I just pre-registered for a ticket to watch a movie from the deck of my very own boat. That’s right, a pop-up drive-in theater on the water. I don’t have a boat, but it doesn’t matter, because Floating Cinema will rent one to me and my friends for an evening in mid-September. Ain’t free enterprise amazing? Here we are, bereft of theaters to sit down in, but that doesn’t stop us from going in search of screens to watch. As an ex-movie palace operator (the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, New York, 1976), I can attest to the obsession with watching a big screen, in the company of strangers; but in these Covid days, we all have to keep six or more feet apart from those strangers. 

Not surprisingly, the drive-in theater business, long on the skids, is making an amazing comeback, thanks to Covid.  Pop-up drive-ins, such as one occupying the parking lot of the Bel Aire Diner in Queens, are all the rage. You can buy a Pulp Fiction Slider and fries, then return to your car and eat it while watching a movie from the lot, keeping the diner in business and satisfying your and your family’s  need to just get out of the house. Kal Dellaportas, one of the principals in the enterprise, was thinking, “How can we bring people in, without bringing people in?”A friend just told me about one such operation at a mall in Dayton, Ohio. The place is mostly dark these days, but there’s a screen, with cars lined up in front, courtesy of some enterprising folks. In this case, local food vendors in trucks just sorta showed up.  

Drive-ins and social distancing have been linked since the get-go. A New Jersey-ite, Richard Hollingshead invented the drive-in movie theater in 1933, apparently because his generously proportioned mother was shy about going out in public; she didn’t fit easily into a traditional theater seat, so he made it possible for her to stay in her automotive shell for the whole show! It caught on, though. Who else besides a shy woman might want some social distance?  Drive-ins, for decades, afforded couples the privacy they longed for, especially before bucket seats made erotic experiment tricky. Later on when those couples had children — noisy, hard to keep in their seats — the local drive-in, which charged by the carload, reduced the price of admission, but also the need to shush squirmers. By the nineteen fifties the landscape of the  lower 48 was seeded with over four thousand outdoor movie screens, and the fad caught on elsewhere, even as far away as India. 

What I’m wondering is if the resurgence will disappear after we finally wrestle this pandemic to the ground?  Or will people’s social habits have altered so completely, that clustering in cars (and, yes, boats) will be the new norm? I’m sure the proprietors of original working drive-ins, such as The Electric Dusk Drive-In in L.A., screening The Great Lebowski this coming weekend, and the Mahoning in Lehighton, Pennsylvania (Reel Rumble Weekend, on the 14th and 15th, with “all-out wrestling under the stars...and a tag-team of classic films to follow...”  will do just fine, buoyed up by all the additional attention they’ve been getting. We will come back to life as it was, slowly and over time, having learned a lot. Meanwhile, the drive-in theater business will have gotten fat and healthy. Add to that, perhaps, the boat-in business.  

Why not?

Afterthoughts:
1. For more on the history of drive ins.
2. Beyond Cinema isn’t the only event organizer to come up with the idea of float-in movies. A “Cinéma sur l’Eau” — or cinema on the water — is coming to the Seine River in Paris this weekend. Individuals, too, are increasingly flocking to the waterways, buying boats in lieu of their usual summer plans, which are now tabled as a result of COVID-19.3.  For what it’s worth, Walmart has gotten into the drive-in game  What does this tell you about how lucrative that game could be? 

My mother, born in 1908, survived the 1918 “Spanish Influenza,” as it was then called. She didn’t want to talk about it though. When, as a child, I asked, she simply changed the subject. This was rare for her, direct conversationalist that she was. The topic she chose was the movies; Mother claimed to have grown up along with “the whole movie business.”

“I was your age when the movies were born. I remember going to picture shows before there were theaters.” 

