Once a week, back in the nineteen eighties, I had a good thing going that involved the Gramercy Theatre. This will definitely reveal my age, but hey, by now you’ve probably done the math, since I keep talking about running a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, for one year, 1976.... Anyhow, some nine years after Dean and I bombed out as theater operators at our 2672-seat movie palace, I found myself working as a cook, going to school and, on Wednesday afternoons, seeing a psychotherapist on 23rd Street; I needed her, after our spectacular failure, and while I was at it, there were some other issues. Therapy was scary, useful, but depressing, if not without its reward. You see, there just happened to be movie theaters all up and down West 23rd Street in those days, and, thanks to Local 306 — the union that had a lock on projectionists’ contracts in all five boroughs of NYC — Wednesday matinees were everywhere. As an ex-theater operator, I knew all about the matinee shift, that usually sold only fifteen or twenty tickets max; you actually lost money, but the projectionist was getting paid anyhow, so you opened. Wednesdays in the mid-eighties found me, oftener than not, at the Gramercy, a single-screen house, alone in the dark with popcorn, keeping the faith with what I called the “after therapy movie.” 

Far as I can figure, I invented this institution, which died when I stopped seeing my therapist, Leonora. I was learning a lot about my mother and boundaries, and what the weak points were in my marriage; but I was also learning it’s alright to go to the movies alone.

I’d been brought up, you see, to think of movies as something social: a date, double or otherwise; lunch and a movie with a friend in downtown Cincinnati, perhaps at the Albee, to see Cleopatra; a carload of folks at the Oakley Drive-In to witness The Day the Earth Stood Still. With the exception of when your sister, who worked the concession stand at the Mt. Lookout, got you in for free, with unlimited refills on popcorn, in the Midwest of my childhood, you just didn’t go to the movies alone.
This impression had been reinforced the year we ran the St. George. Mostly our patrons were roving gangs of kids, hoping to pass for adults so they could see Taxi Driver, or, the other ruse, longing to pass as children and pay just ninety cents. Dates came of course — and it didn’t matter that our balcony generally wasn’t open, sometimes they snuck up there anyhow — and if they didn’t, there were two thousand seats on the ground floor, so if you wanted to blow some weed and get it on, you could guarantee several unoccupied rows between you and the rest of the crowd. 

There were some solitary exceptions, people who came in and bought that one lonely ticket, but they were generally eccentric. Old Doctor Oppenheim, a real MD, retired, lived in the apartments just up the hill. Using her market cart as a walker, on Wednesday afternoon she made her way downhill and under the marquee, regardless of what we were showing. All she really wanted to do was buy one of our exquisite premium hotdogs (all beef, Kosher, with dijon mustard on a real hand-made Italian bread). Usually, she just bought the dog and chatted with me on the other side of the box office cage; sometimes, rarely, she’d go in past the mahogany pillars and sit in the dark alone. Then there was the jazzman; I’ve described him before, a retired (sax player? bassist?) who dressed each Wednesday in some or another spangled suit (gold lame, shimmery scarlet, sparkly green, silver) then bought a ticket to the movie, and of course, a hot dog. He’d watch the movie through the glass that divided the theater from the lobby, all the time mumbling the names of women we presumed to have been his lovers.
 
Desperate for revenue, we ran a soft-porn triple feature once (Love under 17, The Sensuous Teenager, and Love times Three), and suddenly the whole auditorium was filled with solitary men of a ragged sort. Clean up afterwards wasn’t cheap or pretty, though it wasn’t anything like what the Variety in Manhattan must have been putting up with, or certain of the Times Square houses we occasionally borrowed projection supplies from. 

It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that I discovered that other kind of solitary movie-goer, more common on the Manhattan side of New York Harbor, the discerning movie buff, reading The New York Review of Books, a coffee in hand. I don’t suppose any of these Wednesday afternoon folks were refugees from psychotherapy like me, but I’ll never know for sure. Like our St. George in the seventies, the Gramercy was a third-run house, which had somehow recovered by the mid-eighties, having been bought by City Cinemas and turned into a very successful art theater. So those people I suspected of being reviewers might just have been Vincent Canby or some other rare bird.

The best movie I ever saw after therapy, and one of the best movies I ever saw period (wow am I glad it entered my psyche from a large pristine movie screen) was Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman. I cried all the way through, in part because, in therapy, I had just revisited my own childhood, and because Bergman was a contemporary of my then-newly-deceased mother, whose memories of growing up in the early part of the twentieth century included such things as magic lanterns, those precursors of cinema, one of which is featured movingly in the film.

