"As a veteran movie-goer, whose childhood played out in the movie palaces, drive-ins and small neighborhood houses of Cincinnati, and whose young adulthood found me (1976) attempting to keep open the doors of the 2, 672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, I feel estranged. 
 
I am tired of sheltering in place, sick of the stream being broken because too many of my neighbors are making the same demands of it. Most of all, I’m weary of not sitting in the dark with strangers, gazing up. I will always miss the big big screens of my youth, when Technicolor was in bloom. But even the diminished screens most theaters before the Pandemic offered are beginning to seem as exotic as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. 
 
I’d settle in comfortably now...just to rub shoulders with strangers. I wonder if at least some of our unrest, civil and otherwise, could be quelled by this simple act of communion? — sitting down without fear of contamination, together in the dark. 
 
Theaters are suffering, and so are we. They’re closed, and we’re home. Even Trader Joe’s has”senior hours.” Restaurants have it hard, but at least they can offer carryouts, or lean-to’s on the street where you can sit  spaced apart. You can go to Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side, bundle up and order salmon, while watching fellow New Yorkers soldier on. Two weekends ago, we did just that, and while we were sitting in Barney’s chrome chairs, and I was musing, “...this is almost warm enough to be Key West!” a man walked by, masked of course. He had a Schnauzer on a leash, and I kid you not the dog was also wearing a tiny white mask! You have to take your theater where you can get it.
 
Before last March we would have gone to a flick after bagels and lox. It’s that same thing we love, and we need – sitting shoulder-to-shoulder for several hours with no windows or doors open – that has led to all those touching messages on marquees. 
 
So we keep on with our old episodes of What’s My Line (we’re up to 1960 now, having watched several hundred) and binge watch The Queen’s Gambit and The Crown. And Colbert, of course. I was stunned and pleased Friday when he completely anticipated what I’m feeling about going to the movies. Not a movie, just, well...movies.
 
You’ll find a link shortly. You have to watch the whole show to get the segment I’m talking about, but here’s why you should watch it:
 
(Colbert introduces)
 
“...Warner...Its 2021 Films will arrive in theaters and streaming on HBO Max simultaneously including The Matrix 4!
That’s so exciting!  I can hardly wait to escape to a.. a fantasy world where all human contact is virtual and we’re kept immobile while consuming high-calorie sludge!
Everyone’s wondering when we’re gonna go to the movies and when we’ll feel normal again...”
 
Amen, I say.
 
(Image of a generic marquee)
 
(Colbert  presents) “the most anticipated film of the year.”
 
(Clips that resemble a preview mash-up)
 
(Woman’s voice) 
“...a movie really any movie in a theater would be great!”
 
*a romantic comedy
*a spy thriller
*or another Marvel thing
*I would even sit through one of those movies where a dog teaches a family the true meaning of Jesus. Or whatever.
 
(Man’s voice)
“...Together we’ll have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before they even start the previews.”
 
("Finnegan’s Fish Loaf:  a mutiny of flavors in every bite...")
 
But it’s not the movies that bring it home. It’s the faces, the boredom, fear, delight, a hand reaching into giant popcorn. The light on these faces, all facing the same direction. And what I’ve neglected is the Chyrons, of which I’ll tease just one: “...THE ONLY DEADLY PATHOGENS ARE ON EVERY INCH OF THE FLOOR. Now that’s nostalgia! And speaking as an ex-theater manager, you have no idea.
 
Don’t miss the whole segment! Here’s the link to the complete show, which was really, really worth watching, from beginning to end. 
 
Afterthought:
Can’t resist; here’s the last bit:  
 
"This film is not yet rated, as the future remains a dark enigma."
 
Amen, again.

The June 1947 issue of International Projectionist features a eulogy for 15-year-old Marion Shea, who lost his life in a theater fire.

