, The nine “angels” in shell-like recesses above the proscenium of the Valencia, a former Loew’s Wonder Theatre, don’t quite look the part; their wings seem cramped, each extending well above its niche, and their robes are too white for the azure stucco of a theater built in Rococo/Spanish, Colonial/PreColumbian styles. Sister Theodora Forbes, the secretary of the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People — which calls the old palace home — is leading us through this Eberson-built atmospheric. On the balcony she pauses to explain, “...they were naked Greek gods and goddesses...” Bishop Ronnie Davis put it more succinctly to the New York Times, on the occasion of the theater’s  landmarking, ''We dressed them up and sanctified them, put wings on them and made them angels.'' Whether the nine figures were originally gods and goddesses or, more likely, the nine muses, they have undergone a transformation, as the Valencia itself did, from a temple of dreams and date-nights to, well, a temple — or more specifically a tabernacle. 

How is it exactly that a theater gets sanctified? When my husband, Dean Thompson, and I ran the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 1976, we rented it for a Sunday to an evangelical group, who arrived in several busloads. We watched that afternoon, as worshippers dropped their crutches and walked in faith to the stage. That was just a single day; after the rental was over we went back to showing Jaws. The St. George was church for a day, but the Valencia is a dedicated sacred space. There’s a wall just outside the auditorium (sanctuary) hung with crutches and braces of all kinds. I imagined those healing moments, not unlike the time lightning struck my childhood home, and Great Aunt Marie dropped her cane, running, miraculously, three times around the kitchen table. Presumably the owners of the crutches on the Valencia’s wall never went back to fetch them (as Aunt Marie finally picked up her cane and began using it again). God’s power is after all more permanent than lightning. 

Upstairs, in the lobby outside the balcony, I spied a pair of locked wainscot doors, bearing the sign PRAYER TOWER (see the photo in the slide show above). Intrigued, Dean asked Sister Forbes what that might be, and she replied, “People go up there to pray.” 

“But what was it before that?” he asked.

“You know, it was where they showed the movies from.” 
 
In other words, the projection booth! I couldn’t help thinking about the lonely projectionist, and I wondered if, whoever he was, he sometimes prayed. For the carbons that lit the projectors to last till the end of the show? For a smooth night with no splicing or mishaps?

It was in that darkest of movie palace years, 1977, that church founder, Apostle Johnnie Washington, eager to move his congregation to a worthy space, purchased the 3,554-seat palace for a single dollar. The flock then accomplished a Herculean task, working night and day and raising two hundred thousand dollars to do a basic clean-up and paint-up. Solidy built and with a sound roof, the Valencia has actually never undergone a major renovation.

Gone, sadly, is the Robert Morton Wonder Organ (4 manual/23 rank) which originally distinguished this and four other palaces in outlying areas of New York City as “Wonder” theaters. Remarkably, all five — the Valencia (first to be built), the 175th Street Theatre in Washington Heights, the Paradise in the Bronx, currently leased to a church, the Jersey in Jersey City, and the Kings in Brooklyn — are still standing. The Washington Heights theater, (United Palace of Cultural Arts), these days a part-time church, still possesses its Robert Morgan instrument. The Jersey City has acquired what was once Loew’s Paradise’s organ. As for the Valencia’s, it was sold in 1964 to the Balboa Theatre in San Diego where it happily sings out to this day. 
 
As many times as I have written about atmospheric theaters, Saturday was my first visit to one, and, although the original electric stars in the night-sky ceiling of this Eberson-designed theater were twinkling, no clouds drifted over. Of course, I knew all good atmospheric theaters had had drifting clouds, but if I hadn’t recalled this, I’d have been reminded. Taking the tour along with us were two or three men who had grown up going to the movies at the Valencia. David Delbaum, a lawyer, who recalls the theater from his late adolescence, said, “When the movie wasn’t any good, you could always just look up!” Several other people, including his friend Steve Friedman, a photographer accompanied by his wife Maggie, remembered the clouds. At our Q&A, Sister Forbes and Bishop Davis said they knew of the whereabouts of the equipment that projected moving clouds on the ceiling, but neither one knew how such equipment might work. The mechanism is explained in a wonderful paragraph from a book on the Palace Theatre in Marion Ohio, one of Eberson’s atmospherics: 

Rather than seating the...patrons in a boxlike, formal setting as passive observers of stage entertainment, the atmospheric design transported them to an exotic European courtyard or garden. A plain cerulean sky replaced the ornate dome of traditional theatre design. Wispy floating clouds produced by a projector replaced crystal chandeliers and gilt. Trees, plants, vines and taxidermy birds replaced gold leaf. Arches, trellises, balconies and plaster statuary replaced marble, painted wood panels and crystal chandeliers. As the entertainment was about to begin, lighting effects created the illusion of a setting sun, as colors changed from yellow to red to mauve. Small lights, arranged in the ceiling in constellation patterns, twinkled to create a sense of infinite space. The atmospheric theatre design made the theatre patron an active, comfortable resident of an imaginary time and place, not a passive, aloof occupant of an oppressive formal space.   

