A Blazing Saddles poster, featuring Cleavon Little on a rearing palomino, hangs in an upstairs bedroom of our house. Mel Brooks’ satire on race and the wild west was the movie that launched our movie exhibition year, 1976, at the St George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace a group of us struggled to run in Staten Island, long after single-screen palaces were anything but a Quixotic adventure. The Blazing Saddles poster was supposed to have been a good luck charm. We rolled it up and set it aside, after a less-than-stellar first week, trying not to notice how many empty seats there’d been in our red and gold Spanish Baroque hall. 
 
When National Screen Service came to collect the rented poster and drop off the one for The Sunshine Boys, we claimed Blazing Saddles had been torn and, for a small fee, we collected it: easy to do in the 1970’s, but nearly impossible in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. 
 
That particular poster was a one-sheet (27" x 41"), half the size of the two-sheets  (41" x  54") that fit our giant poster cases. Four of those cases line the wall opposite the box office windows, red and white to match the foyer’s chandelier. The first case always contained the main feature, with a card in elegant script, Now Showing. The middle case housed the second feature if there was one — Also Showing— and the last two cases offered glimpses of Coming Attractions.
 
Some of our coming attractions never actually came — there was a certain amount of dreaming associated with booking movies. We even went so far as to rent trailers for movies we never had any intention of showing. What could you do if in your heart you really wanted to show The Wizard of Oz but the neighborhood wanted Towering Inferno?
 
Prior to 1939, when Oz first came out, movies and their posters generally belonged to the distributor — Warner Brothers, etc. — and arrived, often enough, at the Greyhound Bus Station in most small towns as one package, overnighted via bus from the previous small town theater. Under no circumstances could the theater operator collect or give to patrons a beloved poster, because the next theater needed it. 
 
For collectors this explains why pre-1940 one-sheets and two-sheets are so rare. For the most part, only “window cards” (14" x 22”) liberally distributed to shopfronts around a downtown area and not re-collected, remain to show us Claudette Colbert or Jean Harlow. 
 
In 1940, the National Screen Service took over the advertising wing of the movie  business, and by the seventies there were plenty of posters, making it possible for me to snatch that Blazing Saddles one-sheet — and a few other things besides. To make things even more convenient for collectors of the future, those posters bore an NSS Identifying Number bottom border on the right — which makes it possible to verify their authenticity. 
 
Like so much else in the industry that surrounded movie palaces and other single-screen houses, with the advent of multi-screen theaters, NSS lost much of its business beginning in the mid eighties and finally disappeared — bought out by Technicolor — a few years after the Millennium. Multiplexes, for one thing, discouraged all but the smaller one-sheets, given the lack of space for coming attractions. 
 
A few weeks ago, at our favorite Manhattan multiscreen theater, I joined Dean, who was mesmerized by what turned out to be the “posters” for film after film, flashing by, all on a ($70,000) Plasma screen: Coming Soon, Coming This Christmas, Now Showing, and, of course, the inevitable Starts Wednesday.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Speaking of Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little, (seen rearing on the palomino) was not Mel Brooks’ first choice for Sheriff Bart.  If the studio heads had trusted Richard Pryor, it would have been an entirely different movie... Little, however, was perfect in the role, lending his character charisma, tinged with irony. He died in 1983 of colon cancer and is remembered primarily for his role in the Brooks farce.  

2. And while I’m thinking about Blazing Saddles, which happens to be a movie about racial bigotry produced and directed by a white man, HBO Max has seen fit recently to give it some “context.”  They did the same thing with GWTW, although the two movies hardly belong in the same category, as one glories in racism, while the other calls it constantly into question.   
 
2.  National Screen Service  also dominated the trailer industry for the better part of the last century, beginning in 1919.

