Traditionally to mark the New Year, I run this reminiscence written by an original staffer, Paul Plonski, of closing down the St. George Theater before midnight, forty-two years ago.  Here it is, altered somewhat, with embellishments, and a series of “afterthoughts,” about the blog in general...
 
The movie had just gone off-screen at the St. George Theatre, our 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. Gabe, our grizzled projectionist (returned to the fold after being disciplined by his union for TV watching in the booth) wanted to get on our good side. His shift over, he strode to the concession stand and slapped down on the glass display case a rather ordinary box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies.
 
“Happy New Year!” He smiled at me, that crooked tobacco-stained grin of his. “These are for you and Dean. Yeah, yeah, I meant to give’m to you at Christmas, but I forgot...” He buttoned his peacoat and made for the street, his brief foray into sociability accomplished.
 
Paulie, who had the concession shift that night, was just shutting things down, counting change, locking the case. He pointed a pretend revolver at the back of the retreating projectionist, and fired a phantom bullet. I laughed, Dean patted Paulie on the back. Everybody knew Gabe’s hourly pay was $14.76. Rich as he was, the Entenmann’s seemed as puny as the gesture that had produced it. We hadn’t paid ourselves in months, and Paulie, worth eleven of Gabe, got minimum wage, $2.20 an hour. 
 
Dean stepped into the stand and grabbed Paulie’s Windex and rag.
 
“It’s almost midnight, and I imagine you’ve got other plans,” he told the kid, fourteen years his junior.
 
Thirty-eight years later, thanks to the internet, Paulie, in his fifties (these days an aeronautical engineer), found me via this website. We’re reacquainted as full adults since then, and I’m happy to say that his memory of that particular New Year’s Eve has become a traditional post for SW.
 
On that preternaturally cold night, we darkened the house, closed down the box office, locked the concession stand, threw the giant breakers to power down the marquee, and bolted the glass doors. We wished whoever remained good luck in the coming new year, 1977. Paulie jumped into his car, parked just below the marquee, and a few of us “management” folk straggled up the hill towards home and some eggnog I had ready. But Paulie’s night would be a little different:
 
You and Dean had made sure to get us out of the theater before midnight so we could make it home in time.
 
My ‘68 Pontiac Firebird was parked on Hyatt Street, right in front of the theater. At around 11:30 I got in, started the car, but could not get it into gear. So...at midnight I was still on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing.
 
[It was around 15 degrees F that night, with wind gusts off the harbor of up to 25 mph; in fact, New Year’s Eve in NYC, ’76 is tied with ’96 for the fifth coldest Dec 31st in recorded weather history].
 
Quiet, except for the wind. Then at the stroke of midnight, the ships in the harbor sounded their whistles and shot off fireworks. It was just me, the wind and the ships with the NYC skyline, a night to cherish forever. PS: The New Years party was still raging when I made it home (nothing missed).
 
Privation, exhilaration. These fit my overall experience of running the theater in 1976 and the first few months of 1977. It was going to be a cold cold winter; we’d be out, broke, by spring. But the theater, while it lasted, was itself a kind of fireworks, a lit spark I try to keep going, in these blog posts.
 
Thanks again, Paulie...and Happy New Year.
 
Peace to everyone... And in the coming year don’t forget to like us on FB, and don’t be shy about comments...and, if you can, find a local movie palace of your own to support.
 
Afterthoughts:
None of these thoughts has anything to do with New Year’s Eves past or present...
 
Afterthought 1:  Radio City Music Hall’s perils, mentioned in last week’s blog post,  raised some interesting responses from many dancers who worked at the Hall. I am  now pleased to number among my friends Rosemary Novellino, thefounder of The Show people’s Committee to Save Radio City Music Hall, and author of Saving Radio City Music Hall: a Dancer’s True Story.Comments from alumna rockettes have come in via FB Message, some of which I’ll be adding to the blog’s comments column, as I get permission. A lot of people breathed sighs of relief when the NYC Landmarks Commission ruled in favor of saving Manhattan’s only remaining palace below 175th Street. 
 
Afterthought 2:  A blog post on Shea’s Performing Arts Center Buffalo with, I promise, a fascinating sub-story of the man who slept in that theater to keep it from being stripped of its Tiffany-designed elements and its remarkable theater organ, is forthcoming.
 