This conversation took place around 1957; I would have been nine years old. A real movie nut, I immediately lost all interest in the subject of flu. How could I not? I was an enthusiastic attendee on Saturday afternoons of anything that was showing at the 20th Century a few blocks from home, on Oakley Square, a small Deco palace. But my favorite theaters were downtown, and my favorite of favorites was the RKO Albee. It styled itself as Cincinnati’s Versailles, with its own Hall of Mirrors. The Albee was where the family went, all dressed up, on Sunday afternoons to eat Swtizer’s licorice and popcorn with real butter and lose ourselves on a raft in the Atlantic with Thor Heyerdahl, or, in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, struggling for survival against the giant squid. 

“There weren’t always theaters,” Mother observed, warming to her topic. “I was your age, and a lot of people had never even seen a movie; but I was lucky. We lived in Toledo then, and on hot summer nights, word would come that a picture show was happening downtown.” 

We’d call that a “pop-up” now — what goes around comes around...

“So,” Mother continued, “We’d get on the streetcar and go to a particular corner where a man was taking money and passing out tickets. You’d sit on a chair or a wooden bench in a vacant lot where he and his friends had hung two sheets on a bare wall. The sun went down and the movie came on. Someone was selling punk...” 

“Some kinda candy?” I guessed.  

“No. It’s a thing you burn, it has a wick, like a candle.  It keeps the mosquitoes off.”  

She made it seem like an adventure, and it had been, in a time before even radio, when the only other techno wonder was “Stereoscope” slides borrowed from the public library. So you got on the street car, a thing that ran on tracks with electric wires overhead, and went downtown to sit in a vacant lot swatting at mosquitoes? That, I now realize, would have been about 1915. In New York City. The Strand, arguably the first movie palace, already stood at Broadway and 47th Streets; but it took awhile for such refinements to reach the Midwest. By 1919, Toledo had a movie palace, but Mother was gone. My grandparents moved just about every other year – so poor, and Gramp always out of work. They settled in Cincinnati where Mother could go to the Palace, built in 1919. She’d have to wait until 1927, when she was almost grown up, to see Clara Bow, “the It Girl,” at the RKO Albee, with its Hall of Mirrors and the world’s largest hand-loomed Austrian carpet. 

Mother was off topic, no mention of the Spanish Flu. So the issue was dropped, and, of course, it’s too late to ask her now. All she said of the pandemic was, “A lot of people got sick and some of them died.”
Will people 20 years in the future, if I'm still alive, ask me about the Covid years? Will I think briefly of the friend I lost a few months ago and change the subject?
 
As for Mother, one death she did mention as important was Rudolph Valentino’s, in 1926, seven years after the pandemic. It was, coincidentally, the same year her mother died. Is that double loss perhaps why she cried so hard? 100,000 people lined up at Campbell’s Funeral Home in New York City to mourn him, many of them in hysterics, and my mother mourned too. If she had had the money,  perhaps she’d have gotten on a train bound for New York.

I’ll never know what life — or lives — the Influenza may have claimed, that Mother didn’t want to talk about. Why not change the subject to the movies? — in vacant lots, at downtown palaces. What would the 20th century have been without them? They were how the world survived its first global war, the pandemic and, eventually, the Great Depression, not to mention WWII and its horrors. 

My mother died in 1985, after I’d gone bust trying to run a movie palace in Staten Island, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre. She never criticized me for an unwise investment of either time or money. 

“What’s it like?” she asked once.  “Is there a velvet curtain and how big is the chandelier?” 

“Huge,” I assured her, “and the curtain has tassels that are half my height.” “Do you ever show any of the old movies...the silents?”

We wouldn’t have dared. In 1976, action was the thing our audience craved, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon. Desperate once, we’d booked Marty Feldman in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, a spoof, which had bombed completely.
 
“Well what about Blood and Sand?” Mother mused. It starred Rosa Rosanova, and of course Valentino. "Now there’s a movie if you could get it.”  

