1976, the bicentennial (200th) birthday party of American democracy, was a big deal. In New York Harbor, just minutes from the doors of the St George Theatre in Staten Island — a 2,672-seat movie palace I was then involved in running — a maritime party was underway, which included so many ships from all over the world you couldn’t see the water for the hulls. people were streaming downhill to the ferry landing, jostling each other to stay on the sidewalk, a problem for us, because nobody seemed to notice that our theater doors were open.

Our popcorn was popping, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea graced both the marquee and the screen, and an usher stood hopefully at the ticket box; but hardly a soul paused to consider the coolness of our marble/red and gold lobby. Who wanted to see a bad interpretation of a Japanese novel, when the big show just down the hill was live? Leading the parade was the U.S. Coast Guard training vessel, Eagle, a sailing ship (alias Horst Wessel) surrendered to the U.S. by Germany as war reparations following WWII. 

The war that brought us that ship had been a "good guys' war" (if there is such a thing), but the war in Vietnam, which had just ended, had been a travesty that cost thousands of lives and pitted generations and social groups of Americans against each other. Two days prior to the Bicentennial celebration, Vietnam had become one nation, its capital in Hanoi. Still, Americans love a party; we also love to forget, so, from coast-to-coast, we did just that, celebrating our two-centuries-old War of Independence, ironically, the war Ho Chi Minh himself had studied, in hopes of modeling Vietnam’s battle on our own. 

There is some kind of party going on in D.C. this year, and for a lot of reasons, I won’t be there. I’m not even planning a picnic at home. Already weary of firecrackers — and the practice sessions in our neighborhood that lead up to everything seeming to explode at once  – we’re off to the movies. 
What better time to be in a darkened hall with popcorn than the night when gunpowder reigns? Pass it on: the movies are as American as a buttered ear of corn. So if you crave quiet, you know where to go. I’d even settle for Sailor Who Fell...that old doggie we showed to practically nobody forty-three years ago. I’m happy to say, however, that Yesterday,a fantasy about the Beatles, is on-screen in a theater I have two free passes to, and the dark beckons. Okay, it isn’t a movie palace; you have to hunt around here to find one that’s showing a movie these days. But the Loew’s Lincoln Square has pretty big screens, good enough for the likes of me on the 4th. 

I fished around to see who else might think of the 4th as a damn fine time to go to the movies, and happened on an article in Esquire.Justin Kirkland’s idea of “The Six Best Movies to See in Theaters on the 4th of July”isn’t mine, except for one movie, Yesterday.But I agree, more or less, with his opening statement:
 
While some good ol' Americans might celebrate the big day with cheeseburgers and fireworks, the best of us know that the real ticket to a laid back Fourth is inside a cold movie theater with a bag of popcorn bigger than your head.
 
Amen!  He lists as the other five movies he’d consider seeinG on the 4th: Spider Man: Far From Home, Midsommer (which does sound interesting, just not on the 4th), Pixar’s Toy Story 4, Child’s Play, and The Dead Don’t Die.

Other than Yesterday, possible movies I’d like to counteract the explosiveness of the 4th with: Amazing Grace, Halston, Late Night, and a Les Blank double-feature, Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazon, (two docs from the late seventies on Mexican American culture that are playing in Manhattan at the Metrograph).  

There are, however, movies that either feature July 4th or are simply saying something about what it is to be American, and someday it might be interesting to put together a personal film festival of them: Jaws (which we should have shown at the St. George on the 4th, but had already blown away in late May, a month too early), Glory, about a black regiment in the Civil War — the movie that introduced me to Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman. Of course, there’s good old Yankee Doodle Dandy — worth it just to see James Cagney dance his way up the proscenium walls of a theater on both sides of the stage, Hidden Figures — about black women mathematicians who put NASA into space, Independence Day (even though it is an Oliver Stone flick), and Saving Private Ryan.There are so many possibilities; add your own. Of the above, I wish I could have shown Glory on the big grape-soda-stained screen at the St. George, but it came out in 1989, more than a decade after our time as theater operators. So it goes.
 
Have a good (noisy or quiet) 4th, you guys, whatever your preference is...