3.  A dance review on December 24, by Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times, “E Pluribus Nutcracker,”  turns out to have been, among other things, a hymn to my beloved St. George Theatre, and I quote:
 
The St. George is a marvel too little known outside Staten Island. The 2,800-seat theater, built in 1929, was intended as a home for vaudeville and cinema to vie with those across the water on Broadway. After coming close to demolition at the start of this century, it has been lovingly restored. The foyers and balconies are fabulously ornate. Auditorium, front-of-house areas...are spectacular.
 
Sailing past the Statue of Liberty on his way home, Macaulay seems to be making the point that the whole trip, to and from Manhattan, is part of the adventure, 
 
On the way back from Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty seemed a perfect part of a “Nutcracker” day. Like the Sugar Plum Fairy, she welcomes strangers and embraces diversity.

A friend who lives near Philly mentioned the other day that he’d come up to NYC to see the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall; don’t believe he even spent the night, just came and went, mesmerized by the mechanics of the show, the elaborate stagecraft, the appearing and disappearing orchestra, and no doubt the iconic Wooden Soldier Fall, a dance move dating back to 1933, that mimics falling dominoes, as each dancer/soldier falls on the next one. This year’s show, I’m told, includes the falling soldiers and, of course, the usual camels, part of the traditional “Living Nativity” — also dating back to ‘33. There are other post-millennial wonders of course, including a finale with overhead drones. Where are there NOT drones these days? I live in the five boroughs, so of course haven’t been to the Christmas Show in years. The last time was about fifteen years ago with my sister, who’d come north to see me through a knee operation. I was on crutches, barely able to walk, so the sight of all those perfectly proportioned bodies, their parallel legs raised six inches above their heads, seemed surreal. But then, I’ve always found chorus lines dream-like...
 
It all started on December 21, 1933, the year after the Music Hall opened. That first Christmas Show was accompanied by the movie Flying Down to Rio (strange choice, perhaps) and The Night Before Christmas, a Walt Disney Silly Symphony — an animated short film. The show, created by the Music Hall's stage producer Leon Leonidoff and none other than Vincente Minnelli, (then Radio City’s music director) lasted just two weeks.
 
Fast forward to the 1970‘s: the nearly six-thousand-seat Radio City was still showing movies and presenting a stage show, but drawing scant audiences, something I failed to notice that year, busy as I was, running a movie palace of my own. (Well, not my own, because I didn’t own it, just the right to go broke paying its rent). That would be the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat hall in Staten Island, seventy blocks south of Radio City and a ferry-ride away. We had no Christmas Show at the St. George in 1976, just a four-wall “deal” involving a little-known movie called In Search of Noah’s Ark, which purported to prove that pieces of Noah’s original ark had been found on Mt. Ararat. Well, it was a living, at least for that month, and because it was a four-wall, we didn’t have to do anything but turn the theater over to  Sun Pictures, and pop some popcorn. Towards the end of the Noah’s Ark run, we managed to get a local teen escape artist/magician onstage between showings, to take the chill off.  
 
As a result of running the St. George, I met Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City and, the following year, got a private tour of our big sister theater, including a private showing of some or other forgettable movie (Pete’s Dragon?) and a rehearsal of the Rockettes. A private showing in a nearly six-thousand-seat hall really is a little unnerving... By that time, I was an ex-movie theater operator, and could see just how much trouble big theaters were in everywhere. There was talk, that year and the year after, of the demise of Radio City, the last of the Manhattan behemoth palaces; which brings us to January 1978, when the end nearly did come for the music hall. 
 
“Nostalgia Draws Music Hall Crowds, Despite Cold”
 
The headline could have come out of yesterday’s New York Times, but it didn’t. The date at the top of the column is January 8, 1978. Radio City, Roxy Rothafel’s great gold Deco clamshell of a theatre, occupying — since 1932 — several thousand square feet of prime NYC real estate, about a half-block of Midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was in trouble. Everybody knew about it; 5,690 mostly-vacant seats in Midtown? "Vacant" anything is a no-go in Manhattan. Management promised to keep the doors open till Easter. Then the Rockettes — once upon a time Russell Markert's Music Hall Roxyettes — and the whole shebang would be gone. Folks from as far away as Minnesota braved the frostbite of forty-one years ago, in lines four deep around the corner, compelled by the notion that the Music Hall was going the way of so many palaces. It had been “curtains” (pun intended) for the Roxy, Radio City's sister theater only a few blocks farther downtown (demolished in 1960) and on the other coast, for the 3,387-seat Paramount (aka Graumann’s Metropolitan) in L.A. (torn down in 1961), just to name two spectacular demolitions. By 1978,  it seemed there might be more movie palaces down than standing.
 