A chandelier, imported from Greece and added to the Valencia some time in 1977, seemed dead wrong to me from the moment we walked in. Atmospherics, by their nature, never featured central chandeliers. These theaters were supposed to replicate an open sky, the way a planetarium does. 
These days, an illuminated cross on the back wall of what was originally the fly-space, a banner reading “Reach the heart and save the soul,”  and stepped acoustical tiles where ropes and chains once held curtains and scenery, give the backstage area a feeling somewhere between the stage of a music hall and a formal church’s apse. To the left and right of the stage were once dressing rooms, some of which serve to fulfill laudable church missions, such as outreach ministry.  

Sister Forbes is quick to point out how lovingly Eberson fulfilled his promise to transport the Valencia’s patrons from their ordinary lives. The proliferation of lion heads in the carved ceiling beams of all three lobbies, for example, may be references to none other than Marcus Loew himself, an immigrant from Austria, whose last name, in German means “lion” (lowe). The church welcomes this theme as underscoring the Biblical “Lion of Judah,” which, in Christian iconography, is said to refer to Jesus, another layer of meaning for an already meaning-layered house.

Looking down from the mezzanine on a tiled fountain covered by a remarkable carved wooden roof, I was joined by my new friend David, whose memories of the Valencia date back to around his seventeenth year. I was staring at the artificial flowers that edge the tiles of the dry fountain, dreaming of water, when he recalled, “There were goldfish in there once.” Immediately I saw them, and wished that the church might consider adding this symbol of Christianity to its reinterpretation of the space. 
The outer lobby is as big as a good-sized screening room. Its carved pillars reference the Alhambra, and it contains, in addition to wrought iron railings for movie patrons standing in long lines, twenty or so poster cases. Where once they offered Should Ladies Behave? or The Ice Follies of 1939, these days they inspire a different audience, the waiting congregants, with Bible verses: 

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, / because he hath anointed me / to bring good news to the poor. / He hath sent me to heal the broken hearted / to preach deliverance to the captive/and recover sight to the blind,/to set the oppressed free.”  (Luke 4:18, variation of translation).

The great movie palaces, in their way, promised to do all of the above.They brought good stories, the next best thing to good news; and what could heal a broken heart better than a fine movie? So the captive and the oppressed were freed — and if you consider the  blind, my husband (his whole life suffering from macular degeneration), who at every movie still sits in the front row next to me, struggling as he always did, to absorb all that light transmogrified into images, well then, isn’t that a form of redemption? 

The lesson I’ve taken away from the Valencia is that there are all kinds of salvation.

Afterthought 1: Enjoy the slide show! Robin Locke Monda, an artist of considerable talent and a close friend, whose work in graphics and design frame this blog, discovered the tour we took of the Valencia last weekend. The pictures, except when otherwise indicated, are hers.

Afterthought 2: Note from the slide show that the faux “buildings” left and right of the proscenium are not at all symmetrical! This would, of course, be true for a real cityscape, which Eberson sought to capture.

Afterthought 3: Constructed in just six months, the Valencia was the first of the five Wonder Theatres to open, in 1929, with Monte Blue and Racquel Torres, in White Shadows on the South Seas. It screened its last film in 1977, The Greatest, starring Ernest Borgnine.

​Afterthought 4: Thanks to 

The St. George Theatre, which, in 1976, I had the distinct privilege of going broke running, is — eighteen years into the new millennium — still standing. Not only that, it has a new marquee! Thank God. The old one, crusted with inappropriate stucco and leaking badly, worried me when I worked there, before the stucco was added and for years after that, as I walked uphill under it. I’m not entirely entranced by the curved front of the new signage; and I’m sure I’m not alone in finding electronic signboards sterile, but no matter, life goes on, and the theater is a working house. This does all of us, who struggled once to keep it going, proud. We ex-theater entrepreneurs are part of the coral reef of the theater’s survival. One day a month ago, a truck turned left and parked under the marquee, bearing giant electronic letters, to be mounted on the new marquee’s curved front: ST GEORGE THEATRE. Well, I thought, that’s the closest we’ll get to anything resembling actual marquee letters now.
 
You know marquee letters: the older ones were cast black aluminum, and the newer 1950’s variety, black or clear red plastic. On changeover night, in most cases Tuesday, an usher or other able-bodied teen got up on a ladder and pulled down the old letters that spelled out the movie about to depart, then slid the new ones, announcing the feature yet to arrive, onto the metal tracks that covered the glowing white plexiglass surface. 

Several years ago, back when the old leaky marquee was still barely hanging on, I wrote a blog post about the ritual of changing marquee letters. The theater was open under its current management as a live working house, but had no functioning marquee. A pause I made in my car under the marquee generated the post that follows, and there’s a little something else at the end:

I’m sitting in my Volvo directly beneath the marquee of what was once our theater, despite the fact that around fifteen years ago someone chose to cover it — like a badly iced cake — in beige stucco, which always makes me afraid the whole thing will come crashing down. Although it’s been forty years, I can blink my eyes and see the steel tracks that used to run on two sides, and the erratically flickering St George Theater in curved neon centered above.

My original intent today was to get a cappuccino. The space to the right of the theater — a failing barbershop when the marquee still had its tracks — is now a coffee bar. I’m waiting in my car beneath a red NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, just long enough for the barista to make my double shot. When it’s ready, she gives me the signal. I dash in, slap a five dollar bill on the counter, grab my drink and run back to the car. I’m late to leave for my next appointment, but sitting beneath the marquee for even a brief time is a kind of transport, like falling down a mine-shaft in time. I sip my coffee and tumble. 