I’m giving the last word to our second president, John Adams, one of the signatories of the document that severed our ties with King George III, across the pond. Adams was writing his wife, Abigail:
 
I am apt to believe that it [independence] will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
 
Afterthoughts:

1. Adams, in his letter to Abigail, was actually referring to the 2nd of July, since it took about two weeks for all the signers to sign, and the first ones had done so on the 2nd. Still, we can blame and praise him, for our noisy carryings on. The violence implicit in his statement might have something to do with the risk each signer was taking in a perilous time; as Benjamin Franklin remarked back then, “...gentlemen, we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” And so they did hang together in the collegial sense, giving us the opportunity to do that, as well as to pursue happiness, and to expand our numerous tribe.
 
2. In a spooky coincidence, John Adams died on the 4th of July, fifty years after he and his colleagues signed the Declaration, in 1826. He and Thomas Jefferson had had a life-long rivalry, though they respected each other immensely. As Adams was dying, he is reputed to have whispered, “...Thomas Jefferson still survives...” Alas, Jefferson (who hoped Adams was still alive) had died a few hours before, on that same July 4th. Odd and wonderful: they went out together, two remarkable firecrackers.
 
3. For a sense of how desperate NYC was in the mid-seventies, and what it was like to view the tall ship parade on July 4, 1976, check out these narratives.  
 
4. Here’s the Esquire article on going to the movies on the 4th of July: 
 
5. And finally, a clip of James Cagney as George M. Cohan, dancing his way up the proscenium walls. Apologies for an ad you’ll have to skip...Cagney was an old hoofer from Vaudeville, before he played tough guys in gangster flicks. 

The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.  
Time, May 14, 2015

In 1976, while a group of us struggled to keep the doors of a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, open, we feared all the while that movie-going as an American social activity was going, going... Gone? But we would never have blamed attention span. There were understandable reasons for our fear of the movies’ demise, back in the seventies: low box office revenue, empty seats. Our cantilevered balcony was almost permanently closed, the home of random kids who snuck up there, hoping to do some drugs, do each other, or just go unnoticed until we’d closed down and left for the day. Movies that drew an audience in our troubled urban neighborhood were hard to find and difficult to book, and the distributors of those flicks typically took two-thirds of the meager receipts. However, what was actually done-for in the mid-seventies wasn’t movies per se; it was single-screen theaters, especially palaces. We learned that lesson the hard way, losing money hand-over-fist and closing just shy of the one-year anniversary of our opening.
 
A lot of things have come and gone since I sat behind the bars of a box office or shoveled popcorn into buckets: VCRs, for one thing, and video stores for another. Network television, the snake that seduced our audiences away, has been flattened in its turn, by streaming services and cable networks.  
Are the movies themselves really wasted this time? A group of directors, producers, actors and etc. in Sunday, June 23’s New York Times seem to think so, or at least they’re very confused. The fault, according to actor Kumail Nanjiani lies in YouTube and other platforms, since teens and slightly older young adults usually can’t devote time to a two-hour narrative in a communal setting. Implicit is the suggestion that platforms deliver in bite-size morsels millennials are used to. Or does low movie attendance (the average American sees a movie in a theater four times a year) have to do with content itself? 

When I was a Girl Scout, we made fun of the Brownies, the (then) youngest members of GSUSA. We fourth graders in green uniforms accused our peers who were not paying attention of having a short “Brownie Interest Span,” a phrase we’d picked up from our troop leader who’d received it in G.S. training. It really meant, “She’s just like a Brownie — can’t follow the plot of a long story, can’t take directions, can’t even sit still.”

So what makes a number of us adults, these days, less attentive than a goldfish? It isn’t attention span we’ve got to worry about, but (Brownie) interest span. Robert McKee, a prominent teacher of screenwriting, reflects on interest, “...story has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.” He also credits “empathy” for getting us to pay attention. 