Film — the real thing, with sprocket holes, that runs through a projector — is rare these days, but in 1976, when we ran a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, it was plentiful and thankfully not explosive. This didn’t keep the fire inspectors from fining us if fire buckets in the projection booth weren’t precisely 12 inches off the floor, a regulation that dated back to the bad old days of nitrate film. Almost all movies, certainly major motion pictures, were on a nitrate base before the late forties and certainly after 1952, when Kodak finally stopped making the volatile stuff, and switched entirely to a variation of acetate, the base they’d been using all along for home movies. In the heyday of the movie palaces, going to the movies, let alone working as a projectionist, were risky activities. Theater fires as dramatic as the one depicted in Cinema Paradiso were, before 1952, common, if not somehow likely. 
 
How likely? A 1936 issue of International Projectionist estimated that one American projectionist died, on average, every 18 days, probably not of a heart attack. Nitrate often simply exploded. 
 
And get this: while projectors were carbon arc (which we still had at the St. George in seventy-six), nitrate film, whose base is essentially a solid form of nitroglycerin, had all the aspects of a bomb (fire, volatile material). 
 
The very existence of  projection booths in theaters had been established early in the silent era, largely as a safety feature, an attempt to contain anticipated fire. Should a fire begin in the booth, the wax that lined the projection ports — if not a fuse of some sort — melted, and flame-proof shutters sealed the booth from the theater, like a tomb, which, as a matter of fact, it might become. Case in point, the June 1947 issue of the aforementioned International Projectionist eulogizes a fifteen-year-old — presumably breaking into the craft of projection — Marion Shea, who lost his life in a theater fire. 
 
What is it, or was it, about nitrate film stock? A US Navy instructional movie about the safe handling of celluloid/nitrate film includes footage of a full reel of the stuff burning underwater. Water, in fact, is the worst thing you can add to a nitrate fire: it only encourages dangerous gases.
 
Beginning in the thirties, the fact that practically the whole history of movies as an art form was laid down on unreliable stock that might explode spontaneously, meant that a number of archives were destroyed on hot summer days, in storage vaults that lacked ventilation. Everything Fox ever made before 1937 went up in an archive fire that year, requiring seven fire companies to extinguish.
A similar calamity happened to MGM’s archives in 1965.  
 
We hardly show movies on nitrate anymore, except in rare circumstances, which still doesn’t solve the problem of preservation of rare reels, because, over time, in the presence of the kind of heat you experience in a hot car in a parking lot in July, these films will either explode or bubble and degenerate. 
 
This leads me to the anecdote that started off this post. My friend, Robert Endres, now retired from his long-time job as Chief Projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, reminisced recently about his attempts to save some archival footage of the Center Theatre’s opening. The Music Hall had, in those days, vaults for the storage of nitrate film, and Bob was trying to get the fragile newsreels converted to acetate before they disintegrated altogether.
 
One of my great regrets was that I couldn’t save newsreel footage of the opening of the Center Theatre. There’s very little documentation about it, and I had the footage in our vault.  It was nitrate and when I opened the can I noted that it had started to bubble. Our Chief Operating Officer suggested taking it to Technicolor and having the Lab director take a look at it. I did. When I walked into his office, he closed the blinds over the inside window. He opened the can, took one look, and said, “Get it out of here!”  I said, “Can’t you do something?” and he repeated, “Get it out of here!”  I picked the can up and put it under my left arm, and he said, “No, put it under your right arm. That way if it blows up it only takes a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took it back to the Hall very gingerly!
 
I couldn’t resist asking  Bob what happened after that...to which he replied,
 
I held the can out at arm’s length most of the way back. I took the subway and I’m sure violated a number of rules of the Fire Department and the MTA in doing so, although they probably wouldn’t have known about the hazard of nitrate film by that time.
 
Nitrate film seems to be a perpetual hot potato. Michael Zahs’ collection of early Miele films, which he kept in a shed on his Iowa property for many years, were nitrate; this didn’t keep him from mailing a number of them to the Library of Congress, which duplicated them and mailed them back! 
 
You might be wondering why, if Kodak had acetate as far back as 1909, which it happily sold to amateur filmmakers, it kept producing nitrate materials to sell to the studios? The myth surrounding nitrate’s beauty, the dense blacks and luminous whites, is probably the answer. To which I say, what price beauty?
 