It’s 1976. Jim, a senior usher, is teetering on a 15-foot ladder on the downhill side of the marquee. A dangerous wind threatens him, as he tries to keep his balance while hanging that most fragile of items, black-painted aluminum marquee letters. It’s Tuesday night. A new movie starts on Wednesday. It’s Jim’s job to spell out, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, for all to see. It’s an impossibly long title. He has to substitute an upside-down M for the W, and two capital I’s for the L’s. We inherited our incomplete set of letters — and not much else — from the previous theater manager, who pulled out in the dead of night. At least he left us the means, more or less, to spell out the names of the movies that would break our hearts, week after week, failing, one title at a time, to fill our cavernous auditorium. A gust of wind causes the ladder to sway, and Jim drops a precious capital G. There is no sound quite like the sound of breaking cast aluminum, a surprisingly brittle material. Almost like glass but not quite. What’s a substitute for G? 

I shake myself back to the present, press the button that starts my Volvo, and pull out from under the marquee’s shadow. 

Paulie Plonski (concession staff, usher, and all-round crew from our year at the St. George) is someone I hear from every once and a while. He wrote this reminiscence of changeover night, in response to mine:

For a moment I was in the car with you in front of the theater. I could see the ladder. The sidewalk in front of the theater was on a hill, making the right side of the marquee a much higher climb than the left. The ladder was on the right, a formidable height. A blonde high school kid was next to the ladder. He was quite energetic and a little nervous, as he steadied the ladder at it's base. The wind was blowing, black cast aluminum letters were being passed up the ladder and others were being passed back down. There were a lot of voices, and then a quick yell to watch out, as the G came crashing down, then some more yelling, much louder this time, followed by a period of calm. The wind again. The high school kid was at the base of the ladder, steadying it, but cautiously looking up. There was an unusual movement above, and suddenly the edge of a white panel popped out. The wind had quickly gushed underneath, extracting it from the marquee. Flipping erratically, the panel fell towards the ground. The blonde kid moved quickly, but the edge of the panel caught him on his nose and mouth. 

There was a sudden pain in my upper lip, I couldn't help, later, looking in the mirror: everything looked fine. Good. I smiled. It was a slightly crooked smile, a smile that has brought, perhaps, character and many compliments to my life ever since that windy day. I am not sure what a substitute for G is, but after watching Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles in that film, I certainly figured out why that sailor fell from (  )race with the Sea.

Afterthought 1:  
I love his description of the letters being passed up and down the ladder. It seems magical to me now.  In the light of electronic signboard marquees, the whole analogue ritual of spelling out words in aluminum seems medieval, like a hand-lettered text. I am also in awe of Paulie’s cheerful acceptance of something which apparently altered his smile permanently. What a smile it was, and is!

Afterthought 2:
Believe it or not, the leaking, barely functioning marquee was subject to a tax. Isn’t everything?

Afterthought 3:  
Other movies were hard to spell out too...

Afterthought 4:  
Part of the Tuesday evening ritual was figuring out what the five precious lines of the marquee would say, Dean recalls. “I forget how many characters per line, but I remember the problem of having only one G. (Hence, John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be Kinq on the uphill marquee side).

It's a new world we’re living in, and I don’t mean the one Cristoforo Colombo (aka Columbus) is said to have discovered. I’m writing this on what many cities now call Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the national holiday originally named for Columbus. The fact of this switch made me think about that movie palace in Albuquerque, the one with with Pueblo architectural flourishes. It makes sense that a theater with Native American themes would be primarily Pueblo: the cliff-dwelling peoples are and always were agricultural (as were their ancient ancestors, the Anasazi. Farming is not nomadic; it results in permanent structures, and so a style of building, one that, in Albuquerque’s KiMo Theatre, has resulted in the natural blending of Pueblo style and what some call Art Deco. 

The interior of this theater is designed to resemble the inside of a ceremonial kiva, with log-like ceiling beams depicting dance and hunt scenes. The skulls of Buffalo I mentioned function as variations on wall sconces throughout the theater. Unsurprisingly, rumors abound that the theater is haunted. Beyond the skulls, the death of a small boy in the 1950’s adds credence to this myth.     

There were no skull-sconces or ceremonial effects at the St. George Theatre, a 2672-seat palace in Staten Island, which I helped to run back in 1976, nothing to remind the patron that the Lenape once paddled their canoes across New York Harbor, before there was a Staten Island Ferry. Sadly, you have to go to the local museum to learn about them. Well, it is New York, and indigenous culture is buried a layer deeper than in the west. 

So I give you the KiMo, possibly the only Native American-themed movie palace on the continent (if there’s another one you know of, be sure to drop that info in comments; I’d love to know about it too).
Oreste Bachechi, an (Italian) immigrant, as so many palace entrepreneurs of the twenties were, made his living in dry goods and liquor, dabbling briefly in a local theater enterprise. But he wanted to build his own movie palace, a building "that would stand out among the Greek temples and Chinese pavilions of contemporary movie mania." It is also said that his family, especially his wife, had close ties to local citizens of Pueblo descent, a very American story, the newly-arrived embracing a culture whose roots go back to the first millennium. Accordingly, Oreste hired an architect, Carl Boller, of Boller Brothers, out of Kansas City, who had already built an impressive number of movie theaters in the west and midwest. This was a sizable commission for Carl, who didn’t just dream up Native American flourishes, but traveled extensively, visiting the pueblos of Acoma and Isleta, and the Navajo Nation in search of inspiration. 

