“...thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.” ―Roger Ebert

As pipsqueak theater operators at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I operated with a team of young entrepreneurs in 1976, we took what crumbs our booking agent dropped to us from the Mann Theaters table of available movie product. Our agent was a Mann employee, and we were his side-hustle. One of the crumbs happened to be the 1976 film, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, starring the improbable duo of country singer Kris Kristofferson, and British actor Sarah Miles, the latter obviously desperate for work.

The movie was depressingly bad. Roger Ebert’s notion that only bad movies are truly depressing fits Sailor like a trim pair of bellbottoms; Vincent Canby said as much in The New York Times,“There is a beguilement to Sailor,...that of sitting through a movie in a state of irascible unconvincedness while being more than half seduced.” Half-seduction, as I can attest, is far worse than no seduction at all. Based loosely on impressions of a classic Japanese novel by Yukio Mishima, the movie could put you to sleep in five minutes (it did have that effect on a number of patrons, who wandered out of the dark wanting their money back). This, despite the fact that Mishima’s novel had been quietly terrifying; I recalled not being able to sleep after having read it.

All the dreary, improbable or disappointing movies we ran could be summed up as a waste of carbon-arc light, film stock, and the poor moviegoer’s buck fifty (or ninety cents, if underage). Canby knew what he was talking about when it came to seduction: when properly executed, it is I believe, what makes a movie worth going to.

A brilliant movie will deliver anywhere. Seduced in the back of a Chevy or a Paris hotel suite is still seduced. But the opposite isn’t true; movies that fail to deliver can still be softened by elegant surroundings, or another round of popcorn. So it was with the bad movies that we ran in 1976.
There was, at least, a gleaming dome to look up at. The brightest moment I recall from Sailor is the intermission (we actually scheduled one, as if we knew somehow that people would need a break). Out into the lobby they came, eager for popcorn, never expecting the real drama of the night about to take place under our three newly-polished chandeliers.

We were, at the time, using our uninhabited mezzanine to house four very young puppies, who’d been born under a bush in our yard. The dogs had the run of the mezzanine, which was fine, we thought; they were afraid of the stairs. During Sailor’s Saturday night intermission, a woman munching on popcorn, while sitting on the stairs to the mezz, proved she could reach C above high C with a blood-stopping scream. Further shrieks. In under a minute, the whole lobby emptied out onto the street. Then word went round, and screams turned to guffaws. Something wet had indeed entered her ear: the tongue of a curious puppy! Boffo, as we already called her, had braved the stairs to make her debut. We’d named Boffo after the old Variety term “Boffo Socco” — which means “outstanding box office”. Though Sailor was hardly boffo or even boffola, the show went on, with a much-awakened audience. BTW, the puppy would turn out to “have legs,” another Variety term signifying that she would last — eleven more years. She was a showbiz dog if there ever was one! 

In Search of Noah’s Ark was a fake documentary which, after several decades, developed a kind of cult following as kitsch, relieving it not at all of its burden of badness. Who could believe that splinters of Noah’s actual ark, like purported fragments of the true cross, had been found on Mt. Ararat? Busloads of evangelicals could, and did believe this: a seduction for a specific audience, but nothing much for the rest of us.

Gable and Lombard was the pits, as Roger Ebert himself testified, “They had more than love — they had FUN!  Yes, and they did more than make love, too — they made movies, but you'd hardly guess it from this one.” Gable and Lombard is one of those movies where casting decisions saved thousands at the expense of believability. The result was a child-like actor (James Brolin) playing in Daddy’s (Clark Gable’s) shoes. Jill Clayburgh was only a little less objectionable as Carol Lombard. Nothing happens, no seduction. 

For all the bad movies, we also showed a lot of good ones, including some real surprises, flicks I’d expected would be bad and then was surprised to catch myself stopping and sitting down to watch. So  it went with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the title, I thought at first, said it all. And the trailer, those women running from Leatherface in his mask, seemed to convince me it was all just blood and gore. With a bad movie you see the trailer, and oftener than not you’re sure you know what the movie’s going to be; like fast food (finger-lickin’ good), the sign says it all. What made Chainsaw worth watching, once the real movie arrived on screen? The cinematography, for one thing. Tobe Hooper had been a documentary cameraman. The film was violent, but, at the same time, in its cynical way, it had something to say about violence. The first sizzling frames drew me in. Instead of going back to my office to sort unpaid bills, I grabbed a popcorn and sat down front. I generally avoid bloody movies, but, as is true with much of Hitchcock (think the shower scene in Psycho), I couldn’t take my eyes off what was happening. 