Back when we ran a movie palace — the St. George Theatre — in 1976 and part of ’77, we complained a lot about bad bookings — the second or third-run movies our agent forced on us, because we couldn’t afford to bid for first-run product. Recently I’ve done a deal of research into what we actually did run, culling the microfilms of the local paper for the weekly movie time clock ads we placed forty years ago. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Blazing Saddles, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist — I remembered those titles, but had conveniently forgotten The Giant Spider Invasion, The Dragon Dies Hard, and Don’t Open the Window. Some of those flicks, arguably all of them, are “cult films” now. (Texas Chainsaw was already a cult film).
 
What exactly IS a cult film? The definition is up for grabs — highly subjective — and since the Net has a way of building cult-like enthusiasm around the least thing (Nike Air Force 1S’s for example), we’re all better off making a personal cult movie list of our own.
 
I think everyone would agree that a true cult movie (unlike the aforementioned specs) has to prove itself by surviving its own time. Some films — like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which we held over for a second week in June, 1976 at the SGT — were already showing evidence of doing just that. 
 
By the time we got ahold of Chainsaw, it was two years old. Leatherface had a permanent rep, and Tobe Hooper’s low-budget  ($300,000) thriller was already on its way to cult status. Banned at various times in a long list of countries, including Canada, Britain, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and West Germany, Chainsaw initially caused audiences in several U.S. theaters to walk out in disgust. The movie featured unknown actors and had the distinction of being panned — for gory content — by important critics, some of whom simultaneously praised it for its direction, cinematography and acting.  Ultimately, the film garnered $30 million in profits. In old box office parlance, it “has legs”  which, whatever you say, has got to be part of the definition of a cult film. Experts seem to disagree on which films actually are cult films, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on all the lists.
 
To quote Tim Dirks, cult films “....are usually strange, quirky, offbeat, eccentric, oddball, or surreal, with outrageous, weird, unique and cartoony characters or plots, and garish sets. They are often considered controversial because they step outside standard narrative and technical conventions. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a classic by these standards. They can be very stylized, and they are often flawed or unusual...” Sounds like Chainsaw, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead to me. Wikipedia’s list of cult films, numbering some 1, 535, is way too inclusive (Being John Malkovich — are you kidding?). Most of the films are clustered in the 1970‘s and forward — when, in all probability, the notion of cult films commenced. 
 
A handful of 1930’s films (Blonde Venus, for instance) seem to have made the cut; then there’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bedtime for Bonzo, and a paltry few other movies before Eisenhower. There are other lists, readers’ polls and so on, which often include a small number of films from the 1970’s and the bulk of entries from the eighties and beyond, when readers were growing up. Obviously, when you were born has a lot to do with what you include on your list.
 
Eleven of the films on the Wikipedia list played at the St. George in 1976 and the early part of ’77, while we were tearing tickets at the door:
 
Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971)
Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 19 74)
The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976) 
Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976)
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)
The Giant Spider Invasion (Bill Rebane, 1975)
Reefer Madness (Louis Gasnier, 1936) 
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorcese, 1976)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
 
Other films we ran which have, arguably, generated cult followings include: 
Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)
Don’t Open the Window, aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau, 1974)
Smile (Michael Ritchie, 1975), a gem starring among others a young Bruce Dern. It ought to be a cult film, if it isn’t.
 
We almost ran Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1976) — which is on the Wiki list, but ended up with Cooley High instead, arguably a cult film if there ever was one. Spike Lee lists it on his “List of Films All Aspiring Filmmakers Should See.” If you haven’t read this list, you should. We can all learn a thing or two from Spike, whose movies, alas, didn’t come along until after we went bankrupt at the theater. To have seen Do the Right Thing on our screen — now that would have been a fine thing. 
 
Afterthought:
I never did answer the question, “What is a cult film?” Sometimes I think it’s just any movie you yearn to see more than once. By that measure, I’d like to add Casablanca (seen it about fifteen times) and Two for the Road (at least fifteen) and Becket, and In the Heat of the Night and and... (well I could go on and on) to my personal list.