I am grateful to the movies all through my life, for having given me the strength to go on when things were terrifying and for catapulting me out of unendurable reality. Other people have had their churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, shrines, sweat lodges; but I have had movie theaters, many of them more sumptuous than the holiest of houses. 

It’s hard now that the experience of moving pictures, cinema, what-have-you, is relegated, more often than not, to a stack of multiplex shoe-boxes, or to the big screen in your den or a laptop, or, worse, an iphone. 

 "Whither has fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”  Wordsworth gets the last say.

Afterthought 1: 
Speaking of churches and the like, “High Church” is what we used to call Radio City Music Hall, back when we were theater operators. We visited periodically, privileged to use the employees’ entrance, where we met our friend, Robert Endres, then the head projectionist of the place. You could have put several St. George theaters in the music hall... 

Afterthought 2:
Speaking of the still-much-discussed taboo concerning going to movies alone, get a load of numbers 5,7,8 and especially 12, in Buzzfeed’s list of reasons to overcome that taboo.

Yesterday, in a rebellion against watching the recent Academy Awards, I sat at the kitchen counter and listed all the movies I could think of that I have loved, and might want to see again. That’s what makes a great movie: that the second or third time you see it, you’re still discovering something, or, if it’s a comedy, you’re still laughing. My list is about twenty-five titles long and, not surprisingly, includes a generous selection of films I watched in 1976, when I was busy helping to run a movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, to which this blog is dedicated. Not all the movies we ran in ’76 had been released in that year — we were a “buck fifty,” second-to-third-run house — but everything we ever ran was a seventies title. And so, trolling through a lifetime list of fondly-remembered movies, I find five that we ran at the St. George: Blazing Saddles (1975), Bananas (1971), Taxi Driver (1976), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), all flix I’d like to see again or have seen more than once. I think I loved Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie (1976), but can’t remember it distinctly. By that time, the theater was failing so spectacularly, and it was so cold (January) — the landlord having turned off the heat) — that my memories of the Brooks film are literally locked up in a kind of mental ice.
 
A litmus test of how much I liked a movie was whether or not I watched the whole thing. If I felt drawn to a movie, I either watched it in patches, when I could spare the time from juggling the books of a failing business, or if I couldn’t resist, and was profoundly depressed, I just plain sat down and watched the whole damn thing. As winter approached, sitting down had a lot to do with how warm it was, hence my sketchy memory of Silent Movie; how can you laugh when you’re freezing? 

Prints of the movies we showed, even the newer ones, arrived in our lobby in film canisters Wednesday mornings, scuffed and scratched, but still watchable at half-price. Remarkably, a number of the sixty-three films we projected in our year running a movie palace have since been inducted into the archives of the Library of Congress:

All the President’s Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Taxi Driver
The Exorcist
Blazing Saddles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Jaws 
Woodstock

A Venn Diagram of this list and mine would show more than a sliver of commonality. It’s alarming how many movies I don’t remember that we ran at the St George that year. Until I resumed the painful process of scrolling through microfilms of The Staten Island Advance circa 1976, looking for the movie ads we ran (interspersed with ads for flared pants and unbelievably cheap steaks), I had nearly forgotten  — or blocked — a number of titles. One was an Italian thriller, easy to forget the title of, as it had aliases. We advertised it on our marquee as Don’t Open the Window, while in England it was known as The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, having started its Italian career as Non Si Devi Profanare il Sonno del Morti, roughly, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. Then there was the naturally forgettable Cops and Robbers, and the meant-to-be-hilarious Mother, Jugs and Speed — whose Harvey Keitel and Racquel Welsh are so young you hardly recognize them (Cosby’s in this one, still looking innocent). The St. George Theatre low-budget list is lengthy. I have absolutely no memory of: Death Machines, The Legend of Bigfoot, Food of the Gods (based on H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel) or At the Earth’s Core (from a work by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914). Did we really spend precious projector carbons on the likes of The Giant Spider Invasion, a 1975 release that apparently features huge spiders descending on the town of Merrill, Wisconsin? 

