The announced double feature at the St. George Theatre (a 2672-seat movie palace I and a handful of friends lost our shirts running in 1976) was Smile, an early indie about a beauty contest, and The Sunshine Boys, starring George Burns and Walter Matthau as a couple of aging Vaudevillians. Showtimes were in the papers, but folks who attended the six o’clock screening were treated to an inadvertent triple or quadruple feature, two movies plus audio portions of what was playing upstairs in the projection booth, re-runs of McHale’s Navy and Gilligan’s Island from an omni-present illicit television not so far off. These features played to an audience of one, Gabe, our projectionist, long past his prime, who hardly cared what was on the big screen down below.
 
He routinely missed change-overs, treating the audience to periodic tag-ends of reels, with perforations and white space. At the exulted salary of $13.76 an hour (equivalent nowadays to $61.50), why did we cut him a paycheck? We hadn’t paid ourselves in forever. Local 306, the NYC projectionists (and spotlight operators’) union, had a lock on the five boroughs. There wasn’t even, as I recall, a contract: 306 had simply been at the theater since it opened in 1929. Whatever guy they deemed to bestow on you, you took, no questions asked. Gabe more or less came with the theater, along with the dirty carpets and soda-stained movie screen, our inheritance, whether we liked it or not.
 
We complained often to the union. Dean called our rep at 306, and  he invariably promised to talk to our wayward “employee.” Sometimes he did. After these chats Gabe was worse than ever, rolling in moments before screen-time, glaring as he ascended to the booth. For a while there was television silence, but a week or two later, McHale’s (Ernest Borgnine’s) unmistakable bray eventually filtered through the soundtrack of whatever was showing. It was always jarring, but sometimes downright surreal, as when Roy Scheider was trying to stare down the great white shark in Jaws. 
 
One magic morning, following several calls to the union, two representatives of 306 strode into the lobby, to talk about our “problem.” But talk is cheap. We took them to the booth and out its side door there, onto the theater’s catwalk, a railed pathway within the skeleton of the dome. It was a world unto itself, which also incidentally served the booth as a kind of techno burial ground. Amid the dead projector parts and other detritus to the left of the walkway, lay a brand-new Sony Trinitron, as well as a half-dozen discarded portable TVs — two RCAs a couple of Motorolas, even a Dumont, from the more distant past. The reps were speechless.
 
There was a hearing the following Tuesday, and we never saw Gabe again. On Wednesday, a nice young man strode into the lobby, displayed his union card, shook hands all around and asked for directions on how to get to the booth. I think his name was Phil. Perhaps the reason I don’t remember him as clearly as Gabe was that he did his job flawlessly, he was pleasant, he came and he went. 
 
When you’re going broke in a business, humor is an important survival tool. Woody Guthrie was a hero of mine. He’d written a terrific song I have always admired, which was often sung at  rallies back in the Depression. It goes like this: 
 
There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
 
Times were tough in the thirties; my own mother’s best friend had been a union maid, an organizer. But in our case, in 1976, the shoe of desperation was on the other — entrepreneurial — foot. Accordingly, we sang our own parody of Guthrie’s song:
 
There once was a management maid who wasn’t getting paid. 
She was in a fix with 306....
 
I won’t treat you to the nastier verses of our parody. 
 
After the union did right by us, we went back to the business at hand, going broke. We were a single-screen movie house in the age of TV dominance, fighting for audience share with the multiplexes. But in the larger sense, while Gabe was around, we actually had more than one screen.
 
Afterthoughts:
1.   A lot has changed since 1976. With the advent of digital projection, the job of projectionist in most theaters has devolved to a side-gig most managers can handle. Even as far back as 1996, the once-strong projectionists’ union was struggling to keep its membership up as you can see from this article in the archives of The New York Times 
 
2.   The quality projectionist, as he (were there women projectionists?) was conceived has always been a skilled technician and, yes, an artist. The intricacies of trimming carbons, keeping two projectors going — one loaded and ready, the other in process, then siting cue-marks and making the changeover flawlessly from reel to reel, all the while coping with malfunctions in delicate equipment, handling the film itself, requires constant attention. Thankfully, there is still film, projected the traditional way in bigger cities, like L.A. and NYC, and even in rural Pennsylvania (see last week’s blog post on digital vs. film).
 