Well I started by quoting Roger Ebert, and I’m thinking of ending with an observation from an old mentor of mine, the structuralist filmmaker, Hollis Frampton. Though his films have no or little narrative, he sincerely loved movies, when their seductive powers worked. Born in the latter days of the Depression, in Wooster, Ohio, he grew up in the dark watching Laura, Rope and whatever else Hollywood had to offer from week to week at the local movie house. A poet, photographer, and, eventually, a filmmaker, he appeared at a pivotal point in my life, and changed my worldview. Over a Bloody Mary at Donohue’s on Lexington near 68th one Wednesday in 1972, he offered me his personal viewing formula: “A movie that works has to make you forget your toothache, the love you just lost, and the balance in your checkbook....” He was right. Four years later I went on to run a movie palace, and can add to his observations, “and if you’re working in the theater where the movie’s showing and you want to sit down...” 

Well that cinches it.

Afterthoughts:
1. Movies I remember sitting down for at the St. George:

• The Man Who Would Be King
• Taxi Driver
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Blazing Saddles
• Smile
• Silent Movie
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest               There were others.

2. You can never read too many good quotes. Who said, “Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.” 

(Answer: Charlie Chaplin)

Year after year, the third of May goes by unnoticed. We pass Cinco de Mayo, heading straight for Mother’s Day, without pausing to reflect on a sequence of events that, on May 3, 1948, quietly changed forever the way Americans cinematically entertain themselves — or even what kinds of buildings they enjoy these entertainments in. What happened on that date in early May (coincidentally in the year I was born) gave a huge boost to television, eventually wiping out the movie palaces, and releasing movie stars and directors from a kind of indentured servitude that only Hollywood could create.  “The studio system” was finally dead. Before the United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (aka the Hollywood Antitrust Case) came down on the government’s side, a kind of barter system often prevailed  when it came to casting movies, as with Gone With the Wind. David O. Selznick, the director, wanted Clark Gable; and he was gonna have him. 

These days, he’d just contact Gable’s agent, but under the old monopolistic studio system, Gable “belonged” to MGM, which didn’t make a practice of loaning out its stars. So a deal was struck, and three years later GWTW opened in Loews theaters nationwide; Loews was MGM’s parent company. Yep, that’s a monopoly alright, when an entity or class of entities has exclusive possession or control of a commodityor service.

Before 1948, theaters that bore the Paramount, Loews, 20th Century Fox, or RKO logo on their marquees showed largely that parent company’s product. If you ran a Fox theater, you took what was given to you, the way a child eats the family meal, and never mind liking broccoli. But it was even worse for the small mom and pop operations: those theaters had to take a “block” of films, including some turkeys, in order to get one or two good titles. Block booking, it was called. 

After 1948, a lot of theater properties went up for sale, and Paramount and its brothers found themselves short capital. The lawsuit had been going on, one way or another, since the 1920’s, with some intermissions (the Depression, WWII) during which the studios argued hardship and got away with it, thanks to an indulgent FDR. In the end, it had been the small producers (Selznick, Disney, Orson Welles, and the like) who’d nagged the Department of Justice into paying more attention. Now that it was over, the studios had to recoup their losses, which they managed, by selling parts of their film libraries to television, and, well, you know the rest. Ninety million people went weekly to the movies in 1948; ten years later, it was 46 million, and TV was king. 

By the time I came along — in league with other brave young entrepreneurs keen on opening the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat movie palace — the studio system was dead. During our theater year and beyond, its remains continued to molder away, like a giant forest tree fallen some decades before. Nobody “owned” stars anymore; the movies they appeared in were sometimes indies, and the stars were basically “free agents” (to borrow a term from baseball). Theater chains, Mann and the like, were separate from film companies; the chains bid for pictures, letting the chaff (The Last Tycoon, for example) fall to us small-time theater operators. We got some good stuff, including second- or third-run classics, some obscure stuff that ought to remain obscure, like Don’t Open the Window, and classic bombs like Gable and Lombard. Not so different from block booking, when you think about it.

I can’t say it was a living, running a movie palace in 1976, but it was a great adventure, and a fine decade for film. The studio system could never have produced the rebellious, quirky or gritty films of the seventies like Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, or Logan’s Run, not to mention sleepers like Coolie High and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These were movies we had the privilege of showing, but the year also produced films we never got our hands on, like Network, The Seven Percent Solution, Marathon Man, Breaking Point and Bound for Glory. Not to mention Obsession, which could well have come out of the studio system in its heyday (Roger Ebert called it “a 1940s melodrama out of the ‘CBS Radio Mystery Theater’ by way of a gothic novel...”).

1976 was smack in the middle of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era and it spoke to the rebellious, questioning attitude of that zeitgeist. We in the five boroughs and their surrounds had also survived the near-bankruptcy of New York City (they were talking, after all, about selling off parts of Central Park and certain items stored in the Met’s attic!). By 1976, the recession was on the wane, but we wouldn’t know it till the nineteen eighties. 

In early March, 1977, we were out of the theater, our magnificent dream over. That’s when I finally had time to catch up with movie going: to see Rocky Horror with the rest of humanity, and some of the movies listed above — at other theaters, like the Quad in the Village — that were still open.  
 