How many narratives have you watched lately which stir feelings of empathy? Even when trying to find something to binge-watch at home these days, my husband and I go through ten or fifteen serialized narratives before we find one that can make me forget I’m in the bedroom watching on a flat screen.
Attention span or interest span? What about the fact that the CDC, in a 2015 report, notes Americans (adults as well as children) with ADHD are increasingly more numerous, rising from 7.8 percent in 2003 to 9.5 in 2007 and 11 percent in 2011. As a former tutor of learning disabled children, and an unofficial (never diagnosed) member of the ADD community, I can say that all of us — attentionally challenged and otherwise — share the problem of too many things vying for our attention. For some of us, it is harder than it is for others, to cope with a fragmented, high-pressure world, that makes too many demands on attention; and if you’re not interested?  Well then... 

Going into the lobby of a movie theater, paying for a ticket, buying a popcorn and surrendering to a mutually-shared dream in the dark (when it’s a well-crafted movie) is  an excellent way to train the muscle of attention, or the elastic band of interest span, that needs to be stretched by stories that juice empathy. 

In the future, will all movies go directly from Sundance to streaming? Will binge-watching a story in small segments on an iphone or laptop replace the pleasures of watching a screen larger than the poster cases in the lobby of the St. George Theatre?

“If I had grown up watching YouTube, I don’t know if I would like movies,” Kumail Nanjiani admits. But we aren’t goldfish; and Americans still go out to specific movies, or theaters, like one of my beloved haunts, the United Palace of Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan. Roughly once a month, it shows a big-screen wonder, like Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, or (coming soon) The Matrix.

Paul Feig, in the NYTimes piece that sent me off on this chase, gave my tear ducts a workout by evoking that great moment in Lawrence of Arabia when a tiny dot on the horizon slowly becomes a man on a camel. It takes at least a minute, perhaps a minute and a half. That’s one of my favorite moments ever in film; you need a wide, wide screen to show it. As a director, Paul observes, “there are moments when you want to do a cool shot like that, but you go, When people end up watching this on their phone, they’re not going to see anything.” Being forced to think that way is, I think, very much the tail wagging the dog. Fortunately, there are movies like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight still coming out, and how about the one that almost won the Oscar that same year (2016), La La Land? Dunkirk was built for a large screen too, so it ain’t over, not yet, and maybe never will be. We are, after all, human beings, whose DNA came from storytelling around the campfire’s flame. Campfire, cave: what else is a darkened theater?  
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Try this interesting read on big screen movies. 

2. I mentioned “cantilevered” balconies, of which the St. George’s balcony is one magnificent example.  Here’s a little more on what that’s all about. 
​  
3. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru mentioned in the NYTimes panel, is an interesting dude:  get a taste here...

Four Operas for Three Dollars! boasts the sign I rescued from the “Sign Room” at the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat movie palace we ran for one year, 1976, in Staten Island, New York. A brave band of young ignorant entrepreneurs, we were trying with all our might to make a combined live house and movie theater out of this Eugene De Rosa architectural gem. Alas, it was all movies for us, with a few exceptions; we never booked anything as elaborate as an opera. The price on the “four operas” sign, even then, seemed ridiculous. However, I’ve done some checking: across the harbor in Manhattan, the New York City Opera — deemed “the People’s Opera” by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia — sold tickets in its inaugural (1943) season for exactly 75 cents. A subway token cost you a dime that year, and a movie ticket around 29 cents. I think I know enough from various sources to conclude that the bargain operas being offered were a small package deal — not a whole production — probably medleys from “Carmen” or “Madam Butterfly” or whatever — including some rising talent from Manhattan.

I was thinking of this sign yesterday, when the New York Philharmonic played on the St. George Theatre’s hallowed stage-boards, not an opera this time, but the brass section of the NYPhil, dispatched on a grant to play for free in the city’s fifth and still least-regarded borough. They usually do these concerts in a park, but our Staten Island mosquitos are heavyweight champs of the world, so someone wisely opted for an indoor concert.

I harbored various fantasies as a theater operator, back in ’76, of what it would be like to hear one of the big-guy orchestras from the other side of New York Harbor, in our sacred space, with its perfect acoustics.
 