 Dog Day Afternoon is such a seventies flick. As part of a strangely-matched double feature we somehow paired with Law and Disorder, Dog Day was the third major movie we ran at the St. George Theatre almost half a life-time ago in late April, 1976. Dog Day was over a year old, but we were a “buck fifty” house ($1.50 for adults, 90 cents for children) — and lucky to get it, however many other theaters had already shown it. Starring a heartbreakingly young Al Pacino, it’s the more or less true story of a desperate man, John Wojtowicz (Sonny Wortzik in the film), who tried to rob the Chase Manhattan Bank at 450 Avenue P in Gravesend, Brooklyn, for money to, among other things, buy his lover a sex change operation. Before the story rolls, Sidney Lumet gives us New York City at street level the way it was then. 
 
How did he know we’d be watching from the future? The streets were trash-strewn and desperate: he shows us the sheer grime of it all, the anger and cynicism of ordinary citizens, ready to cheer a man with the audacity to rob a bank. 
 
The desperation was entirely real. What else were we doing in an aged movie palace, if not hiding from the streets? We had a kind of sanctuary. We had at least the illusion of safety — under our pleasure dome and in the cool recesses of the alcoves, the defunct green-tiled water fountain in the lobby, the pink and white-tiled candy stand with its sweet and grassy (popcorn) smells.
 
Outside, people were getting mugged, sometimes right under the marquee. A fist-fight blew up there one afternoon, resulting in one guy knocked out of his Birkenstocks — they remained pointed downhill on the pavement while he flew sideways into the street. He got up, using his teeshirt to staunch the blood, and moved on. Nobody called the cops. 
 
Many people, white as well as Black, didn’t trust cops. The need to keep things to yourself was primal, which is why we had grown men from the neighborhood working off the books on weekends — to keep some of the tougher local kids from walking on the backs of the theater’s seats or assaulting each other with broken bottles in our lobby. 
 
The shops up and down Hyatt Street — the luncheonette, the barbershop next to the theater — were part of another era. I never saw a soul go into the barbershop; it was as if the ninety-year-old barber lived there, periodically flicking dust off his red naugahyde chairs with a frayed whisk broom. 
 
Night was another thing altogether: the street deserted, sounds of glass shattering. The bank’s night drop was only two storefronts away from the theater. Some nights I just didn’t go, but hid the cash in a locked cabinet under the flashlight batteries. 
 
Dog Day was one of many movies I watched in snatches. Seeing it recently, I remembered parts of it, and other parts seemed new, which may mean I had never seen them at all. Back then I’d get some popcorn, go in and sit down for a half hour or so, then remember that I needed to figure out how to make payroll and still buy cleaning supplies — or pay the carting company, who, it was rumored, would break somebody’s kneecaps if not compensated in a timely fashion. That detail from my actual theater-management life fits the tenor of Dog Day nicely — that and another movie we showed, Taxi Driver — about a Vietnam Vet with violent streaks who drives a night taxi and tries to save a young girl turned sex worker.

Desperation was part of the Zeitgeist.

Which is why I savor my memories of the theater’s cool lobby and sheltering dome. Like a medieval cathedral, it held us:  you could walk in there and drop out of time.
 
Afterthoughts:

1. One night in the early seventies, we’d invited a couple to dinner. She was on time, but alone, explaining that her husband, who worked at AP, was on assignment covering a hostage situation. He did arrive eventually, two hours late, grateful for the steak we'd warmed for him. Turned out, he’d just covered the John Wojtowicz robbery, whose story later became Dog Day.
 
2. It’s easy sometimes to think the times we’re passing through are the worst ever. The other day I said to a friend, “I almost think this is a harder decade than even the Depression.” She said her father, if he were alive, would argue with that, and I’m glad she called me out. The Depression and seventies New York, in its own way, were brutal and frightening. Covid times are too. There is, I think, no “worst ever.”
 
