This just in:  The Avalon, a small atmospheric palace on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, has officially closed its doors as a dedicated movie theater. 

Never having been to Santa Catalina, the ear worm I’m now fighting in my head is, what else, the Four Preps’, “Twenty-six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me/ Santa Catalina, the island of/ romance, romance, romance, romance.”  What is it about islands?

This blog happens to be dedicated to another island movie palace, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I helped to run for one magical entirely exhausting year, 1976. Staten Island, one of NYC’s five boroughs, is a far cry from Santa Catalina, but hey, an island is an island! 

There are some pretty fascinating island movie houses in places I’ve been. Take for example the Fishers’ Island Cinema on its own isle, nestled in Long Island Sound and snuggled between New York and the Connecticut shore. A writing group I belong to does a retreat off-season at Fishers each fall. We always pass the cinema on our way to the retreat, but I’ve never been to a movie there, because it’s always closed by September. Not many people winter on Fishers, ferry service being what it is. I understand the F.I. Cinema was built by the army in 1932 when that remote locality was at least half military base. These days, summers only, the cinema serves whoever’s occupying the windswept houses on bluffs and beaches, and a tiny year-round population.
 
On Chincoteague, a more famous island off the coast of Virginia, and a wild place if ever there was one, ponies run in the surf. The Island Roxy is the only surviving movie house on Chincoteague, where once there were three; and like the theater on Fishers, it’s closed off-season. The Roxy started its career in 1945. When the movie based on Misty of Chincoteague, the classic horsy child’s book, premiered, none other than that pony led the parade down the main street. In fact, Misty’s hoof-prints are set in cement in front of the Roxy, to commemorate the occasion. 

No doubt island movie theaters are special, as islands themselves are. If theaters everywhere are in a struggle, in this age of streaming, then island theaters may serve as a kind of microcosm of a theater’s demise — or triumph. 

The Avalon (Santa Catalina) has a rich history, so I’ll focus on it. After ninety years of steady exhibition, it ended its movie-house career on New Years Eve, in a quiet last showing of an unremarkable movie,  with about 40 people in the audience. Because it’s in Southern California, home of Hollywood, it likely won’t be torn down or boarded up. Rumor has it that it will stay in the market place for special bookings, somewhere on the pattern of The Theater at the Ace Hotel in L.A.; but it can’t count, as it used to, on regular walk-in business. If it were so unfortunate as to not be near L.A., the Avalon might not survive at all. 

​Here’s a description of its interior, quoted directly from its Cinema Treasures entry:
A truly classic movie palace, situated in Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, just 22 miles off the coast from Los Angeles. The Avalon Theatre opened on May 29, 1929 with Douglas Fairbanks in The Iron Mask. It is located in the Casino Building, built by chewing gum magnet William Wrigley Jnr, and is located beneath the Casino Ballroom. The building was never intended for or used as a casino, but for dancing (which in the era of the ‘big bands’ attracted the likes of Benny Goodman — the 'King of Swing' to play here to 2,000 capacity dancers. The outer lobby of the building has eight ‘Atlantis’ inspired tiled mural panels, the work of John Gabriel Beckman, who decorated the entire Avalon Theatre in an Atmospheric style. There are painted murals on the side-walls depicting a noble savage hunting deer with a bow & arrow, as a few Franciscan monks arrive by galleon surrounded by stylized hillsides. The rear wall has painted murals of birds and monkeys.

Above the rounded proscenium arch is a re-creation of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, whilst on the asbestos safety curtain is painted “Flight of Fancy Westward”, depicting a primitive surfer boy riding the crest of a wave, superimposed on a background of the map of the island. The silver leaf ceiling is made to glow in shades of pink and violet by colored lights hidden behind a low wall surrounding the auditorium.

The Avalon Theatre is equipped with a Page 4 manual 16 rank theatre organ, built by the Page Organ Co. of Lima, Ohio. It is still in working order and is played regularly at film performances on weekends only. Films played daily every evening of the week and were a mix of first run and classic silent movies. The complex is still owned by the Wrigley family who keep the building well maintained.

Love the surfer boy on the safety curtain!