 3. Ironically, TV, once the enemy of the movies, is side-lined these days too, as smaller and smaller screens take over, implicit in this Variety piece about Martin Scorcese’s new film, The Irishman. He’s made it with Netflix, which pretty much guarantees it will make only a brief appearance in theaters, and in many households, not even on TV. The most troubling aspect of the Variety article is the economics of movie production...read it.

After watching At the Drive-In, a documentary about the Mahoning Drive-In Theatre in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, I was moved to reprise the blog post you’ll find  below, which I wrote on 2/16/16 about the struggle between traditional film and digitalization. Yes, two years later, digitalization is winning the battle, but there are always glorious hold-outs, and one of them happens to be the Mahoning an entirely volunteer operation which is, after three years, an enormous success. The theatre is owned and managed by a projectionist aided by a crowd of local film buffs. For a time, its giant screen was dark, because no one could afford the switch to digital, and the only way to stay on the current film distribution circuit would have been to drop the cash for a technical switch. So what did this crew of desperadoes do? They took themselves off the current film circuit, opting for retro, and continuing to run their original 1940's Simplex projectors, while renting whatever older films could still be shown on their screen. You would think, in the wilds of Pennsylvania, this would doom them, but thanks to social media saavy, the programming decision worked, drawing people from all over the U.S., some of whom camp out to go to one of the Mahoning’s festivals, or see a particular film in its traditional format. And that’s not all the Mahoning crew has done; I refuse to spoil the narrative of this fine documentary by telling you what happened when Jaws,which they’d rented on film from Hollywood didn’t arrive on time. You’ll have to watch At the Drive-In yourself to learn about that.  

Meanwhile, below please find my 2016 treatment of Film vs. Digitalization, with some updates at the end. Currently, of movies released in 2018, 91% used a digital format and just 14% used film. Not all that much has changed, but film’s hold is getting more tenuous...  

I have’t climbed to the balcony — then the fourteen steep stairs from the back of the balcony to the projection booth — of the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat movie palace I helped to run — since 1977, when we pulled out from under the marquee, taking what was left of the popcorn and candy, a couple of movie posters, some foot-light covers we’d paid eight dollars apiece for, and whatever was left of the cash.
 
For about a year and a half after the theater went dark, the light of a single bare 40-watt bulb, visible from six stories below in the parking lot, told me there was still electricity up there; then that last bulb went dark, and the booth became, in my memory, a shadowy dream space, its hulking pedestal-mounted carbon-arc projectors a fantasy I had to struggle to recall.  
 
Even then our projectors were antique, a technology which used actual  fire to illuminate film as it passed through the gate — as primitive in what had then become the age of xenon and platter projection as quill pens and inkwells.  
 
Every technology is superseded by the next, and the next. What would Gabe, the grizzled old union projectionist we overpaid back then, think tomorrow, if he climbed the stairs to the booth and found, in place of two behemoth projectors of ancient vintage, a laptop? In this most digital of ages, not only has film itself fallen into mortal danger, but so is the thing once called “projection.”  If Tarantino, Scorcese and Nolan are right, the death of film is the death of film art. Is film — hard to transport, easy to scuff and scratch, hard to preserve, environmentally un-friendly — really better (sharper, richer, just plain more authentic) than digital imagery? Would my old friend and  teacher, Hollis Frampton, a structuralist film-maker who died in 1984, agree?
 