On September 19, 1927, the theater opened to a sell-out crowd of 1,321. Pueblo and Navajo citizens ("numerous prominent tribesman of the Southwest...”)  performed on stage that night: Isleta’s Pueblo Governor, Pablo Abeita, offered a name for the new theater, KiMo, is combination of two Tiwa words meaning "mountain lion," liberally interpreted as "king of its kind." 

The KiMo was then and is today three storeys in stucco, with the stepped characteristic of native Pueblo architecture, blending with recessed spandrels and  a strong vertical thrust reminiscent of Art Deco. Both the exterior and interior of the building offer a variety of indigenous motifs: a row of terra cotta shields above the third-floor windows, hand-woven rugs disguising air vents, and chandeliers shaped like war drums and funeral canoes. Wrought iron birds descend the staircases, and those garlanded buffalo skulls with glowing amber eyes are in full evidence. 

As part of the Paramount chain, the theater had a good run until the early sixties, when a fire destroyed most of the stage and the proscenium arch, and did other considerable damage. It’s a familiar story; downtown Albuquerque was enjoying its version of white flight, and the theater was reduced to showing “adult” fare. A brief flirtation with demolition (1977) ended when the City of Albuquerque and a group of concerned citizens intervened. An extensive renovation included many small singular efforts, including the matching of door handles that were original kachina dolls (a Hopi motif) and, in one notable case of delicate restoration, “The balcony railing in the lobby, composed of wrought iron bird figures, was 11 inches too short to meet modern safety codes. Harvey Hoshour [restoration architect] devised a novel solution to retain the railings' original look. Additional metal was inserted in the birds' necks and legs to make the railing taller. The talented craftsman who performed the work was none other than the grandson of the man who created the original railing.” 

Lobby murals of Southwestern landscapes that include cliff dwellings, by Carl von Hassler were restored in another phase. In a third and final (1999) phase, perhaps the most expensive,  “conservationists worked for months atop scaffolding far above the auditorium floor to restore the spectacular 'environmental' artwork [that had been destroyed by fire]. Vigas (roof beams) decorated with Pueblo Indian motifs seem to open onto a starry night sky,” a nod to atmospheric theater styles.

What happened to Oreste Bachechi? Sadly, he died the year after his theater opened, although his sons operated the KiMo for the intervening decades. Reflecting for a moment on the turtles, birds, buffalo, stars and other natural effects that grace his beautiful theater, I found this: “27 acres of fertile valley farmland,” the former Bachechi estate, is apparently on the verge of being developed by the City of Albuquerque, with hopes of turning it into a kind of wildlife preserve, a  “balanced master plan... that promotes non-competitive recreational uses and environmental educational opportunities such as wildlife viewing, hiking, multi-use trails, improved and dedicated equestrian parking, native landscaping, an expanded pecan tree orchard, a memorial rose garden dedicated to the Bachechi family, an expanded wetland, and an agricultural field to attract migratory water fowl with perennial crops of bluestem, sacaton, lovegrass, and ricegrass.” 

Now that the movie palace has been safely restored, what better way is there to treat the local movie mogul’s fertile acres? 

Afterthought:
Indigenous Peoples’ Day is really a flip-side kind of thing: when Colombo arrived, some ten million people were already living here, in what we have come to call America. (That our continents were named for another European adventurer, Amerigo Vespucci, underscores the point I’m about to make). History is like a twisted ribbon, whose surfaces blend. Despite centuries of bloodshed, native peoples (First Nations in Canada) are remarkably still around, and such miracles should be honored. Think Sherman Alexi, the poet/filmmaker/novelist or John Herrington, astronaut of the Chickasaw nation, or Charlene Teters said to be the Rosa Parks of Native American culture. Then there’s the heritage of naming: hardly a state in the lower forty-eight exists that isn’t woven through with Native American river names: Mississippi, Shenandoah, Ohio, Tallahassee, Missouri, Miami, Truckee, to name a few. I wonder how many movies that portrayed the old cowboy vs. Indian theme played the KiMo mid-twentieth century, before we could see the other side of American history?

Alphabetically, from Amarillo, Texas. to Witchita, Kansas. There once were arguably 66 movie theaters bearing the word “Fox” in their names. It was a prestigious moniker, in the 1920’s and 30’s, when William Fox one of the great movie moguls of all time, was in peak strut.

Most of these theaters were grand and copious enough to qualify as palaces; some were even atmospheric. More than half survived the ravages of the nineteen seventies, when the wrecking ball, the  architectural equivalent of the guillotine, snugged up under many a darkened marquee. During that period I briefly struggled to keep alive another movie palace, the St. George Theatre, 2,672 seats on Staten Island’s north shore, another story, the basis for this blog and the book that will eventually stand behind it. Meanwhile, back to the Foxes.

A friend writes that he has now visited two of what he considers the big three Fox theaters: Atlanta, St.Louis and Detroit. He’s thinking of major Fox theaters still standing. From another perspective, there are five “sister” Foxes, all linked by their designer, C. Howard Crane, which would make an entirely different list (Brooklyn, Atlanta, San Francisco and Detroit), but alas, glorious as they all were, two of them no longer stand. The Brooklyn Fox went down long ago to make way for a Con Edison building, and the San Francisco Fox was demolished after a gala last-night “party,” movingly described in a video that includes a lavish tour of the doomed house; the video takes you all the way to the wrecking ball phase, if you can stand to watch it. 