Afterthoughts:
 
Here are a few more hot potato anecdotes from Bob Endres, and one other afterthought besides;
 
Bob’s comments:
 1. We actually had a nitrate film vault at the Hall complete with two sets of doors. My boss discovered that it wasn’t cooled in the summer and had some of the film brought down to my office in the booth. Since you’re not supposed to have more than a few thousand feet of film outside of a fireproof container at one time, this startled the city inspectors when they came to check the booth, particularly since one of the cans on top had a big red label saying “Nitrate” on it. There was quite a bit of nitrate footage stored in the nitrate vault still, when I started there. Our Head of House Operations knew about it and when he saw Towering Inferno he said we should get  it out of the building. 
 
2. I...didn’t want to destroy the documentary footage that we had on the history of the Hall. Since it was operated by RKO, there were a lot of RKO newsreels that contained Radio City stories.  We also had a “March of Time” episode that featured the Hall. I made a deal with MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] that they could have the footage if they would pull acetate prints for me, thus enabling me to show footage that I didn’t want to take a chance with when it was on nitrate. A stagehand and I filled a shopping cart with reels of nitrate film and wheeled it up 6th Avenue to MOMA.

​3. We did a tribute to Myrna Loy at Carnegie Hall with a film retrospective. I got a call from an editor wanting to know if we would run a clip on nitrate film. When the editor said she would take the clip out of the 2000’ reel in was contained in, I said O.K.  She brought the three-minute roll to New York in her purse on a plane.
 
Final notes: 
1. Acetate (“Safety Film”) is no optimal medium either, not volatile like nitrate, but imminently perishable. Check out “vinegar syndrome.”
2. This blog post, which necessitated a deal of research, of which I’m quite proud, first ran in its intirety on 1/30/19.

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-four years ago. So much has happened in the previous year — a world plunged into darkness — that this memory of New York Harbor at midnight can’t entirely dismiss. Still, it’s good to remember that darkness and light are meant for each other! Here’s to 2021; may it be everything 2020 failed to be...

Below you’ll hear first from me and Dean, my husband and partner in the theater. 

Then Paulie, as we called him back then, will step up with his reminiscence: 

(Me and Dean) 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:

(Here’s Paulie)

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 way to support theaters and the arts in general, until the world as we knew it comes back again...

Last year I see that I offered up a found poem, so I offer it again...I wrote it  forty-four years ago, before I became a poet/writer.  Found it in a box of journal entries rescued from the garage...

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?”

Afterthoughts:
1. It’s amazing to me that I knew in 1976 what I was going to do. Wonder if the drunk is still alive? Despite his state, or maybe because of it, he understood, somehow, what a myth really is!

2. Well, reader, for the last eight of these forty-four years, I’ve been at work on the manuscript of Starts Wednesday: A Year in the Life of a Movie Palace. Had thought to bring it out in this bad nearly-gone year, 2020, but am waiting for the sun to shine just a little on us all, so, with luck, you’ll see it before the next time I bring out this blog post! Peace and health in the new year to everyone!

It all started on December 21, 1933, the year after Radio City Music Hall opened in Manhattan. 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 last year’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. 
 
We need them now, those Rockettes to take us somehow safely through the pandemic, into a time when we can think of doing anything as extravagant as going to theaters again. 
What is it about dancers? In the cold, on the sidewalk, or in a deserted theater, they just keep moving!
 
Afterthoughts:  
 1.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.
 
2. 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!”