On the activist side of the argument stood, in 2015, a small but impressive band of directors:  Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), Laszlo Nemes (Son of Saul), Christopher McQuarrie (Mission: Impossible --Rogue Nation),  Adam McKay (The Big Short), Todd Haynes (Carol), J. J. Abrams (Star Wars: Episode VII), Judd Apatow (Train Wreck), Sam Mendes (Spectre), Scott Cooper (Black Mass), Bill Pohlad (Love and Mercy), Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs), and David O. Russell (Joy). All of the previously-mentioned movies were produced in 2015, using Tarantino’s newly-tweaked Ultra-Panavision (2.76:1 aspect ratio) 70-millimeter film process. Beyond that, roughly 100 movies were produced that year on film.
 
But, (as Ron Popeil of Ronco used to say) “...wait!  There’s more!” The slow anticipated demise of film technology that’s been going on since the millennium isn’t just  about aesthetics; it’s about people’s livelihoods. Over the last several years, since Paramount became the first major distributor to announce that it would no longer produce or distribute film as a physical project, mom-and-pop cinemas and smaller chains in the U.S. have been packing up their popcorn, the way we did in 1977, closing the doors, and going home. To combat this, and to create a platform for the new 70mm phenomenon, the previously-mentioned A-list directors went to eBay looking for old projectors to rebuild. In 100 cinemas nationwide, they installed the new systems, their aim to create a viewer experience reminiscent of the fifties, when the palaces were still at a high shine.
 
In 2011, A.O. Scott of The New York Times, trying not to sound too nostalgic, observed: “The machinery of production and distribution is in the midst of an epochal change, part of the rapid and convulsive digitalization of everything under the sun. If you go to a movie theater, you are less and less likely to see a film in the traditional, literal sense. Cans and reels have been replaced by hard drives and digital files, and some of the old material hallmarks of cinema — the grainy swirl of emulsion as the light passes through the stock, the occasional shudder of sprockets sliding into place, the whirr and click of the projector — are quickly taking on an aura of antiquity. Movies are shot and shown digitally and increasingly distributed that way as well, streaming onto the screen in your living room or in your hand.” 
 
Have the activist directors turned back this tide? — or just plugged a temporary hole? Do/will audiences miss that “grainy swirl of emulsion?” Is film arguably better, in the way some argue that vinyl is richer than CD’s were or downloads are? “Digital projection is just television in cinema,” Tarantino maintains. Is he right? What is it about technology that supersedes itself constantly, putting whole industries and thousands of small storefront operations inadvertently out of business? It isn’t just storefront businesses, either. 
 
Kodak, once the “jolly yellow giant,” as one filmmaker friend used to call it, drifted into deep trouble, around the time Scott was waxing poetic about grainy emulsion. The company was losing 100 million dollars annually. Now thanks to Spielberg, Tarantino and the gang — not to mention Nolan and Scorsese, and a growing crowd of others, the big K is back, anticipating profits in 2016, for the first time in years. 
 
On to the next challenge: processing labs, many of which no longer exist. Unbelievably, according to Ed Lachman, who shot Carol, “the New York Film Lab [a partnership between Deluxe and Technicolor that was created to respond to film’s shrinking footprint] is closed. They were going to throw out all the equipment. I inquired about it, and the general manager let me have the lab equipment. I have it in storage. We can develop film at Fotokem in Los Angeles, which is a very good lab. ... But there's a market and [we need] a lab on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.” 
 
Perhaps enough theaters capable of projecting film will be able to stay in business — which brings me to a thought I’ve been harboring as I read about all this Errol-Flynn-like brinksmanship. What if — way back at the St. George — we’d been required to replace those old carbon arc relics with digital projectors? I have a vivid memory of one Saturday night in 1976, having to hop on the ferry (the St. George Theatre was and is in Staten Island) and schlepp via subway to the porn district in Times Square. We’d run out of carbons to operate our antiquated projectors (probably because we hadn’t paid the supplier). The porn houses were virtually the only theaters left in NYC that had our kind of projection. They loaned us the carbons, and we soldiered on. What if Dog Day Afternoon, Cuckoo’s Nest and The Exorcist could only have arrived in a lovely beam on our wide stained screen if we had the latest technology? Xenon, the techno breakthrough of that time, was way beyond our reach. Fortunately, nobody required us to upgrade: as long as we remained in the movie palace business, smudged and scratched prints, more than one of which burst into fire on-screen, continued to arrive each Wednesday in heavy steel canisters our intrepid ushers managed to lug up seven flights to the booth.
 