Though I don’t remember these one-week wonders, a lot of people post-millennium seem to revere some of them. In fact, a few of the less-memorable titles cited above have emerged as cult films. Don’t Open the Window — or whatever you choose to call it — is a 1974 fiction zombie horror film, which has made it to Blu-Ray. Likewise The Giant Spider Invasion, has prospered over the years, raking in approximately $15,000,000. How low-budget was Spider Invasion? The giant spider was a Volkswagen with artificial black fur and fake legs, operated from the inside by seven members of the crew. I haven’t included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) in this list, because I actually sat down to watch it. Normally I am not one for blood and gore, but Texas Chainsaw had a visual elegance to it, somewhat like Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Chainsaw is now the cult film to end all cults.

It’s been forty-three years since I ran a movie palace. The trouble with imagining a “favorites” movie list forty-three years in the future, is that presentation in theaters is what made even the lowly Death Machines into something of a cult. Theaters, especially single screen houses like the St. George, may also be why Taxi Driver is in the Library of Congress; and why the number of people watching the Academy Awards is slipping year by year, with a modest uptick the other night, that still yielded the second-lowest attendant audience in Oscar history.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma did very well, but here in New York City, its presence last fall on release in an actual theater, the IFC, lasted only about two weeks. Of course! — it’s a Netflix property.   

Since I was a child, we’ve gone from “Where’s that showing?” to “Did you see it in a theater?” Now we’re headed for, “Nexflix... or Amazon?” That said, I notice Roma is showing post-Academy Awards, at the Nitehawk on Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where, while trying to comprehend non-subtitled phrases, a patron has the opportunity to down a Barry Lyndon (pink peppercorn-infused Perry’s Tot Gin with Combier Pamplemousse, lemon, and Earl Grey) — who cares if a phrase slips away? The 1974 Kubrick movie the drink is named for was a technologically brilliant piece based on a Thackeray novel, notoriously slow, but beautiful. I wish I’d had a grapefruit-laced drink back then to settle me into my seat...

Afterthought 1:
Here’s the original list of movies I can’t quite forget. I’m tempted to add to it, but then the whole point was to generate a list of movies in one moment, off the top of my head:
Two for the Road (1968) Stanley Donan (he just died, BTW)
Cinema Paradiso (1988) GiuseppeTornatore
Fanny and Alexander (1982) Ingmar Bergman
Taxi Driver (1976) Martin Scorsese
Dr. Strangelove (1964) Stanley Kubrick
Metropolis (1927) Fritz Lang
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Sidney Lumet 
Blazing Saddles (1974) Mel Brooks
The Graduate (1967) Mike Nichols
Bananas (1971) Woody Allen
Tin Men (1987) Barry Levinson
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) David Lean
The Atomic Café (1982) Jayne Loader
Do the Right Thing (1989) Spike Lee
Casablanca (1942) Michael Curtiz
Murder on the Orient Express (the original Sidney Lumet version, 1974) 
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) John Huston
Moonlight (2016) Barry Jenkins
The Dead (1985) John Huston
Chinatown (1974) Roman Polanski
My Brilliant Career (1979) Gillian Armstrong
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Peter Weir
Executive Action (1973) David Miller
The Piano (1993) Jane Campion
A Passage to India (1984) David Lean
12 Years a Slave (2012) Steve McQueen
 
So few women! This exercise has left me determined to look for more work by women directors. 
 
Afterthought 2:
It’s interesting to note that Dog Day Afternoon had already won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, while Blazing Saddles was nominated in its time, for three Academy Awards. Bananas never won anything apparently, but I treasure it because I liked Woody Allen best before we knew he was a perv and when he was sticking to his natural genre, slapstick. Taxi Driver won the Palme D’Or and was nominated for four Oscars, none of which it was granted. Silent Movie was a Mel Brooks throwaway, brilliant, with an amazing cast of walk-ons

 Quick! what was the first uninterrupted feature film you ever saw, and where did you see it? Your answer will, of course, reveal your approximate age. If you’re over forty, chances are decent you saw it in a movie theater. If you’re over fifty, you probably did see it in a theater, and, if you’re sixty-five or above, that theater was likely to have been a movie palace, or at least a modestly-ornate neighborhood house.

Proceeding backwards, if you’re thirty or below, it’s possible or even likely that you saw your first  serious movie on Cable before you saw any such thing in a shared public environment. The generation that might eventually answer this question “...saw my first movie on Mommy’s ipad,” isn’t old enough to take this survey, and may not be given to reading blog posts about movie palaces, when they grow up. Life goes on, and nothing lasts forever.