That Page organ was in action for the last show, on New Year’s Eve, as described by The L.A. Weekly:
About an hour before the nightly 6:30 p.m. screening, organist Jon Tusak sat down...and began pumping out a free-flowing, almost jazzy instrumental mash-up of “If I Only Had a Brain,” the always poignant “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and other tunes from The Wizard of Oz. As Tusak kneaded the keys and pulled the organ’s stops, birds in the walls and ceiling of the theater chirped along excitedly in a merrily demented sing-along. 

Since the Avalon is atmospheric, the birds were preceded by, “tiny lights inside the constellations decorating the vast universe of the Avalon’s high, expansive white ceiling.” 

Although I’ve never been to the Avalon, the lush Cinema Treasures description of its interior makes me feel like I have. 

And what about those Beckman murals of Atlantis? All the islands I’ve cited here, with the exception of my own Staten Island, are tiny, while Atlantis, which may or may not have existed thousands of years ago in the Atlantic Ocean done in by a giant flood, was, so they say, an island continent before it sank. 
Now Atlantis is probable myth, cited by Plato as an allegory, but I’ll take it as an operant metaphor for the demise of movie theaters everywhere, each one an island, sinking below our bad habits of just staying home and binge-watching.

Whether you’re on an island or not, go out to the movies. Do it now!  

Afterthoughts:
1. For a fascinating treatment of how the Atlantis allegory was taken up in the 19th century by various adventurous thinkers, check this out.  

2. Avalon, BTW, was also a legendary island, in Arthurian legend, the place where the sword Excalibur was forged. Told you islands were special!

3. Thanks to The L.A. Weekly, cited above, and to my friend and colleague, Robin Locke Monda, whose link to the Weekly’s, “The Last Picture Show:  Southern California’s Most Beautiful Movie Theater Closes,” got me thinking about islands.   

“'What kind of work is running a movie house?’ my father-in-law asked. Who knew? Not us, until we opened the New Yorker. It ran through the sixties and early seventies: a golden age in cinema, turbulent in politics — French New Wave on our screen, ’68 uprisings at Columbia University. An Upper West Side hub became, as Bernardo Bertolucci dubbed it, ‘a kind of wild cinema university, like Henn Langlois’s Cinematheque in Paris.’ We were young film buffs, learning as we went. Not knowing where we were going. The theater is gone, but its marquee still glimmers in my mind. As we shaped it, it shaped us. Movies, moviegoers, our own lives unspooled on one ongoing reel. The New Yorker became our anchor, where time and place converged. I thought it would go on forever.”
--The New Yorker Theater and Other Stories From at Life at the Movies, by Toby Talbot, 2009.
 
As a an ex-movie-house operator (St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976) I try to keep up on the history and art of theater management, such as it is; how could I have missed the story of another couple struggling to keep a movie theater open? And not just one theater, but a series, eventually, of three! 

The New Yorker Theatre has been gone for some time — a sad story — but Toby and her husband Dan went on to run three other Manhattan art houses: Cinema Studio, the Metro and, finally, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas which lasted till 2009. Toby and Dan (he’s sadly now deceased) are celebrities of sorts in the rag-tag fraternity of ex-movie theater operators. They lasted long enough to actually retire! —whereas most of the rest of us, myself and husband included, washed out and went on to other careers. That said, we have some things in common with the Talbots. 

What kind of work, after all, IS running a movie house? My mother, back in Ohio, didn’t ask. It was enough that her daughter had run off — at the end of her junior year in Cincinnati. It was New York City I ended up in, involving myself in all sorts of nebulous and flaky enterprises. By 1976 I was running a movie theater with my husband, who’d briefly worked for two celebrities, then failed as a freelance TV producer. Our theater, the St. George, was hardly an art house. On the Staten Island side of the harbor, it had a daunting number (2, 672) seats to fill; meanwhile, who in our audience knew from Bertolucci? He’d envisioned the New Yorker as a “wild cinema university,” while the only thing wild at the St. George was the audience itself, which demanded, “action,”  as much as they could get. We gave it to them: Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  mixed in with genre-benders like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Well, it was a living.

Like the Talbots, we didn’t know where we were going, learning — as they were — while we went. They just got farther than we did; well, they were in Manhattan, where support for what they were doing kept them more or less in the black.

The theater, she says, “...is gone but its marquee still glimmers in my mind.” Amen, sister. I miss the glimmer of our old marquee, though it leaked badly and was problematic to keep lit and set – with those very breakable aluminum marquee letters. Changing them once a week required heroics of great proportion on the part of one teenage staffer or another, teetering on a rickety wooden ladder on an uphill slant, often as not in the wind. 