I’d read the headlines too, and had felt the despair. I was still grappling with my own severe depression: less than a year before, my team had crash-landed, after trying and failing to keep the St. George open as a movie palace. The year after our failure, my old favorite hometown palace, the RKO Albee, had finally been reduced to a pile of marble and plaster dust in Cincinnati, despite a vigilant Save the Albee committee. My friend and colleague, Robert Endres, then still head projectionist at RCMH, recalls the shock of hearing that Radio City would close:
 
I guess you could say I was ‘stunned’ at the closing announcement as was everyone else. I had been out in Illinois with my parents over the Christmas holiday.... I walked into work that first day back to be told there was a meeting in the large rehearsal hall and we were told to attend. When I got there the Music Hall executive staff was there, as was Marshall [president of Rockefeller Center] who made the announcement. The mood was pretty grim.
           
It was a time, the late seventies, when hardly anybody could see far enough into the future to imagine how the great halls could ever be useful again. Across America, in most cities, suburbanites hardly ever went “downtown” anymore: derelict palaces in badly-lit urban settings made downtown movie-going seem a lonely, even dangerous experience. Even inside the theaters, there were incidents. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb. Such was the life of the urban movie-goer — and exhibitor.
 
The Music Hall had an entirely different problem. Manhattan is the ultimate “downtown,“ so even in the dire seventies, there were plenty of people on Midtown streets, and the Music Hall was certainly safe, if hardly populated. But with nearly six thousand seats, a dwindling NYC tourism couldn’t begin to support Radio City; and New Yorkers didn’t think of the Music Hall as a place to go for movies. To quote New York on the subject of moviegoing in 1978, “ You consulted one of the foldout sheets everyone had tacked above their desks or in their kitchen, from the revival houses, blessed be their names—the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Regency, Theatre 80 Saint Marks, the Bleecker Street Cinema.” These were the theaters of the day. Ironically, it’s these very art houses that are mostly gone now, while among other refurbished movie palaces, Radio City stands. 
 
It was — who else? — the Rockettes who finally saved Radio City. Two days after Alton Marshall made the announcement that the theater’s last day would be April 12, Rosemary Novellino the dance captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company and Eileen Collins, the Rockettes' union rep, founded The Showpeople’s Committee To Save Radio City Music Hall, with the Rockettes at the movement’s core.
 
While all those patrons were standing in lines four deep on the cold pavement, Rockettes were entertaining them! The committee, meanwhile, launched its letter-writing campaign gathering better than 150,000 signatures worldwide, an impressive feat pre-internet. This and a number of efforts at publicity – including some guerrilla theater, in which committee members gathered signatures while dressed in suits of armor (to highlight their “war” to save the Music Hall) – could not be ignored by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the morning of March 14, the day of Radio City’s Commission hearing, the committee organized an “impromptu” Rockette kick line on the steps of City Hall. 
 
Two weeks later on March 28, the Music Hall's interior was declared a landmark, and not a moment too soon, given Marshall's deadline. Six weeks after that, on May 12, 1978, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. 
 
A little more than forty years after the Rockettes danced in the cold — for all those people who assumed they were getting a last look at Radio City — the hall is still standing, a live house featuring occasional film.  
 
As are many grand theaters across America, including my own St. George. Despite our failure to keep it alive as a movie house in 1976, and a number of failed subsequent efforts by entrepreneurs at repurposing the St. George (roller rink, dinner theater, antiques venue), it’s alive and kicking; and I mean that literally, with a children’s corps of dancers onstage many afternoons. This story can be had via the recent PBS Documentary, Treasures of New York: St. George Theatre starring our theater’s eventual savior, Rosemary Cappozalo, and her family. Rosemary, or "Mrs. Rosemary," as she's known in Staten Island, was a Julliard-trained dancer and veteran teacher herself. What is it about dancers? In the cold, on the sidewalk, or in a deserted theater, they just keep moving!
 