I remember well Cincinnati’s movie palaces, (Cincy is where I grew up), and the local single-screen theaters in my immediate neighborhood. In 1976, newly-arrived in New York, I took a hand at running a palace in Staten Island, the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat house on the lip of New York Harbor. The first movie we ran at the St. George was Blazing Saddles, but the first movie I ever saw, twenty-six years before that, was Tea for Two starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae a dream couple in fifties hetero America. This dreaminess is what attracted my sister, then fifteen, to the movie in question. No, the movie hadn’t been my choice (at two, who has a choice?) but my sister had to babysit me, and so off we went with her friend Madge, to watch the first of MacRae and Day’s “...genial, old-fashioned musical films...” The West Point Story, On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon would follow, causing the New York Times to reflect that “...these two [Day and MacRae] complement each other like peanut butter and jelly.” That was sex in fifties middle-class America. Not only was the movie not a PBJ to me, I didn’t like it at all — I screamed through it, as a matter of fact, causing my sister to tie me to my seat. 

Sad as this tale of my passage through the “terrible twos” may be, it was the beginning of my long movie-watching career spent happily in the dark, tickling the bottom of a bag of popcorn for the half-opened “grannies” of corn I still love best. Most of the movies I saw growing up really were my choice. Who could forget Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? — the tentacles of the giant squid  — or Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, with its then-high-tech special effects; a black-and-white saucer cutting off the dome of the Capitol building, demanded I hide my eyes behind my cupped hands. Saw those at the Mt. Lookout where my other sister, a Bobby-soxer with multiple boyfriends, had a job popping corn and staffing the box office, a glass and chrome single room on the street outside. (She was nearly killed in that box office by a  stray bullet fired one New Year’s Eve that went through the glass, but that’s another story). 

Dating at The Hyde Park Art, a local Art Moderne stadium theater, in the summer of ’64, I alternated between two terrors: 1.) fighting off my date’s clammy hand and 2.) watching Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove, ride the bomb out of its bay cowboy style, sparking the nuclear war we all feared. There were plenty more movies before I made it to New York to run a movie palace: Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road at the modest neighborhood Ambassador Theatre, later torn down to make way for a parking lot, and Barbarella: the last movie I saw at the much-beloved grand (and then still pristine) Albee downtown. After Jane Fonda strutted her stuff that night, three drapes (two valences and a formal house curtain) lowered, as the lights came up, and a solitary uniformed usher swept the nearly-empty gilded palace, from the top of the main aisle, down to the orchestra pit. The Albee was demolished eight years later, the year after we opened with Blazing Saddles, at the St. George in Staten Island. It was the seventies, and nobody but nobody was going to single-screen palaces anymore; but we didn’t know that.  

Along with my husband Dean, also something of a renegade and nostalgist, I’m a sucker for a challenge, and I always want to save what’s nearly past but still somehow beautiful. It wasn’t a waste, because the St George, which we tried to save as a movie palace, morphed finally and beautifully into a live local theater, cherished by its community. 

Note: If this blog post feels more reflective than others you may have read in Starts Wednesday,it’s because I am on the cusp of another birthday, thankful for having survived this far, curious as to what’s next. What is life if not the sum of all your mistakes and victories, your noble and ill-advised adventures?
  
Afterthoughts:

1. Given the racial tensions we experienced at the very urban/suburban St. George, it was prophetic that we opened in April, 1976 with Blazing Saddles, a movie that’s even more controversial today than it was in the seventies. Mel Brooks recently confessed that, while it could never be made today, at least not by a white American, even then there was one controversial thing left on what used to be called the cutting room floor.  

2. After a long career of movie-going, I still come out, when I can, to movies on screen, choosing the theater and its screen at least as carefully as I choose the movie. Case in point, Lawrence of Arabia last summer, in the 70 mm format it was intended to be seen in, at the incomparable United Palace of the Cultural Arts, one of the original Loew’s Wonder Theaters, on 175th Street in Manhattan. Movie palace viewings are rare, so I make do, most of the time, at Loew’s ‘plex of giant-screen theaters on 68th and Broadway; I still adore the Cinema Village, where I’m planning to see some of the 8th Annual Winter Film Awards/Festival soon...and the Paris is a cherished anachronism just off Central Park, when I want to pretend it’s the old days. Movies in Philly, where I visit my sister, are best had at the Ambler, a nicely-restored old house. No, she doesn’t tie me to my seat anymore...