I’m choosing to stick with my friend’s picks, the three major Foxes that survived. So here, for your pleasure, are: the Atlanta, the St. Louis and the Detroit Fox(es), past and present. Long may they stand, as they have so far, miraculously.

While a lot of movie palaces have ended up as temples or churches, The Atlanta Fox actually started out as one; a temple for a fraternal group, the Shriners. Back in the waning glory days of the 1920’s, the Shriners broke ground to build a lavish temple/HQ in Atlanta, but their dream was too elaborate for them to afford. Enter William Fox, who plugged in the additional bucks to finish the project, opening the Fox as a full-blown movie palace on December 25, 1929, a little less than two months after Wall Street, according to the famous Varietyheadline, laid “an egg.” (The egg that Wall Street laid would end William Fox’s empire, which has a lot to do with the fates of all the Foxes, from Amarillo to Witchita). The Fox bankruptcy (Fox stock plummeted from $119 a share to $1 after the Crash) pitched ownership of the lavish Moorish/Egyptian atmospheric back onto the city of Atlanta, which auctioned it off for a paltry $75,000, not much for something that took $2.75 million to build. But the movies, and traveling live shows, not to mention big bands, were how a lot of people got through the Depression; so the theater did just fine then and afterwards, until the nineteen seventies when, like so many other single-screen theaters, the bottom fell out. In 1974, Southern Bell, the regional arm of AT&T, approached the owners of the theater with an offer to buy, with the intent of tearing the theater down to build the parking deck for a new headquarters on the site; but here’s where civic pride and celebrity muscle kick in. Lynyrd Skynyrd and (unlikely bedfellow) Liberace, in company with the newly-formed Friends of the Fox, persuaded the City of Atlanta to find a way to hold the wreckers back, which it did, finally refusing to issue a demolition permit. Returning briefly to Lynyrd Skynyrd, their first live recording, One More from the Road which later went platinum, was based on concerts given at the Atlanta Fox. 

Many consider the saving of this movie palace as the template for not-for-profit theater revivals nationwide. To this day, the Atlanta Fox is reportedly the only major theatre in the country to have a full-time restoration staff.  

Described by a now-defunct local paper as having “...a picturesque and almost disturbing grandeur beyond imagination,"the Fox’s original architecture comprises two styles: Islamic (building exterior, auditorium, Grand Salon, mezzanine Gentlemen's Lounge and lower Ladies Lounge) and Egyptian (Ballroom, mezzanine, Ladies Lounge and lower Gentlemen's Lounge).The Egyptian Ballroom echoes a temple built for Ramses II at Karnak, while the mezzanine Ladies Lounge features a replica of the throne chair of King Tut (all the rage in the twenties) and makeup tables that reveal tiny sphinxes. The 4,665-seat auditorium replicates an Arabian courtyard, complete with a night sky of 96 embedded crystal "stars" (a third of which flicker) and projected clouds that slowly drift across the "sky." Apparently, a rumor that one of the stars was actually a piece of a Coke bottle was confirmed in June 2010 when two members of the theater's restoration staff (that’s when it’s good to have one!) conducted a search above the auditorium ceiling.

What does St. Louis have to offer? The Fabulous Fox as it styles itself now, was designed in “Siamese/Byzantine” style, a close twin to its Detroit sister. (Both were flagships for the Fox chain). In the lobby, a pair of huge gold griffons flank the grand staircase, and deep red faux marble columns ring the mezzanine level. From every corner statuary peeks out—including a group of large gilt maharajahs. What are maharajahs doing in a Siamese/Byzantine palace? (What, for that matter, is a Siamese/Byzantine palace?) Opening its doors in 1929, with 5060 seats, at a cost of five million dollars, around  71 million in today’s bucks, St. Louis’ Fox had a good run. However, like its four other Crane-designed sister Foxes in Brooklyn, Atlanta, San Francisco and Detroit, the St. Louis Fox was in bad shape by the seventies, reduced to showing mostly Kung Fu to sparse audiences. After hard times, it was rescued by one Mary Strauss, a hard-working wife of a real estate developer. Mary persuaded her husband to buy the theater with a consortium of friends in the early eighties, and restored it for two million, in under two years. That’s important in the annals of movie palace survival — no time for vagrancy or leakage to set in. She recalls, “Almost everything that Leon and I approached was not ‘What are the obstacles?’ It was ‘Why can't we try?’ Being an artist growing up, I think I knew how to approach a project. One of the things that Leon and I did was we went in the summer of 1981 to a League of Historic American Theatres ramble in Ohio. We met people, we networked....What I learned is everything can be reproduced and fixed if you find the right person.” The Fabulous Fox opened in plenty of time to host home-town rocker Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday in 1986. 

If it weren’t for MoTown and a steady diet of Blaxploitation films, the Detroit Fox might not be standing. But it’s a good thing it is:

“On the side walls at the orchestra level are Moorish arches extending to the balcony. Above is a colonnade at the balcony level with nine vermillion scagiolia columns matching those in the lobby. The columns support decorated arches and behind the first three are grilles that conceal the bays containing the 2,700 pipes and other effects for the organ. The areas between the other columns are filled with tinted mirrors. The walls are topped with a cornice decorated with lion and human faces set among geometric designs and sunbursts. 