Afterthoughts: 
1) Here’s an interesting example of reverse discrimination, exhibitors miffed over having already done the digital conversion, rendering them unable to project Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar in 2014. 
 
2) Check out the comments column from the original post.

3) Stephen Follows, who has written extensively on film vs. digital, with a recent update. Apparently, genre has a lot to do with what audiences seek out:

In my original article, I looked at what percentage of films of each genre were shot digitally over a six-year period (2010-15).  It showed that 77% of sci-fi films had switched to digital but that only 41% of romantic films and 33% of war films had followed suit. At the time I spoke to a Director of Photography who said: ‘History films shoot film more because it’s softer and people associate it with a period look now and Romance because film still makes actors look more attractive than digital.’

​By adding the last three years to the dataset, we can see how things have changed. Sci-fi movies are still the most likely to be shot digitally (now at 91%) and war and romance films are still among the least (both at 73%).  Although the order has remained very similar, we can see that all genres have increased their reliance on digital formats.
 
Thanks, Steven.

The “movie palace”  was, arguably, invented in America. Where else would “palace” find itself appended to the synonym for (last century’s original technological obsession), the “moving picture?” (Possible answer, if I wanted to argue with myself: “in England, where they’re called “Picture Palaces”) 

Movie palaces were ubiquitous by the time I came along, which explains why, in 1976, a hard-nosed crew of us enthusiasts fought so hard to keep the doors of The St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque confection in Staten Island, open for business. It was our birthright, we assumed, to watch movies in elegance on a giant screen. 
 
There are no real palaces in these United States, with a few exceptions — Vizcaya in Miami? Hearst Castle in California? The former home  of the Archdiocese of New York, once known as the “Villard Houses,” built for the president of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1884? The President lives in a house whose only notable attribute is its whiteness. Palaces--Buckingham, Windsor, the Doge’s domicile — are for princes.

Raised in the 1950’s, I thought of our beloved Cincinnati movie palaces — the Grand, the RKO Albee, and, yes, the Palace (later the International 70), with their extravagant smoking and powder rooms, hall of mirrors (reminiscent of Versailles) and soaring domes, as — echoing the Communist rhetoric of our day-- “people’s palaces.”  But in the land of free enterprise, they’d been built to lure the upper crust.

What was the first ever movie palace? Some say the Regent Theater (designed by the estimable Thomas Lamb,) which opened in NYC’s Harlem in 1913, followed almost immediately (1914) by Lamb’s million dollar Strand Theatre on Broadway — back when a million was a million. By 1929 there were already — springing up like so many elegant Chanterelles  — roughly 21,000 movie palaces coast to coast. Lamb and his colleagues could hardly keep up.

When the San Francisco Fox opened in June of 1929, newspaper and magazine advertisements proclaimed: "No palace of Prince or Princess, no mansion of millionaire could offer the same pleasure, delight, and relaxation to those who seek surcease from the work-a-day world...You are the monarch while the play is on!"

The whole thing had really started as an attempt to make upscale opera crowds investigate movies, an experience that, prior to 1913, consisted of sitting in “flea pits,” on wooden benches, while ushers waved lighted sticks of citronella (“punk”) to keep the insect population at bay. But as a business-school grad once told me, it’s not the “classes” but the “masses” you want to serve if you’re an entrepreneur, and serve the masses the moguls and impresarios did, with enthusiasm. 
​
So, thanks to all this enterprise and the average person’s desire for a little glamor, we still have the palatial (Grauman’s) Egyptian, and Chinese theaters, New York’s United Palace (one of the original “wonder theaters”), and who could ignore other  “Palaces” still at this point listed as standing and operational: The Palace Theatre (Albany, N.Y.), The Palace Theatre (Marion, O.), and The Palace Theatre (Louiseville, Ky.), among so many? No doubt there are other unabashed palaces, so named, still open for business;  if there’s one I’ve ignored, please let me know!