3. Bob  Endres (formerly of RCMH) recalls, “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...”  

4. An earlier version of this post appeared in December, 2018 and garnered a few comments. Here they are:  
Honestly So many did everything they could to “save the Music Hall” as a formerRockette and Alumnae member I could not fathom the loss of My Home Away From Home. After the fact I did learn that Bob Enders comment was the true one , Nonetheless less I’m just happy The Radio City Music Hall is still your fav place to go. --Linda Lynch, 12/28/2018, 11:06:25 am
 
It is no small miracle that the hall is standing on all that’s prime Manhattan real estate! — VH, 12/31/2018, 09:46:03 am
 
 
VH
1/7/2019 10:54:37 am
 
This just in from our friend, Robert Endres, former chief projectionist at RCMU, "You mentioned the Roxy being close to Radio City – actually there were two Roxy’s within one block of the Hall. The original Roxy was just exactly one block west of the Hall, and the “New Roxy” was one block south, for a time they were both in operation at the same time as the Hall. The Hall and the New Roxy were asymmetrical on 6th Ave with the RCA building in between them. The “New” Roxy didn’t last long, as the “old” Roxy sued Roxy over the use of his name, and the theatre became the Center Theatre."

It was a midnight show on a Friday night — Woodstock maybe or Reefer Madness — after forty-four years it’s hard to recall. We’d sold around three hundred tickets, enough to create islands of life in the mostly-empty auditorium. Three hundred guests, in a room built to hold 2,672. The following morning, as luck would have it, we’d agreed to rent our glorious St. George Theatre — every seat — to an evangelical revival church service. A thousand dollars!  We could pay Warner and UA their cut of the previous two feature packages and somehow book another second- or third-run double feature. 
 
The traveling minister called out of nowhere. Easy money! No projectionist to pay, no box office or concession staff, and at least a few of us “managers” could sleep late. But at 1:30 A.M. Saturday, as the midnight show was winding down, our father-and-son cleaning service, tired of spilled Coke syrup and popcorn, and knowing they’d have to clean the whole place, including the balcony, resigned. 
 
It was early in our theater enterprise, only a month since the theater’s “Grand Opening.” We had plenty of entrepreneurial energy and a brand-new Electrolux canister vacuum I’d just bought. In subsequent years, this rolling steel can would acquire the nickname  “R2D2” for its resemblance to the Star Wars character, but in 1976 Spielberg’s epic hadn’t yet burst into the public imagination.  Gleaming and still nameless, our vacuum was a work horse, and a good thing too. We also had a broom and an endless supply of trash bags. After the last usher left, three of us — all members of “management” — climbed the steps to the balcony, lugging the vacuum behind us. We would ace this, then maybe catch a nap before the sun rose.
 
Should’ve been a cinch in the balcony — that part of the theater was off-limits to the audience with its endless popcorn and spilled Coke. But somehow, despite our strategically placed Balc ny Closed sign on the lowest step to the Loge and a rope across the stairs at the other end of the lobby, there was more life upstairs than we thought: an empty bong, candy wrappers, a sweater, even a pair of panties! Why was I surprised? “Off-limits” means “come in” to at least a third of every population. 
 
As for finding surprising things, a friend once discovered a gun stashed between seats in the upper balcony of a hometown theater. Only about ten at the time, she wrapped it in a scarf, then tried to hide it in a bedroom closet back home, but her daddy, thankfully, got wise.  
 
As I worked my way down the aisles with R2D2 that night (a colleague vaulting the seats just ahead of me, clearing away the bigger trash), I was ignorant of time. In a movie palace there is no daylight —that’s why pictures of half-demolished palaces, with their pierced domes, seem so shocking. Emerging sun-blind like the nocturnal cave creatures we’d become, we were stunned to learn it was seven thirty! The church people would be in the lobby in about forty-five minutes, to claim their temporary sanctuary. 
 
We’d taken better than six hours to clean the place. The area near the Orchestra pit, including the pit itself, had been particularly vile — banana peels and condoms. It smelled suspiciously like a subway platform — I will not elaborate. 
 
One of us broom-swept the stage, to which in only a few hours, hundreds of “saved” souls would find themselves drawn, having “cast off” their crutches.  
 
The Reverend — whose name is lost to memory — arrived on time with a crew, including one man whose job it would be to audiotape the sermons and testimonies, and make instant high-speed copies for sale in the lobby, an impressive operation.  
 
Dean and I strode out into the light of day, looking forward to breakfast alone together at the St. George Clipper, a diner down the street.  It was — I forgot to mention — the morning of Dean’s 30th birthday. I seem to recall he had an omelette.
 