Our theater, these days, still stands and, is, remarkably, open, getting its living mostly from live acts of major and minor proportion, Doo-wop revivals, K.D.Lang, you name it. A hard-working local family keeps the new electronic marquee lit and everything in order. A classic red velvet and gilded plaster cave of a theater, it was always all about the building. And, though our sweeping “wide” screen with its grape soda stains is long gone, new management has acquired a modest screen on which to run the occasional film series. Well it ain’t a rep house, but anyplace that shows movies in this age of streaming has my vote. 

“As we shaped it, it shaped us,”  Talbot notes; I agree completely. While she and Dan went on to run three cherished art houses, we got a seat-of-our-pants one-year education in running a storefront business, which served us well in future endeavors. Selling tickets, worrying about how to pay the carting company or get together enough money for a downpayment on The Exorcist, sweating how to make payroll for our largely teenage staff (minimum wage $2.30 cents an hour) — grew us up.

And there is nothing like watching a great movie in bits and pieces, dropping in to sit down for parts of Silent Movie, or Blazing Saddles. It was quite an era. Eight of the films we ran have made it into the Library of Congress, some of the best Hollywood had to offer in the turbulent seventies. Other films we screened are cult classics, like Cooley High. 

Talbot reflects, “I thought it would go on forever.”  I’ll second that motion. That’s how it is when you’re still under thirty.

Afterthoughts:
1. I was privileged once, as a patron of the New Yorker, to hear Myrna Loy speak before a screening of The Thin Man, just one of the many joys the Talbots provided. 

2. Recently I profiled an all-volunteer effort to resurrect the art house tradition on the Upper West Side, just across the street from the Talbots’ last theater, the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, whose marquee has been blank since 2009. This group of enthusiasts are hoping to resurrect the Lincoln Plaza, and, who knows?

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-three years ago.  Here it is, altered somewhat, with embellishments...and an afterthought.

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.

As an afterthought, I offer up a poem I wrote forty-three years ago, “At the Box Office;” I found it in a box of journal entries rescued from my garage. Such is the life of the writer.

At the Box Office
Selling tickets last night
I got into a conversation with a drunk
who said, “Selling tickets must be pretty dull,”
and I said,
“I meet some pretty interesting people.”
He said, “You don’t talk to them though,
just sell’m tickets,
but wait a minute — you’re talking to me.”
I said, “Someday I may write a book about this place
and you may be in it.”
He said, “Be sure you spell my name right,”
and I said, “If you’re in my book you won’t be yourself exactly.”
He said, 
         “Like a myth?”

*       *       *

Ever go to a movie you really wanted to see, picking the theater first? You wouldn’t have gone to that movie at all if you’d had to see it someplace else. Case in point: when I helped to run a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island (1976), running in the red as we were, we managed to get our hands on The Exorcist, first run in ’74 but taking another turn around the block. We’d paid a small fortune for it, and were already settling in for the usual dejection of Wednesday afternoon, when typically only one or two people showed up to whatever we were showing. 

But wonder of wonders, by four o’clock, lines had begun to form around the block, and by nightfall our 2,672-seat hall had filled nearly to capacity –twice. People told us later it was the dark mysterious cave of our auditorium that had drawn them, with its rich red velvet and gold statuary. Most had already seen the movie first run, but imagined the light of certain key scenes, playing on gilding and drapes, and so they lined up. The first time they’d seen it had been for the movie, the second time for the theater. 
    
What’s the relationship between a movie theater and its movie? In this age of streaming, it’s a good question to ask. 

Last week, I wrote about a certain pop-up theater on the upper west side of Manhattan that has come to be because the constituents miss the closed Lincoln Plaza across the street. They miss watching art house classics, but also something more; the very drabness of the lobby, with its portrait of Humphrey Bogart as Rick from Casablanca, its smoked salmon sandwiches and the proprietors’ daughter’s artwork, at the derelict and empty Lincoln Plaza they hope will one day re-open. This loss has drawn them to rent an auditorium and seek publicity, with hopes.... It’s the Lincoln Plaza they loved, as much as the movies that it showed. 
  