I’ve never been to the movies in Paris, but a girl can dream. David Sedaris just took me there briefly in “The City of Light in the Dark,” and although his essay was written around the millennium, nothing much seems to have changed in Paris since then, from what I’m able to determine. Within a five-block radius of Sedaris’ apartment were/are “...a dozen thirty-to-fifty-seat revival houses with rotating programs devoted to obscure and well-known actors, directors and genres.” Apparently, many of these are “...mom and pop theaters, willing to proceed with the two o’clock showing of The Honeymoon Killers, even if I’m the only one in the house.”

I ran a “mom and pop” theater once, a 2,672-seat single-screen movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, back in 1976. Okay, it wasn’t like a tiny Paris revival house, but we did once or twice play to fewer than six or seven people, making the vast gold and red-velvet interior seem vaster.

It was on Wednesdays at the St. George, matinee day, when we could forecast our losses for the week. If the matinee did squat, we knew the movie’d be a doggie for the whole weekend: true for Gable and Lombard, equally true for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.

One particular afternoon, nobody at all showed up, all 2,672 seats empty. What to do?  Dean (the “pop” in our mom and pop operation) called Gabe in the booth and instructed him to kill the projector, but keep the sound track going, so we’d stay on schedule for the evening, in hopes that somebody eventually would show up. “Then,” he pointed out to the grizzled projectionist, “you can just fire up the projectors to go along with the sound. Why burn expensive carbons when nobody’s watching?”

Around four thirty, a lone customer appeared. He bought a ticket, grabbed some popcorn and headed into the dark. Dean instructed Gabe to fire up the projectors, and the movie bloomed on the screen.  

Seemed okay, but a few minutes later, our single patron reappeared. 

“Can I have my money back?” he asked Dean, who was stocking the concession stand.

“What’s the problem?” 

“Well, it’s just so lonely in there...” the man confessed.

That, apparently, would never happen in the City of Light, where the love of cinema trumps all, and where, remarkably even today, people would rather go out to the movies than stream or binge-watch Fresh Off the Boat. And the rep houses (long vanished in New York, for the most part), are so various in Paris that often two or three versions of a movie can be had in different parts of town. Want to see the 2013 Great Gatsby? You have to be careful not to show up at the 1974 or even the 1949 Gatsbys showing at other unrelated locales.

The other thing Sedaris prizes about going to the movies there is the silence. Parisians simply don’t talk during the movie, not even teens on a Saturday at a slasher flick. He prizes this silence, what he calls, “the French dark...” which he could never find in Chicago, where a neighboring moviegoer insisted on listening to the Cubs’ game during a movie. Or other places in the U.S. where people would rather defend their rights of self-expression than surrender to what’s on screen. 

This was particularly the case at the St. George in ’76, where, even before Rocky Horror, people talked back — or just talked — all through the movie. Our auditorium, in those happy times when the orchestra section was almost full, buzzed like an open-air market on a good Saturday. 

​So how is it that Paris gets away with this degree of cinema refinement? How do those tiny cinemas survive, sans even a concession stand, to offset costs? Apparently someone wanders the audience selling candy and ice cream from “...a tiny tray around his neck.” 

Moviegoing habits seem to be dying out on this side of the water, offset in some places by luxury seating and table service, but Paris cinema goes on, a lovely anachronism, silence and choice in a city that takes its movies seriously, the city where, in fact, movies began. 
 
Afterthoughts:
1. The original Sedaris essay was excerpted in a lovely book, Paris in Mind, edited by Jennifer Lee, Vintage Books, 2003.