I was not disappointed on Sunday, and there were other rewards.We’d been lucky enough to get our hands on six of the free tickets, so brought a slew of friends along, one of whom just celebrated her eighty-first birthday. Despite the fact that she’s lived in Staten Island most of her life, I strongly suspect she hadn’t been under the graceful dome of the St. George in at least forty years, and being in the theater awakened plenty of memories. It’s that way with the old palaces; they’re memory sponges.

​The first thing she wanted to tell me about was the organ, long absent from its “elevator” hidden in the stage. I was glad to hear anything she had to say about that long-absent instrument. I wrote several posts about it, a 3/30 (3 manual/30 rank) Wurlitzer, sold off to a pizza parlor in Texas, in the early seventies, before we came along. We had found the elevator in the stage, so I knew there had been an organ, and researched what became of it; but I have no personal experience of the instrument. Though the organist was let go in 1935, from time to time the theater presented a little musical entertainment before movies, and my friend remembered several of these interludes. From our seats in the upper balcony, she pointed to the exact spot on the stage where the “lift‘ had been, “They darkened all the lights, and then, there he was, [the organist] rising out of all that blackness, sitting on his bench.” He must have been dramatically lit: a follow spot whose beam no doubt descended six stories from the projection booth would have added drama. I know those old carbon-arc spots well, having watched our friend Bob Endres, a projectionist of considerable chops, operate them back in 1976 for one of our modest attempts at live entertainment), probably Chaka Khan, who sang at the St. George in a disco night number when nobody knew her. I asked my friend where the organ pipes had been; as I suspected, they’d inhabited part of the alcove stage right, whose sole resident for some time has been a giant gold Greek goddess. “I’m going to ask some people I know if they remember any more details,” she promised.

Simply sitting in the space seemed to have pierced my friend’s memory in several ways: she had a darker recollection of her times at the St George, a newsreel, towards the end of WWII she’d seen in the theater, back when going to the movies was how you got your news. “Nazi Murder Mills, April 26, 1945;” I googled just enough of the newsreel to find that headline. You can access the actual film under that title, if you’d like; but I can’t bring myself to subject it to an ordinary link. This horrendous (now infamous) footage of the Bergen-Belsen camp, shown just days after it was shot, in American theaters across the continent, reveals the bulldozing of thousands of emaciated bodies. My friend would have been seven. “How could they show this to young children?” she wondered last night. 
I thought of the transfiguring qualities of cinema, the effect of that black-and-white imagery blasted on the St. George’s giant screen. Under the sheltering recess of the theater’s cream and pink dome, my friend learned very quickly that if this could happen to people in Germany, it could happen, as she pointed out, “...even to my family.” She was seven in April, 1945.

Our visitors from the New York Phil played on. They honored D-Day with Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis,” and Meacham’s “American Patrol.” They played an arrangement of Gershwin’s “Blue Lullaby.” That’s the second time I’ve heard Gershwin rising to the recesses of the dome. The first time, was almost fifty years ago, in 1976; a friend played “Rhapsody in Blue” from an upright piano we hauled center stage. It was late in our theater year, and our contentious landlord had seen fit to cut off our heat; it was so cold you could see the pianist’s breath, just above the keys. These and other flashes of light or fragments of sound are my own memories, decades younger than my friend’s, but keeping company with hers, in the plaster recesses of a theater I am grateful to say still stands. 
  
Afterthoughts:
1: Philip Smith, the conductor, a 37-year veteran of the Philharmonic, made the Sunday concert at the St. George into a lesson in brasses, playing along at intervals with the 3 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 percussionists, solitary tuba and equally solitary euphonium that comprised the group, quite enough to make the dome ring as if heaven itself were opening! 

2. My friend’s memories of the camp footage were underscored by her distant memory of having just escaped Denmark, her father’s land of birth, on one of the last liners to sail before WWII broke out. Subsequent ships, tankers, liners and otherwise, were targets for German torpedoes. So those bulldozed victims must have had additional meaning for her...

3. I mentioned the architect of the St. George Theatre early in this post; here’s a little something about him (also the architect of the more famous Apollo Theatre). 