In a memoir workshop I facilitate on Saturdays at the local library, a writer brought in a piece on Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1971. Although her piece was dedicated to the link between the sense of smell and memory, with a nod to  the Necco Wafers factory, which dominated the neighborhood with its toothsome scents (chocolate on Wednesdays for example), she broadened it to describe other aspects of the community, including an intriguing reference to Central Square Cinemas, one of two art houses then in the neighborhood. The movie theater blogger in me sat bolt upright when she read the following sentence, “Another indoor space that Necco Wafers could not penetrate was the Central Square Movie Theater. It reeked of popcorn and salt. This venue showed the same picture, The King of Hearts, for five years.”  

Five years? Clearly they were desperate for product! A 1966 film, The King of Hearts, in those days something of a failure, would definitely have been rentable as a B pic, dodging the necessity of booking weekly features — which would require a deposit-and-percentage arrangement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, launched a little later at The Waverly in Manhattan, had, I’d assumed, been the standard-bearer for ritual viewing, the first of its kind, Now I know better. 

If Rocky Horror was more-or-less launched as a cult film by repeat performances at The Waverly,  The King of Hearts was largely pulled out of the viewing trash heap by Central Square. Its reviews in 1966 had been dismal. Without those five faithful years of presentation, and the word-of-mouth that ensued, Hollywood might never have been forced to cut fresh prints.

A bio of Henry Sheehan, film critic and native of Boston notes, “...Further down Mass. Ave. were the twin Central Square Cinemas, though they almost didn’t qualify as a twin, since Philippe De Broca’s King of Hearts took up one screen for at least three years (no joke; there’s some kind of record involved).”

I have been looking hard for evidence of this official record, haven’t found it, but in the process of looking, found the following, in the annals of The Harvard Crimson (1980), “The 1967 film 'King of Hearts' starring Alan Bates, directed by Philippe deBroca, began its run in 1971 as a ‘fluke,’ assistant theater manager David C. Skinner said Sunday. The film began as a co-feature in the double-screen theater, only to skyrocket to a five-year engagement that became a Cambridge classic.

Joseph W. St. George, a film programmer, Sunday said he attributes part of the movie's success to ‘being anti-war when Nixon was invading Cambodia.’ He added, ‘It was absurd, beautiful and warm-hearted. It didn't offend your sensibility. It didn't make you think.’’’ 
 
No doubt it was the anti-war theme of the movie during the darkest years of the Vietnam War that drew people to it initially. Then word-of-mouth, followed by the tradition of attendance at Central Square made it a “Cambridge classic.” In other words, a ritual of attendance. 

Have we lost this important link, between attendance and theater?  Or, as I mentioned earlier, in an age of binge-watching and streaming, attendance at any theater?

Closed since 1980, Central Square Cinemas’ original site is, apparently, a Quest Diagnostics storefront these days. Farther down Massachusetts Avenue, the Orson Welles, the more serious art house in Cambridge, survived another six years, succumbing on May 24, 1986 to a fire which started, sadly, in the popcorn machine. Thus do movie theaters end, either in conflagration, via fire, or in the ice of troubled booking and no attendance.

Afterthoughts:
1. Chris Cato, whose piece, “Scent and Memory,” I’ve referenced (thanks Chris!), also notes, “The Orson Welles Cinema included a record shop, bookstore, and a restaurant that notoriously required strangers sitting at the same table to order the same meal. I ate there only once.” Odd place, Cambridge in 1971!

2. Here’s another intriguing entry from The Harvard Crimson (1975) on booking troubles at Central Cinemas.

“Something magic still happens when you go to the movies,” according to Naomi Rossabi, quoted in a recent Alex Vadukul New York Times article about a currently operational movie theater with actual ushers.

So what if they happen to be 81 and 83 (Ms. Rossabi) respectively? The concession workers and ticket sellers are about the same age. The article continues, describing a recent showing of Mr. Klein, the 1976 World War II psychological thriller; "Ann Logan, 71, yelled directions to customers as she sat in her walker; Norma Levy, 76, sold tickets from rolls of red paper stubs and stashed money into a little metal box; Rita Lee, 88, helped sell refreshments at a foldout table." 