3. An early version of this post elicited the following comment, from my friend, Beth: “It's sometimes hard to believe that much of the Upper West Side was as gritty as some of those films. Think of The Panic In Needle Park, for example; that 'hood is now fairly posh. Interesting to watch those films "from the future", as you wryly put it. Like catching glimpses of Paris in years past in some new wave films."

 iHow did the wicked witch end up melting in The Wizard of Oz? (It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie; the answer to the above question appears in “afterthoughts,” at the end of this post). Wizard was big in my 1950’s childhood, so big I saw it about twelve times, and almost always at one or another of Cincinnati’s movie palaces: the Albee, the Twentieth Century, or the RKO downtown. Some movies demand a decently big screen and Wizard is one of those. You want to really see Margaret Hamilton melt and look carefully for the fabled trapdoor she’s supposed to disappear into (I never manage to see it, but I always look).
 
Back in June, a friend sent me a card of the 1939 fab four:  Ray Bolger, Judy Garland, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (which is to say, the scarecrow, Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion) skipping arm in arm down the yellow brick road on their way to Oz. Why do I still want somebody — anybody from the movie I saw so many times growing up — to still be around? Now it all really does seem like a dream. 
 
Kansas is in stormy black-and-white (actually dyed sepia), and Oz in vibrant Technicolor, a process invented  back in 1917, though seldom used till The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind came out. By then, the Depression not quite over but waning, and the scent of war in the air, it was time for those ruby slippers. The slippers are, as a matter of fact, silver in the book, but Samuel Goldwyn was paying for all the Technicolor, and he wanted those shoes to dazzle. All these years later, after the last munchkin, Jerry Maren, died at 98, the whole speaking cast of that great movie is completely over the rainbow, with no more lollipops for the guild to present. 
 
It’s been eighty-three years since 16-year-old Judy Garland stepped into the role of Dorothy, a little girl in gingham wearing red sparkly shoes, and belted out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” for wide release. That wide release probably included the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island, which many years later I was to have a hand in running — but I digress — The Wizard has the show today. 
 
Early releases of Wizard are interesting to muse over. On June 5, 1939, sneak previews in Santa Barbara, Pomona and San Luis Obispo, California, helped director Victor Fleming figure out what to cut (the movie ran two hours, though 90 minutes was the max in those days). Amazing note: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” almost got the hatchet, which, beyond robbing the world of a great song sung by a great young voice, would also have stolen away an Academy Award for the production.
 
Three August “test screenings” (August 11, in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Cape Cod Massachusetts, and August 12 at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin) gauged audience response to the now 101-minute movie. Of these three unofficial premier sites, only Oconomowoc (Strand demolished in 1960) celebrates with frequency the 1939 screenings. There’s a plaque on the site where the Strand Theatre once stood, “This commemorates the World Premier of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, shown here in downtown Oconomowoc, at the Strand Theatre on August 12, 1939.” Well not exactly the world premier, even if you count trial screenings, since Cape Cod and Kenosha beat the Strand by a day. Meanwhile, that hasn’t deterred Oconomowocs, from erecting colorful statuary of Dorothy, Toto, and her three companions, to which this summer a father/daughter team added a mural, the first of several improvements planned by  city officials. 
 
Admission to the original 1939 evening showing, BTW, at the Strand was 40 cents for adults and 10 cents for children. Each anniversary of the movie’s release, despite the Strand’s untimely death, citizens of Oconomowoc have gathered to watch the movie on a temporary outdoor screen. How America does love to remember. And to capitalize.
 
On August 15, 1939, at  the then 12-year-old Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in L.A., The Wizard of Oz was officially born to its viewing public. Munchkins and other cast members in formal dress were in attendance. Already on a train bound for New York City, Judy Garland and her side-kick-of-the-era, Mickey Rooney, planned live entertainment for the stage of NYC’s Capitol Theatre, where Oz would open to the East Coast, on August 17th. 
 
