Every Wednesday at the St. George Theatre, a new feature — sometimes two — arrived at the box office. The usher on matinee 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 it was 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, Taxi Driver, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Exorcist: 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, certainly not enough to fill 2,672 seats all at once.
 
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 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 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.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Speaking of our projectors, Bob Endres, a good friend and a visiting projectionist in the seventies, recalls, "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. 
 
2.  Paul Plonski, these days an aeronautical engineer, but in 1976 a St. George Theatre staffer, recalls:
When you mention, ‘The usher on matinee duty lugged the film reels in heavy hexagonal cans, two at a time, up to the booth,’ I was one of those ushers. I remember picking up those hexagonal cans in the lobby of the theater ... not quite in the lobby ... but in front of the ticket booth on the main entrance. There were probably four or more cans on a given day. Grabbing on to two of them, I found, to my surprise, they were much heavier than eye might perceive. My memories take me into the main lobby, the palms of my hands burning from the narrow metal grips of the handles, taking a short break and proceeding up to the mezzanine level. Once there, another short break, then up to the balcony. On the balcony, there was a magnificent view of the theater ... amazing ... totally amazing to be looking down on the theater below and its magnificent beauty, the orchestra pit, the historical stage, the chandelier above, how powerful it felt to be looking down from above on a theater with such a rich entertainment history. The journey continued, upwards, ascending through the balcony, until I was at the very last seat, again looking down at the stage floor below, how small everything looked. Turning about, a narrow door, very narrow, so narrow most patrons would not realize its existence. I squeaked through the narrow door, with two film cans, one in each hand, a set of stairs, steeper and narrower than the stairs leading to the semi-nonexistent door itself. The film cans would bounce off the sides of the walls as I ascended to the projectionist booth above. At last, arriving at the technical perch of the theater, it seemed as though I were atop of the world. There were little openings looking down upon the theater below, once again making everything below look so small. It never lost its magnificence ... it still has not, every week new cans... Starts Wednesday!!! —Paulie

In 1976, there were movies that were right for a movie palace in an urban setting — and then there were the movies we wanted to show. Romantic entrepreneurs, we should have passed on The Man Who Would Be King, John Huston’s adaptation of a story by Rudyard Kipling starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine was wrong, wrong, wrong in a neighborhood that craved Taxi Driver, Shaft, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We booked it anyway, an expensive mistake that cost us a nearly empty auditorium for a week — but gave me an afternoon.

In that year of trying to keep the St. George Theatre’s doors open, I seldom watched a whole movie. I caught glimpses of whatever was on screen, as I passed from my office to the restroom, the candy stand or the manager’s office. As I walked back and forth, I felt I had seen the movie, especially if it wasn’t very good. When it was good, I lingered for stretches by the concession stand with a small buttered popcorn.

The Man Who Would Be King was the exception. It was lush, a tale of two adventurers in search of treasure. The tones of the movie are reddish gold, they matched the theater itself, the brocade and gilded statuary, especially when the light from the film shone on all that gold leaf. The characters in Kipling’s story are eventually undone by their own greed and a hunger for power, something I could barely imagine, struggling as I was to pay our rent on the theater and our house. 

Two people bought tickets for the show. Counting me, that made three of us in a 2,672-seat theater. I settled into my perch in the empty balcony. I would never sit there again or feel that free again, as we slipped, one week at a time, through what was to be a disastrous year. But in my memory of that afternoon, I am completely happy. I ate my popcorn right down to the grannies at the bottom of the box. The Man Who Would Be King was the movie for that moment in my life, filled with the right blend of desperation and bravado. 