The movie palace I proudly went bust running in 1976, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, has, these days, a sparkling new marquee. Finally. The one I remember, a conventional rectangular affair, leaked badly from before our time through its dismantling in 2018. Somewhere in the nineties a temporary owner sought to hide this defect by covering its rusted neon and crumbling illuminated tracks in thick stucco, leaving only a small script “St George” in the front, whose neon was almost always dark. For years afterward I worried that the weight of all that plaster on a rusted framework would bring the whole thing crashing down on some unsuspecting pedestrian, but thankfully it never did.

I can tell you myriad stories about the old marquee,  come to think about it, I have already: what it was like to power it up from a Frankenstein-like Buss fuse panel in the box office which arced when you threw the switches and could easily electrocute the person holding the wooden handle, should her hand stray onto bare metal. And how perilous it was changing the letters, dangling from a fifteen-foot extension ladder balanced on an uphill pavement that slants at about a twenty degree angle. Whatever its dangers or condition, the marquee was there for a reason, to let the world know what we were showing, and, if we had enough unbroken aluminum letters, what was coming soon. There was a moment  recently, just after the curvaceous new marquee went up, when it seemed current management only wanted to show off pictures of the interior. Gorgeous as that baroque cave is, where were announcements of acts booked next month or next week?

The entrepreneur in me was troubled, but I’m pleased to report that “Kool and the Gang” flash by on the electronic signboard if you pause long enough. Gone are those breakable letters, whose disappearance forced us to use upside-down W’s for M’s and deliberately misspell a number of words. We’re post-millennium now, no time for analogue tech. And the show must go on.
​
In some places, the show doesn’t go on anymore , but the marquee still does. For instance, in Mount Morris, New York, the New Family Theatre’s marquee, last time I drove through, bore on it’s tracks the following message,

According to Cinema Treasures, the New Family, which opened in 1939 with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,was demolished, although the marquee was preserved. Whoever owns the marquee has turned it into a giant local greeting card.

In New York City, the new owner of a closed-down movie palace or neighborhood cinema is allowed to use the defunct marquee, as long as she or he has a marquee-use permit. A couple of years ago on the Upper East Side, I spied the marquee of the Clearview Cinemas, a six-screen theater, now defunct, repurposed as one of the sites of Manhattan Mini-Storage. I imagine that pretty soon there will be more mini-storage units in Manhattan than there are apartments.The new owners of the building had seen fit to list a number of phony movie titles on the marquee: Lost and Out of Space, Space Hunter, and other wonders.

On New Dorp Lane, not far from where I live, the excellent neon Art Deco marquee of the Lane, a stadium theater that was landmarked some time in the eighties, has become the signboard for its new resident, the Crossroads Church, now advertising God instead of Rodney Dangerfield. There are other more stellar examples of theater churches. The famous former Loew’s 175th St. these days the United Palace of Cultural Arts, was originally one of five “Wonder Theaters,” in the Greater NYC area, but morphed, in 1969, into Reverend Ike’s United Church Science of Living Institute. The exquisitely restored "Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco” Thomas Lamb theater is also now a cultural center, as well, detailing that whole enchilada, church and showplace, on its wraparound marquee. 

In 1977, a year after we left the movie exhibition business, our rival Staten Island movie palace, in the nearby neighborhood of Stapleton, advertised its own demise, FOR SALE, on the marquee. The Paramount operated as a nightclub, then as a rock venue, and finally, for a decade or so as a warehouse for neighboring Steckman’s Sporting Goods. These days its magnificent crumbling marquee advertises itself once again, this time not for sale but for lease. Like so many American movie palaces, it has an uncertain future.

Afterthoughts: 
1. Recently, Atlas Obscura invited anyone who treasured a theater marquee to send in their pix. I recommend the whole tour, but my faves from that collection are: The Grand Lake in Oakland, Ca., a listing which editorializes,

WE WILL NOT ENFORCE THE R RATING ON FAHRENHEIT 11-9
POLITICAL DISCOURSE MUST NOT BE STIFLED

In Marquette, Michigan, the Delft Theatre invites us to

BELLY ON UP TO OUR BRUNCH & BLOODY BAR
SAT 7 SUN 10 AM

2. “The business of America is business,” as Calvin Coolidge famously quipped, so it shouldn’t be surprising that some marquees have nothing to do with theaters, or even churches. An (out-of-business) ice cream parlor in Newark recently trolled for business with:

I SCREAM
YOU SCREAM
THE POLICE COME IN
IT’S AWKWARD. 