It’s easy to say that, as a white middle-class child in Eisenhower’s America, I was about as safe as a person could get, but I didn’t know it, and that’s what counts. One afternoon at the Mt. Lookout Theatre in Cincinnati where I grew up, I ducked under the seat-back in front of me one Saturday afternoon. There had  been other bouts of movie hiding, but this particular moment was when a flying saucer sliced off the dome of the Capitol Building, in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and I just couldn’t take it. I wasn’t alone. The grown-ups — back in that gilded decade — always seemed a little jumpy, despite mammoth steaks on the grill and cars with tail fins. Ordinary people had begun building fallout shelters in their backyards. At school we ducked under school desks during drills, so why not hide on the floor of the theater where I went each Saturday, to spend my free ticket?

Fast forward to 1976, when, as a young adult, I helped run The St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. I was grown-up, but still afraid. The fall of Saigon, that finally ended the bloody war in Vietnam, was only a year behind us; the recession was slowly winding down, but New York City’s near-bankruptcy was still fresh in everybody’s memor; and the Cold War was hardly over. Watergate had sent a president into exile, reminding me of the Goya etching I’d seen at the Met in Manhattan, “The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters.” 

Grown-ups don’t hide under seats, but there are other ways to avoid the assault on your  eyes and ears (and nervous system) that sitting in the dark watching a movie with strangers offers. We ran plenty of scary stuff the year we worked as theater operators; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) comes immediately to mind. Based on a presumably true story of a mentally-disturbed man, Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, Tobe Hooper’s early slasher film did as well as many movies in our single-screen palace. As a theater operator, I had plenty of opportunity to observe its effects on the audience: concession sales were heroic, a sign that people felt the need to get  up and move out of the darkened auditorium for a moment, nervously grabbing another popcorn or seeking the comfort of Snickers, standing outside the glass that separated lobby from theater, for a few moments of rest. You could see but not hear the movie from there. Those who stayed put in the auditorium were a little bit jittery, jiggling around and poking each other. As for myself, I sat through the better part of the movie one afternoon, shading my eyes at intervals and pulling my long hair tight over my ears. 

Ever wonder why people pay to ride fast dangerous rides? Roller coasters are hardly for the faint-of-heart, in the literal sense. They increase heart rate and trigger fight-or-flight responses involving adrenaline and cortisol; but as long as your heart can take it, you may get a dopamine/endorphin rush, fun, if your particular physiology is set to run that way. Horror and/or slasher movies are one cheap-and-safe (think virtual) way of getting those same roller coaster highs, without being hung upside down high in the air.  

One movie that did draw all the thrill-seekers out and into our baroque cave of wonders was The Exorcist, the only movie we ran in our theater year that sold out the house (four times, to be exact). I remember it well, counting out $13,000 in receipts on the old piano in the office. The fact that we had to turn most of that money in to Warner and his brothers, is, perhaps, the thing that makes my memory of the movie truly horrifying. As for what happens on screen, call me an oddball, but I’ve never found Exorcist particularly scary! I was not raised in any church, and priests, even ones who act nobly, leave me cold, that and I have difficulty with suspending my disbelief, when it comes to “possession.” Here, for your perusal is an excellent treatment of why The Exorcist is the scariest movie of all time according to one watcher. Others don’t agree, putting the original Exorcist at the bottoms of long “Exorcism Movie” lists (if you wait long enough, everything becomes a genre!).

Other “scary” movies we ran:  Carrie (yes, thoroughly frightening, but also objectionable from a first-wave feminist perspective); Embryo (too improbable — a scientist figures out how to turn a fetus into a full-grown miniature human); The Devil Within Her and Burnt Offerings (both about possession), and Don’t Open the Window, (aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, depending on which country you see it in). That’s a movie with more aliases than the average con artist.  
Interestingly enough, I find One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which reveals the horrors of a psych ward, the scariest movie we ran that whole year! (It figures prominently in last week’s post about crying at the movies). Crying, cringing in fear, how close? 

Afterthought: 
1. On last week’s emotional reaction to movies (crying) I’ve had a few comments back from readers. One is from Betsy Baltzer, an old friend, who recalls crying at Casablanca (at the exact scene you might expect, when the more or less homeless French drown out the Nazis by singing La Marseillaise). Betsy had a friend who was kicked out of a local neighborhood theater for crying at the end of West Side Story. The end? Why? It’s all pretty much over by then.
 