Afterthoughts:  
1. Coming Soon: the story of Shea’s Buffalo, the only Tiffany-designed theater still standing, a theater-rescue story to follow the near-demise of Radio City.
​
2. The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York City would never have existed if the city hadn’t demolished one of its most glorious buildings, the old Penn Station, and felt a deal of remorse about that fact, passing the Landmarks Law in 1965. So without the loss of that fine Beaux Arts transportation hub, Radio City Music Hall (and a number of other buildings, including Grand Central and large parts of the Broadway Theater District) might never have been spared.

3. Something anecdotal: a story in my husband’s family involves a friend of his father’s, a WWII G.I. who was in the vanguard of American troops that liberated Paris in 1944. Story goes, he was riding on a tank in the liberation parade when a woman tossed him some flowers, exclaiming, “Vive les americaines!” In return, the soldier shouted, in his best high school French, “Vive la Arc de Triomphe.” Determined to have the last salute, the smiling woman sang out, “...et vive la Radio City Music Hall!”

​4. Bob  Endres (formerly of RCMH) gets the last say:  “I heard one interesting story from a former vice president who, after he retired, had lunch with Alton Marshall...President of Rock Center. Marshall apparently told him that they really didn't want to close the Hall, but...had to do something about the format, so they put the story out that they were going to close...to get enough attention to be able to restructure...”  

Now that the St. George Theatre, our local palace, has a movie screen for the first time in forty-one years, I’m thinking wistfully about the old one. I remember it well, having run the 2,672-seat Spanish Baroque theater, in the last full year of its cinema career (1976). After serving briefly as a flea market and a dangerous dark period of near demolition, the St. George is, these days, largely a performance space, as so many surviving movie palaces are. But film is finding its way back into the palaces of yore; think the United Palace of the Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights) and the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, N.C. among so many across the U.S. So the St. George has caught a ride on the film series band-wagon.

Descending on a pipe from the fly loft, the theater’s current screen is a relative postage stamp, compared to its predecessor, a classic of the 1950’s, mounted on a giant curved stretcher. Consisting of a huge piece of heavy white perforated material, the old screen had tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual metals embedded in their surfaces. Designed to accept Cinemascope, our screen had a good “gain” — or reflectivity — and was “pearlescent.” Black tones came across as very dark gray, and the overall image was bright — if you ignored the grape soda stains in the lower left-hand corner, from some impulsive long-gone patron. 

The screen curved slightly outward at the left and right edges. I always thought the curve had something to do with wrapping the audience in light, and I was partially right. A flat screen makes light travel farther to its corners, encouraging a slightly distorted image, the so-called “pincushion effect.” Godzilla battled Megalon on our screen with no distortion, the grape stain hardly evident, once the battle was underway.

Everything I know about the screen and screens in general, I have learned in retrospect. In 1976, we were just trying to stay alive, relieved if more than a few hundred people paid money to sit in the dark and watch, and grateful that we had a screen at all. Although we could hardly afford a new one, our buddy, Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall conspired briefly to get us a “used” screen at no charge. Radio City, then primarily a movie theater, traditionally replaced its pristine screen annually (no soda stains for them). Theirs was better than twice the size of ours; so half of a discarded Radio City screen would have been plenty. Alas, our stint at the St. George was over before we could take advantage of this bargain.

Certain ushers liked to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. Little did our audience know that, while they were watching, all sorts of antics were going on behind the screen. Each night an usher went into the shadows back stage to engage two switches: one to bring up the red and blue footlights and another to light the house sconces, as the film ended. Leroy — scrawny, barely 5’5” and 130 pounds — was always reluctant to go into the dark, even if only a comedy was showing. 

One night during the last reel of The Exorcist it fell to a reluctant Leroy to do this duty. One priest was already dead and another would soon hurl himself from a window, possessed by the Devil. Add all of this to the soundtrack of tubular bells — indeed creepy. Unbeknownst to Leroy, Cheri, a bit of the devil already in her, lurked in the shadows, stage right. As he approached, she pushed a flashlight beneath her chin and rasped out, “I willlllllll possess you!”

The blood-curdling scream and pounding footsteps that came easily through the perforated screen, probably seemed just one more chilling movie sound effect to folks still seated in the house. Who knows if some long-ago patron of ours hasn’t downloaded the movie recently and wondered as the credits rolled, Wasn’t there a last scream?