In Newcastle, Oklahoma, a dental practice boasted,

BEST CAVITY SEARCH EVER.

These aren’t really marquees as such, but free-standing signboards with track lettering. I include them, because the definition of “marquee” is enormously elastic anyway, which brings me to:

3. The definition:
“marquee (n.)
1680s, "large tent of unusual elaborateness," from French marquise (mistaken in English as a plural) "linen canopy placed over an officer's tent to distinguish it from others,' " fem. of marquis and perhaps indicating "a place suitable for a marquis."

By 1812 the English word was used to denote large wooden structures erected for a temporary purpose (a concert, dinner party, etc.). The extended sense of "canopy over the entrance to a hotel or theater, etc." is recorded by 1912 in American English.’ [underlining mine].
​
It so happens, that if you want to rent a tent (for a wedding or whatever) in the UK, apparently you ask for a marquee, but there isn’t a wedding planner on this side of the pond who’d know what you were talking about!

Alone in the projection booth, April, 1976, just foolin’ around. It was our first week, and I was filled with hope and adventure. Our group of well-meaning young entrepreneurs had just taken the lease on a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island. At the top of the upper balcony, six stories above the stage, the booth transfixed me. It was dingy and achingly historical. 

Our two massive (obsolete) carbon arc projectors dominated the room, but there was also an accumulation of detritus (some items dating back to the start of the theater in 1929) strewn about: boxes of raggedy trailers of indeterminate age, gels for carbon arc spotlights in a grimy corner, parts of long-gone cannibalized projectors in heaps on a shelf. Out beyond the booth, on the cat-walk that led around the inside of the dome, was a junkyard of dead TVs, the watching of which flagrantly violated the projectionist’s union contract.

That was an issue we were having with Gabe, the ancient hairy gnome of a projectionist we’d inherited from the previous theater operator. But that afternoon, never mind; it was the old file cabinet with rusted drawers that claimed my attention. I jerked open a dusty drawer, feeling around inside till my index finger encountered something sharp. Glass, bound with some kind of cloth tape.  I held the object to the light, and a night scene instantly bloomed into focus: the moon hung over a lake, with silhouettes of trees in the foreground. The sky was purple, the moon gold. The scene — hand painted? — was suspended between two cracked panes of glass. 

Don’t know if you remember this line from a Rogers and Hammerstein song. The musical is Oklahoma. A nineteenth-century cowboy has just returned from the nearest big city, excited by all the high-tech glamor he’s encountered: flush toilets, seven-story buildings. He declares: 

Everything's like a dream in Kansas City
It's better than a magic lantern show.
         
Imagine a world before movies. 

Ever wonder why horses in paintings prior to the eighteen seventies gallop with all four feet extended and off the ground? It looks wrong, but before Eadward Muybridge, father of stop-motion photography, showed what the human eye can’t see, who knew how a horse galloped? That would be The Race Horse (1878), arguably the first motion picture ever shown. Not too long after, in 1895, the Lumieres brothers were said to have created panic in a theater full of people with simple footage (fifty seconds) of a train arriving in a station, (L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat)
​
Whether this story is true or apocryphal, people back then weren’t used to “moving pictures,” at least not true photographic ones. But the idea that projected images could move was not entirely foreign to them, thanks to the conjured magic of a lantern show. Who hadn’t seen one? Probably created by Christiaan Huygens  as early as 1650, this early projector could be used to show primitive animation, achieved by various types of mechanical slides.

By the time actual cinema arrived, clever showmen had already covered the map on both sides of the Atlantic with narrated slide shows, the most sophisticated of which were animated in some mechanical way, like a two-dimensional puppet performance. The hand-painted image of a man with an axe “chops” the tree limb. A little girl skips rope, actually jumping, thanks to a hand crank on the side of the slide. 

The magic lantern slide I found in a file drawer had been, even as long ago as 1929, a left-over of another age. By the time the St. George Theatre and other movie palaces rose in all their glamor, slides like the one I found were decorative effects, to be projected on a scrim between shows, but seventy-five years before, they’d been the whole show, whether still or animated. 