2. Here’s a little something on movies that reflect our fear of the Internet; that’s something we could never have imagined in the more brutal, hardly virtual 1970s.

When was the last time you cried in the dark at a movie theater?  Were you with somebody else? Were you alone?  I can clearly remember crying at the St. George, the 2,672-seat movie palace I helped run back in 1976. Most of the time, I was crying because I couldn’t figure out how to pay the private carting service, or didn’t know where I was going to get a deposit for the next movie, but occasionally I cried as the result of actually watching a film. I know I cried at Taxi Driver (when Travis takes his date to a porno movie), Dog Day Afternoon (when the cops remove Sal’s body from the car). And of course there’s always One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in that scene where the Chief smothers the lobotomized McMurphy with a pillow. The death of a first-rate brain is more compelling to me than any amputation. When Danny falls to his death while singing “The Son of God Goes Forth to War,” in John Huston’s 1975 movie based on Kipling’s novel, The Man Who Would Be King, I lose it every time, running through whatever tissues happen to be in my pocket. I was in the St. George’s balcony in May of ’76 the first time I saw this epic, which I’m sure has something to do with later crying episodes. We were soldiers of fortune too, in our theater adventure.

In the almost sixty years our theater was a movie palace, its red velvet cushions must have absorbed countless gallons of tears; still it’s interesting that, if you google “movies that make you cry” or “tear jerkers,” even on the IMDB site, you’ll find hardly any movies that engendered this reaction in audiences prior to 1980. It’s as if the tear ducts of previous decades remained stubbornly dry. Well we know this isn’t true: think of 1946 and It’s a Wonderful Life!

I wish we could have showed my favorite good cry, Casablanca, at the St. George, but in 1976 in a tough urban ‘hood, the flirtations and idealism of WWII seemed almost extraterrestrial. I regularly bawl my eyes out at home whenever we let ourselves into Casablanca’s warm bath of love, cigarette smoke, and political resistance.

As a child I cried at The Wizard of Oz, every single time I saw it on the big screen (that would be at least five times). When Dorothy sees Auntie Em in the Wicked Witch’s crystal ball, so far away, I just can’t help it. I didn’t cry, but hid my eyes when the witch died, mostly out of fear of melting, even if (or maybe because) what was changing from solid to liquid before my eyes was, in the witch’s own words, “all my lovely wickedness...”

Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander was a straight-through cry, made the more poignant by the fact that I had chosen to see it as one of my “after therapy” movies. Being alone in the dark, watching as children begin to understand death, that was what did it. It’s easier, I think, to tear up when nobody you know is sitting next to you;  you can lose yourself among strangers with little or no embarrassment.

There are pure cries and impure cries. 

Impure ones end up making you feel manipulated. Among them, for me: Terms of Endearment, Titanic, and, reaching way back... My big sister, eight years old, burst into tears every time Lassie tried to come home in that 1943 movie. Judy’s tears were so wrenching and convulsive my father was forced to take her out of the Hyde Park Art, our local theater, because she was disturbing other moviegoers. As family legend has it, they tried three times to see the movie from beginning to end. Was it the war? My sister had a rep; she also cried on December 26th for orphaned Christmas trees on a vacant lot. 

Heading up the “pure cry” list for me is one of my favorite rom coms of all time, Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road. Have you ever thought a movie was written with just you in mind? I was involved in a volatile relationship in 1968 when it first came out, same one I’m still involved in. At intervals of roughly ten years, Dean and I have watched this movie, and I can credit it for keeping us under the same roof for a half century. The couple (played by Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn) seemed, when we were in our twenties, intimidatingly grown up, but now that we’re twice their age, I think of them almost as grandchildren!

There are also in-between cries, neither pure, nor impure. Casablanca, I think, falls into this category. Yes, the bad guys singing “Deutschland Uber Alles” — outsung by French expats singing "La Marseillaise"— is exploitative, to say the least; but I surrender to it with a free heart. Then at last, there’s the scene at the airport. What could be more grown-up and more true than Rick’s pronouncement, “I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world.” Whether there was an alternate ending or no, Amen to that. 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri comes to mind; was I crying for or against Mildred, the woman whose daughter was raped and killed, in a town that seemed not to be paying any attention? It’s hard to have a clean cry at a deeply cynical movie.