Afterthought: In last week’s post, I recounted an evening spent at the first movie to show at the St. George in decades, Working Girl, on the new small screen I mentioned. Heading for the balcony, I felt a bit like a returned working girl myself, glimpsing, as I passed, my former office under the stairs in the lobby: a pang mixed with a thrill.  

I have a number of small souvenirs from the St. George Theatre, originally a 2,672-seat movie palace which I had a hand in running for one year,1976 (and a little way into 1977). Rolls of tickets (1 adult $1.50), Starts Wednesday, Starts Sunday, and other signs for every day of the week, BALCONY CLOS D, an original EXIT sign, cast-aluminum marquee signage: TECHNICOLOR, AND, even a lone cast-aluminum marquee comma. Our year in the theater didn’t end well, as you may already know. Perpetually in the red, in a decade when single-screen theaters, let alone movie palaces, were imperiled, we cut corners in all sorts of crazy ways, like running the film but not the light in the projector, to keep on schedule, in case somebody showed up. The projectors ran on very expensive “carbons,” two of which (positive meets negative) created an “arc” similar to that used in welding, hence fire, hence light. Primitive? The technology was old even then. I have a box of carbons, come to think about it, one more ancient souvenir.

And now I have a new item to add to my St. George Theatre collection, a drink cup bearing the legend “St. George Theatre, A Non-Profit Organization.” As my husband Dean is fond of remarking, “We were non-profit back then, too; we just didn’t know it!” 

I got this cup last week for attending the first movie offered at the St. George since we loaded up our U-Haul forty-one years ago. 

For a long time, the current proprietors, a local family with roots in children’s dance, Rosemary Cappozalo and her daughters, Luanne Sorrentino, and Doreen Cugno,  seemed reluctant to present movies. Hadn’t the theater originally been built for Vaudeville? The fact that the old stained screen had burned long ago in a fire had to have been something of an impediment; but several local groups, including Staten Island Arts, have shown interest in presenting movies; and arts grants are a good thing  – that’s what admitting you’re actually not-for-profit gets you! 

Working Girl, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, was the entertainment of the evening, a movie born of the decade that followed our theater time. Our Zeitgeist had been all about horror (The Exorcist, Burnt Offerings, Carrie) or mean streets: Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Cooley High; but by 1988, the St. George was dark, having exhausted its brief post-movie house careers as 1.) a flea market and 2.) a roller rink. Across the harbor, mean streets had given way to Wall Street and the Reagan years. 
It had been bitterly cold when I’d last seen a movie in the theater, February, 1977. Carrie; I remember shivering in the balcony. It was too cold to sit down.The landlord had stopped heating our beloved cave in late November, and we had worked for months in the cold, selling tickets with gloves on, warming our hands in the popcorn machine. To watch the first movie officially screened in almost half a century, at the theater we lost — despite every effort, legal and otherwise, to keep it open — and for that movie to drag New York Harbor uphill just a few blocks, and let it fill the screen before us, while we sat in the familiar (somehow warm) dark, was my catnip. 

Friends I was sitting with had never seen the theater’s interior before, so I gave it to them in backstage tales, explaining why a digital projector tethered to the lip of the balcony isn’t the same at all as two carbon arc projectors, pointing up and back at the darkened portals of the projection booth. We had wine and popcorn, a strange pairing, one that seemed wrong, but made me wonder if I’d have gotten through the winter of 1977 better with a little pinot noir hidden behind the candy stand. There had been grass, but I wasn’t much given to smoking it back then; besides, it was expensive, and we were broke. 

There were vendors the other night, working the lobby and the mezzanine. You could get your hair styled and teased on the spot, you could buy a vintage coat with shoulder pads. For many of the nine hundred or so people who showed up, it was an event, to share on social media, a local arts party. 
Where was I? What decade was I in? Melanie Griffith, Alec Baldwin, and Harrison Ford were all so young, they could have played adolescent walk-on roles in one or another of the movies we showed.  I just checked: Griffith actually DID play such a role in Smile, a 1975 Indy we showed early in ’76. 