Afterthoughts:
1.For an interesting treatment of United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc., check this out. Please forgive the Constitution Center in the link above for its incorrect citing of the date, May 4, 1948. In all other sources, the date is listed as May 3 of that year. 

2.Gone With the Wind, mentioned at the start of this post, had inhabited the St. George’s giant screen, if not when we ran the place.

3.Since television plays a role in this post, here’s a little treatment of technologies, as they have enfolded each other, like so many Russian dolls.

“Just the facts ma’am...”

Whoever remembers Sgt. Friday, the L.A. P.D. (TV) detective, identifies him as the speaker of these words as surely as Bogart, in Casablanca, has been forever tagged with, “Play it again, Sam.” Oddly enough, neither Bogie nor Jack Web — the actor who created Dragnet, and played Sgt. Friday — actually said the oft-quoted words he is tagged with; but these sources are fiction, so lapses are somehow more forgivable. Shakespeare never penned “All that glitters is not gold,” either, (it was “glisters” — The Merchant of Venice) and Cary Grant never said “Judy, Judy, Judy.” 

Journalism is another thing altogether.

The facts, dude; what are they, exactly? In this blog I strive for accuracy – though I may inadvertently stray, for which, preemptively, I apologize. Starts Wednesdayis based on my experiences of movie theater operation in 1976 (specifically at The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island). I check a lot of facts when I write about things beyond the lobby of the St. George. One prime example is the business of our projection booth, and the twin alternating carbon arc projectors that occupied that space, delivering Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, Dog Day Afternoon, and another hundred or so films to our giant grape-soda-stained movie screen daily. Carbon arc projection is a highly technical process, and although I witnessed it, I don’t pretend to be competent enough to write about it unaided. Complex though it was, it was, even in those days, largely anachronistic, if not downright medieval.

The St. George and a handful of older houses, including its sister theater, the Paramount, down the street — and the porn houses on Times Square — still depended, as we did, on boxes of carbon rods. These, when burned, created a spark that kept an image on-screen. More than once we ran out of carbons, generally requiring me or someone else to take the Staten Island Ferry, then the number one train uptown to Times Square, to borrow a box of the precious rods in the porn district. Carbons had to be trimmed as they burned, and were good for only a short period of time. The difference between our fire-driven technology and the tidy long-lasting Xenon bulb, which all newer theaters had switched over to, was like the transition from horse and buggy to horsepower. 

So imagine my surprise when a friend recently sent me an article from The New York Times that clearly needs the loving services of a fact-checker. (Do they exist anymore?)  The headline of the piece gave me trepidations, “How a Movie Projectionist Keeps the Dying Art of Celluloid Alive.” Celluloid, for safety purposes, hasn’t been in use anywhere since around 1951. According to numerous sources, corroborated by my projection expert, Robert Endres, retired head projectionist of Radio City Music Hall,  and currently projection technician for Dolby Sound in NYC, celluloid was phased out in the ‘50’s.

“... The full term is “nitro cellulose”, and as you might guess from the ‘nitro’ it’s the same basic material as gun cotton and is of course quite flammable and even explosive. It was phased out with acetate as a base which, while it will burn, is not explosive. That base was in turn succeeded by a polyester  (ester) base which won’t tear or break as easily...”

I knew this, and, intuitively, I know, from reading certain Quentin Tarantino press-releases, that “celluloid” has become an emblematic term, feeding the nostalgia of people who long for a return to real film projection. Still, the misuse of this term has got to be confusing to anyone who wants “the facts,” (sir or ma’am or...). 

The author of the article, James Barron, chronicles the activities of Jesse Locascio, a young man who is learning projection from the ground up, but he gets key facts about projection wrong, completely spoiling the piece for me and, presumably, anyone with any degree of knowledge of the subject.

This segment of the text is more or less right:
For generations, movie theaters had two projectors for each screen. The movies were cut into segments, each about 20 minutes long and each on a separate reel. Every 20 minutes, as the end of one reel approached, the projectionist had to start the next reel on the other projector. 

Then the trouble begins:
There was a reason for the two-projector arrangement: the bulb in the projector had a life span of not much longer than 20 minutes.” [dead wrong! What had to be changed or at least trimmed, were the carbons]. The author then compounds his error, “The projectionist had to install a new bulb [wrong again] every time he...changed a reel. Longer-lasting bulbs were perfected in the 1960s and 1970s, [huh?] and with them reel-like platters big enough for a whole movie to fit on just one. 

I’ll let Wikipedia take it home; good enough in this instance:
The Xenon arc lamp was introduced in Germany in 1957 and in the US in 1963. After film platters became commonplace in the 1970s, Xenon lamps became the most common light source, as they could stay lit for extended periods of time, whereas a carbon rod used for a carbon arc could last for an hour at the most. [underlining mine]. 

Bob Endres notes, “Another error in that story is that projectors contained a ‘bulb’ that burned out every twenty minutes or so, when of course the light source was carbon arc. That concept was apparently beyond the grasp of the author.”