If this sounds like a small-town operation, be surprised: the pop-up is on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where art house enthusiasts mourn the closing of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, two years ago across the street. Despite general dinginess and water leaking from its ceilings, its concession stand sold lox sandwiches, and most quarrels — about sound during foreign films — were amicable enough. Operational from 1981 till a little past the death of one of its two founders, Dan Talbot (and his wife, Toby), it was arguably the best art house in the city, affiliated with a French chain. Its landlord, Milstein Properties, recently declined to renew its lease, citing the expense of repairs, and the theater has displayed a sadly blank marquee ever since. The pop-up cinema just across the street, New Plaza, is, according to the Times, “...trying to establish itself at a time when independent theaters are in a death struggle with streaming video and a generation of moviegoers demanding in-theater craft brews and plush recliner seats.”  

Yep, it’s a troubled time for traditional movie theaters, on a downward slope since the seventies, when I was part of a young group of hopeful entrepreneurs, who strove mightily for a few months in 1975 and the better part of 1976 to keep a 2,672-seat movie palace open, with a movie on-screen, hence this continuing blog.  

Recently, I profiled another operation in rural Pennsylvania, the Mahoning, a drive-in theater, that’s gotten around the problem of not replacing their original projectors with (very expensive) digital projection, by being extremely clever in programming and social media.

Over a year ago, I devoted this column to the Majestic, a Rapp and Rapp theater in Streator, Illinois,  the project of the indefatigable Katie Troccoli and her hard-working family. The Majestic appears, sadly, not to be in operation as of this writing, but knowing Katie, it may rise again.

What do all these theater operations, past and present, open and otherwise, have in common? They either are or were entirely volunteer. What does it say about us as a culture that the movies — that ritual of sitting together in the dark — that held us together through two world wars, Vietnam, the sixties and seventies, even the high-rolling eighties — has devolved to the level of lemonade-stand entrepreneurship? 

Interestingly, the staff of the pop-up New Plaza, might have helped us run the St. George in 1976. In those days, these same ushers and concession workers would have fit right in; they’re only a little older than I am right now. Is this the last gasp of boomers and pre-boomers, who remember the sense of community movie theaters used to afford?

What is it about community, which seems to have almost vanished in a country — and a world — where people don’t talk with people who don’t agree with them, and typically  either watch Fox or MSNBC (or vote pro- or anti- Brexit)? Are we afraid of sitting next to each other in the dark? Or just too lazy to go out? 

The staff of the New Plaza are likely MSNBC watchers at home, but that is not necessarily true of the mixed bag of people who will show up next spring in Pennsylvania, to get the Mahoning ready for another season. From what I can discern, they just love drive-in theaters, and the variegated fare they remember from growing up at them. This is how it was for us at the St. George in Staten Island, while we struggled to keep ten red and gold doors open.

In September, 2018, Thomas Beller (“The Death of a Movie Theater,” The New Yorker), quoted his mother on the closing of Lincoln Plaza:

“It is not so much the physical place as it is the atmosphere. The level of the films. The world of the films selected that created, in turn, a world of its own that encompassed us. The physical space became dear to us. I want to hug it so it could not be taken away from us. But it is not hug-able.” 

That’s how I feel about The Paris, recently closed, but saved again, perversely, by Netflix for premiers, something I suppose we’re expected to be grateful for. It’s how I felt about the Albee in downtown Cincinnati where I grew up, which kept its appointment with a wrecking crew in 1977, about the time we were forced out of the St. George in Staten Island. We had never intended to be volunteers there, but we had no choice, barely able to pay our teen concession and box-office workers, and eventually unable to make the steep monthly rent. 

So here’s to the New Plaza, on the Upper West Side, where two or three million dollars (what it would take to occupy the vacant Lincoln Plaza across the street) isn’t an out-of-this-world donation for someone whose brownstone is valued at far more. According to New Plaza volunteer, Barry Schulman, “We only need one of those people. Maybe two. We’ll let them name the place.”

Good luck guys.

Afterthoughts:
1. New Plaza’s single-screen auditorium, rented from the New York Institute of Technology, seats 259 people, and is secure to the volunteers until at least May, 2020. Meanwhile, they’re looking for donations!

2. My husband, when he was nine or ten, operated his first movie theater in a neighbor’s backyard, the screen a bed-sheet, bottles of Kool-Aid for sale, the clientele on bicycles. You could say it was a pop-up drive-in!

Covering nearly half a city block, seven stories tall with three basements and sub-basements, and eighteen dressing rooms, the St. George Theatre in 1976, when we arrived, was a massive time capsule. Suddenly let loose in a 2,672-seat movie palace, a theater that had, since its opening in 1929, seen a lot of action — both live and cinematic — we stumbled on something new and surprising, even historic, almost every day. I’m thinking now of a singular discovery we made in a storage space beneath the stage.

