Every Wednesday morning at the St. George Theatre — the 2,672-seat movie palace I was involved in running for a single year, 1976 – two movies, a new feature, and usually a B flick, arrived at the box office, in heavy hexagonal cans. It was the duty of the usher who had the matinee shift to lug them two at a time, up to the projection booth, a long, almost Himalayan trek. 
 
Paul Plonski, these days an aeronautical engineer, but then a teenage usher (when he wasn’t selling candy), recalls,
 
“...I remember picking up those hexagonal cans in the lobby...in front of the ticket booth on the main entrance. There were probably four or more cans on a given day. Grabbing on to two of them, I found, to my surprise, they were much heavier than eye might perceive. My memories take me into the main lobby, the palms of my hands burning from the narrow metal grips of the handles, taking a short break and proceeding up to the mezzanine level. Once there, another short break, then up to the balcony...[where] there was a magnificent view of the theater ...totally amazing to be looking down on the theater below and its magnificent beauty, the orchestra pit, the historical stage, the chandelier above, how powerful it felt to be looking down from above on...such a rich entertainment history. The journey continued, upwards, ascending through the balcony, until I was at the very last seat, again looking down at the stage floor below, how small everything looked. Turning about, a narrow door, very narrow, so narrow most patrons would not realize its existence. I squeaked through the narrow door, with two film cans, one in each hand, a set of stairs, steeper and narrower than the stairs leading to the semi-nonexistent door itself. The film cans would bounce off the sides of the walls as I ascended to the projectionist’s booth above. At last, arriving at the technical perch of the theater, it seemed as though I were atop the world. There were little openings looking down upon the theater below, once again making everything below look so small. It never lost its magnificence ...” 
 
After the usher-on-duty trudged back down the stairs, the projectionist loaded the main feature’s first two reels onto our ancient Century “carbon arc” projectors. “Carbon arc” projection was not exactly high tech anymore, but it was what we had. The St. George was a dollar-fifty movie house (second or third-run) — no fancy xenon bulb projectors for us. The light from our projectors, that shone through the film as it passed the gate, came from an arc similar to the equipment welders use, an actual fire sparked between two carbon metal rods, that lit the film.  
 
And the show began.
 
Blazing Saddles, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Taxi Driver, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, The Man Who Would Be King, The Omen: the films we booked had one thing in common. They’d all been around at least a year, in most cases two. Even if we’d had the advance money to put down on a first-run feature, we’d have lost out in a bidding war to the new strip-mall theaters, offering a choice of two or even three screens. There was precious little new film to be had in 1976 and ’77, and nobody could imagine filling all of our 2,672 seats.
 
Still every Wednesday was a new chance at success, our movie booking fantasies reinforced by the heady notion that if we could just sell out a live show once or twice, we’d break even for the whole year. Breathless and in our twenties, with the kind of energy that dared the odds, we never managed to achieve such a boffo socko live show, even once. Yet we were, as Paulie recalls, “atop the world,” in what I still think of as a magic cave.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Although I said we couldn’t imagine selling out all the seats for a movie, we did manage that twice, later in the year, when we showed the director’s cut of The Exorcist, a film ideally matched to our shadowy palace.

2. I just came across this interesting 1989 tidbit about carbon arc and its technological successor, the xenon bulb — itself now obsolete. Check it out! 

3. Bob Endres, a friend who sat in as a projectionist from time to time at the St. George, adds, "The lamps you had when I was there were made by Ashcraft. I’m reasonably sure the projector “mech heads” (the actual projector itself) were made by Century. In this photo the big unit on the projector base is the Ashcraft lamphouse, and the unit directly in front of it is a Century “mech” or picture head. Below it is the Century sound head, although at the St. George you had an RCA sound system so the sound heads were probably RCA. If Abbott Theatre Supply in Manhattan was your equipment and booth supplier, that would make sense since they sold Ashcraft and Century and RCA exclusively in the area.   