Afterthoughts:
1. If you’ve never read Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, I recommend it. She lost both her parents to the “Spanish” Influenza.
​
2. Brooks’ Silent Movie is a wonder. The only person to speak in all of its one hour and 27 minutes is the mime, Marcel Marceau.

SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE reads the marquee of the NiteHawk in Brooklyn, a cinema closed since March. Yes, on the other side. In the world movies unfailingly depict, the one we left behind in March: of close-crowded bars and packed elevators, of handshakes and hugs, where you don’t flinch when somebody’s dog touches the back of your leg while you’re waiting to cross at the light. A world where masked people don’t have your best interests at heart, a world with movie theaters, where people pay to sit with strangers in the dark. Imagine that! 

There’s been much said recently about the total demise of the movie exhibition business, but maybe the reverse is true. Look what’s happening at drive-in theaters, almost defunct, now thriving! So you think streaming has taken over? The Mahoning Drive-In in Lehighton, Pa., an “...old-fashioned 1948 single-screen outdoor theater showcasing vintage films in a nostalgic setting,” keeps selling out. In advance. Wow! People are crazy to go somewhere, see something.

Memories die hard: here’s a glimpse of a time (1976) at the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2,672-seat palace. People not only sat together in our cavernous movie palace without any social distance, but sometimes even conceived children in the remotest parts of its balcony or just plain hid, hoping we’d close the place and leave them alone, under a widening dome. It was the end of summer, traditional high time for theater attendance. 

Labor Day at the St. George Theater: 1976, a Monday, the sixth of September. The Omen was on-screen, a banner day preceded by a banner weekend, great numbers, almost boffo socko (big box office) we talked about opening the balcony. At concession, Paulie was barely keeping up with orders for popcorn, Coke, Charleston Chews, kosher hotdogs on homemade Italian rolls, and Haagan-Dazs ice-cream (new that year in Staten Island). Great crowds of people strode into the lobby, ten and twenty at a stretch, family groupings, filling the gap between lunch and a picnic to mark the end of summer. I was on box office, happy to deal with a continual rush a patrons.
 
Occult or horror films always did well. The Exorcist, then three years old, had played to a packed house for us in July, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre had pulled good numbers. "Boffo Socko," the term our booking agent was fond of using to describe a box office hit (see also “boff,” “boffola,” “whammo” and “socko” by itself) is “slanguage” invented by or at least swirling around the showbiz mag, Variety. We spoke this dialect with pride, even going so far as to name two puppies we’d adopted “Boffo” and “Socko.” 

By Labor Day, we’d been theater operators for exactly five months. Even though we’d lost money hand over fist the first two months, we’d begun to break even, so we thought we knew what we were doing. It seemed we always would be standing in the lobby tearing tickets, looking forward to another week, and that’s how I’d like to think of us. 

In retrospect, it had been cheeky to show The Omen, an occult film featuring a malevolent child — ”the antichrist” — whose sign is 666 — on, of all things, the 6th of September.  More than a few numerologists might be tempted to blame the sudden and precipitous decline in our box office sales that followed the day after Labor Day, on our choice of product. But that most ironically named American holiday, the day that ends the summer, had been the real culprit: the beginning of every new business and school year, the end of the movie theater operator’s season, a fact we had yet to learn. 

As we round the bend into August of this malignant year, theater operators with empty auditoriums instinctively fear September, always till now the turn of the year, when vacations end, and business and school begin. But this is a year like no other... and here’s my theory.

While we’re all waiting for a vaccine, Hollywood has been holding back the summer block busters, no fools they. People aren’t ready to come out yet. Tenet, the new Nolan movie, awaits, and an awful lot of folks are either working from home or living on unemployment, so September doesn’t mean the beginning or end of anything, really. Let the drive-ins have their day, and niche theaters, happy to show “classics” like Jaws or Jurassic Park or even The Omen. Just as, in the 1930’s, movie houses, especially palaces, gave people escape from the Depression, the Nitehawk at any time of year, will find its grateful audience once again. What’s that line from Field of Dreams?  “If you build it, they will come...”