The ceiling is designed to resemble a round tent with an oculus supported by spears. The tent drapes slightly and is covered with acoustical felt bearing a stenciled design. The ceiling of the oculus is blue with a globe chandelier of colored glass suspended from a starburst design. The chandelier is 13 ft (4.0 m) in diameter weighs 2,000 lb (910 kg) and contains 1200 pieces of glass.” The previous is direct from Wikipedia -- just too rich not to simply put quote marks around.

Said to be the largest surviving movie palace of the 1920’s, the Detroit Fox has 5,048 seats (5,174 if removable seats placed in the raised orchestra pit are included). Here’s something to ponder: in the orchestra section alone are 2898 seats. That’s more seats than many palaces have, in total.The Detroit Fox hosted a lot of biggies in its time. For a Martin and Lewis promo of their (then) up and coming movie, Money, check out Cinema Treasures entry, specifically in the “comments” column where Bob Furmanek left us a little treat. 

I’d like to close with a sad tip of my hat to William Fox, an enterprising immigrant  (weren’t all the moguls?) whose greatest talent may have been in picking movie stars; Theda Bara comes to mind, entirely a Fox invention. William Fox’s life didn’t end well, because, as Vanda Krefft (The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox), observes, “Ultimately, Fox would venture too far away from what he really wanted to do—shifting too much of his attention toward business and away from art, engaging in questionable stock market deals, and trusting people he knew he shouldn't trust. As a result, in 1930, he lost control of his two namesake companies, Fox Film and Fox Theatres. He never recovered, either personally or professionally. After that, history turned its back on him and began its long, sad process of forgetting.” 

But his name still lives. Isn’t that something?

Afterthought:  
Thanks to Robert Endres, long-time friend and veteran projectionist (most recently and for a long time at Radio City Music Hall). He’s who gave me the notion to write this blog post,  by mentioning his visits to each of three Foxes, though more thoroughly than most folks, being privileged to tour their booths as well. 

It was a reckoning year. Our run as theater operators at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island ended abruptly in March, removing us permanently from further agonies of back room dealing, those increasingly desperate attempts to book the next movie. Who would get Smokey and the Bandit? Or Saturday Night Fever? Not us, though we might have screened them second-run, if we’d hung on a little longer; but that year was bigger than our solitary crisis. 1977 was pivotal, both for Hollywood, and for single-screen theaters wherever they were straggling out their existences. In New York City and Gallup, New Mexico; in Detroit, Cincinnati, and Youngstown, Ohio; even in L.A., the darkness that, for a decade, would seal the St. George, brought wrecking crews or conversion to formerly glamorous theaters, some of which morphed into warehouses or churches, parking garages, or even, in one case, a basketball court.
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The strip mall 'plex was hot, a trend famously begun by a man named Stanley Durwood back in the Sixties, who reasoned he could sell twice as many tickets and pay only one staff. It worked. His chain became AMC.

Still, there were problems from the distribution perspective. By '77 there were too many screens, all competing for fairly scarce product, from a Hollywood that was undergoing its own transition, still having not quite risen from the ashes of the studio system.
 
Released on Memorial Day weekend, two months after we popped our last corn, Star Wars was about to change the whole game, but nobody knew that. There were a lot of back room shenanigans going on, a bidding war of the giants, over George Lucas’ third movie. You might expect everybody wanted it, but if you did, forgive your hindsight. The war was of an inverse kind. You know how in baseball, when you get chosen last to play on account of the fact that everybody thinks you’re a nerd who can’t hit or field? Nobody wanted this quaint epic involving robots and lightsabers and a princess, when they knew The Other Side of Midnight was going to be the blockbuster of that summer. (Remember it? I don’t). Arguably the biggest box office behemoth since GWTW sat on the horizon, but nobody could see it. Star Wars would have been perfect for the St. George; though we would  never would have gotten it, even before the big guys knew what they had. It’s nice, anyhow, to imagine filling all 2,672 of our seats, the way we did just once in July of '76, for the re-run of The Exorcist. Ah well, such are the wistful dreams of ex-theater operators, even forty-plus years later.   

For palaces, 1977 was a demolition derby; and for Hollywood, conceptually, at least, it was a hard right turn. Before Star Wars,the studios aimed for the dating audience, with a tilt towards what pleased the guy (women would come along willingly enough it was assumed). I was part of the generation they aiming at, in movies like The Graduate, Alfie, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver; so much for college dating. Star Wars would be all about teen audiences returning again and again, and, while they were at it, buying the accoutrements, the dolls and regalia Lucas was smart enough to keep the rights to. Star Wars “...is modern pop cinema’s very own Big Bang: traces of it are to be found in every blockbuster thundering its way into your multiplex.” After Star Wars, in December of '77, came Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we were on our way.

Sci fi was suddenly cool, if not intellectual, and it was chock full of special effects. The force, if you consider The Shape of Water, is still with us today. 