4. Speaking of Ashcraft lamphouses and Century heads, here’s a story worth checking out. 

At the St. George Theatre — a 2672-seat movie palace I was involved in running in the nineteen seventies — it was a real kick to go backstage behind the screen when the movie was running. You could do this and actually look at the audience looking at the movie! — while the audience couldn’t see you. That’s because the screen, a huge piece of heavy white material stretched on a giant frame over thirty feet wide and twenty feet tall, was perforated, with tiny pin-sized holes to let sound from the speakers travel more naturally from backstage to the audience. It wasn’t silver at all, as early motion picture screens apparently had been, with actual silver embedded in their surfaces. Designed to accept CinemaScope, our screen had a good “gain” — or reflectivity — and was probably “pearlescent.” Blacks came across as very dark gray, and the overall image was bright — except where a long-ago patron had spattered something strawberry or grape colored on the lower left quadrant. 

The screen curved slightly outward at the left and right edges. I always thought the curve had something to do with wrapping the audience in light, and I was partially right. A flat screen makes light travel farther to its corners, encouraging a slightly distorted image, the so-called “pincushion effect.” Godzilla battled Megalon on our screen with no distortion, and the strawberry stain was hardly evident once the movie was underway.

Everything I know about the screen and screens in general, I have learned in retrospect. Back in 1976, we were just trying to stay alive, relieved if more than a few hundred people paid money to sit in the dark and watch the movie, and grateful that we had a screen at all. Although we could hardly afford a new one, our buddy, the head projectionist (Cinema Paradiso Is His Favorite Movie) at Radio City Music Hall — then primarily a movie theater — conspired briefly to get a “used” screen for us at no charge. Radio City traditionally replaced its pristine screen annually. Theirs was better than twice the size of ours, so half a screen would have done nicely. Sadly, our stint at the St. George didn’t last long enough to take advantage of this bargain.

Little did our audience know that, while they were watching, all sorts of antics were going on backstage. Each night an usher went into the shadows behind the screen to engage two switches: one to bring up the red and blue footlights and another to light the house sconces, as the film ended. Leroy — scrawny, barely 5’ 4” and 120 pounds — was always reluctant to go into the dark, even if only a comedy was showing. One night during the last reel of The Exorcist it fell to a reluctant Leroy to do this duty. One exorcising priest was already dead and another would soon hurl himself from a window, possessed by the Devil. Add all of this to the soundtrack of tubular bells — indeed creepy. Unbeknownst to Leroy, Cheri, a bit of the devil already in her, lurked in the shadows, stage right. As he approached, she pushed a flashlight beneath her chin and rasped out, “I willlllllll possess you!” The blood-curdling scream and pounding footsteps that came easily through the perforated screen, probably seemed just one more chilling movie sound effect to folks still seated in the house. Who knows if some long–ago patron of ours hasn’t downloaded the movie recently and wondered as the credits rolled, Wasn’t there a last scream?

Afterthoughts:
1.To broaden your grasp of antique projection equipment...
2. Some movies were made only for the wide screen. For more on this, check out Crossing the Desert on a Camel. 

“The clouds that once floated over a thousand balconies have drifted away for good. The machines broke years ago. One by one the stars have blinked out, their tiny bulbs blackened... dead stars in the cold outer space of grimy atmospheric ceilings.” Ben M. Hall chose those sentences to end his memorable book about movie palaces, The Best Remaining Seats, evoking the darkened ceiling of an atmospheric theater (a palace whose very ceiling, in an electrified take on trompe l'oeil, imitated the open sky). By 1961, when the book came out, palaces — atmospheric and otherwise — were going down fast. Only a year earlier, in 1960, Gloria Swanson had posed for Life in a sumptuous gown in the fresh ruins of New York’s most famous palace, the Roxy. Ms. Swanson had starred in The Love of Sunya, the silent that opened the Roxy in 1927. 

By 1976, when, with a group of friends, I tried my luck at running a (non-atmospheric but nonetheless exquisite) movie palace — the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque confection) — hundreds more of the grand old houses were closing or about to close, losing their livelihoods, about to meet the Roxy’s fate.