The New York Times may not have any fact checkers left, or perhaps the writer was on deadline. I’m happy to say, I have a projection expert and friend, who saves my bacon all the time when it comes to projection, screen curvature, acoustics and all sorts of tech-heavy subjects. Thanks, Bob. Surely the Times could do as well? Perhaps they need Sgt. Friday to remind them to stick to the facts...  

Afterthoughts:
1. The life span of a xenon bulb was and still is around 3,000 hours, according to film-tech.com 

2. Dragnet was a radio show before it found its way to TV, and the first movie spin-off from a TV series, BTW. See this tcm.com article.  

3. Check out An Ode to the Lost World of the Film Projection Booth, on Wired.com.

4. I’ve written several blog posts about Robert Endres, a good friend and indispensable projection consultant, but here’s a peek at his rather extraordinary life.  
​
5. What are the odds, that in one week I would receive two articles on movie-theater-related tech topics, both containing blatant inaccuracies?  This blog post has dealt with only one of them. The other article was passed on to me by a second friend, and concerns theater organs, which I often write about here. The article showcases a 7 manual digital/pipes organ currently being installedin the Castro Theatre in San Francisco; it claims that organ is the world’s biggest. The article’s writer cheekily compares it to the notable 7 manual/33,00-pipes Midmer-Losh being restored in the vastness of Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, and — pulling out all the stops — also to the illustrious (6 manual/ 29,000 pipes) Wanamaker instrument in Philadelphia, which can rightly be called the largest fully-functioning pipe organ in the world. Piling it on, the article deplores the Wanamaker’s light use, claiming it is played for two brief “vignettes” of fifteen minutes each, daily. In actuality, it’s put through its paces six days a week (Monday-Saturday), for two 45-minute recitals, not to mention full-length after-hours concerts, thanks to Friends of the Wanamaker Organ. I can vouch for the 45-minute recitals, having enjoyed at least one such recently, while standing in the (these days, Macy’s) women’s shoe department on the main floor of that iconic, acoustically excellent atrium. If you’re anywhere near Philadelphia, treat yourself!  

The American movie-going experience, from its inception until nearly the 1970’s, contains a parallel universe, a reflection in a shiny surface: black theaters. In some African American neighborhoods, smaller theaters supported black audiences. In larger cities, theaters, palaces big enough to accommodate a separate audience in the balcony, used that space to bring black/white audiences together — all the while keeping them apart. Such was life before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made segregation in public spaces illegal. For seven years, I’ve been working on Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, and for five of those years writing this blog; still there’s the unanswered question. Was outright segregation practiced in our beloved movie palace? We became theater operators at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat house, in Staten Island, in 1976. The day we opened those red and gold doors for business, twelve years had elapsed since the Civil Rights Act. I haven’t yet found the person who’ll tell me if African Americans were welcomed by our predecessors, but it’s likely, given the practices of the day, that some or another discouragement kept black audiences out.  

In 1976, we inherited two mixed audiences from the operator who preceded us: a largely white suburban population — that had moved out of our neighborhood, to newer subdivisions on the South Shore of Staten Island — and a mixed local white and black population, who kept, at times, an uneasy peace. On April 7 of our theater year, we opened, ironically, with Mel Brooks’ still-controversial Blazing Saddles, a satire about race that Brooks now admits he probably couldn’t make today. The American worm of racial attitude was just beginning to change, and I’m happy to say we were on the just side of that moment.

A friend just sent me a wonderful article on the city of Birmingham (Alabama) and its theater restorations: another revitalization story, thrilling! Any theater saved is a welcome miracle; but surprise!  Two of the theaters listed as restored were black houses, during the Jim Crow era.  One, the Lincoln, has been bought and restored by Andre Holland of Moonlight, who remembers this movie house from his boyhood, apparently not as a theater he attended, but as a vacant space next to a local barbershop, that was, nonetheless, filled with memories for most of the older people he knew. Reading this, I got all excited and googled BLACK THEATERS RESTORED. Then, AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATERS RESTORED. Okay, I found a few, and there’s always the compelling story of the Apollo on 125th Street in Harlem. But like so much else having to do with things black and white in America, results in the black column are a little disappointing. There just aren’t that many. I’m sure it’s a tale of bucks: it can take as much as fifty million dollars and, working on the fast track, five years, to restore a run-down theater, even a small one, according to Jerry Martinez of Martinez and Johnson, an architectural firm out of D.C. It’s about deep pockets and lots of time, and donors able to give. These things are scarce everywhere, but can be doubly hard to come by in black communities. 

Still, despite discouragements, I present a few tales of black theater restoration; with time, may there be more.