How did those traveling showmen (30,000 in the U.S. by 1895) manage to project anything before there was electricity?  “Limelight,” a kind of pre-electric stage lighting, was used in theaters and music halls. It made for an intense illumination from a flame of oxygen mixed with hydrogen, then directed at a cylinder of quicklime heated to 4,662 °F before melting. Yikes! Sounds dangerous and it was, if you consider how many theater fires there were in the 19th century. At home, people used anything they could find to illuminate their amateur magic lantern shows: whale oil, candles. A later modification, the sciopticon, was outfitted for the burning of paraffin, “...a double flat wick illuminant...the heights of the wicks...controlled in order to get the maximum light intensity for the images.” It’s as if all these early projectionists were practicing up for what would be invented next.

There were moving pictures then, before there were movies!

Afterthoughts:
1. Ever see the Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander?  

2. Whatever you do, don’t miss this selected short from a museum in Australia, Lanterna Magica. It’s well worth waiting to skip the ad.

3. The Oxford English Dictionary “Word of the Day” on Friday was “sciopticon,” hence the idea for this post...

sciopticon, n.
‘A portable magic lantern designed for displaying photographs.’
Pronunciation: Brit. /sʌɪˈɒptᵻkɒn/,  U.S. /saɪˈɑptəˌkɑn/
Etymology:<  scio- comb. form+ optic adj.+ -on, after ancient Greek neuter nouns ending in -ον (see -on suffix1), probably as alteration of scioptic n.

Now hist.
A portable magic lantern designed for displaying photographs.

1870 Documents Assembly State of N.Y.  XIII. 892 The Sciopticon. Mr. L. J. Marcy of Philadelphia has given this appropriate name to an improved portable magic lantern... The sciopticon, well supplied with photographic pictures of remarkable organic structures, beautiful scenery and specimens of line architecture, will be prized in many a family as an unfailing scource [sic] of amusement and instruction.

1871  L. J. Marcy (title) The sciopticon manual: explaining Marcy's new magic lantern and light, including magic lantern optics, experiments, photographing and coloring slides, etc.

1883 Eng. Mech. 6 Apr. 104 
Of the oil-lanterns it will be supposed that I prefer the sciopticon.

1885  C. G. W. Lock Workshop Receipts  4th Ser. 401/2 
To make an enlargement on a 12 by 10 opal, using a sciopticon burning paraffin.

1901 Course of Study  1 425/1 
The sciopticon, or ‘magic lantern’, working drawings of which are given herewith, is designed in such a manner that it can be constructed in the manual training room or carpenter-shop.

1957 New Yorker  13 July 20/3 
We made..stage-lighting apparatus and effects of every description..—gallery reflectors..and sciopticons (these produced such stage effects as snow, rainbows, rain, lightning, waterfalls).

1982  L. L. Marker  & F. J. Marker Ingmar Bergman  iii. 114 
The bold attempt by Emil Grandinson to use sciopticon projections in the first production of To Damascus I(1900) had been too far ahead of its time.

2012  H. Schmidgen in  N. Anderson  & M. R. Dietrich Educated Eye  iv. 108 
The kymographic registration of the animal's circulation took place on a glass plate that, while the experiment was taking place, moved horizontally through a sciopticon.
 
 
 
 

 Film — the real thing, with sprocket holes, that runs through a projector — is becoming rare these days, but in 1976, when we ran a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, it was plentiful and thankfully not explosive. This didn’t keep the fire inspectors from fining us if fire buckets in the projection booth weren’t precisely 12 inches off the floor, a regulation that dated back to the bad old days of nitrate film. Almost all movies, certainly major motion pictures, were on a nitrate base before the late forties and certainly after 1952, when Kodak finally stopped making the volatile stuff, and switched entirely to a variation of acetate, the base they’d been using all along for home movies. In the heyday of the movie palaces, going to the movies, let alone working as a projectionist, were risky activities. Theater fires as dramatic as the one depicted in Cinema Paradiso were, before 1952, common, if not somehow likely. 

How likely? A 1936 issue of International Projectionist estimated that one American projectionist died, on average, every 18 days, probably not of a heart attack. Nitrate often simply exploded. And get this: while projectors were carbon arc (which we still had at the St. George in seventy-six), nitrate film, whose base is essentially a solid form of nitroglycerin, had all the aspects of a bomb (fire, volatile material). 

The very existence of  projection booths in theaters had been established early in the silent era, largely as a safety feature, an attempt to contain anticipated fire. Should a fire begin in the booth, the wax that lined the projection ports — if not a fuse of some sort — melted, and flame-proof shutters sealed the booth from the theater, like a tomb, which, as a matter of fact, it might become. Case in point, the June 1947 issue of the aforementioned International Projectionist eulogizes a fifteen-year-old — presumably breaking into the craft of projection — Marion Shea, who lost his life in a theater fire. 