1976-1979 could be said to be prime years of dereliction for movie palaces. Loew’s Kings on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and the Beverly in L.A. were both darkened in 1977; The Victory Theatre in Holyoke, Massachusetts went dark in 1979; The Albee in Cincinnati, my hometown, was demolished in 1977 to make way for a hotel. Its coming demise had a lot to do with why I pitched in to save a movie palace in New York, where I’d come to live. The Michigan Theatre in Detroit was converted to a three-level parking garage in that same year; and the list goes on. The Michigan is perhaps the most touching example of a fate worse than demolition — a French Renaissance dome that once sheltered 4,000 seats, given over to the protection of (what else in Detroit?) automobiles.  

There are several reasons why great single-screen theaters were particularly vulnerable in the mid-seventies. The country had been through a serious recession, and  whoever was arguably prosperous had moved to the suburbs. Meanwhile, the knock-out punch TV delivered to movie attendance made selling thousands of tickets to a single screening almost impossible: theater operators fought back by building (mostly suburban) multiplexes, a process that had begun in 1963.

Nobody went downtown anymore: derelict palaces in deserted urban settings made movie-going a lonely, even dangerous experience. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb.

​Six years later at the St. George in Staten Island, a group of us struggled to sell enough tickets to fill at least half of our 2,672 seats, despite fights that often broke out in the auditorium between neighborhood boys; one in particular featured broken beer  bottles. Another time there was a gun – but I will not elaborate;  you’ll read about it soon enough in Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, the full book that will, within the year, follow this website.

In 1988, eighteen years after the Bronx pipe bomb incident, a shootout between gang members at the aforementioned Loew’s Paradise — by then divided into four smaller theaters — resulted in an actual fatality. Such was the life in downtowns everywhere, and in the age of palace decline.

Despite thousands of wrecking-ball parties, there have been and continue to be notable victories in the saga of America’s most opulent movie theaters. I’d like to close with a tip of my former motion picture operator’s cap to the Palace Theater in Marion Ohio, saved from demolition by a local arts group in 1976, the very year so many other theaters went dark forever. I began with a description of a typical atmospheric, so it’s fitting that I should end with one. The Palace was one of the last such theaters to be built (1928, John Eberson) and is said to be one of 16 to survive today. Just a note on Eberson: considered to be the great patriarch of atmospheric theaters, he was, like so many involved in the rise of American cinema, an immigrant — from what today would be considered the Ukraine. Beginning with the Hoblitzelle Majestic (Houston, 1923), he designed roughly a hundred such houses, featuring stars in many ceilings, clouds, landscapes left and right of the orchestra that gave the wonderful illusion of being outside. These theaters were shows in their own right, as much as show-places. Remarkably, most of them went up between the years 1923 and 1929; for that decade, Eberson was a busy man.

The week the Palace opened, The Marion Star offered its readers a glimpse of what the new theater’s atmospheric dome might evoke, to a patron gazing up from one of the new plush seats:
“Allow your imagination to carry you to the gentle slope of a moon-lit Spanish hill...a vine covered garden wall, broken here and there with graceful arches. Through the archways spreads the soft light of a harvest moon, and the dim glow casts shadows over the somber colored walls. Overhead myriads of stars [electric light was still a miracle in 1928!] are twinkling in an azure blue sky, and soft, fleecy clouds are drifting gently...”

Clouds “drifted,” thanks to a series of mechanically-synchronized slide projectors or a “cloud machine” hidden in the recesses of a theater’s dome.

Ben M. Hall (founder of the Theatre Historical Society of America) whose words opened this post, passed suddenly and violently in the rough-edged 1970‘s. If he were alive today, I’m sure he’d take solace in knowing how many grand movie theaters, atmospheric and otherwise, survived the seventies and eighties after all. The preservation and/or resurrection of so many palaces proves how important they ultimately were, and are, to their communities, thousands still standing as arts and community  centers, churches, live theaters, and yes, Marion proves it — as movie houses.

Afterthought:
​Don’t miss this recent post on the Avalon, a tiny atmospheric that just closed on the island of Santa Catalina, off the coast of southern California. Owned by the Wrigley (chewing gum) family, it’s safe, I think, for now, and from what everyone says, enchanted.

This just in from Variety:
China closed swathes of cinemas on Friday in response to the outbreak of novel coronavirus which started in the city of Wuhan and has now killed 26 people [old news: the figure is up to 106 as of this writing]. The closures come a day after the distributors and producers of the seven major blockbusters that had expected to launch from Jan. 25 cancelled their films’ releases.

