I’ve been thinking about Roots lately. I’m one of a minority of Americans alive in 1977, who failed to watch even a single episode of the mini-series when it was broadcast over eight gripping nights. I couldn’t watch it; I had a failing theater to run. Based on Alex Haley's best-selling novel, Roots followed several generations of enslaved African Americans, beginning with the capture of a young man in West Africa, Kunta Kinte. Roots changed the way many white Americans thought about slavery, while at the same time legitimizing the family chronicles of many black families. Despite the fact that I missed the experience of viewing it as it aired, it affected my life — and the business I was failing at — profoundly.

Television, ironically, achieved over the course of those eight nights what we in our grand old movie palace had failed to do. We’d been trying to bring our white suburban and black urban audiences together under one wide dome to watch movies — not an easy feat in a neighborhood many white people were afraid to drive through. It didn’t help that, after winter set in, our beloved St. George Theater had no heat, thanks to a landlord who was actively trying to evict us. Then, in that most desperate winter — from January 23 through January 30, while Roots aired — we were for the first time completely vacant. Our scant winter audience, those few brave souls accustomed to sitting in their hats and coats in a cold auditorium, had stayed home in front of their own televisions.

VCRs existed, but they were toys of the rich, so when a program aired, you watched it — or missed it. And everyone knew that Roots was not to be missed, a game-changing event. The last night set a nationwide Nielsen Ratings record for the largest audience ever to view a televised show. That record would not be bested until 1983, when M*A*S*H aired for the last time. Roots was obviously the ultimate triumph of television over movies, that had been coming for some time, but it was much larger. Except for me, the managers and skeleton crews of other theaters, and whoever else was unlucky enough to work nights, everyone watched, as the forbidden story of slavery unfolded. A
scandal some years later, would call into question some of the details of Haley’s tale; was it fiction or non-fiction? But inaccurate or not, it was a story that needed to be told. I was glad, the morning after each of those eight nights, to hear our staff, black and white boys and girls who loved and trusted one another, buzzing about Roots.

This year the League of Historic American Theatres’ (LHAT) annual conference was in New York City. That was fortunate for me, because I live in one of the city’s five boroughs, Staten Island. It’s been nearly 40 years since I lost my shirt trying to save the St. George Theatre there. I was in a category apart from the successful theater entrepreneurs listed in the program, and wanted to tell them about the book I’m about to publish, Starts Wednesday: Coming of Age in a Movie Palace, a memoir. 

The new theater partisans I met during LHAT's historic theater tour (the “ramble”) were older and wiser than I was when my friends and I signed on the dotted line to lease a 2672-seat theater in New York City, expecting to support ourselves from the enterprise! In most cases, the people I met at the conference were less aspiring entrepreneurs than volunteers who had kept their day jobs, even if they did raid the 401K to keep the local Rialto from becoming a Red Lobster. The Rialto, BTW, is these days a not-for-profit, eligible for grant money and tax abatements. As my husband (a former partner in our long-ago misadventure) is quick to point out, “We were a not-for-profit — we just didn’t know it!”

In Harlem we toured the newly refurbished Apollo Theatre and met Billy Mitchell, “Mr. Apollo,” who fell into a job there at age 15 and stayed through the comings and goings of James Brown, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and other famous talents. If he hadn’t come to 125th Street that day in 1965, on an errand to borrow money from his Aunt Essie, and ended up getting coffee for the manager of the Apollo, well then who knows?

At the second stop on the tour, the sumptuously gilded United Palace of Cultural Arts (originally the Loew’s 175th Street Theater, one of the five original New York “Wonder Theaters”), we walked in through the stage door, past a row of African drums — as important to that venue and to the communities of Washington Heights and Inwood as the United Church that calls the theater its home on Sundays.

We walked the Lincoln Center campus, with its 18-plus major arts institutions, and learned first hand what a 1.5 billion dollar restoration might feel like. On request, our tour guide, a professional singer, tested the acoustics for us in a vacant Alice Tully Hall.

The lobby of Radio City Music Hall was filled with anvil cases and equipment, a major load-in for a talent show to come. Management apologized, but it was our pleasure to watch as a giant lighting grid, in the form of an arc, flashed into being on stage, while we listened to a history of the place and learned, to our astonishment, that the six thousand and thirteen seat theater actually makes money!

The last time I was privileged to tour Radio City was in 1976. Meanwhile at home in Staten Island, we were going bankrupt trying to keep the doors of the St. George Theatre open. But the head projectionist at Radio City, at that time a friend of ours, made us forget our troubles for an afternoon, whisking us from the projection booth to the original manager (Roxy)’s private apartment, and then for a quick tour of that city-within-a-city, backstage.

Now, almost 40 years later, the current manager tells us they’re making money?  I wasn’t sitting on my hands — I burst into hysterical applause!