2. If you do make it over there, I have it on recent authority that you’ll need to break a few codes to figure out movie-going in Paris, and a detailed guide to all the cinemas doesn’t hurt either. Here’s some news from a couple who conquered the cinemas there. Also, visit www.secretsofparis.com Don’t forget, you’ll be watching movies in English mostly, not French. I think that’s some of the allure for Sedaris, the familiar made unfamiliar.

3. Next time I get to Paris, I intend to check out the Grand Rex, largest single movie auditorium in Europe (2,750 seats). Wonder if they have a candy stand?

A Blazing Saddles poster, featuring Cleavon Little on a rearing palomino, hangs in an upstairs bedroom of our house. Mel Brooks’ satire on race and the wild west was the movie that launched our movie exhibition year, 1976, at the St George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace a group of us struggled to run in Staten Island, long after single-screen palaces were anything but a Quixotic adventure. The Blazing Saddles poster was supposed to have been a good luck charm. We rolled it up and set it aside, after a less-than-stellar first week, trying not to notice how many empty seats there’d been in our red and gold Spanish Baroque hall. 

When National Screen Service came to collect the rented poster and drop off the one for The Sunshine Boys, we claimed Blazing Saddles had been torn and, for a small fee, we collected it: easy to do in the 1970’s, but nearly impossible in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. 

That particular poster was a one-sheet (27" x 41"), half the size of the two-sheets  (41" x  54") that fit our giant poster cases. Four of those cases line the wall opposite the box office windows, red and white to match the foyer’s chandelier. The first case always contained the main feature, with a card in elegant script, Now Showing. The middle case housed the second feature if there was one — Also Showing— and the last two cases offered glimpses of Coming Attractions.

Some of our coming attractions never actually came — there was a certain amount of dreaming associated with booking movies. We even went so far as to rent trailers for movies we never had any intention of showing. What could you do if in your heart you really wanted to show The Wizard of Oz but the neighborhood wanted Towering Inferno?

Prior to 1939, when Oz first came out, movies and their posters generally belonged to the distributor — Warner Brothers, etc. — and arrived, often enough, at the Greyhound Bus Station in most small towns as one package, overnighted via bus from the previous small town theater. Under no circumstances could the theater operator collect or give to patrons a beloved poster, because the next theater needed it. 

For collectors this explains why pre-1940 one-sheets and two-sheets are so rare. For the most part, only “window cards” (14" x 22”) liberally distributed to shopfronts around a downtown area and not re-collected, remain to show us Claudette Colbert or Jean Harlow. 

In 1940, the National Screen Service took over the advertising wing of the movie  business, and by the seventies there were plenty of posters, making it possible for me to snatch that Blazing Saddles one-sheet — and a few other things besides. To make things even more convenient for collectors of the future, those posters bore an NSS Identifying Number bottom border on the right — which makes it possible to verify their authenticity. 

Like so much else in the industry that surrounded movie palaces, and other single-screen houses, with the advent of multi-screen theaters, losing much of its business beginning in the mid eighties and finally disappearing — bought out by Technicolor — a few years after the Millennium. Multiplexes, for one thing, discouraged all but the smaller one-sheets, given the lack of space for coming attractions. 

A few weeks ago, at our favorite Manhattan multiscreen theater, I joined Dean, who was mesmerized by what turned out to be the “posters” for film after film, flashing by, all on a ($70,000) Plasma screen: Coming Soon, Coming This Christmas, Now Showing, and, of course, the inevitable Starts Wednesday.

Afterthoughts:
1.  Speaking of Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little, (seen rearing on the palomino) was not Mel Brooks’ first choice for Sheriff Bart.  If the studio heads had trusted Richard Pryor, it would have been an entirely different movie... Little died in 1983 of colon cancer and is remembered primarily for his role in the Brooks farce.

2.  National Screen Service also dominated the trailer industry for the better part of the last century, beginning in 1919, so that trailer for Gone With the Wind, which we had no intention of ever showing as a feature at the St. George, came directly from them.