsing, as I passed, my former office under the stairs in the lobby: a pang mixed with a thrill.  

I have a number of small souvenirs from the St. George Theatre, originally a 2,672-seat movie palace which I had a hand in running for one year,1976 (and a little way into 1977). Rolls of tickets (1 adult $1.50), Starts Wednesday, Starts Sunday, and other signs for every day of the week, BALCONY CLOS D, an original EXIT sign, cast-aluminum marquee signage: TECHNICOLOR, AND, even a lone cast-aluminum marquee comma. Our year in the theater didn’t end well, as you may already know. Perpetually in the red, in a decade when single-screen theaters, let alone movie palaces, were imperiled, we cut corners in all sorts of crazy ways, like running the film but not the light in the projector, to keep on schedule, in case somebody showed up. The projectors ran on very expensive “carbons,” two of which (positive meets negative) created an “arc” similar to that used in welding, hence fire, hence light. Primitive? The technology was old even then. I have a box of carbons, come to think about it, one more ancient souvenir.

And now I have a new item to add to my St. George Theatre collection, a drink cup bearing the legend “St. George Theatre, A Non-Profit Organization.” As my husband Dean is fond of remarking, “We were non-profit back then, too; we just didn’t know it!” 

I got this cup last week for attending the first movie offered at the St. George since we loaded up our U-Haul forty-one years ago. 

For a long time, the current proprietors, a local family with roots in children’s dance, Rosemary Cappozalo and her daughters, Luanne Sorrentino, and Doreen Cugno,  seemed reluctant to present movies. Hadn’t the theater originally been built for Vaudeville? The fact that the old stained screen had burned long ago in a fire had to have been something of an impediment; but several local groups, including Staten Island Arts, have shown interest in presenting movies; and arts grants are a good thing  – that’s what admitting you’re actually not-for-profit gets you! 

Working Girl, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, was the entertainment of the evening, a movie born of the decade that followed our theater time. Our Zeitgeist had been all about horror (The Exorcist, Burnt Offerings, Carrie) or mean streets: Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Cooley High; but by 1988, the St. George was dark, having exhausted its brief post-movie house careers as 1.) a flea market and 2.) a roller rink. Across the harbor, mean streets had given way to Wall Street and the Reagan years. 
It had been bitterly cold when I’d last seen a movie in the theater, February, 1977. Carrie; I remember shivering in the balcony. It was too cold to sit down.The landlord had stopped heating our beloved cave in late November, and we had worked for months in the cold, selling tickets with gloves on, warming our hands in the popcorn machine. To watch the first movie officially screened in almost half a century, at the theater we lost — despite every effort, legal and otherwise, to keep it open — and for that movie to drag New York Harbor uphill just a few blocks, and let it fill the screen before us, while we sat in the familiar (somehow warm) dark, was my catnip. 

Friends I was sitting with had never seen the theater’s interior before, so I gave it to them in backstage tales, explaining why a digital projector tethered to the lip of the balcony isn’t the same at all as two carbon arc projectors, pointing up and back at the darkened portals of the projection booth. We had wine and popcorn, a strange pairing, one that seemed wrong, but made me wonder if I’d have gotten through the winter of 1977 better with a little pinot noir hidden behind the candy stand. There had been grass, but I wasn’t much given to smoking it back then; besides, it was expensive, and we were broke. 

There were vendors the other night, working the lobby and the mezzanine. You could get your hair styled and teased on the spot, you could buy a vintage coat with shoulder pads. For many of the nine hundred or so people who showed up, it was an event, to share on social media, a local arts party. 
Where was I? What decade was I in? Melanie Griffith, Alec Baldwin, and Harrison Ford were all so young, they could have played adolescent walk-on roles in one or another of the movies we showed.  I just checked: Griffith actually DID play such a role in Smile, a 1975 Indy we showed early in ’76. 

I settled in and watched. The format  of the new screen was, as I’d feared, terrible, almost square; the title, Working Girl, was at risk of losing its W and its l, on the truncated flat white surface. As is true almost everywhere nowadays, the beam didn’t come from on high; it lacked a certain divinity.
I closed my eyes and listened to the movie; and, thanks to those gorgeous acoustics I knew all about, the sound track wrapped itself around us, voices in a dream. The three of us — my goddaughter, her mother (my friend) and I — had planned to walk out after the opening, having come to see a New York Harbor we two older women remembered commuting back and forth on, with its then-intact World Trade Center and packed morning ferry.  As it turned out, we stayed a little way into the movie, past the point where Melanie Griffith cuts her hair.

“We’re walking out of the 1980’s,” I whispered, as we made our way down the steps from the balcony.

Or was it the seventies? 

“This is really something. I wish I could enter the settings of my first adventures...” my friend said.

She meant, “...the way you do when you come here.” 

​Well, she had a point. (What exactly is the past?)

“When it’s winter, and I’ve got tickets to a concert here, I can’t quite believe my feet are warm,” is all I had to say.

​Movies are time-benders, living dreams. Movie palaces — I truly believe this — are the Faberge Eggs built to contain them.