The previously-mentioned Lincoln Theatre in Bessemer, Alabama comes to mind first.  Andre Holland, its owner and savior notes, "It's good for people — particular young people — to have something to be proud of in their neighborhood... The Lincoln was [before 1964] the only movie theatre you could go to. Everyone who went has memories of it. They remember first dates there, they remember the titles of all the movies they saw." A 400-seat theater built in 1948, the Lincoln has a balcony — likely in a stadium configuration — and orchestra, and functioned until around 1970. Before Holland enter the lists, there were two other Lincoln enthusiasts who got the ball of restoration rolling forward: Jake Bivona, a local attorney and “big movie fan” formed the Lincoln Phoenix Project back in 2013, apparently enlisting the efforts of an actor and filmmaker, Kevin Wayne , best known for his role in The Magnificent 7. Wayne planned to make a documentary. Whether this film exists is hard to determine; likewise, whether Andre Holland is a partner or colleague of these early Lincoln boosters is unclear, but every person in favor of restoration or preservation is, I think, a natural ally. One thing is clear; when the Lincoln is complete it will offer both movies and live acts and give a needed boost to Bessemer’s sad downtown — so much of what theater restoration is all about.

The Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. is the oldest African American theater in the U.S., predating even the Apollo. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and a number of other performers have graced its stage. Martinez (quoted earlier) recalls that the Howard was in pretty dismal shape, “...It had been vacant for decades when we started work on it. It was a solid building, but the interior was totally gone. The only thing that was left was the shape of the proscenium and the shape of the balcony.”

The Howard opened in August, 1910, a legitimate/Vaudeville house, its facade done in Beaux-Arts, Neo-Classical, and Italian Renaissance styles. Apollo, at the top of the facade, played his lyre over T Street, while the inside featured a copious balcony with eight boxes and a proper number of dressing rooms. Not surprisingly, the Howard Players from nearby Howard University often took the stage, as well as the Lafayette Players.

The ups and downs of the Howard mirror the trials of many palatial theaters from the thirties into the bad old seventies. Serving mostly black audiences, and, beginning in the early Depression, black movies, along with live acts, the theater was a hot spot, attracting top talent like Lena Horne, and offering competitions, like its rival, the Apollo, in New York. During WWII, it hosted  a number of balls, attended by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and, in these instances, offered the likes of Abbott and Costello and Danny Kaye, in addition to popular black performers.

Though management was black, the theater seems always to have been owned by white management companies, during its serious working years. These companies faded away by the fifties, when the Howard went Rock and Blues. Beyond the fall of single-screen movie theaters, two things did the Howard in: ironically, desegregation, and the riots of the late sixties. It served briefly as a church, then simply closed, despite its designation on the National Historic Register. 

Its recent re-opening in 2012 after a full restoration by Martinez and Johnson, have given the Howard renewed purpose, recalling its peak during wartime. As the theater’s website observes, “When the nation was deeply divided by segregation, The Howard Theatre provided a place where color barriers blurred and music unified. The Washington Bee dubbed it the ‘Theatre for The People’...the place where dignitaries, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady gathered with everyday folks to see both superstars and rising stars...” Billy Eckstine, Billy Taylor, the Ink Spots, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gilespie, Dick Gregory, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley (I haven’t even gotten started) either debuted there, or used the Howard as a touchstone for their careers. Like the Apollo and the Cotton Club in Harlem, the Howard seems to have survived and prospered by vaulting over the impediment of segregation.

Finally, here’s a brief nod to the Carver Performing Arts Center in Birmingham, a city on fire--in the good sense-- with theater restoration. The Carver Theatre was an African American cinema, opened in 1935 with roughly five hundred seats. Recent restoration has made it, among other things, the new home of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame Museum. The theater’s location in what is considered the Birmingham Civil Rights District probably made restoration a must-do for local civic officials, and a good thing too.

If single-screen theaters of all kinds suffered vacancy and neglect in the seventies, from a combination of multi-plexing and television, then other factors, like white flight (which, arguably, has never gone away), and the desegregation of public places, put additional pressure on black theaters coast-to-coast. Fortunately, people of all backgrounds love their local theaters, and there’s always someone willing to fight to preserve, restore or rebuild them. 

Afterthoughts: 

1. I didn’t include the Apollo in this post, as it seems such an obvious example of a black theater with a fascinating past, but if you want to read a little about it, here’s a good treatment. 
2. For a glimpse at how the neighborhood near the Howard (and its sister, Howard University) has gentrified, read this.

I have a sixth sense when it comes to identifying buildings that used to be movie theaters. Decommissioned churches are marked by their steeples and stained glass; but theaters that have become warehouses, boutiques, sporting goods stores, even parking garages, have their own traits: broad low porticos, with perhaps a marquee or the remains of it, ticket windows, balcony fire escapes at the back or on the side of the building. One other thing theaters, especially palaces, often exhibit is ornate decorative effects that refer in some way to the theatrical.