I settled in and watched. The format  of the new screen was, as I’d feared, terrible, almost square; the title, Working Girl, was at risk of losing its W and its l, on the truncated flat white surface. As is true almost everywhere nowadays, the beam didn’t come from on high; it lacked a certain divinity.
I closed my eyes and listened to the movie; and, thanks to those gorgeous acoustics I knew all about, the sound track wrapped itself around us, voices in a dream. The three of us — my goddaughter, her mother (my friend) and I — had planned to walk out after the opening, having come to see a New York Harbor we two older women remembered commuting back and forth on, with its then-intact World Trade Center and packed morning ferry.  As it turned out, we stayed a little way into the movie, past the point where Melanie Griffith cuts her hair.

“We’re walking out of the 1980’s,” I whispered, as we made our way down the steps from the balcony.

Or was it the seventies? 

“This is really something. I wish I could enter the settings of my first adventures...” my friend said.

She meant, “...the way you do when you come here.” 

​Well, she had a point. (What exactly is the past?)

“When it’s winter, and I’ve got tickets to a concert here, I can’t quite believe my feet are warm,” is all I had to say.

​Movies are time-benders, living dreams. Movie palaces — I truly believe this — are the Faberge Eggs built to contain them.

One slate-sky day in 2003, I rounded the corner on Hyatt St. in Staten Island, just a few blocks north of New York Harbor and the ferries, and a few blocks south of my house on the hill. I was just about to pass the St. George Theatre, which, as a matter of fact, I’d gone bankrupt running as a movie palace, twenty-seven years before. The theater had been closed for most of those years, but it wasn’t closed that day. There, to my astonishment, under the crumbling marquee, was a pair of star wagons, a catering truck and some generators; a movie was obviously in the making. I’ve seen star wagons galore and nearly tripped over half-dressed actors of some renown across the water in Manhattan; Richard Pryor, sitting on a folding chair on Bleecker Street next to a fire hydrant sometime in 1989 comes to mind; but my home borough is a rarer location site, and our local, then-defunct movie palace rarer still. The movie being filmed that week was, it turned out, School of Rock, the vehicle that propelled Jack Black into the indie stratosphere. It’s presence caused me to reflect, even then, about theaters as locales for movies. How many movies do you know that feature a theater? 

Certain movies practically are their locations: Cinema Paradiso, The Last Picture Show, The Projectionist, Buster Keaton’s silent classic, Sherlock Jr. The last two involve fantasizing projectionists, while Cinema Paradiso and The Last Picture Show involve small-town memories of a returned successful artist. 
The movie theater in Cinema Paradiso wasn’t actual, but a confection based on the memories of its director, Giuseppe Tornatore, of his hometown in Sicily. To get a sense of how the mind of a director searching for location actually works, here’s a quote from movie-locations.com. 

Giancaldo (fictional name for the town), is based on the director’s birthplace of Bagheria, a short train or bus ride to the east of Palermo in northern Sicily...Although scenes were filmed in Bagheria, the famous town square [in the film] is Piazza Umberto in the village of Palazzo Adriano, about 30 miles to the south of Palermo...

The ‘Paradiso’ cinema was built here, at Via Nino Bixio, overlooking the octagonal Baroque fountain, which dates from 1608. The set obviously didn’t survive the filming, but you can still recognize the nearby house onto which Alfredo projects [the film] I Pompieri Di Viggiu (The Firemen Of Viggiu) ... Just to the west, the two churches seen in the film face each other across the piazza.

Like Tornatore, the novelist Larry McMurtry based The Last Picture Show on a reminiscence of his hometown of Archer City, Texas, fictionalized in the novel as “Thalia.” Peter Bogdanovich, his director, dubbed it “Anarene;” in the film, but no matter, the real Archer City served as the location for this 1971 movie. At the time, the town movie theater, the Royal, was closed down, just a shell, superficially spiffed up to become a temporary stage-set. This is where it gets interesting. According to movie- locations.com, 

In the Nineties, ambitious plans to restore the theatre finally bore fruit and, after 35 years, the Royal opened its doors again [this time] as a successful live theatre. 

The movie had become a classic, curated by the Library of Congress, and the Royal began attracting tourists. These days it hosts the Texasville Opry, the Late Week Lazy Boy Supper Club and numerous plays and performances. Its career as a dedicated movie house is over, but as a live venue,  the Royal has only just begun; and largely on account of the movie!