When I was young in summer, there was nothing to do. Well, not nothing. You could run down the block for a quick game of kickball (unless it was too hot and there was nobody to play with). Alternatively, you could scrounge forty-five cents from the depleted ceramic pig on your dresser and walk ten hot blocks to one of the big theaters on Oakley Square, the Ambassador or the Twentieth Century. They were palaces, if far away. But the best was to get on the bus with your glamorous teenaged sister, if she’d let you come along, bound for the Mt. Lookout Theatre (now known as the Redmoor Event Center) where she worked box office or, alternately, concession stand. This was the sweetest option, because, as kid sister, you got in for free with a free popcorn to boot. You could watch Earth Versus the Flying Saucers all day if you wanted to; the shadows of the saucers over the Capitol Building never got old. Another weekend, it might be Forbidden Planet or even Moby Dick — that great moment when Ahab’s corpse (Gregory Peck or his stunt double) is tied to the whale and seems to be waving. It’s no surprise that, by the time I was 25, and living in Staten Island — a borough of New York City — I’d fallen in love with a 2,672-seat movie palace in that borough, the St. George Theatre, enough to sign a lease on the place.
 
All summer that year, kids shuffled into our cool marble lobby, some of them barely able to see over the lip of the box office sill, and shoved 90 cents under the bars in exchange for a ticket. 90 cents was twice what I’d paid in 1956, but then the price of eggs had jumped from 45 cents to around 85 cents by that time.
 
The obedient Midwestern middle-class child and teenager I had been would never have tried to pull a fast one in the lobby of any local theater; but the kids of St. George were street-smart New Yorkers, many of them from struggling families. Probably didn’t have allowances or piggy banks, come to think of it — or a sister who worked in a theater. It was hot, so they came. They wanted to see The Omen or Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Exorcist — or they just wanted to get lost in the dark.
 
The line between CHILD and ADULT had been firmly established at the St George Theatre as 12, but rules are made to be tested and broken if possible.
 
Slouching towards the box office window, a tallish thirteen-year-old shoves a dollar bill under the bars, muttering sotto voce, “one child...”
 
“Quick!”  Brenda intones, her hoop earrings flashing, “What year were you born?”
 
“...uh, uh, 1963?” the hustler stammers.
 
“One adult then,” Brenda concludes, pausing for the interviewee to produce two extra quarters and shove them over the sill, before she hits the button to eject a single red (adult) ticket.
 
Sometimes a customer would simply shrug and slide off towards the street, but most times he (it was hardly ever a she) actually had the change. No popcorn then, unless he could find a friend inside to glom off of.
 
There were other subterfuges. One clever guy actually walked backwards into the theater when patrons from the previous showing were walking out, but we nailed him. In a previous blog post, an old theater colleague recalls some kids who performed in the lobby hoping for a free pass. And then there were the kids who tried the exit doors upstairs, which, by law, had to be left unlocked. They had no handles on the outside, but if you were clever.... Let’s not forget the gang approach: five or six boys pooled their cash to buy one 90-cent ticket. The young ticket purchaser would then sneak up to the balcony and open the exit doors, letting in the co-conspirators. It almost never worked: the light from outside or the noisy door gave them away.
 
It’s a crime to sneak into a movie theater. Technically, the kid described in the first example, who lied about his age, was committing larceny (theft of services), at least in certain states. And the exit-door pryers can be charged as burglars. 
 
The kids in our lobby were just plain poor; we would never have considered calling the cops or pressing charges. We needed all the customers we could get, honest or otherwise. Besides, at least a tenth of them knew Leroy, our youngest usher, who, I suspected, helped more than a few pass for free. “Yo Leroy, lemme slide” — I’d hear. Never caught him, but one summer Saturday, we opened the door at 11:45 for the noon double feature. I found another manager counting a group of people gathered around the concession stand. “Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen...” 
 
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
 
“We’re doin’ great concession,” he observed, “but so far, we’ve only sold eight tickets!“

This is the week of fireworks, people-made stars. Grand Central in NYC makes me giddy each time I walk under its electric constellations. I remember a moment that dates back to my twenties, when, having survived a car trip up the FDR drive on New Year’s Eve Day, with a man so drunk I feared for my life, I spilled out of his Volvo and into Grand Central, and, after a brief passage emerged at last, under its comforting vaulted ceiling. Admittedly, I was drunk too, and in that moment, delighted just to be alive. 