So it was the Sunday before last, as we walked up Broadway in Manhattan, headed for 175th Street and the United Palace of Cultural Arts, that we happened on an interesting building at 165th St. There, on the East side of the street, was a fascinating structure, 3940 Broadway, with an arched inset depicting in great detail Neptune, god of the sea riding a magnificent oared ship. The facade is a mix of oxide green and teal, set in beige tiles. Decorative work surrounding the arch over the entryway features lyres and comic/tragic faces. Oddly, given all the sea imagery, faces of foxes line many of the windows. Foxes? Of course. We paused to admire what we later identified as Thomas Lamb’s Fox Audubon Theatre, commissioned by none other  than William Fox himself, in 1912, three years before he founded Fox Film Corporation in those bad old days when moguls both built and owned theaters and the movies shown in them. 

You probably know that my interest in — and ability to recognize — old theaters comes from the time I spent obsessed with one, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which for one fateful year, 1976, I had a hand in running. The St. George has, like the Audubon Fox, worn a variety of hats (in the case of the St George: flea market, roller rink, church). But the Audubon, functioning now as a multi-use facility under the aegis of Columbia University, is famous or notorious in a whole other respect. Built with both an auditorium and an upstairs ballroom, it’s where, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was shot, and its life and uses after that event reflect, in part, that notoriousness.

There were so many Foxes. Wikipedia lists around ninety theaters, some built by William Fox himself, others joining the chain when Fox West Coast merged with the original Fox Films. The Audubon appears to be the only one of the Foxes known as the site of an assassination, but stay tuned and get a load of some pretty interesting alternate uses of other Fox theaters that have survived.  

The Kingsport (Tennessee) Fox Theatre a small neighborhood house, celebrated its opening on August 22, 1940. According to local journalist Vince Staten the Fox first featured the film “...Alias the Deacon on screen, starring Bob Burns as a ‘hillbilly deacon who is actually a cardsharp in disguise’... The Fox was the first Kingsport movie theater to show movies on Sunday...” (and was subsequently raided for (what else?) showing movies on Sunday). The theater survived as a single-screen house until 1963 when plans were laid to convert it to some kind of off-premises cafeteria for the new high school. As it was determined that students would not be allowed to leave the school, renovation was subsequently halted, giving a local barber the opportunity to set up shop in the lobby. Eventually, the theater became a country music recording studio, lasting at that trade until the early nineties. Rumor has it these days it’s morphed into a beauty parlor.

The Bunkie Louisiana Fox is the kind of storefront I’d spot and instantly know as a former theater, if I passed it by. Hideous though the black and white aluminum siding on its front may be, you can see that the black is disguising what once was a facade/marquee. The de-bunked Bunkie currently serves as, on the right, City Hall Annex/ Court and, on the left, as the local Bunkie library. 

These previous two are humble country Foxes, but there are some famous ones — still standing and otherwise — on that long list of ninety movie houses I just mentioned.    

Arguably, the “Super Foxes,” all palaces built before William Fox’s empire crumbled are: The St Louis Fox (aka “The Fabulous Fox”), The Detroit Fox (aka “The Magnificent Fox”), the tragically demolished San Francisco Fox, and the marvelously resurrected Atlanta Fox. 

The St. Louis and Detroit Foxes are said to be “twins,” built in Siamese/Byzantine style, whatever that is, and seating 4,500 people. Here’s a brief description of the lobby of the St. Louis  house, clipped, I freely admit, from Cinema Treasures:

In the lobby, a pair of huge golden griffons flanked the grand staircase, and deep red faux marble columns ringed the mezzanine level. From every corner statuary peeked out—including a group of large gilt maharajahs. The cavernous auditorium was spectacular in scope, dramatic in its lighting and swirling decor, and when the Governor of Missouri appeared on its stage on opening night to dedicate it, he was nearly at a loss for words.  

Both the SL and the Detroit remained theaters all their days, though they suffered steep declines in the dark times of the seventies.The Detroit, slightly larger, by 500 seats, continued, showing Martial Arts and Blaxploitation, and was landmarked and revitalized in the eighties. 

The Atlanta Fox, was reputedly inspired by a combination of the Alhambra in Spain and Egypt’s Temple of Kharnak. It was begun by the Shriners organization in the late twenties, who were intent on building the most opulent temple possible, then (lack of funds) leased the half-finished structure to William Fox, who finished the job, opening in 1929 with a premier of Steamboat Willie, Disney’s first cartoon starring Mickey Mouse. As is usually the case with movie palace big beauties, it was saved by a local group starting in the mid-seventies, and brags that it has the only full-time restoration staff of any current saved theater. 
 