Let’s not ignore either of the projectionist flicks, Keaton’s Sherlocke Jr., and that weird indie, The Projectionist, both of which involve the craft of projection. I don’t know if the movie house in Keaton’s flick is or was real (if you happen to know, please tell me!), but the movie theater featured in The Projectionist, is an amalgam of several, according to IMDB: 

The film's main setting, a once-lush Times Square movie house, was composited with the façade of an Upper West Side cinema and the projection booth of an Asbury Park theater donated by the Walter Reade Organization in return for the courtesy of a first look. 

If you’ve never seen this 1970 movie, I strongly recommend it. Rodney Dangerfield plays the sleezy and utterly-believable manager, and Chuck McCann, the dreamy projectionist who eventually morphs into Captain Flash. Its unreality, based on the delusions of the projectionist himself, is its greatest charm. He longs for nothing more than to be a hero in a movie, that is, to cross over into the screen.

Which brings us to another movie that contains a movie inside it, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Woody Allen’s 1985 comedy presents a woman who falls in love with a fictional archaeologist, resulting in that character walking literally off of the movie screen and into real life. The film takes place in Depression-era New Jersey, but the theater where Cecilia (played by Mia Farrow) sees fictional Purple Rose over and over again, is named after The Jewel movie house in Brooklyn — one of the first theaters in Allen’s old neighborhood to show foreign films, and perhaps his favorite theater. Movie house scenes were actually filmed in the Kent Theatre on Coney Island Avenue in Flatbush, still operating today.

According to the New York Times, Allen, 

....recalled seeing cartoon double features for 11 cents at the Kent when he was young; entry came with a gift, like a comic book or a toy gun. He said the theater was “a pleasant addition” to the neighborhood, as it was the last place you could see a film before “it vanished into movie oblivion.”

How many directors, novelists and screenwriters have one or two hometown movie theaters on the shelf of their imaginations?

L.A. is, of course, the Mecca of movie house locations, perhaps most recently the Rialto (not the one in the downtown district, but the one in Pasadena), which serves as a locale for Sebastian and Mia’s first date in La La Land.  Sadly, it appears to have morphed into a church. Ah well.

What is it about the movie theater within the movie? Maybe the whole deal about filming inside a theater is a  kind of grown-up dollhouse longing, the famous theoretical “fourth wall” of theater broken down, for easier entrance?

Afterthought: Check out this formidable list of L.A. theaters that have served and continue to serve as locations.

The sun, I’ve recently learned, is always setting on a drive-in theater somewhere.

A friend who studied abroad in India some time ago happened to mention the other night over turkey and cranberries that she’d been to a drive-in in the sub-continent. Drive-ins not in the U.S? Who knew? 
“When I was staying with a local family, we packed poori and dhal and beer and chutney and other edibles and went off to catch a little Bollywood....”  Amazing! While I was struggling to run a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, she was sitting under the Indian stars, eating Tandoori and knocking back a couple of Taj Mahals, Ali Baba playing on screen. 

I’d always assumed drive-ins were a strictly American phenom. We’re the car culture of the world; only in America would a man — whose (obese?) mother couldn’t fit comfortably into a standard movie house seat — think to invent a theater where she could stay in the family car, eat popcorn and watch the flick in private. The man whose mother that was, Richard Hollingshead, was a movie fan and  sales manager at his father’s company, Whiz Auto Products, in Camden, New Jersey. He patented his idea, which became Park-In Theaters in 1933. 

Back to Thanksgiving. While I was deep in conversation with my friend about the plots of Indian films, my husband, at the other end of the table, was having a parallel conversation with another friend, a British ex-pat, who noted that there are two drive-ins in the U.K., and he’s been to neither. He’d like to go to a drive-in anywhere, soon. Perhaps this will happen for him, with more than ten drive-ins within two hours of New York City. 