Chinese New Year is the commercial high point of the cinema industry year in mainland China, with well over $1 billion of box office revenue normally anticipated to flow through turnstiles in a week of celebration and family gatherings. It is also the peak time of year for internal travel, when typically half of China’s 1.4 billion population return to their hometowns to be reunited with family....

​Cinema chains closing their theaters include Wanda, Dadi, Lumiere Pavilions, Emperor, Bona and CGV. But, for the moment, the closures are not nationwide, nor total. China counted some 70,000 screens in 11,000 complexes at the end of 2019.

Variety — which famously announced the day after the 1929 Crash that Wall Street had “...laid an egg,” — is all about showbiz, so may seem a little callous in light of the current epidemic. Still, as a former theater operator, the piece got me to thinking. 

In 2019, according to the National Association of Theater Operators, there were 41,172 screens. in the U.S. With movie theater attendance in trouble everywhere here, thanks to binge-watching, streaming, and other activities we all indulge in, it’s clear we’re losing, rather than gaining, screens. Netflix barely aired Scorceses’ The Irishman before retiring it for home viewing, and you don’t have to ask your friends if they paid for tickets to all the Oscar-nominated flicks available now on the big screen in your bedroom. We don’t go out to the movies the way we used to; or the way the Chinese clearly still do.

The movie palace I was involved in operating for one year, 1976, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, New York, had at that time 2, 672 seats, all facing a single screen. In the thirties, forties and fifties, movie palaces had pretty much blanketed the continent, when the movies were a twice or thrice weekly way of life, a babysitting service, a place to get free dishes, and the only way to see a news program (newsreels), or enjoy a cartoon. But by ’76, it had all changed: palaces were on the way out. 

Our St. George was a sparsely populated cave of sorts, and still, with its copious balcony and loge, it managed to have a lot of life.
  
Here’s a glimpse from an earlier post:  
You can get lost in a movie palace: we knew it, and the younger patrons who didn’t want to go home 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?...Nicky, hear me now. Don 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 was a magic — even a sacred — space, a kind of human-made cave. Tired as I was at the end of a work day, it was hard to go home, so who could fault a boy?  
​
The St. George was, for all of us, our Luray Caverns, our Lascaux, the screen, a cave-wall waiting for the splash of pigmented light. 

Afterthought:
This post, in an earlier version, aired on 2/10/15, garnering the following response from friend of Starts Wednesday, Clifford Browder:
You claim you were novices trying to run the St. George profitably, but in some ways you showed wisdom. Your handling of young adolescent boys, for example -- you did it just right. At that age I wasn't letting friends in for free, but I confess that I and a friend may have sent a candy wrapper or two spiraling down from the balcony to the orchestra … until an usher caught us and made us go sit downstairs. But there is karmic justice: in the same spot in the balcony I and that same friend were so horrified by the spectacle of a villain about to be eaten by crocodiles that we cowered down on the floor, where we couldn't see the screen. Probably missed the best part of that B movie.

The American movie-going experience, from its inception until nearly the 1970’s, contains a parallel universe, a reflection in a shiny surface: black theaters. In some African American neighborhoods, smaller theaters supported black audiences. In larger cities, theaters, palaces big enough to accommodate a separate audience in the balcony, used that space to bring black/white audiences together — all the while keeping them apart. Such was life before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made segregation in public spaces illegal. For seven years, I’ve been working on Starts Wednesday: a Year in the Life of a Movie Palace, and for six of those years writing this blog; still there’s the unanswered question. Was outright segregation practiced in our beloved movie palace? We became theater operators at the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat house, in Staten Island, in 1976. The day we opened those red and gold doors for business, twelve years had elapsed since the Civil Rights Act. I haven’t yet found the person who’ll tell me if African Americans were welcomed by our predecessors, but it’s likely, given the practices of the day, that some or another discouragement kept black audiences out.  
 
