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, losing much of its business beginning in the mid eighties and finally disappearing — 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 died in 1983 of colon cancer and is remembered primarily for his role in the Brooks farce.

2.  National Screen Service also dominated the trailer industry for the better part of the last century, beginning in 1919, so that trailer for Gone With the Wind, which we had no intention of ever showing as a feature at the St. George, came directly from them.

Starting with Tea for Two in 1950, when I was so young I couldn’t eat popcorn for fear I’d choke, it’s  been the movies, or nothing for me. By which I mean not “film,” or “cinema,” whatever that really is. I don’t know any souls who consider themselves cinemaists.  

Some people style themselves “Film Buffs.” Speaking from a NYC perspective, now that The Paris on Central Park has closed its venerable doors, the serious film crowd have shot over to Lincoln Center Cinema, a cliff-dwelling of sorts hanging under the fortress of serious music. There’s “cinema” for you, used mostly to glam up theater titles. 

Back in the nineties there was a short TV series on Saturday Night Live — via Second City – “Sprockets,” hosted by a fictional German film buff, “Dieter” (Mike Myers). but it was really a take-off on European affectations, not about America at all. 

More than a decade before that, in 1976, when, along with a crew of like-minded idealists, I helped run a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, we hoped to screen a “film” or two (whatever we thought that was in those days); but we mostly never got around to it. Our audience were moviegoers through and through, meaning, I suppose, most of them wanted action and grit (Scorcese, Pacino) though they’d put up well enough with Mel Brooks and were mad for Carrie (1976) or The Exorcist (1973) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

So what makes a “film” a film, and a “movie” a movie? You would never call Tea for Two anything but a movie, and not much of one at that, but The Breaking Point which came out the same year, 1950, is nothing if not a film (film noir, at that). Ever notice you can call a film a movie, and mean no disrespect?

Americans are all about movement. So, we seem to trust the term that has the most forward thrust in it, “moving pictures,” “movies,” defined by the one-room Nickelodeons. But it was always film too, the dangerous (explosive) celluloid run at anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four frames a second, past a flame which sometimes ignited (the projector got it’s own room or booth, finally, to protect the audience).

Other defects in early projection began to define the new medium with its catchphrase, “flick” or “flicker,” whose origins are mysterious, but hover around 1926; early film projectors had a large advance time between frames, in which a shutter obstructs the light source, and of course the source of light was a flame.

I still say I’m going to a “flick,” but nothing, especially after the forced retirement of Carbon Arc projectors with their natural moving flames, can be said to flicker anymore (unless you know where to go).
​
So to define this mess of visual narrative, we have the movies. When you come down to it, even high tone film people in North America seem to trust the word “movie” more than anything else. The best of them know to be frugal with intellectual stardust, so Roger Ebert, a first-rate film buff if ever there was one, reflects on an old fave of mine: 

Casablanca" is The Movie. There are greater movies. More profound movies. Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance. There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time. But when it comes right down to the movies we treasure the most, when we are — let us imagine — confiding the secrets of our heart to someone we think we may be able to trust, the conversation sooner or later comes around to the same words:

I really love 'Casablanca'.

Or as my former mentor, Hollis Frampton, a structuralist filmmaker from the seventies, used to say (a paraphrase, forgive me):

I know it’s a good movie if it makes me forget my toothache, the balance in my checkbook, or the love I just lost. 

Notice the word “love” in both instances.

Afterthought:
Whether you call it a movie or a film, I love:
Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Berman) 
Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)
The Dead (1987, John Huston)
 and a host of other things; don’t get me started! 

As a child I loved sitting down with my popcorn fifteen minutes into Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and trying to figure out exactly who that man and woman were (a scientist and his wife, it turned out) and what exactly was happening with the aliens. After the feature was over, I watched Sylvester and Tweety, and a couple of trailers, waiting patiently through MovieTone News munching on the grannies in the bottom of my popcorn tub. I was not alone; people had straggled in at various times. The movie would start up again soon, and I’d find out at last what the main character and his wife had been doing when I sat down. Having reached my recognized entry point, I — or we, if I was with my family — got up and headed for the door. All of this seemed completely natural, we went to the movies; it was a package deal, a continuous loop. Then it all changed. 