The San Francisco Fox, completed in that fateful year, 1929, is the only one of the four Super Foxes not to survive a wrecker’s ball. At 4,651 seats, it’s a near twin to the (smaller) Los Angeles Theatre, 1932 by S. Charles Lee, who imitated many of its design features. By 1963, the powers that be in SF saw to its demolishment, with a gilded demolition ball. Here is the saddest description you can imagine of its final moments as a standing hall:

The steel wrecking ball, painted a lackluster gold for the occasion, crashed through the west wall of the opulent Market Street movie palace at 10:33 a.m. high above some 200 generally disinterested bystanders. Inside, on the abandoned third floor, a wall-length mirror shattered in the .cavernous ladies’ lounge. A stained glass sign, made in 1929 by Tiffany’s, swung violently in a corridor lined with faded red satin.

When the Fox opened June 28, 1929, at 1350 Market St., it was the largest theater west of Chicago. 
In a general sense, the story of the altered lives of Fox theaters is the story of what became of palaces and smaller neighborhood theaters nationwide, which have managed to stand for second and even third lives.

Sometimes they return to their roots, like our own St. George, not a Fox, but grand enough, and these days a mixed house, showing movies, welcoming magicians, local dance and theatrical troupes, comedians, solitary but still-famous rock musicians, you name it -- and even the occasional major act. Well it’s a living, it’s show biz, it’s community and it’s what these giant fantasy castles were meant to do. 

Afterthought 1:
The Audubon, which, as I noted, contains the now-infamous Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was shot, has had an interesting journey from movie theater and meeting place/union hall to its current incarnation as, among other things, the Shabazz Center. Recognize the name?  Betty Shabazz was Malcolm X’s widow and fought hard to revitalize the building and memorialize her husband. She didn’t live to see the completion of this project, but it did finally come to fruition. 

Afterthought 2:
Interestingly enough, the facade of what was once the Audubon Fox, with its amazing depiction of Neptune in the prow of a trireme (ancient Greek ship), shows to better effect, now that it doesn’t have to fight with a marquee and blade sign, which utterly obscured it when it was actually a theater. 

How does a movie palace become a church? And what happens after that?  At the St. George Theatre, which I had a hand in running in 1976, we hosted a single Evangelical church service. It was a hired-out affair. The minister and his staff arrived promptly at nine in the morning, strewing the stage with flower petals and erecting a portable altar; a man with a cassette tape duplicating machine set up his table in the lobby; to him would fall the task of quickly duplicating the sermon and other key parts of the service for sale in the lobby. The agreed-upon amount of time for transition from theater to church and back again was supposed to have been four hours; but when one o’clock came, congregants were still dropping their crutches and heading for the stage, and the tape duplicating guy was doing a land-office business. Respectfully, we approached the minister’s second-in-command who promised to speak to the big guy himself. No dice; as long as crutches were falling to the auditorium floor and cassette dollars were changing hands, the St. George was going to remain a church. Well, nobody can resist the smell of fresh-popped corn for long; accordingly, at 1:10, we fired up the popper and got ready to tear tickets for Taxi Driver, due to hit the screen at 1:45. This got the minister’s attention; time for singing and praying had run out, and his check had cleared the bank. In a few minutes, the congregation headed for the buses, buying enough popcorn on the way out to cut a little into the cassette duplicator’s sales. Moviegoers arrived and mingled with the outgoing worshippers, and, by 1:45, we were on-screen.

That very same day, on 175th Street in Washington Heights, twenty-five miles north, in upper upper Manhattan, Reverend Ike’s United Church Science of Living Institute was just wrapping up a service. Already in its seventh year of operation in what had been one of New York City’s five Loews “Wonder” theaters, the newly-televised service filled all 3,400 seats, with standing room at the back. The Rev (as a friend who worked camera for that church used to call him) was, in addition to being deeply charismatic, a very smart businessman. He’d seen the Loews 175th Street as a perfect gleaming home for his growing congregation, originally headquartered in Harlem at a much smaller theater, the Sunset, whose marquee was so narrow, he’d had to shorten his moniker from Reverend Eikerenkoetter to Rev Ike. 

How did it all begin? In March, 1969, Loews 175th Street blasted into outer space with its last movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was a fitting way to close out operations as a movie house and take on the mantle of Ike’s salvation palace. Ike’s purchase would also be the salvation of the palace itself, which he had more than enough money to repair and restore. Washington Heights, where the theater still stands, was, like so many neighborhoods in those days, in flux: losing delis and gaining Bodegas, as black and hispanic residents replaced Greeks and the grandchildren of Eastern European Jews who’d fled the Holocaust. The movie palace had to go; Loews was pulling out, but, just when it might have kept an appointment with a wrecking crew, the Reverend Ike stepped in, purchasing the near-four-thousand seat Indo/Chinese/Assyrian Thomas Lamb fantasy structure for half a million dollars.