This past August, I saw Lawrence of Arabia once more on a giant screen – the kind of screen that movie was made to be projected onto – at the United Palace of Cultural Arts in upper upper Manhattan. Now that is one deep movie, and complicated. Unlike The Man Who Would Be King, Lawrence has survived into this post-colonial era, by refusing to do anything but tell a good story. It’s hardly a tear-jerker, but I did cry at various points, and, at the end, bitterly: because T.E. Lawrence becomes a sell-out, useless. 

Back to the St. George Theatre where, lost in the shadows of a half-empty auditorium, I cried briefly during Silent Movie, possibly because there was nobody in the auditorium, but me and one other person, to witness a movie in which the only spoken word is uttered by a mime (albeit with plenty of music and sound effects). I also knew Mel Brooks was taking us all back to the movies‘ inception, the silents, which the St. George probably showed just a few of, even if it had opened with a talkie (So This is College) in 1929. So in the midst of a rampant comedy, I cried, and the masks of comedy, as well as tragedy were amused. They continue to rule in the shadows of our still-standing St. George, not a movie theater anymore except for brief moments, when the current management offers up a flick on a modest-sized screen. I’m not complaining. The theater still stands, and that is not something to cry about!

Afterthoughts:
1. What drove me to write about crying at the movies is a book called, Crying at the Movies: A Film Memoir, by Madelon Sprengnether published by Graywolf Press in 2002. This author is no ordinary movie crier, and the movies that set her off are specific to things that have happened in her life.  Check it out!

2. I’ve written in previous posts about movies we ran, among them Dog Day Afternoon. In this early blog post, I claim to have watched the movie in snatches, which I would now argue with myself about. Well, they were long snatches!

3. Speaking of The Wizard of Oz and Auntie Em, as seen by Dorothy in the witch’s crystal ball, after 9/11/01 I found a new way to cry about that part of the movie. When I see this scene now, I also cry because, as a New Yorker, I was trapped out of town, the week after. No cars were allowed into the city. That dark week, my equivalent to the witch’s crystal ball was the television screen I couldn’t stop watching that contained the city I was exiled from..

Even the lowliest food kiosk (as they call them in the U.K.) is always, almost, a restaurant...
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I did a three-year stint as a chef’s assistant/prep cook at the River Cafe in Brooklyn back in the early nineteen eighties, when New American Cuisine was new. This was only a few years after bombing out at running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre, in Staten Island, to which this blog is dedicated. The concession stand at our movie palace had been my particular pride and joy: all-beef (Sabrett’s) hot dogs with dijon mustard on homemade miniature Italian breads; Haagen Dazs ice cream back when it was Haagen Dazs — tiny cups delivered by some guy in a station wagon, Klondike bars to satisfy the kiddie ice cream crowd, fresh popped corn with real butter, and every candy bar available, including frozen Snickers. People didn’t just grab food on the way to the movie; they ate dinner, sometimes standing near the mahogany pillars that framed the glassed-in auditorium, as if eating were somehow more important than what was on screen. 

I’ve always felt there was a connection between our stand and the high-end River Cafe where, a few years later, as a walk-in hire, I learned to make Boudin aux Fruits de la Mer, and a certain vegetable terrine (the delicate chicken breast mousse held vegetables in a heavenly suspension). There was a chocolate terrine that required ten pounds of chocolate and ninety egg-yolks, and other wonders, created or approved by our chef, Larry Forgione.

What was served at our concession stand had been as important to me, in its time, as the opulent items we offered well-heeled diners on the Cafe’s barge, facing sunset Manhattan. So the other day, avoiding all the bad news that’s fit (or unfit) to print in the NY Times, I turned my eye to the obituaries (often the only non-threatening text, and generally better written than other stories). 

LOUIS OSTEEN, 77, SOUTHERN CHEF WHO ELEVATED CUISINE, IS DEAD.