The dome of the 2,672-seat movie palace I worked in a few years after that, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, sends me into transports of an entirely different order. There is, even at the height of the afternoon, no natural light in that beloved old Spanish Baroque Vaudeville  and cinema palace. 

Theaters, movie or otherwise, don’t often feature natural light the way other domed structures often do. Part of the wonder of Grand Central and other public spaces is the afternoon light flooding in from the sides. “...holes in the grillwork of the south windows throw spots of sun on the terminal floor, moving under commuters' quick feet in a predictable pattern, day after day, year after year,” Corey Kilgannon observed in “Darkness at Noon.”
 
Theaters have their own light, a whole history of it. Oddly and interestingly, the very first (Greek) theaters used natural light the way a modern lighting director or projectionist uses artificial, as an integral part of the show. Those first comedies and tragedies took place in the open air, at the top of the day. The sun, far from being a hindrance, was frequently used like a spotlight, with mirrors to enhance certain dramatic effects. Greek amphitheaters were “in the round,” built with the time of day in mind. A few centuries later, the Romans made a business of the whole thing, extending the possibilities for performance in settings like the Coliseum, to night, with the addition of torches, candles and lanterns. 

Better than a thousand years later, if you’d attended a performance at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, you’d have thought you were living in Greece. The Globe was a three-story open-air amphitheater, dependent on sunlight and good weather.

Not until something called Blackfriars appeared did Elizabethan theater move inside, with sixteenth-century “artificial lighting.” In addition to torches and lanterns, there were novelties — “dimmers” (on candles) and colored filters that had found their way across the Channel from Italy. In the seventeen hundreds, the kerosene lantern arrived, and lighting became stagecraft. 

Oil lamps and Lime Light (a spotlight made by heating a piece of lime with a flame of oxygen and hydrogen) followed. Then gaslight, and finally in 1881, London’s Savoy Theatre (home of Gilbert & Sullivan) installed incandescent lighting. Theaters had morphed gradually into domed windowless halls. Not only did natural light interfere with the waking dream of the play, but that great theater mystery (sometimes called a science), acoustics,seemed to fare better in rounded seamless spaces. 
Seated in the mezzanine of the St. George Theatre a few years ago, I had plenty of time to study the recessed dome, its edges where they meet the ceiling, pinched back like a skillfully-wrought upside-down pie crust. Grottoes left and right of the stage, containing matching goddesses draped in maroon velvet, and the heavily gilded proscenium, with hardly a square foot of unadorned wall space, gave me plenty to look at. The SGT is fascinating as an ancient cave, its walls adorned with gazelles and bison. The theater is an iced cake of gilt plaster and drapery that warms to any voice. One cold February night in 1976, a friend of mine, who was helping run the theater (she happened to have a natural operatic soprano voice), stood center stage without benefit of a mic and belted out “Amazing Grace.” It has been 42 years, but it could have been yesterday; I believe the voices that have spoken or sung under the dome are caught and held there, keeping each other company for as long as the building lasts. 

May sunlight never enter there.   

Afterthought:
​But how could I not mention atmospheric theaters in a post that deals with artificial light in domed spaces? The ultimate turning inside-out of a dome, is when the ceiling IS the sky! John Eberson, that genius of turning architecture inside-out, designed and built over a hundred of these wonders, beginning with the 2,800-seat Majestic in Dallas, Texas. The Paramount in Anderson, Indiana gives a video tour worth taking, and don’t miss the Avalon in Chicago, via Matt Lambros whose work documenting movie palaces in all states and conditions never fails to move, astonish and delight me. 
An earlier post on atmospherics tells more. 

According to The New York Times, large chunks of the U.S. are currently under something called a  “heat dome,” a curved lid of high pressure that traps hot air underneath it, causing corn to sweat, dogs to pant more heavily and people to seek dark interior spaces — for example, movie theaters. I wish that right this minute I were in a movie palace under that other cooler kind of dome, preferably with a gorgeous central chandelier, suggestive as they are or were of a visit from a saucerful of extraterrestrials. I also can’t help longing for those fake icicles they used to put on movie palace marquees or the refuge they promised from summer heat, all through my childhood.