In 1976, we inherited mixed audiences from the operator who preceded us: a largely white suburban population — that had moved out of our neighborhood to newer subdivisions on the South Shore of Staten Island — and a mixed local white and black population, who kept, at times, an uneasy peace with one another. On April 7 of our theater year, we opened, ironically, with Mel Brooks’ still-controversial Blazing Saddles, a satire about race that Brooks admits he probably couldn’t make today. The American worm of racial attitude was just beginning to change, and thanks to what we were learning about our audiences, we were changing too, walking toward the light.
 
Last year a friend sent me a wonderful article on the city of Birmingham (Alabama) and its theater restorations: another revitalization story, thrilling! Any theater saved is a welcome miracle; but surprise!  Two of the theaters listed as restored were black houses, during the Jim Crow era.  Reading about them, I got all excited and googled BLACK THEATERS RESTORED. Then, AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATERS RESTORED. Okay, I found a few, and there’s always the compelling story of the Apollo on 125th Street in Harlem. 
 
But like so much else having to do with things black and white in America, results in the black column are a little disappointing. There just aren’t that many. I’m sure it’s a tale of bucks: it can take as much as fifty million dollars and, working on the fast track, five years, to restore a run-down theater, even a small one, according to Jerry Martinez of Martinez and Johnson, an architectural firm out of D.C. It’s about deep pockets and lots of time, and donors able to give. These things are scarce everywhere, but can be doubly hard to come by in black communities. 
 
Still, despite discouragements, I present a few tales of black theater restoration; with time, may there be more.
 
The previously-mentioned Lincoln Theatre in Bessemer, Alabama comes to mind first. The Lincoln, has been bought and is being slowly restored by Andre Holland of Moonlight, who remembers this movie house from his boyhood, apparently not as a theater he attended, but as a vacant space next to a local barbershop, that was, nonetheless, filled with memories for most of the older people he knew. Since last year, The Holland Project has received at least two sizable grants, one for facade work, and is proceeding with plenty of support. A Cinema Treasures entry reflects how neglected it was until Holland came along. He notes, "It's good for people — particular young people — to have something to be proud of in their neighborhood... The Lincoln was [before 1964] the only movie theatre you could go to. Everyone who went has memories of it. They remember first dates there, they remember the titles of all the movies they saw." A 400-seat theater built in 1948, the Lincoln has a balcony — likely in a stadium configuration — and orchestra, and functioned until around 1970. Before Holland entered, there were two other Lincoln enthusiasts who got the ball of restoration rolling forward: Jake Bivona, a local attorney and “big movie fan” formed the Lincoln Phoenix Project back in 2013, apparently enlisting the efforts of an actor and filmmaker, Kevin Wayne, best known for his role in The Magnificent 7. Wayne shot a documentary, which has never had a showing. Now that the Holland Project is on the way, he may post it, in its entirety, on YouTube. One thing is clear; when the Lincoln is complete it will offer both movies and live acts and give a needed boost to Bessemer’s sad downtown — so much of what theater restoration is all about.
 
The Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. is the oldest African American theater in the U.S., predating even the Apollo. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and a number of other performers have graced its stage. Martinez (quoted earlier) recalls that the Howard was in pretty dismal shape, “...It had been vacant for decades when we started work on it. It was a solid building, but the interior was totally gone. The only thing that was left was the shape of the proscenium and the shape of the balcony.”
 
The Howard opened in August, 1910, a legitimate/Vaudeville house, its facade done in Beaux-Arts, Neo-Classical, and Italian Renaissance styles. Apollo, at the top of the facade, played his lyre over T Street, while the inside featured a copious balcony with eight boxes and a proper number of dressing rooms. Not surprisingly, the Howard Players from nearby Howard University often took the stage, as well as the Lafayette Players.
 
The ups and downs of the Howard mirror the trials of many palatial theaters from the thirties into the bad old seventies. Serving mostly black audiences, and, beginning in the early Depression, black movies, like Herb Jeffries cowboy flicks, along with live acts, the theater was a hot spot, attracting top talent like Lena Horne, and offering competitions, like its rival, the Apollo, in New York. During WWII, it hosted  a number of balls, attended by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and, in these instances, offered the likes of Abbott and Costello and Danny Kaye, in addition to popular black performers.
 