The Loews 175th opened on February 22, 1930,  with Norma Shearer in Their Own Desire, and a stage show from the Capitol Theatre in Times Square, it being the mission of Loews’ fifth “Wonder” theater to “bring Times Square entertainment nearer your home.” Original seating was 3,444 seats, making it, even now, at 3,400 the fourth-largest theater in New York City. Meant to resemble an Assyrian fortress on the outside, it’s interior, designed by Harold Rambouch (Waldorf Astoria, Radio City Music Hall) can variously be described as Indo/Chinese. When you take the tour, get a load of the grand (Hindu) staircase, which concludes in a fantasy of the Aurora Borealis. A movie house didn’t get to be a NYC Wonder Theatre if it didn’t sport a Morton Wonder Organ, and it is the honor of the UPCA to have retained its original 4 manual 23 rank instrument in situ. (For the tale of what happened to the other four Wonder Organs, check out the second-to-last post).

I’m a great fan of this theater. It’s one of the few I know of that has served as a church without its occupants altering its grand interior or original pagan raison d’etre, the way a sister Wonder Theatre, the Valencia did. Perhaps it was Reverend Ike himself, dissatisfied as he was with established Christianity’s pious reverence for poverty who gave the thumbs-up to its movie-palaceness; what could be better for worshippers whose core belief is in a successful and positive-thinking self,  than a golden temple that gleams every bit as much as it did the day Norma Shearer first flashed on screen?

Critics of Rev. Ike will say, to this day, that he was only in it for his own prosperity, insisting as he did on cash donations, but he raised the self-esteem of many parishioners who promptly took their place as entrepreneurs in the America he sprang out of.  Meanwhile, the palace gleams from years of good upkeep, when many movie palaces, like, for example, a sister Wonder Theatre, Loews Kings in Brooklyn, required millions to bring it back to spit-polish condition. 

After the Reverend’s death, at 74 the theater continued on for some time, for the most part as a church, until, in recent history, his son Xavier F. Eikerenkoetter, who taught, it is said, drumming to homeless boys on a California beach, decided the church could serve both secular and sacred functions in a changing neighborhood. 

These days, in a newly-prosperous Washington Heights, what can’t you do at the UPCA? An Open Heart Conversation on Bhakti Yoga (May 19)? A Shamanic Circle (June 1)?, The Matrix (June 30)?, Chantings (May 8)?, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (May 5)? or Nicky Jam Tour 2019 (May 10)?
You may have noticed that two of the above are movies, one generally featured every month. Which brings the theater full circle to its movie palace roots.

Have you ever watched post-millennial people in an open-and-functioning-as-such movie palace?
When they’re not looking at the screen, they’re looking upward. Just last Sunday, when the United Palace presented 2001: A Space Odyssey on the roughly 40th anniversary of it’s last 1969 showing, we were there. Forty years ago, the Reverend had just purchased the palace for half a million clams, and was looking towards the Easter Sunday opening of what would become his Palace Cathedral.
A lot of things have changed since the movie 2001 first opened. Arthur C. Clarke, its author, and Stanley Kubrick, its iconoclastic producer, are both dead. Kubrick (d. 1998) didn’t even make it to 2001, a good thing, considering what that year has truly come to represent in the minds of those of us alive at this moment. Some of the things the movie predicted have never come to pass (routine travel to the moon, manned missions to places beyond the moon). Successfully predicted are: Skype, the space station itself, and at least the beginning of verbally receptive A.I. HAL is, fortunately, not extant yet, though there are dire predictions. What to make of the apes/people in the opening scenes? I thought they were silly back in 1969, but these days I’m willing to discuss their viciousness, and that hurled bone that becomes a space station, one the most brilliant jump cuts in the history of cinematography.
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We couldn’t find parking anywhere near the theater, so took a twelve-block hike up Broadway. About halfway there, we stopped in front of a building with a facade so ornate it had to have been a theater — once.  I’m pretty good at spotting decommissioned movie palaces, and I was right. At home later, we determined that this green-trimmed archway, with lyres and the prow of a ship with none other than Neptune himself on the prow, was, as a matter of fact, the old Audubon Theater. Like the UPCA, it was a Thomas Lamb creation — and something more. Above the theater’s auditorium, I learned from Cinema Treasures, is what remains of the Audubon Ballroom. If that locale sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s notorious; there, in February, 1965, Malcolm X was shot. I thought of the ape-men in the movie I’d just seen, and wondered at the drama of human violence on — and off — screen.     

Afterthought:
In 1969, when 2001 played at the Loews 175th Street, it was already a second-run movie. Perhaps unknown to most of Stanley Kubrick’s (and Arthur C. Clarke’s or Keir Dullea’s) current devoted fans, the film hadn’t done so well on it’s first release in 1968. Who were those apes dancing around a megalith? What was the meaning of the megalith anyhow, and how did the captain, played by Keir Dullea, end up on Jupiter in what seems like a French hotel room? Finally, how was he reborn as a “space baby,” and why? Sci Fi audiences, nerds of a particular order, wanted what Arthur C. Clarke kept arguing for, a narrative. But Kubrick was Kubrick, so the film remained as mystical and obscure as the obelisk that keeps appearing throughout the film. It was re-born after being re-branded as “the ultimate trip,” appealing to the LSD and Cannabis crowds.