Good, I thought, something from the food world. I was only half right. Quality obits always start, like good resumes, in the present; and so followed a description of an Inn on Pawley’s Island, SC Osteen made his name at, the grill in Charlston he opened and a name restaurant just down the street, a mention of his elevation of local Southern cuisine, and a seminal cookbook he published. The James Beard Award crowned his career. Then, as is true for all classic obituaries, approximately four paragraphs after the resume, the writer turns his attention to Osteen’s roots: born in 1941, in Anderson, SC, not to a family of cooks as you might suppose, but to a family of small town movie theater owners and operators!  

Chef though Osteen was to become, his first job was, actually, in the family drive-in theater. “I was 10 years old,” he told The Daily Meal, so “...took pride in cooking and serving popcorn, hotdogs and hamburgers...I wanted to make the best concession food I could.”

Wow, could I get my head around that; it’s what I always wanted for us at the St. George. Our concession stand had the highest per capita sales of any movie theater stand in the five boroughs of New York City, in our theater year, 1976.

Good food is good food, whether it’s served at a concession stand or in a white tablecloth restaurant. If you look at the list of eateries Osteen worked at or ran, a number of them turn out to be snack stands, places where he perfected recipes like his chili-pickled shrimp. 

I’ve always thought of restaurants as intrinsically theatrical: the props (perishable) are the food, the cooks and the waiters are actors and/or stagehands, and the diner is the audience. The drama is: will the diner (patron) get the desired food in a timely manner, served in an appealing (or romantic or even orgasmic) way? It doesn’t always work out the way you intend; don’t ask me about the intrinsic flaw in the chocolate-covered raisins we sold at the theater... I’m sure Osteen had some tragic restaurant food stories of his own to relate to friends in the late hours. At the River Cafe, a kitchen run in the French manner, the “cold pantry” was the cooking station where desserts and salads came from. All the sauces for cold things were kept there, and one sad afternoon, the pantryman had the misfortune to serve the garlic/basil cream sauce on the chocolate terrine — mistaking it for the sweet creamy (green) pistachio sauce.

That’s what I mean about drama, and it can happen behind the “line,” in the kitchen or out on the floor in the dining room, or in a theater in the dark, while munching. Masks of Comedy and Tragedy appear largely over the prosceniums of theaters, but could bless the kitchen or concession-stand door as well. 

Afterthoughts:
1. The Osteen Twin, a two-screen theater in Anderson, is what most local folk remember of this family’s small chain. P.C. Osteen, the chef’s grandfather, started the whole she-bang in 1918, with Vaudeville and movies. His four sons took over and expanded the theater business. Harry, the dominant son (chef’s uncle) and the official family historian, carried it into the next generation, with the cooperation of his three brothers.  

For a sense of the life of a small-town theater impresario, here’s a chunk of Uncle Harry’s obit from a 2008 edition of the Anderson Independent Mail: 

Harry Osteen Sr. died on July 10, 2008, at the age of 93. He is being remembered as an important part of the Anderson community.
The Osteen family name was synonymous with the movie theater business in Anderson for the better part of the 20th century, and Harry Osteen was part of that tradition.
He and his wife of 69 years, Verna, also were involved in the Meals on Wheels program in Anderson for decades and were active in Anderson Senior Follies, Outreach Entertainers and ballroom dancing instruction.
The family business into which Osteen entered started when his father P.C. Osteen in 1918 bought one of the downtown theaters that cropped up in the late 1800s. P.C. Osteen bought, sold, and built a series of theaters around Anderson showing movies, putting on vaudeville shows, and helping to introduce a new form of entertainment to a small town.
Harry Osteen along with his brothers Percy, Bill, and Albert carried on the family tradition in the Electric City by opening a series of movie houses between 1946 and 1974.
In 1995, he was awarded the state’s Order of the Palmetto.
In 1996, he received the Service to Mankind Award presented by the Anderson Sertoma Club.
In 2004, he was honored by the Orphan Film Symposium conducted at the University of South Carolina. 

2. Louis Osteen didn’t embark on his restaurant career without, briefly, trying to open some theaters in Atlanta with a couple of friends. It didn’t pan out exactly; boy do I get that!