Afterthoughts:

1. R2D2 is still viable, having outlasted about six vacuums bought since then, none of which has ever cleaned a movie palace. When the Miele was last on the fritz, I drafted the Electrolux, despite the vacuum repair shop’s warning that it could “have a heart attack at any time.” So far, so good...
2. Unbelievably, a vacuum entrepreneur is offering a vacuum cleaner that is also a replica of the original Star Wars R2D2! Check it out! 
3.  Two years ago we visited The Valencia in Queens, one of the original five Loew’s (New York) “Wonder Theaters.” Like many surviving palaces, the theater has morphed into a dedicated sacred space, the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People, displaying in its lobby a wall-ful of crutches and canes thrown down by ecstatic congregants in one or another service. The projection booth serves these days as a “prayer tower.” The congregation has, for the most part, taken exemplary care of this Rococo/Spanish/Pre-Columbian atmospheric theater.

I worry about the diminishment of horizons. Have you ever seen Lawrence of Arabia on a seventy-foot screen? If you saw it on any screen you own, you didn’t experience it fully, in proper space and time. Sherif Ali, played by Omar Sharif,  is a dot on the horizon riding towards Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), becoming gradually distinguishable, no longer a dot but a man on a horse. It takes at least a minute for this transformation to occur. A few years ago, I saw the movie on a giant screen at the United Palace in Washington Heights. During an oasis scene, I felt real thirst. We had been riding across the screen’s desert for some time.

That’s how it was in the theaters of my childhood, and at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 1976, which I had a hand in managing. Our screen may have been badly stained from some long-ago grape soda, but it was big enough for 70 mm. We dreamed big, and so did the better number of directors whose movies we showed: Lumet, Scorcese, Pakula, to name a few. Too bad Jane Campion was just starting art school that year, or we might have screened one of hers. Same goes for Spike Lee. But I digress.

What if there never are any more movie theaters? Movie attendance has been in steep decline for the last several decades. When Scorcese opened The Irishman on Netflix, with merely a nod to a premier in a limited number of theaters, he bypassed distribution to movie houses entirely, flirting with what may be a new theaterless era.Then the Pandemic happened, and well, you know the rest. This year’s Academy Awards will be the first to include films never seen in theaters. But. 

In Marilynn Robinson’s novel, Lila, I stumbled with delight on the following: 

“She went to the movies. Every payday she put aside the money it would cost her to go two times a week, and then she got by on what was left after the rent....When she was sitting there in the dark sometimes, when it was crowded, with somebody’s arm or knee brushing against hers, she was dreaming some stranger’s dream, everybody in there dreaming one dream together. Or they were ghosts all gathered in the dark, watching the world, seeing all the scheming and the murder, and having no word to say about it,  weeping with the orphans and having nothing to do for them. And then the dancing and the kissing and all the ghosts floating there just inches from a huge, beautiful face, to see the joy rise up in it. Like sparrows watching the sun come up, all of them happy at once, no matter that the light had nothing much to do with them.”

Going to the movies. A need so great a woman who works scrubbing a hotel’s lobby sets aside the money for two movie tickets, before she considers food. She needs to participate at least twice a week in a communal dream. 

The huge beautiful face. My own husband’s boyhood memory of a two-story John Wayne. Let’s not lose track of scale; it means something. When I need epic proportion to help me cope with world events, I usually have an apocalyptic dream. 

The pandemic has us grounded. I watch the latest horror on one of our tiny screens. Then I drop off. I’m walking south from the George Washington Bridge, which is somehow half unstrung, like a wounded harp. Something has happened. I make my way down the West Side of Manhattan, the highway a tumble of fallen rock, not a car or bus in sight. We’re all on foot and under heavy pack. My goal is South Ferry, where I’ll try to catch a boat, if there are any left, for home. 

A movie in a shared space, on a giant screen, could have done this work for me, it might have given me the scale I needed to deal with the sense of crisis I had. 

On the other side of this, whatever this is, are there movie theaters?  There better be.