Though management was black, the theater seems always to have been owned by white management companies, during its serious working years. These companies faded away by the fifties, when the Howard went Rock and Blues. Beyond the fall of single-screen movie theaters, two things did the Howard in: ironically, desegregation, and the riots of the late sixties. It served briefly as a church, then simply closed, despite its designation on the National Historic Register. 
 
Its recent re-opening in 2012 after a full restoration by Martinez and Johnson, have given the Howard renewed purpose, recalling its peak during wartime. As the theater’s website observes, “When the nation was deeply divided by segregation, The Howard Theatre provided a place where color barriers blurred and music unified. The Washington Bee dubbed it the ‘Theatre for The People’...the place where dignitaries, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady gathered with everyday folks to see both superstars and rising stars...” Billy Eckstine, Billy Taylor, the Ink Spots, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gilespie, Dick Gregory, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley (I haven’t even gotten started) either debuted there, or used the Howard as a touchstone for their careers. Like the Apollo and the Cotton Club in Harlem, the Howard seems to have survived and prospered by vaulting over the impediment of segregation.
 
Finally, here’s a brief nod to the Carver Performing Arts Center in Birmingham, a city on fire — in the good sense — with theater restoration. The Carver Theatre was an African American cinema, opened in 1935 with roughly five hundred seats. Recent restoration has made it, among other things, the new home of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame Museum. The theater’s location in what is considered the Birmingham Civil Rights District probably made restoration a must-do for local civic officials, and a good thing too.
 
If single-screen theaters of all kinds suffered vacancy and neglect in the seventies, from a combination of multi-plexing and television, then other factors, like white flight (which one way or another has never gone away), and the desegregation of public places, put additional pressure on black theaters coast-to-coast. Fortunately, people of all backgrounds love their local theaters, and there’s always someone willing to fight to preserve, restore or rebuild them. 
 
Afterthoughts: 

1. I didn’t include more than a nod to the Apollo in this post, as it seems such an obvious example of a black theater with a fascinating past, but if you want to read a little about it, here’s a good treatment.  
2. For a glimpse at how the neighborhood near the Howard (and its sister, Howard University) has gentrified, read this.  
3. For a glimpse of life in the balcony of a segregated theater and full discussion of black theaters before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, don’t miss this NPR discussion.

This just in:  The Avalon, a small atmospheric palace on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, has officially closed its doors as a dedicated movie theater. 

Never having been to Santa Catalina, the ear worm I’m now fighting in my head is, what else, the Four Preps’, “Twenty-six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me/ Santa Catalina, the island of/ romance, romance, romance, romance.”  What is it about islands?

This blog happens to be dedicated to another island movie palace, The St. George Theatre in Staten Island, which I helped to run for one magical entirely exhausting year, 1976. Staten Island, one of NYC’s five boroughs, is a far cry from Santa Catalina, but hey, an island is an island! 

There are some pretty fascinating island movie houses in places I’ve been. Take for example the Fishers’ Island Cinema on its own isle, nestled in Long Island Sound and snuggled between New York and the Connecticut shore. A writing group I belong to does a retreat off-season at Fishers each fall. We always pass the cinema on our way to the retreat, but I’ve never been to a movie there, because it’s always closed by September. Not many people winter on Fishers, ferry service being what it is. I understand the F.I. Cinema was built by the army in 1932 when that remote locality was at least half military base. These days, summers only, the cinema serves whoever’s occupying the windswept houses on bluffs and beaches, and a tiny year-round population.
 
On Chincoteague, a more famous island off the coast of Virginia, and a wild place if ever there was one, ponies run in the surf. The Island Roxy is the only surviving movie house on Chincoteague, where once there were three; and like the theater on Fishers, it’s closed off-season. The Roxy started its career in 1945. When the movie based on Misty of Chincoteague, the classic horsy child’s book, premiered, none other than that pony led the parade down the main street. In fact, Misty’s hoof-prints are set in cement in front of the Roxy, to commemorate the occasion. 

No doubt island movie theaters are special, as islands themselves are. If theaters everywhere are in a struggle, in this age of streaming, then island theaters may serve as a kind of microcosm of a theater’s demise — or triumph. 