“No one but no one...will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance of Psycho.”  Hitchcock went so far as to have this sign posted at all theaters where his epic thriller opened. Right then and there he re-trained the movie-going public to start at the beginning. And it wasn’t just the public; the movies of my adolescence that followed — Tom Jones, Cleopatra, Dr. Strangelove —were movies you didn’t want to miss the first fifteen minutes of. 

By the time I walked into the lobby of the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I was involved in running in 1976, the film was the thing, the whole thing. MovieTone newsreels had been gone since 1963, and cartoons, though sweet, cost an extra fifty bucks (as much as the second feature) to run. 

Most of our patrons were grownups who didn’t care anymore about Bugs or Daffy Duck; they got their news from television. Our mid-seventies audience had come at the appointed time to see Taxi Driver or Carrie or Don’t Open the Window — whatever it was we’d advertised on the movie page that week.

They got a little surly if too many “short subjects” intervened.  

We had several patrons who were almost Hitchcock trainees. Dean’s nickname for one particular guy was “Time Clock,” but box office staffers had another name for him, a middle-aged man (accountant?) fixated on the actual start time of any film we ran.

“It’s three minutes past eight o’clock,” he’d state emphatically, pointing at his wrist.

“Yes,” I said, “...and your problem?”

“The film is scheduled to start at eight; it said so in the papers, on your sign board, and in that infernal message I hear when I call the theater.” (We were proud of our answering machine, one of the first of its kind). 

“Eight o’clock is eight o’clock! — it’s now five minutes past eight,” he said, checking his watch.

Over his shoulder and through the glass partition that separated the auditorium from the lobby, I could see the trailer package grinding away, nearly 11 minutes of COMING ATTRACTIONS, for films we mostly couldn’t afford.  

“I think,” I said, “it’ll start in six, maybe seven minutes...” 

And we were off.

“That is preposterous!” he ejaculated.  “I paid good money for an eight o’clock movie! Truth in advertising!  I want my money back.”

Dean appeared, shrugged and reached into his pocket for a dollar and two quarters, and placed the ticket price in the man’s small immaculate palm.

He stormed out the door. 

“Who is this guy?” I wondered.

“Staff calls him Tic Toc, but I think of him as Time Clock,” Dean explained.

Tic Toc was not the only time-troubled patron. A mother surrounded by three children of various ages stood outside the box office one Saturday afternoon and, after purchasing four tickets, inquired when the main feature would start.

“It started only about five minutes ago,” Brenda responded. 

Puzzled and disappointed, the narcissistic mother asked, “Well, could you re-start it?  Traffic was terrible...”

Brenda actually stopped chewing her perpetual gum and stared at the woman. “No way,” was all she could muster.
​
I was getting my hair cut yesterday, so asked my stylist — a friend of many years and one of the most savvy moviegoers I know — if, when he was growing up in the fifties, he’d been in the habit of arriving late to movies.  “Absolutely not!” he replied, “My whole family...we were always on time; it was important to us.” On time, and ahead of his time.

What did a nickel buy at the movies once upon a time? In 1905 in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, it bought a ticket to whatever was showing at the  nickelodeon, a flea-bag experience with in many cases bare wooden benches and genuine fleas. By the time I came along in the 1950’s, a nickel at the local stadium-constructed theater bought a small Snickers or a box of Good n’ Plenties; but I’ve leaped over a chunk of time here. Let’s step backward and pause at 1929, the height of the movie palace era: a bag of popcorn cost exactly 5 cents (the equivalent of 62 cents today). A movie ticket in ’29 cost  35 cents, seven times what it had cost in 1905 at the Nickelodeon, (that’ s $4.32 in today’s money). As of 2019, the average cost of a small popcorn is $6.09, yet a movie ticket costs $9.01. 

What gives? Why did the humble bag of corn outstrip inflation so completely, while the price of a ticket only just doubled? Ironically, the movie palace offered glamorous powder rooms, magnificent chandeliers, marble staircases, infant care, an army of uniformed ushers — so much more for so much less — while 2019 movie theaters, even the best of them, feature nary a potted palm. (You can get booze, sandwiches and other delights delivered to your reclining chair, but that is no substitute for elegance or screen-size, subjects of another blog post).