Afterthoughts:
1. Get aholda this. 
2. In some localities, such as Chester County, Pa., home of The Colonial Theater, which I featured a few weeks ago they premiered their re-opening with BlobFest.  The Colonial has kept on going, apparently, since early July, clean, socially-distanced, all that good stuff, and people are showing up for movies.

Had your second cup of coffee yet?  Well then, in twenty seconds or less, can you name the four “characters” in the short cartoon, “Let’s All Go to the Lobby?” The clip is a “snipe” actually — more on that later.

If you grew up any time in the latter half of the twentieth century, you remember this one-minute piece of animation well: four food items, a candy bar or box of chewing gum, a large box of popcorn, a small box of the same, and, bringing up the rear, a soda in a paper cup. They’re all singing and walking leftwards, in a companionable way. A six-frame, one-minute teaser designed to induce movie theater audiences to head for the snack-stand, this cartoon has a long history; it’s actually listed as a “film” in Wikipedia. I think that’s stretching the category of “Films Set in a Movie Theater,” but never mind.

​Though “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” has been riffed off many times, featuring such substitute characters as a hotdog that Homer Simpson decapitates with one bite, the classic original was directed by one Dave Fleisher for Filmack, way back in 1957. That would be about right; fifty-seven was the year I found myself entitled to unlimited popcorn, candy and Coke at the Mt. Lookout Theatre, a Deco treasure of a place near where I grew up, in Cincinnati. I was nine, and, lucky me, my sister worked concession at the theater, when she wasn’t sitting in the chrome-embellished ticket booth outside. Either way, I didn’t  have to pay a thing for my popcorn, so Fleisher’s walking food characters sent me instantly for refills. It was the year of The Incredible Shrinking Man; after all those trips to the lobby, I was hardly shrinking.

Nineteen years later, all grown up, or so I believed, and living in New York,  I signed on to a project my husband had undertaken, running a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island.  Of course we ran “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” especially when we featured an INTERMISSION — that single word in gold on a blue background, another “snipe.”  

What’s a snipe, you ask?  Well basically it’s advertising intended for the big screen in which the theater may choose to promote: food, itself, a local business, an event or whatever. Long before "Let’s All Go..." became iconic, Filmack, the larger of two companies that made its name selling snipes, featured simpler animated snacks, as well as season’s greetings, stylized note cards welcoming patrons to a particular theater, rules and regs, such as SMOKING IN THE LEFT FRONT SECTION ONLY (or these days, TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE). Snipes that feature local advertisers appeared most often at drive-ins.
 
Since most snipes involve some kind of animation, cartoonists short of cash, including, apparently, a young Walt Disney himself, have been known to turn their design attentions to snipe creation for a quick buck. That’s what Dave Fleisher was up to when he made popcorn and soda take a walk.
I myself once inadvertently designed a snipe, for the Oakley Drive-In in Cincinnati.  My father had set himself up in business as the owner of a used car dealership, Hallerman-Reeker (Mr. Reeker was, briefly, his partner). In 7th grade at the time, and supporting aspirations as an artist, I found myself tapped to design a single-frame ad for the dealership, 

The ad featured my father’s and Len Reeker’s smiling faces on either side, next to their respective names. It would be a decade before I met Dean, who was to become both my partner — for life and at the St. George Theatre; still, he recalls going to the drive-in that summer and seeing the ad, which only ran for a few weeks. My design, had been transformed into an orange-toned snipe. Daddy lost his shirt in the dealership, which didn’t make it to Christmas. That was something I would come to experience myself, several decades later in the theater business.