Roger Ebert, looking back in 1999, says it best:
Star Wars effectively brought to an end the golden era of early-1970s personal filmmaking and focused the industry on big-budget special-effects blockbusters, blasting off a trend we are still living through. But you can't blame it for what it did, you can only observe how well it did it. In one way or another all the big studios have been trying to make another Star Wars ever since (pictures like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and Independence Day are its heirs). It located Hollywood's center of gravity at the intellectual and emotional level of a bright teenager. (See the review here.) 

It was 1982, coincidentally the year of E.T. I went alone to a movie, L'Étoile du Nord, starring Simon Signoret and Philippe Noiret; it was what I then called an “after therapy” flick. Having poured out my tale of a fractured family to my shrink, I indulged in a movie I’d chosen in advance, something with good writing (based on a Simenon novel) and character actors you could lose yourself in. The movie delivered. I was just getting up to leave as the lights came on, satisfied by a story that ends as an older woman recognizes her love for a man sent into exile in a penile colony. In the next row two slightly younger patrons shared their impressions, “That sucked! Where were the special effects?” 

Afterthought 
If you skipped over an earlier link to the story of how (then Mann’s, now TCL but always Grauman’s) Chinese Theatre grudgingly agreed to take Star Wars for two weeks, then rushed to refurbish another fleabag theater it owned to hold onto the suddenly-hot flick, check it out.   

Yesterday, in the company of a thousand or so fellow citizens, I had a past-life experience; a past half-life, anyhow. I saw a movie long enough that after the word INTERMISSION appeared, I could get up and walk around, in a theater with a red-velvet house curtain that briefly closed on a generous-size movie screen. We sat in the front row, as is our custom, and I got a comforting dizzy sensation, harking back to childhood, as I gazed at the faux boxes left and right of the stage that shelter gilded statuary, and the filigree that frames the proscenium arch of this particular movie palace.

What palace, you may wonder? Wonder indeed: the theater used to be Loew’s 175th, an original “Wonder Theater,” but these days it’s styled the United Palace of Cultural Arts, a part-time church and rest-of-the-time cultural center. Eighty percent of the theater’s 1,800-seat orchestra section, was full of people just like me, looking up when they could at their surroundings. You never see that at Lincoln Square (it has Imax) or the Angelika or another regular movie theater, because there’s nothing to look up at. The movie in question, Lawrence of Arabia, which I grew up with — have seen it at least six times — was a perfect match for the United Palace, in what I think of as upper upper Manhattan (Washington Heights). Having operated a movie palace myself (The 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, 1976), I know what it means when an exhibition space rivals its movie. John Huston’s epic, The Man Who Would Be King, which we ran to an almost empty house, comes to mind. I also know what a miracle it is that a palace of any size, let alone one that seats 3, 330, is open as a multi-use facility, and actually still, occasionally, shows movies.

I came out, after three hours and thirty-six minutes of sand-blown dunes, and an exhausting camel ride that really did seem twenty days long, from one side of the giant screen to the other, feeling vulnerable in a way no Pirates of the Caribbean ever would have made me feel. Arriving at a depicted oasis actually made me reach for the water bottle under my seat. The blinding eye of the sun rising on one more inexorable cinematic day of trekking, was as big, in real life, as the circular recess in the theater’s central dome. What made me thirsty, tired and dusty feeling were the psychic dimensions of the movie, which matched in scope the screen and literal surroundings. This movie requires a frame vast and ornate enough to complement it. Given that frame, Peter O’Toole dancing in the garb of a Bedouin is as real as your own very personal dream, one that you unwillingly shake yourself out of, as the house lights come up. 
 
Later at home a neighbor casually mentioned that she has a DVD of Lawrence. Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu, Amazon, Starz, even DVD: what does it do to David Lean’s vision of a disintegrating hero lost in the desert to watch on at best a large-screen TV, let alone a Mac Book or iphone? (The video vs. film controversy I’ll reserve for another time). And how rare is it to see such a great movie in the setting it was designed for? Way back in 1962, Hollywood caved and let NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies have The Snows of Kilimanjaro and a host of other fairly recent movies. To promote its new film library, the network concocted a seductive pastiche of theater marquee lights to serve as an intro. So sad. Since then, quietly, something has been shrinking, and it isn’t just the picture.

Before that, when television had already begun to encroach on movie ticket sales, back in the early 1950‘s, Hollywood had fought back by thinking big, first with Cinerama, involving the projection of three simultaneous films at once. Cinerama gave way to the more dependable wide-screen technologies — VistaVision, CinemaScope and Ultra Panavision — as Hollywood struggled to keep audiences from straying entirely to the convenience of Bonanza and Ozzie and Harriet on the little screen at home. It worked, for a time, especially since Warner, U.A. and the brethren agreed to withhold important epic films from network exposure (black-and-white movies from the 30’s had made it to TV). But it was a tide they couldn’t hold back.

The slow slide in movie theater attendance that had accelerated in the 1940’s had become an avalanche. In 1940, roughly 50% of all Americans went to the movies at least once a week. By 1950, it was 40%, and by 1960, 20%. By 1962, 15% were still out to the flix on a weekly basis. In 1962, the year, paradoxically, that Lawrence of Arabia hit the screen in Super Panavision 70, the opportunity to stay home and watch big deal movies, some of fairly recent vintage, was just too good for a lot of people to pass up. A number of the movies NBC got their hands on had been executed for the wide screen, so had to undergo a process of “pan and scan,” — a severe cropping — to adjust to television’s then very-limited  4:3 aspect ratio. The picture wasn’t just shrinking, but changing shape. You know how that works. You buy a museum postcard of a Monet haystack painting. You think you’ve got the whole thing, but something seems off, then you realize that postcards are always a standard size, and the card maker has truncated the image of the painting to fit standard format. In movies-to-TV there is still "letterbox" which at least preserves the shape of the shot. But....