The Avalon (Santa Catalina) has a rich history, so I’ll focus on it. After ninety years of steady exhibition, it ended its movie-house career on New Years Eve, in a quiet last showing of an unremarkable movie,  with about 40 people in the audience. Because it’s in Southern California, home of Hollywood, it likely won’t be torn down or boarded up. Rumor has it that it will stay in the market place for special bookings, somewhere on the pattern of The Theater at the Ace Hotel in L.A.; but it can’t count, as it used to, on regular walk-in business. If it were so unfortunate as to not be near L.A., the Avalon might not survive at all. 

​Here’s a description of its interior, quoted directly from its Cinema Treasures entry:
A truly classic movie palace, situated in Avalon on Santa Catalina Island, just 22 miles off the coast from Los Angeles. The Avalon Theatre opened on May 29, 1929 with Douglas Fairbanks in The Iron Mask. It is located in the Casino Building, built by chewing gum magnet William Wrigley Jnr, and is located beneath the Casino Ballroom. The building was never intended for or used as a casino, but for dancing (which in the era of the ‘big bands’ attracted the likes of Benny Goodman — the 'King of Swing' to play here to 2,000 capacity dancers. The outer lobby of the building has eight ‘Atlantis’ inspired tiled mural panels, the work of John Gabriel Beckman, who decorated the entire Avalon Theatre in an Atmospheric style. There are painted murals on the side-walls depicting a noble savage hunting deer with a bow & arrow, as a few Franciscan monks arrive by galleon surrounded by stylized hillsides. The rear wall has painted murals of birds and monkeys.

Above the rounded proscenium arch is a re-creation of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, whilst on the asbestos safety curtain is painted “Flight of Fancy Westward”, depicting a primitive surfer boy riding the crest of a wave, superimposed on a background of the map of the island. The silver leaf ceiling is made to glow in shades of pink and violet by colored lights hidden behind a low wall surrounding the auditorium.

The Avalon Theatre is equipped with a Page 4 manual 16 rank theatre organ, built by the Page Organ Co. of Lima, Ohio. It is still in working order and is played regularly at film performances on weekends only. Films played daily every evening of the week and were a mix of first run and classic silent movies. The complex is still owned by the Wrigley family who keep the building well maintained.

Love the surfer boy on the safety curtain!

That Page organ was in action for the last show, on New Year’s Eve, as described by The L.A. Weekly:
About an hour before the nightly 6:30 p.m. screening, organist Jon Tusak sat down...and began pumping out a free-flowing, almost jazzy instrumental mash-up of “If I Only Had a Brain,” the always poignant “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and other tunes from The Wizard of Oz. As Tusak kneaded the keys and pulled the organ’s stops, birds in the walls and ceiling of the theater chirped along excitedly in a merrily demented sing-along. 

Since the Avalon is atmospheric, the birds were preceded by, “tiny lights inside the constellations decorating the vast universe of the Avalon’s high, expansive white ceiling.” 

Although I’ve never been to the Avalon, the lush Cinema Treasures description of its interior makes me feel like I have. 

And what about those Beckman murals of Atlantis? All the islands I’ve cited here, with the exception of my own Staten Island, are tiny, while Atlantis, which may or may not have existed thousands of years ago in the Atlantic Ocean done in by a giant flood, was, so they say, an island continent before it sank. 
Now Atlantis is probable myth, cited by Plato as an allegory, but I’ll take it as an operant metaphor for the demise of movie theaters everywhere, each one an island, sinking below our bad habits of just staying home and binge-watching.

Whether you’re on an island or not, go out to the movies. Do it now!  

Afterthoughts:
1. For a fascinating treatment of how the Atlantis allegory was taken up in the 19th century by various adventurous thinkers, check this out.  

2. Avalon, BTW, was also a legendary island, in Arthurian legend, the place where the sword Excalibur was forged. Told you islands were special!

3. Thanks to The L.A. Weekly, cited above, and to my friend and colleague, Robin Locke Monda, whose link to the Weekly’s, “The Last Picture Show:  Southern California’s Most Beautiful Movie Theater Closes,” got me thinking about islands.