What is it, or was it, about nitrate film stock? A US Navy instructional movie about the safe handling of celluloid/nitrate film includes footage of a full reel of the stuff burning underwater. Water, in fact, is the worst thing you can add to a nitrate fire: it only encourages dangerous gases.

Beginning in the thirties, the fact that practically the whole history of movies as an art form was laid down on unreliable stock that might explode spontaneously, meant that a number of archives were destroyed on hot summer days, in storage vaults that lacked ventilation. Everything Fox ever made before 1937 went up in an archive fire that year, requiring seven fire companies to extinguish.
A similar calamity happened to MGM’s archives in 1965.  

We hardly show movies on nitrate anymore, except in rare circumstances, which still doesn’t solve the problem of preservation of rare reels, because, over time, in the presence of the kind of heat you experience in a hot car in a parking lot in July, these films will either explode or bubble and degenerate. 

This leads me to the anecdote that started off this post. My friend, Robert Endres, now retired from his long-time job as Chief Projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, reminisced recently about his attempts to save some archival footage of the Center Theatre’s opening. The Music Hall had, in those days, vaults for the storage of nitrate film, and Bob was trying to get the fragile newsreels converted to acetate before they disintegrated altogether.

One of my great regrets was that I couldn’t save newsreel footage of the opening of the Center Theatre. There’s very little documentation about it, and I had the footage in our vault.  It was nitrate and when I opened the can I noted that it had started to bubble. Our Chief Operating Officer suggested taking it to Technicolor and having the Lab director take a look at it. I did. When I walked into his office, he closed the blinds over the inside window. He opened the can, took one look, and said, “Get it out of here!”  I said, “Can’t you do something?” and he repeated, “Get it out of here!”  I picked the can up and put it under my left arm and he said, “No, put it under your right arm. That way if it blows up it only takes a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took it back to the Hall very gingerly!
 
I couldn’t resist asking  Bob what happened after that...to which he replied,

I held the can out at arm’s length most of the way back. I took the subway and I’m sure violated a number of rules of the Fire Department and the MTA in doing so, although they probably wouldn’t have known about the hazard of nitrate film by that time.

Nitrate film seems to be a perpetual hot potato. Michael Zahs’ collection of early Miele films, which he kept in a shed on his Iowa property for many years, were nitrate; this didn’t keep him from mailing a number of them to the Library of Congress, which duplicated them and mailed them back! 

You might be wondering why, if Kodak had acetate as far back as 1909, which it happily sold to amateur filmmakers, it kept producing nitrate materials to sell to the studios? The myth surrounding nitrate’s beauty, the dense blacks and luminous whites, is probably the answer. To which I say, what price beauty?
 
Afterthoughts:

Here are a few more hot potato anecdotes from Bob Endres, and one other afterthought besides;

Bob’s comments:

1. We actually had a nitrate film vault at the Hall complete with two sets of doors. My boss discovered that it wasn’t cooled in the summer and had some of the film brought down to my office in the booth. Since you’re not supposed to have more than a few thousand feet of film outside of a fireproof container at one time, this startled the city inspectors when they came to check the booth, particularly since one of the cans on top had a big red label saying “Nitrate” on it. There was quite a bit of nitrate footage stored in the nitrate vault still, when I started there. Our Head of House Operations knew about it and when he saw Towering Inferno he said we should get  it out of the building. 

2. I...didn’t want to destroy the documentary footage that we had on the history of the Hall. Since it was operated by RKO, there were a lot of RKO newsreels that contained Radio City stories.  We also had a “March of Time” episode that featured the Hall. I made a deal with MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] that they could have the footage if they would pull acetate prints for me, thus enabling me to show footage that I didn’t want to take a chance with when it was on nitrate. A stagehand and I filled a shopping cart with reels of nitrate film and wheeled it up 6thAvenue to MOMA.

3. We did a tribute to Myrna Loy at Carnegie Hall with a film retrospective. I got a call from an editor wanting to know if we would run a clip on nitrate film. When the editor said she would take the clip out of the 2000’ reel in was contained in, I said O.K.  She brought the three-minute roll to New York in her purse on a plane.

Final note: Acetate is no optimal medium either, not volatile like nitrate, but imminently perishable. Check out “vinegar syndrome.”