It goes without saying, screens everywhere are getting smaller, and, yes, more confined. As they shrink, they take with them a piece of the audience’s imagination. In Lawrence on the big screen, a figure contained in a desolate horizon is observed with increasing frenzy by Lawrence’s panicked guide. We — and Lawrence —see nothing for several seconds. But then, either at the same moment Lawrence recognizes the rapidly-approaching figure on horseback, or a few frames later, we see the rider, growing bigger as he approaches. The delay in recognition is important; it increases the tension, arouses the curiosity of the movie gazer, and demonstrates the vastness of the desert, as well as the illusion of its emptiness. How would this be possible on anything but a very large-screen wide-format TV? Even on that screen, the lag time between the guide’s comprehension and Lawrence’s, and ours, would be too great. 

Unless you’re a cinemaphile, who’s sought out one of Quentin Tarantino’s or Christopher Nolan’s most recent releases — on film — you’re likely not even to know where the nearest theater offering 70 mm projection might be. I have to admit I went to Nolan’s Dunkirk without even bothering to check out the specs in advance. Despite this, I left thinking “Wow, I feel as though I actually was on the beach in France for all those hours, being shot at.” The scope of Nolan’s vision in that movie is similar to the scope of Lean’s in Lawrence. Nolan shot Dunkirk in a combination of 70 mm and IMAX, resulting in an aspect ratio of 1.43:1. That’s the tallest frame you can get, creating a visceral experience that makes you feel as though you’re there.  Nolan describes it as “virtual reality without the goggles.” Well, so I didn’t see it in Imax,  but I did see it on-screen at a theater which supports 70-mm, and the scope of the director’s vision apparently got across.

We live in an age that lacks scope, cinematic and otherwise. What has become of us? When you conceive a movie for Netflix, a movie which will probably never see a real movie screen, let alone a screen sized to present a big idea, you’re trapped in a tiny world-view. 

Since this blog post began on the subject of that delicious evening in August when I crossed the desert on a camel, I’d like to give the last few words to the theater itself. In 1969, when Loew’s cut its Wonder Theaters (and other venues) loose, their 175th Street Theatre, occupying a full city block, was as vulnerable as Cincinnati’s Albee (razed in 1977), the Kings in Brooklyn (shuttered in the mid-seventies, the home, for many years to come, of the sadly homeless and gang shoot-outs), and the Loews Triboro in Queens (dark since 1974 and demolished, according to the New York Post,in that very dark year, 1977). But not so for the United Palace, saved by faith. Or, more notably, by a preacher whose ministry focussed on the good feelings brought on by economic prosperity. What better place to feel prosperous than a gleaming movie palace? And so the theater began its apprenticeship as a church, morphing into a dual-purpose facility gradually, as church and occasional rental hall and then, after Reverend Ike achieved his heavenly reward, passing to his son Xavier, a musician. He fulfilled his dream of creating an arts and cultural center to transform lives through the arts in Washington Heights, by expanding the former Loews theater to its current dual cultural and religious status. 

The icing on the gilded movie-palace cake is that this Thomas Lamb theater’s original Robert Morton 4 manual 23 rank organ, recently removed for renovation by the New York Theater Organ Society,will return soon, refurbished and ready for action. I’m going up there when it does.


Afterthought 1:
Of the five Wonder Theaters, so named for their Robert Morgan “wonder” organs, the UPCA is the only one whose original instrument remains.

Afterthought 2: This just in from Robert Endres, whom I originally met at the St. George Theatre and who was, for many years, the head projectionist at Radio City Music Hall. Beyond being a generous friend, he’s a tech genius of all things projection. Here he’s answering a question I asked about viewing availabilities in NYC:

With regards to 70mm theatres, both the Regal on 42nd Street and the Loew’s/AMC Lincoln Square have 70mm equipment (kinda) as does the Village East.  The “kinda” is because some of the 70mm projectors put in by Weinstein for “Hateful 8” were bought by Warner Bros.They have their own crew that’s called when they need to have 70mm projection.The projectors also “travel” between screens in some of the multiplexes so it’s hard to tell just what size screen the picture may be shown on. One of the projectionists is from New Jersey where he’s a stage hand most of the time, but has made a pretty good living lately running Warner 70mm equipment at both the Regal and Lincoln Square.  Another house that has 70mm equipment is Cinema I on the East Side. I know they’ve run a few pictures that I didn’t even know were available on 70mm such as Wonder Woman. Alas, with the exception of Lincoln Square, all of the screens are flat rather than curved. The Lincoln Square screen has a shallow curve but nothing like the deeply curved screens used for three and single projector Cinerama and Todd A-O and 70mm Panavision. None of the D-150 screens have survived either. With the exception of the Cinerama Dome in L.A. and the Cinerama theatre in Seattle I don’t think there are any curved screens left, although both of those houses can run three strip Cinerama.

Why is the dearth of screen curvature sad? Here’s a partial explanation. 

NOTE: Thanks to Matt Lambros at After the Final Curtain for the wonderful photo!