Scene from Citizen Kane
Every Wednesday at the St. George Theatre, a new feature — sometimes two — arrived at the box office. The usher on matinee on duty lugged the film reels in heavy hexagonal cans, two at a time, up to the booth. There our projectionist loaded the first two onto our ancient Century projectors. “Carbon arc” projection was not exactly high tech in 1976, but they were all we could afford. The St. George was a dollar-fifty movie house (second or third-run) — no fancy xenon bulb projectors for us. The light that shone through the film as it passed the gate in the projector came from an arc similar to the ones welders use, an actual fire that burned expensive rods of carbon in a primitive fire. And the show began.
Blazing Saddles, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Taxi Driver, Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Exorcist, The Omen: the films we booked had one thing in common. They’d all been around at least a year, in most cases two. And even if we’d had the advance money to put down on a first-run feature, we’d have lost out in a bidding war to the new strip-mall theaters offering a choice of two or even three screens. There was precious little new film to be had in 1976 and ’77, and nobody could imagine filling all of our 2672 seats.
Still, every Wednesday was a new chance at success, our movie booking fantasies reinforced by the heady notion that if we could just sell out a live show once or twice we’d break even for the whole year! Just across the harbor in Manhattan, impresarios like Sid Bernstein and Ron Delsener were making a living booking rock bands in auditoriums not half so elegant as the St. George’s, with its gilded statuary and brocade house curtain. There were five of us in the “management” team, all of us breathless and in our twenties, with the kind of energy that dared the odds. The St. George was a magic cave, and we believed in magic.
Bob Endres, our former projectionist, adds, "The lamps you had when I was there were made by Ashcraft. I’m reasonably sure the projector “mech heads” (the actual projector itself) were made by Century. In the photo the big unit on the projector base is the Ashcraft lamphouse, and the unit directly in front of it is a Century “mech” or picture head. Below it is the Century sound head, although at the St. George you had an RCA sound system so the sound heads were probably RCA. If Abbott Theatre Supply in Manhattan was your equipment and booth supplier that would make sense since they sold Ashcraft and Century and RCA exclusively in this area.
Blazing Saddles, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Taxi Driver, Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Exorcist, The Omen: the films we booked had one thing in common. They’d all been around at least a year, in most cases two. And even if we’d had the advance money to put down on a first-run feature, we’d have lost out in a bidding war to the new strip-mall theaters offering a choice of two or even three screens. There was precious little new film to be had in 1976 and ’77, and nobody could imagine filling all of our 2672 seats.
Still, every Wednesday was a new chance at success, our movie booking fantasies reinforced by the heady notion that if we could just sell out a live show once or twice we’d break even for the whole year! Just across the harbor in Manhattan, impresarios like Sid Bernstein and Ron Delsener were making a living booking rock bands in auditoriums not half so elegant as the St. George’s, with its gilded statuary and brocade house curtain. There were five of us in the “management” team, all of us breathless and in our twenties, with the kind of energy that dared the odds. The St. George was a magic cave, and we believed in magic.
Bob Endres, our former projectionist, adds, "The lamps you had when I was there were made by Ashcraft. I’m reasonably sure the projector “mech heads” (the actual projector itself) were made by Century. In the photo the big unit on the projector base is the Ashcraft lamphouse, and the unit directly in front of it is a Century “mech” or picture head. Below it is the Century sound head, although at the St. George you had an RCA sound system so the sound heads were probably RCA. If Abbott Theatre Supply in Manhattan was your equipment and booth supplier that would make sense since they sold Ashcraft and Century and RCA exclusively in this area.
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