Speaking of the St. George, while it existed under our management, we ran trailers, and the occasional snipe, having inherited a drawerful of one-minute films: STARTS WEDNESDAY, STARTS FRIDAY, COMING SOON, INTERMISSION and what have you. Of course, there was always “Let’s All Go To the Lobby,” which we hardly needed to show. Though we lost money hand-over-fist at the box office (who could fill 2,672 seats for one movie by 1976?), our concession per capita was enormous, tied with the big Broadway houses in Manhattan, causing us to joke that closing the auditorium and opening a cafe might have been, well, a wiser business model. 

Meanwhile, let’s all go to the lobbies of our imaginations, and snack on memories of theaters we’ve known. I don’t know about you, but when I watch a movie on the bedroom screen, and I see people standing or sitting close together, I want to warn them about keeping a safe distance. It’s a kind of pathology, but it will end, and then we’ll all go out and sit down together in the dark. It’s in our DNA.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Dave Fleisher had a very interesting and difficult life. Although Wikipedia cautions that the above link lacks citations, Fleisher’s life story is well worth reading. Nice guy, rose pretty high and, though he didn’t quite finish last, he needed his commission from the walking food minute. 
 
2. I’ve searched all over for the origins of the word, “snipe” in a theatrical context. If anybody knows, I’d love to know...

...we’ve been drawn into the darkness for longer than we’ve been drawn to mountains. The hand stencils on cave walls in Western Spain have been dated to about 65,000 years ago. That’s 20,000 years or so before Homo sapiens is thought to have reached that region. So these are Neanderthal handprints. The idea of us being drawn into the darkness is an ancient longing. There’s also some of the most amazing, eerily present findings from European caves from the last Ice Age. A bone flute made from the wing bone of a griffon vulture was found deep in a limestone cave. The thought of that flute being played in that cave with ice filling the landscape around it, I don’t know about you, but it sets my spine shivering.

Robert McFarlane, author of a book I want to read, Underland, has walked and crawled his way into and around a lot of dark enclosed places. Writer, teacher, mountain climber, spelunker, informal folklorist, and general burrower, he knows a thing about the dark insides of things. That flute: is it evidence, like painted moving gazelles and bison, of early theater?

How exactly are theaters like caves?  Well, both Lascaux — which has been called a paleolithic cathedral — and the St. George Theatre, a movie palace I helped run in 1976, lack windows, allowing for instant surrender to the darkness.

You can get lost in a 2,678-seat movie palace: we knew it, and the younger patrons who didn’t want to go home after the movie was over, knew it too. The balcony and loge were off limits — we hardly ever sold enough tickets to populate even the orchestra. But kids of a certain age — boys who are thirteen, fourteen — like to test limits. Exit doors in the balcony led to fire escapes. Although we weren’t using the balcony, the FDNY had forbidden us to chain these doors shut. So one kid would buy a ticket and sneak upstairs to let his friends, who had climbed the fire escape, in for free. For the most part, they’d hang in the upper part of the house 'til closing time, even bringing their own concession: beer and KFC. Pot-smoke drifted to the dome. On Friday and Saturday nights after the midnight show, you could hear them breathing up there, waiting for us to close and go home.
 
Addressing them directly was the best way to flush them out. Sam, the floor manager, who knew all the kids’ families, would stand center stage and call them by name, “You up there Randall? Won’t be pretty if I hafta come getcha...”  “Obi, hear me now. Don’t make me tell yo  mama...” 

Exit doors on unoiled hinges groaned, followed by the rapid slap of sneakers flying down the fire escape.

What did they want? How many Snickers bars can one adolescent boy consume? Or was it a night in the shadows back stage they were after? 

The theater is a magic — even a sacred — space. It was for all of us, our Luray Caverns, our Altamira, the screen, a cave-wall waiting for the splash of pigmented light. Tired as I was at the end of a theater day, it was hard to go home, so who could fault a boy? 

Afterthoughts:

1. Last week I went searching for a movie palace that was open, and, somewhat miraculously, I found one, in Phoenixville, Pa., the Colonial, which also happens to be the Blob’s home theater; yes, that blob! Hope BlobFest went well, in its virtual incarnation...
2. The larger older small-town theaters, like the Colonial, have lots of room to offer, when the pandemic finally wanes: palaces and stadium theaters can easily afford a six-foot separation between patrons. Just a thought.