True confession: I was a movie palace operator in 1976, when a group of us tried valiantly to keep the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace in Staten Island near the ferryboats, open for business. Cost of our popcorn then? seventy-five cents  —  and tickets? — a buck fifty for adults. (These are straight out of memory, so not adjusted for inflation). We were a third-run house, but even at premier houses, the deal was about the same: most of the money to be made in ‘76 was from concession sales, which is true today, There’s a reason why concession sales dominate now as they began to then: Hollywood movie studios take upwards of 70% of the opening weekend box office receipts.

Now whatever happens to a theater operator, you gotta have popcorn, and if you want to sell it, it better be fresh-popped. To this day, despite practically living off the corn at the St. George (supplemented with egg salad from home) I astonish myself by continuing to crave the ritual grain; but I won’t buy it, if I don’t see a popper, and if there isn’t at least a slight lingering grassy smell in the lobby, Devoid of popcorn, I’ll shrug and walk into the theater, feeling somewhat naked. 

Popcorn has numerous subtile functions:

• It’s a ritual object intrinsic to the ceremony of moviegoing. I always try to preserve a third of the box or bucket until the movie starts; what a waste to consume all of the magic food during trailers — or these days, worse — ads.

• For the theater operator, it can be a form of currency: we used to give it away when the film broke and while the film (that collective dream moviegoers were having) was being repaired.  What the modern equivalent of that is in our digital projection age, I have no idea.

• A more devious use of popcorn is as subliminal advertising, as popcorn’s major mode of communication is olfactory. If you want more people to show up at concession for the more expensive sodas (35 cents for a small), then pop some fresh corn. This is how you can tell a lot of theaters have gone to hell, such as one of our regular haunts, the Loews/AMC Lincoln Square at 68th and Broadway in Manhattan. Walked in there the other day for Imagine, and not only was nobody in line to buy anything edible, there was no discernible smell of anything, and all the concessionaires were asleep at the counter, like figures in an enchanted castle.   

Returning briefly to the ritual eating of popcorn in theaters, there is something comforting about reaching into the bag or bucket at various filmic moments: the main character, a woman, hasn’t yet realized there’s a stranger in her house; or it’s a comedy and the main character’s a dweeb you nonetheless identify with, who’s just embarrassed all of us. There is also the melting witch, and the flying saucer that just sliced off the top of the Capitol.   

Who knew popcorn could be so versatile!

Afterthought:
At the St. George, our popcorn was, compared to other theaters, relatively cheap. We didn’t actually own our own stand, having, like share-croppers, sold it off to a concession company in Rochester for a loan we had already used up; which is to say we had no true sources of revenue. The running joke among management staff was, “Let’s close down the screen and just sell popcorn," but that would have completely eviscerated whatever cash-flow we had...

“We’re saved!  We’re saved! There’s some people here who want to shoot a movie!” I appeared, breathless, from the auditorium of our 2672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, which I’d been showing to three women who had walked in off the street. Dean, my impresario husband — whose noble enterprise running the theater largely was — perked up immediately. Fantasies of Brian de Palma or Martin Scorsese briefly interrupted his usual despair.  
 
Business was in a nose-dive. It was winter, 1977, and we were involved in a heat war with the landlord. We needed a miracle — perhaps this was it. “Could be thousands of dollars!” I chirped on, enthusiastically. The women appeared from the auditorium. One of them smiled and gave Dean a card. “Are you the manager? We’d like to rent your theater for an afternoon.” Dean sighed then tried to disguise his disappointment. “You’re shooting a spot, right?” 
 
They were — for an upholstery company, it turned out. We settled on around $850. On the appointed day, bin after bin of lighting equipment rolled in. “This is going to cost at least two hundred in electricity,” I mused, glumly. But the inside of the theater had never seemed so luminous; despite myself, I rejoiced. “Is it always this quiet?”, the production coordinator wondered. “Any interior sounds? Banging heat pipes, that kind of thing?” 
 
I chuckled — “Well that won’t be a problem! ” — then I explained about the landlord and the heat.
 