Alas, there is little that remains, even of descriptions of the Capitol. According to Cinema Treasures, the theater had better than four thousand seats, and, at one time, was managed by none other than S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel himself. It was a Thomas Lamb theater.
  
With Hitler fifteen days shy of invading Poland, and the Depression not really over yet, people waited in line at the Capitol, and at Grauman’s too – and under a lot of other marquees – to forget a world that must have seemed to be falling apart.

Perhaps we need a little Oz these days too?  
 
Afterthoughts:

1. The wicked witch “melts” because witches and water don’t mix. Dorothy has doused the witch with water to keep her from setting fire to the scarecrow. According to one source, Hamilton “...was standing on a trap door and was supposed to disappear down into it quickly when the smoke (followed by fire) puffed up, but during the second take of that scene, the fire came too early and her costume started burning. She suffered second and third degree burns and was unable to work for a month. When she came back, she refused to do any more work with fire.” Can’t say as I blame her.
 
2. As of May 24, 2018, with the passing of the last living Munchkin, Jerry Maren, at 98, (who portrayed one of the three representatives of the Lollipop Guild), it can now be said that every actor who received an on-screen credit or spoke dialogue in The Wizard of Oz is dead.
 
3. I’d like to imagine that The St. George Theatre, which I ran for a year in 1976, premiered The Wizard of Oz after it left the Capitol; seems logical, as, 37 years before we showed up, the St. George was a first-run house, the biggest and most ornate theater on the island.
 
4. From a New Yorker cartoon: little girl sits with her mother watching The Wizard of Oz on television. Caption: “But why does she want to go back to Kansas, where everything is black-and-white?”  Interestingly, a decision was almost made not to feature Kansas as black-and-white — too austere for children! Imagine that... 
 
5. The Wizard of Oz has been officially tapped as the most influential film ever made, by a group of Italian researchers who analyzed 47,000 films across 26 genres. Runners up in that contest include: Star Wars, Psycho, King Kong (1933), and 2001: A Space Odyssey. A list of the top twenty is contained in the link above. Their definition of “influential” has a lot to do with outstripping other movies in how much a film has inspired and been referenced in the film industry. 

Are people actively going out to the movies — anymore? again? As a former movie palace operator (the St. George Theatre, 1976), I can’t help wanting to know. Certain theaters, I’m relieved to say, seem to be drawing regular audiences, at least in New York City. So what do moviegoers, emerging like prairie dogs from their tunneled lives, seem to be fixated on right now? 

The year 1969 is getting a lot of attention.

I grew up in the sixties. It’s easy to go all nostalgic, forgetting the rate at which boys my age were coming home feet first from ‘Nam. But if I let go of that sad fact for a second, I can remember the first time I heard Abbey Road on a friend’s turntable (“because the world is round...”), the drift of pot smoke through the projector’s beam at the Esquire Cinema on Ludlow in Cincinnati, where we’d gone to watch Elvira Madigan or revisit Knife in the Water. Other nights, there was Two for the Road or A Man and a Woman, if you wanted all pretty, no violence.

 I was surprised to read in the Sunday New York Times that not only are New Yorkers going out to the movies again, but the late sixties are actually hot. 
       
Glynnis MacNicol, who wrote the Times article, admits she’s been to La Piscine, a 1969 French psychodrama/swimming pool flick starring Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, four times! So, apparently, have a lot of other people. Film Forum has held it over since May. It has, apparently, become the go-to of the summer for that theater. The earlier Times’ review, “Pretty Rich People Behaving Poorly.” seems to sum up what’s got people coming back. Without giving away what happens. these characters behave fairly darkly. Don’t miss the trailer, if you want a taste: Romy’s tits were admirable and Alain’s navel not to be beat. 

In other words, a little voyeurism, a dash of sadism, may be just what we need on summer vacation from the pandemic. Who can resist a splash?