At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I helped manage for one magical overwhelming year, 1976, I spent a good deal of off-time sitting in a mostly empty auditorium, under its consolingly magnificent dome. If the Czars of Russia had their winter palace, well we had our summer one. Czar Nicholas had fireplaces, but we had a giant central air conditioner, reminiscent of the 1930’s. As I recall, it was no easy feat getting the thing — almost the size of a city block — up and running: it shuddered and shook, reminding some of us of Frankenstein, when the monster awakes. 

Summer has traditionally been “block-buster” time in the movie business. Epics or big-themed movies with lots of action seemed to go well in the dog days. Why is this? The original experience of movie watching in theaters was a first, primitive kind of virtual reality, the ultimate escape: in hot summer the more overwhelming, the better. These days blockbusters are largely special effects driven, but in the summer of 1976, titles as various as Futureworld, The Omen, and Silent Movie kept people entertained in the cool dark under one kind of dome or another. 

With the exception of The Omen, whose reels we somehow got our hands on, other 1976 summer titles went to the first-run houses who could afford to bid for them. Our fare for June, July and August consisted of small-bore stuff like Godzilla vs. Megalon, or used titles that had been some other summer’s blockbusters, like Jaws (1974) or even the slightly-antique Deliverance (1972). 
The Exorcist had never been a summer movie, having enjoyed it’s original release date in December of 1973, but I will always think of it when dog days come around.

It became our private blockbuster, the only flick we ever showed that made a clear profit and filled our Spanish Baroque cave with people shoulder-to-shoulder, happy to be terrified, in the cool dark, under a soaring dome.
​
Stay cool this week wherever you are. Air conditioning is too ubiquitous these days to seem transforming, but there are still theaters, and some of them have domes.

“I don’t think,” film mogul William Fox remarked in the mid nineteen-twenties, “that there will ever be the much-dreamed-of talking pictures on a large scale. To have conversation would strain the eyesight and the sense of hearing at once, taking away the restfulness one gets from viewing pictures alone.”

​As Ben M. Hall, in The Best Remaining Seats, observes with a deal of irony, “Look who’s talking!” By the time Fox made this remark, the Warner Brothers had already taken the plunge with Vitaphone, a Bell lab wonder of synchronized sound, that consisted of a turntable which took twelve or sixteen-inch discs timed (more or less) to match the lip movements of actors on screen. So many technologies had already preceded Vitaphone (the Phonokinema, Phonofilm, Web’s Electrical Pictures, the Kinetophone, the New Kinetophone, the Cameraphone) it’s hard to keep track. Fox, the naysayer, was soon to join the parade with “Movietone,” based on a German invention, Tri-Ergon (sound on film). 

When his adaptation of this process was complete, Movietone became the granddaddy of movies as the world eventually came to know them, with a “stripe” of sound consisting of variously-dense lines along one side of film. This was better than Vitaphone, more exact, but, for a time, Vitaphone would be the expensive process theater operators dug deep into their pockets to absorb the cost of, just in time to offer their patrons the first spoken (movie) words, “Wait a minute — wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet!” — Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.  

Actually, the first “talkie” had already aired in New York (August, 1926), Don Juan, a romantic adventure (most kisses in film history — 127 actually!) starring John Barrymore. It was technically the first feature-length film to utilize Vitaphone (with synchronized musical score and sound effects) though it has no spoken dialogue. The talking picture Rubicon had yet to be crossed.

In 1976 at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island which I took a hand in helping to run, we found a Vitaphone handbook in the projection booth, and an old, non-functioning speaker backstage that bore the Vitaphone logo. Our theater had opened in 1929, with So This is College, a (Warner/Vitaphone) talking picture, two years after Jolson spoke and sang. By this time, every theater operator worth his (her?) salt already knew the Vitaphone Manual front-to-back, enough to program talking short films in place of the less-interesting live acts that used to play between silent features. Vaudeville was on the run, and so were some silent film stars who couldn’t talk without sounding like a squeaky mouse, had unacceptable accents, or simply couldn’t adjust to a different style of acting. Clara Bow (the “It Girl”) was one such: when she heard that there was a fire at Paramount, she quipped "I hope to Christ it was the sound stages!" A seasoned actor, she went on to make 11 talkies before retiring to become a rancher in Nevada.