As to their number in the U.K., he’s close to right; there are actually three drive-ins there, one in Manchester, one in Liverpool and one in London. The one in London sounds like a real send-off of all things American; according to the London TimesDriving column, “As we pull up at the ticket office an usherette on roller skates slides up to our door. Dressed in classic American-style garb, she explains how the screening works: attendants will guide us to a space; we should switch off the headlights to avoid dazzling or flattening the battery; we may run the engine, if necessary; be sure to tune in to the film’s FM frequency on your stereo; flash the hazard lights if you need any refreshments…”

The Drive-In Film Club in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London has something on the drive-ins of my youth, the Oakley and the Montgomery, in Cincinnati, (both long gone). Who could imagine car-hops with food? or usherettes on roller skates? We hoofed it to the snack stand in my day, and, from what I’ve seen of revived American drive-ins, people still make their way there on foot — or send the kids. How else to get them out of your hair for a minute? Other drive-in theaters in the U.K., which would include the Route 66 (yes!) chain, are owned by the same outfit. Route 66 has screens in Manchester, Liverpool and, soon, in Leeds. Don’t miss the previous link if you want to read about how insane Brits are these days on the subject of remaining in their cars. The Liverpool Route 66 is only one feature of a 24-hour attempt on the part of one London Timesreporter to remain in his car for a whole day, eating, stopping for coffee, going to a bank and a dry cleaners, and, yes, a movie, followed by napping in a tony part of London. He even profiles a type of disposable urinal. 

The reason drive-in theaters are on the rise in Britain is so is gridlock; which is a clue to why India, with its growing population of drivers, has four drive-in theaters. The largest one, which happens to be larger than any other drive-in theater I know of, is the Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad, with, they claim, space to play to 6000 people for a single showing (665 very crowded cars). Screening mainly home-grown fare from Bollywood, the Sunset doesn’t actually require a car for admission. Pedestrians stand under a special covered area despite winter temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius (86F).The world’s only beach-side drive-in, the Prarthana, is located in Southern India, and includes “on-site dining.”  The STBL, on the coast in Northeast India, got four stars from UdaY, who noted, three weeks ago, “You can visit here with your four wheeler directly to the outdoor theatre to watch the movies. Both indoor & outdoor also available here. For outdoor they also provide chairs and fans just beside to your four wheeler. Food zone; snacks ; other amusements for kids are also available here. They also provide a free cab from highway to the theatre. Try to visit this place at least once for a different chill outs.” There’s apparently a brand-new drive-in in Mumbai. Which theater did my Thanksgiving guest have the pleasure of visiting? And was she in a car?

I found only one mention of a drive-in in Europe, in Cadiz, Spain, but it’s in Fort Mitchell, a naval base, so I imagine, from the name (Flix Cinema) that it must be American. Doesn’t count. There are lots of outdoor cinemas in Paris, Barcelona, Locarno, Vienna, and other European locales, but all of them are for pedestrians. If you want to experience outdoor movies from an individual hot tub, check out hot tub cinemas in London, Liverpool, New York, Ontario, Los Angeles and elsewhere; but you can’t drive a hot tub, and the screen-size sucks. 

Where else are drive-ins on the rise? China, of course.  With a burgeoning car culture, you can bet that the two drive-ins I could find evidence of that are available to Chinese movie patrons, are likely to spawn more. For a trip to the Maple Motor Theatre in Beijing, check out this YouTube video, which includes an interview with Wang Qishun the owner and founder. He always loved movies, and then he loved cars. It became his life’s dream to “...let our friends and other car owners watch movies in their cars like Americans.” He’s done that, and now he’s going for a chain; there may already be as many as ten drive-ins throughout China, he speculates. 

I love drive-ins. There are currently only around 333 in the U.S., which still makes us the drive-in theater Mecca of the world; but nothing compared to the 4,000 that squeezed in cars in the late 1950’s. Currently, there is at least one drive-in in every state but Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana and North Dakota. Find one near you.

Despite the fact that drive-ins world-wide are likely indicators of global warming on the rise, I understand why people in India, China and the U.K. are warming (no pun intended) to them. As Nick Frow, Director of the Drive-In Film Club in London, observes, “Your car is your kingdom, basically. You can do exactly what you want when you want to do it in your car. You want to rustle your sweet packets? Want to talk to your missus, or the family in the back? Brought a baby and it wants to cry or needs a feed? No problem. It’s perfect.” 
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I gather that rustling sweet packets has to do with candy, though it has a slightly sexy sound to it; but then drive-ins have always been great places to fool around. The steamed-up windows provide perfect sanctuary. Here’s to the Oakley in Cincinnati, scene, in my life, of several passionate dates, and these days the site of a retirement home. I wonder if any of the residents upstairs revisit nights they recall having in cars, down on ground level, half a century ago?