Going from the ridiculous to the sublime, friends turned me on to another movie, Summer of Soul, a documentary that came to The Nitehawk in Brooklyn a few months ago. It was also filmed in 1969, the only thing it has in common with La Piscene. I was in New York City that summer, when the Harlem Cultural Festival, preserved by this documentary’s footage, took place. Headlining Sly Stone, Fifth Dimension, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and I could go on and on, the festival drew standing room only crowds. I had just moved to New York City that summer from Ohio. Being white and ignorant, I had no clue  this series of events was actually taking place just a subway ride away, when Woodstock — which we couldn’t get to on account of bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Thruway — had gotten all the media attention. Mostly white twenty-somethings, some naked, many in an altered state, trumped a well-behaved 99-percent-Black crowd, apparently. The Harlem footage languished in its canisters, in a garage for fifty years. Rescued finally, intercut with interviews from surviving audience members and performers, and released this year, it reminds us that Black lives do matter. And that there was life, a lot of it, before the pandemic, and will be again. 

Afterthought:
How can I close without a brief reflection on the St. George Theatre in 1969? One torrid afternoon, not long after arriving in New York, we were patrons in what would be, just seven years later (and briefly) our theater. We bought tickets not because we wanted to see the movie, but to get cool; we had no air conditioning in our garden apartment. Although The Sterile Cuckoo, starring Liza Minelli, was a bit of a doggie, unwatchable by today’s standards, we could sit in the dark and recover from the unbearable heat of our first New York summer. 1969. The world hadn’t grown up quite yet. Was Liza Minelli ever that young? Was I? 

 Even with a turkey that you know will fold
you may be stranded out in the cold,
still you wouldn’t change it for a sack of gold,
Let’s go on with the show,
Let’s go on with the show.
—Irving Berlin, There’s No Business Like Show Business, from Annie Get Your Gun
 
I woke up humming these lines.“What show?” I wondered, and should we go on with? My reverie is at least partly the St. George Theatre, a glorious red and gold movie palace which, with a group of well-intended friends, I ran briefly, in 1976. That’s what this blog is all about. 
 
But if Irving Berlin’s words penetrated to my sleeping mind, well, there had to be something more epic going on. The world is in trouble right now I reminded myself, and the current production we’re all involved in is a probable “turkey,” to borrow show-biz slang from Variety for something that has no “legs,” and is about to close. That would indeed leave us all “stranded,” though not necessarily in the cold (Sicily last week comes to mind, where temps reached 48.8 Celsius, which is 119.84 Fahrenheit, the highest ever recorded in Europe). 
 
It’s the pandemic, baby. It has a box office so big — boffo socko — it has managed to shut down theaters of all kinds (except drive-ins, which it actually enhanced for more or less a year. Broadway is finally back, and I yearn to go to Springsteen or Trouble in Mind or really anything; but, although I’m vaccinated, I’ve got a compromised immune system, so gotta sit it out for what might be a long long time. 
 
Don’t let this stop you though, should you be the possessor of a robust immune system! I cheer your antibodies, and, assuming you’ve been vaccinated, I’m sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with you in the theater of my dreams. That goes for movies too. I’m waiting, remembering what it was like munching popcorn next to a total stranger, never giving a thought to our commonly-breathed air.  
 
Every week I get an email from The United Palace, one of New York’s five original Wonder Theaters, about what they wish they were showing, if they could open their doors normally again. Why wait, guys? Even I could come to a theater that seats 3,400, if you let just four or five hundred of us in!
 
It’d be just like 1976 all over again, when, at the St. George Theatre, we hosted a smattering of people in a space meant for 2,672. Those were terrible numbers! How we longed to sell out. 
 
Afterthoughts:
 
1. Let’s get back to the song that started this meander. Irving Berlin wrote it for a piece of pure show biz hokum, Annie Get Your Gun, and it became an anthem. 
 
2. During the pandemic of 1918, New York City kept its theaters of all kinds open, as a way to raise morale and advise the public about health safety; the city was an interesting exception, since, in other places, theaters closed.