What exactly was it about sound pictures that so disappointed a number of actors? Beyond wishing the sound stages would go up in flames, Bow  observed, "I hate talkies ... they're stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there's no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me." Harold Lloyd’s career never quite recovered when sound came in; the very soul of a physical actor, he had always done his own stunts. When sound was more or less a fait accompli, Lloyd actually made a film (Welcome Danger) in two versions, one a talking picture and the other a silent. Charlie Chaplin, who wrote and produced most of the movies he starred in, simply refused to accept sound, producing City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936) without dialogue. (His use of sound-effects in both these films was brilliant).

But despite Chaplin’s sophistication, sound was here to stay; nothing in Hollywood would ever be the same. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight major studios to release its first (part-) talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter.
It would take a while for all of America to follow the new technology: the number of sound cinemas grew from 100 to 800 between 1928 and 1929, but were, for a brief time, vastly outnumbered by silent theaters--which nonetheless grew in number in the same period, from 22,204 to 22,544. For a while, a little way into 1930, Hollywood produced movies in dual versions, silent and talking. Though few in the industry had predicted it (including William Fox, whose early opinion on sound started this blog post), Points West, a Hoot Gibson Western released by Universal in 1929, would be the last purely silent mainstream feature to emerge.

By the time I came of age in the sixties, most of the silent stars had left their handprints and footprints in Grauman’s cement, and, endangered species that they were, had gone off to live in the Hollywood Hills or elsewhere, if they had made enough money, at an ironic remove from official Hollywood. There are interesting exceptions, including Lillian Gish who kept working until six years before her death in 1993, making her last screen appearance in 1987. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about movie palaces as the natural homes of the silents, but it ain’t necessarily so. Our theater, the St. George, was built when silents reigned, but opened in 1929 with a talkie. Its dressing rooms (rubble-strewn and vacant by the time we came along in 1976) housed vaudeville actors a little way into the 30’s, but silents were, as it turned out, never on the bill. Nor were they available at a host of other prominent palaces, including, among others, the gorgeous Atlanta Fox (1929), the Pomona Fox (1931), The Loew’s 175th Street Theatre (1930 — “Times Square entertainment nearer your home!”) (now the United Palace), all of which were completed in the age of sound.

As for the movies themselves, what exactly is a movie, and how long will movie-going last? When I first entered the projection booth of the St. George Theatre, its hulking carbon-arc projectors were already obsolete. Not so long ago, friend Bob Endres, who worked the better part of his adult life as the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, a man I remember for his white-gloved treatment of film, dropped a small disc into a computer at Dolby Sound, where he currently works, and a crisp movie appeared on the screen in their viewing studio. Think of the kinetoscope at the beginning of the 20th  century, film’s century. It was a single-viewer device. And then there were nickelodeons — those primitive storefront theaters. And crowds gathered in vacant lots in places like Toledo, Ohio — my mother remembered sitting on some wooden benches watching flickering images on a bed sheet, batting away the mosquitos.

That’s how it all began, followed by movie palaces and hometown theaters. And then TV comes along, right there in your living room, smaller but free. TV forces the movie industry to create smaller theaters with more screens to allow for select crowds and greater choice. (I had the bad luck or poor judgement to try running a movie palace at that juncture!). Movies, by this time, have come to TV. A decade later TV is in every room of every house and then it too begins to disappear! The Internet, that biggest of all fishes, swallows it whole, and here we are again, watching tiny screens — it’s an endless loop of technology.
​
Afterthought:
During my theater management year, we ran Silent Movie, a film by Mel Brooks in which nobody actually speaks, except, once, a mime...It may have been the only silent our twenties movie palace ever presented...