Quick! What movie palace was a setting for that 1958 classic sci-fi, The Blob?  You’re forgiven if you didn’t know it was The Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pa., still standing and, in these Covid times, making its way slowly (but not inexorably, like the blob) back into business. Here’s a Wikipedia description of the blob’s acting debut at that theater, “the creature enters the Colonial Theater and engulfs and devours the projectionist before oozing into the auditorium. ...screaming people leave the theater in blind panic.”  

The Colonial, like most old movie houses that are still standing, has undergone a couple of narrow escapes, and not from extraterrestrial ooze. It was nearly torn down a couple of times, then saved and lovingly refurbished by local enthusiasts. Same as my own local movie house, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island (New York), which I co-ran in 1976. It’s closed right now, NYC being a more urban setting compared to Chester county, Pa.,  where the Colonial had its “soft” open on July 3. According to the facilities manager,  things went fairly well.  People are still uncertain; some say “...see ya when there’s a vaccine,” but others seem ready for socially-distanced viewing. 

Currently showing: Deadpool, Star Wars: Episode VII — the Force Awakens, and, for kiddies, The Jungle Book. The historic original auditorium seats 658, but state Covid guidelines indicate it can’t contain more than fifty percent capacity, spaced a socially-distant six feet from each other. So you don’t have to wear a mask all the time, as, for example, when you’re munching on popcorn. When you’re coming and going and, of course, in the bathroom, you’ll have to look like a bank-robber, but otherwise you’re free in the dark. Cleaning with a very heavy duty product between screenings. Sounds good, huh?

The Colonial started its theater life as a vaudeville house, in 1903. Then, like so many live theaters, it got the movie bug and, from 1915 to the present, remained a cinema. Jim Breneman, a pipe-organ restorer took it over in the eighties, installing a Kimball organ. His death in 1992 threw everything into question, and the Colonial had to be rescued from the wrecker’s ball, by the community itself, which rose up, saved, refurbished and reopened it. Like other such operations, it’s a not-for-profit, which is why they can risk opening at 50% capacity. At the St. George in the seventies, we were theoretically “for profit,” but hardly more than a quarter full most of the time. We’d have been a great model for Covid re-opening!

Marketing director, Bob Trate, told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If [patrons] don’t [follow the rules], they’ll jeopardize not only public health but also the shared sense of escape that comes with seeing a film on the big screen. You just want to go and turn your brain off and watch a movie,” he pointed out, “and not worry about somebody coughing behind you.”

Good as binge-watching Perry Mason can be, or signing up with Disney to finally catch Hamilton, or viewing a Netflix premier, there ain’t nothin’ like sitting in the dark with strangers — as long as they’re at least six feet away. Oh, and if there’s popcorn.

Afterthoughts:
1. Each year at this time, the Colonial hosts a BlobFest to commemorate its role in the iconic Steve McQueen movie. It’s big business for a small town, which usually involves a screening and street fair.  At a given moment (see the movie’s trailer, if you haven’t already) , everyone in the theater gets up and bolts for the street in a “panic.” For obvious reasons, the festival will be virtual this weekend, giving the enterprising theater an opportunity to reach out to a larger Blob audience. Teeshirts available! Oh, and by the way, for those interested in the inner workings of a projection booth, circa 1958, the aforementioned trailer is not to be missed. Wow did that projectionist miss his changeover!

2.  Casting about for things to do during the shut-down, the Colonial, on April 6, ran a “Punny Marquee Title Contest,” and got over 400 submissions. The winner, “The Day the Earth Stayed Home,” was posted on the marquee. 

3. Here, for your perusal, are the rules and regs of movie-going for the future, as cribbed from the Colonial’s site. We’re all gonna hafta get used to this, so read up...