The shoot was a wrap by 4 PM, and we returned to our role as movie palace operators. By 11 PM we’d raked in around $127 in concession and ticket sales. Concession was the greater part of this haul, on account of the hot coffee and fresh warm popcorn that made it possible to watch a movie in an unheated palace. The day’s take was, even in those days, peanuts, but when I added in the $850 (forgetting the probable bump in next month’s electric bill), I could pretend we’d made a grand.
 
The following day, Dean got two phone calls. The first was from Local 306, the projectionists’ union, demanding we add another 6-hour shift, at $13.75 cents an hour, because we had used the booth--even though the projectionist (had he been around) would have been useless. The second call was from Local 1(IATSI). How many stagehands had we employed? We hadn’t, of course, but they had a right. Answering the phone, “You've reached the St. George Theatre, located in beautiful downtown St. George...” Dean pretended to be a kid working the box office. He’d pass the message on — he promised — to the manager.  
 
Afterthoughts:
1. This blog post is the result of a back-and-forth in the comments column of a previous post. I’d like to thank reader Josephine Scherer for reminding me that we ever DID rent the theater for an upholstery commercial.
 
In her first comment, she recalled the projection booth, as it was in 1977, with phenomenal accuracy. In her second, she went on to describe said commercial. Here’s the better part of what she had to say:
 
I remember the St. George well! We used it as a location for a commercial shoot. And what a projection angle! The booth was scary—if I recall correctly, Century SA's on top of RCA 9030 sound heads, with big Ashcraft rotating positive carbon arc lamps... on five-point bases with railroad ties under the back end to get enough tilt-down! Good thing earthquakes don't happen much in New York!!
 
Now for her comments on the long-ago commercial, and a little more besides:
 
...It was for a chain of fabric stores. We had this wonderful actress who could do a bang-on Judy Holliday impression (we had previously used her in a commercial for a Broadway musical). We start tight on her face, as she says: "My boss said I could re-cover all the chairs in here," and goes on to say that the fabric shop had so many great patterns and colors she couldn't choose just one- "...So, I did one of each!" Then we zoom out, and we see it's a huge theatre, with every seat covered differently. Helen, our prop lady, had a ball making all the slip covers! 
 
Sadly, this was around the time your fine upstanding landlord put the vicious dog in the furnace room so you couldn't turn the heat on... So unspeakably sad.

2. After our time as theater operators, the St. George had a few other side hustles: School of Rock and the TV series SMASH in which it played a role as a theater in Boston. 
 
3. No doubt the reason so many L.A. palaces are alive these days is the side hustles they’re able to get, not just commercials, but full-on shoots.

How 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 in stormy black and white (actually dyed sepia), and Oz in vibrant Technicolor, a process invented  back in 1917, though seldom used till 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. Eighty years later, with the last munchkin, Jerry Maren, dead at 98, the whole speaking cast of that great movie is completely over the rainbow, with no more lollipops for the guild to present. 

But wait! Eighty years! — an anniversary! Eighty years since 16-year-old Judy Garland as Dorothy, a little girl in gingham wearing red sparkly shoes, belted out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in 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, Ca. helped Director Victor Fleming figure out what to cut (the movie ran two hours, and 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 from 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 actually 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. 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 (including this year’s 80th) finds citizens of Oconomowoc gathered to watch Dorothy and friends on a temporary outdoor screen near the demolition site of the 500-seat theater. No regrets about the Strand’s untimely death?
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. [but already on a train bound for New York City were Judy Garland and her side-kick-of-the-era, Mickey Rooney, ready with a 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 at 1645 Broadway. What is it about NYC and its theaters? For that matter, its train stations, concert halls and other wonders have constantly to be saved from demolition — and, like the Capitol, are often not. According to Cinema Treasures, the theater had better than four thousand seats, and, at one time, had been managed by none other than S.L. Rothafel himself. It was a Thomas Lamb theater, but what exists of it pictorially these days can be found mostly in sites like Pinterest: crowds packed under the Capitol’s marquee and a handful of yellowed flyers and programs. 
  
Yet there it was: while Hitler was fifteen days shy of invading Poland, and the Depression wasn’t really over, people waited in line, on Broadway 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 the 24 May, 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 Ozis 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 in black and white?”  

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. Interesting list.