Barely five feet high, the space had originally been designed to hold the elevator for the theater’s 3/30 Wurlitzer organ. Behind that vacant space however, a friend found a megaphone-like device nearly three feet across. It reminded Dean of the loudspeakers once hung on telephone poles at his high school stadium. This one had a Western Electric logo at its base, and VitaPhone Sound imprinted on the bell. The logo jogged his memory; hadn’t we found some literature in a mezzanine-level storage closet? 

According to those frayed pages, the Vitaphone dated back to the day the St. George Theatre opened with So This is College on December 4, 1929. The movie was an early “Talking Picture” — the hot new technology.  A few years later, beginning in the early 1930‘s, all talking pictures would use an SOF (Sound on Film) format — an optical audio track on the film itself. But the first ever Talkie, usually credited as The Jazz Singer and predating So This is College by two years, had been, for all the hoopla, a primitive product. It premiered on August 6, 1927 at The Warner Brothers Theater in Manhattan. Al Jolson’s first spoken words both seen and heard were “Wait a minute...wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” The film and its technology were a smash, a Vitaphone/Western Electric sensation. 

This meant that the sound portion of the film was actually presented on a 33 1/3 16-inch record, amplified through one or more speakers like the one we found beneath the stage. Amazingly, projectionists in the late 1920’s had to first cue the film for a “talkie” to a specific marked frame, then cue the record to a white arrow painted on the disc itself.  Hopefully both image and sound started at once. However, keeping the two tracks in sync was a mechanical process which the poor projectionist had to struggle with as each 11-minute reel spun out.

The evolution of Vitaphone involved an unlikely assortment of characters, including Lee DeForest (one of the fathers of radio who contributed the Audion Amplifier Tube in 1913), Will Hayes (whose Hayes Commission on censorship would trouble the industry for decades — nonetheless credited with the first spoken words “on film” — introducing The Jazz Singer), and Harry Warner, the film mogul, one of the Warner Brothers. Vitaphone also involved mega industries of the times, including Western Electric — later Bell Labs, and the Edison Company, not to mention Paramount Pictures — Warner’s competition. The race to good sound dominated the movie business in the mid-twenties and well into the thirties.

But I digress. Having found the scuffed and dusty battleship-grey speaker horn, with some cloth-covered electrical wires sprouting from its end, and a poster announcing the marvels of a “talking picture house on Staten Island,” we looked for the amplifier, the phonograph and other relics of the theater’s first sound system, but they were lost to time, perhaps in some sub-basement.

So it goes in an aging movie palace. Despite our inability to pay even the most basic bills in our year at the theater, we managed, by sleight-of-hand, to install improved sound behind our grape-soda-stained giant screen, importing two (state-of-the-art for their time) Altec-Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers from a defunct movie theater we knew something about back in Cincinnati. 

After seeing the five-foot tall VoT’s, I was stunned. “Amazing! — that that Vitaphone thing once managed somehow to fill this whole place with sound!”  The Vitaphone hadn’t had to work very hard. We were accustomed to talking to each other center-stage to upper balcony, without in the least straining our voices, and not even a rumor of an echo. The St. George was and is (how miraculous that I can speak of our theater still in the present tense!) an acoustic grande dame of ever-increasing beauty. 

Afterthoughts:

1. The literal first sound in movies is hard to pin down.  Jolson’s famous “...wait a minute...” begins the first spoken words in film, but sound had been coming on for some time.  Here’s a scrap of The Jazz Singer entry from Wikipedia, to illustrate: “The...Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, Don Juan (premiered August 1926) and The Better 'Ole (premiered October 1926), like three more that followed in early 1927 (When a Man Loves, Old San Francisco, and The First Auto), had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects. The Jazz Singer contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech.”
2. It’s hard to imagine, in our over-saturated media age, what the advent of sound meant to motionpictures. So many fine actors, whose gifts were largely visual, lost their careers because their voices just weren’t up to it. Vilma Banky couldn’t lose her Hungarian accent. Douglas Fairbanks retired early. Clara Bow, the “It” girl, summed it all up, “I hate talkies,” she said in 1930. “They’re stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there’s no chance for action.” Check it out.