I once (1976) helped run a theater, the 2,672-seat St. George Theatre in Staten Island, that contained, beneath its gilded proscenium, a single viewing screen arguably the size of a small playing field. What a wonder, that there ever were such behemoths, that single-screen houses had, until the 1970‘s, been the norm, or that people ever gathered together in the dark to watch a one-and-a-half-story tall Katherine Hepburn kiss an equally mammoth Spencer Tracey. The New York Times recently featured an image of a fan laughing while presumably watching Comedy Central on a cell phone. Screen size may be irrelevant these days, but it was once a subject of conversation, as when, in 1976, MGM finally released Gone With the Wind to television — first to HBO and, in November, to network television (NBC). It became (ironically) and remains, the highest-rated television program ever presented on a single network, watched — in relative miniature — by 65 percent of television viewers. I watched on a portable Sony Trinitron at a lunch counter in Florida, as Rhett carried Scarlet up what seemed, at the time, like a dollhouse staircase.
By then TV had been eroding the habit of movie-going for a couple of decades, a back-and-forth struggle. In 1963, the fledgling American Multi Cinema (AMC) Theatres — originally Durwood Theatres owned by Stanley H. Durwood — opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in Kansas City presumably to cut overhead, but also to steal back some of the viewing audience, by offering a choice of titles. Viewers — used to their Zeniths, Sonys and Motorolas — didn’t seem to care about the relative smallness of these screens, and the trend caught on. A very American crisis ensued: by 1976, there were actually too many screens for the product that Hollywood offered; a sudden 7.5 percent decline in movie theater attendance sent the movie business into a panic.
The average single-screen movie theater operator — most often located in a crumbling downtown area — couldn’t hope to compete for scarce film offerings.
We were that operator. Our unofficial anthem during the dark winter of 1977 — a parody of an American Airlines ad then running on TV — went something like this: “With our big screen to the north and our snack-stand to the south, we’re the St. George Theatre, living from hand to mouth.”
The St. George Theatre ended its days as a movie house with our departure in 1977, the same year Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn and a number of other great old palaces went dark. Our luminous — if grape soda-stained screen, burned up a few years after we departed, in a backstage fire that would have taken down the house if the theater’s protective asbestos fire curtain hadn’t fallen and stopped the progress of the blaze. The St. George has survived, a home, these days, for live entertainment; but, for our theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.
It’s sad, but several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, or The King and Iin widescreen processes such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision or Todd-AO. William Paul argues that “Both the architectural screen and the technological screen have changed...in ways that directly affect our perception of the movie image.” He also notes, “The screen itself might have influenced the development of film style.” [1]
In an age when more and more households don’t even own a TV (the final irony!) hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions! In New York City, the venerable Paris (with balcony seating!) still boasts a pristine single screen, not a palace, but hey. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.: they have so many restored single screen or older theaters in that town, you should plan to stay for a year. Check out The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd., and the Vista on Sunset Drive, just for starters. Seattle’s Cinerama Theater is, I’m told, a wonder.
There are scads of single-screen houses listed in Cinema Treasures. How many of them boast a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia (Super Panavision 70) is anybody’s guess, but I remain, as always, optimistic.
Note: I wrote this post several years ago (yes, I confess, this is mostly a re-run), and interestingly, it seemed to predict something that has come to pass. Lawrence of Arabia was reissued this year on actual film in, of course, 70 mm and, thanks to Tarantino and Nolan and others, has appeared on wide screens nationwide, including — and for me especially — the United Palace in upper upper Manhattan, where I was privileged recently to see it, and enjoy an upward-at-the-dome gaze during intermission. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, quite like an epic of that caliber in a pristine palace.
[1] Paul, William, 1996, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology and the Motion Picture Screen,
in The Movies: Texts, Receptions and Exposures, eds. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsburg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 245-6.
By then TV had been eroding the habit of movie-going for a couple of decades, a back-and-forth struggle. In 1963, the fledgling American Multi Cinema (AMC) Theatres — originally Durwood Theatres owned by Stanley H. Durwood — opened the two-screen Parkway Twin in Kansas City presumably to cut overhead, but also to steal back some of the viewing audience, by offering a choice of titles. Viewers — used to their Zeniths, Sonys and Motorolas — didn’t seem to care about the relative smallness of these screens, and the trend caught on. A very American crisis ensued: by 1976, there were actually too many screens for the product that Hollywood offered; a sudden 7.5 percent decline in movie theater attendance sent the movie business into a panic.
The average single-screen movie theater operator — most often located in a crumbling downtown area — couldn’t hope to compete for scarce film offerings.
We were that operator. Our unofficial anthem during the dark winter of 1977 — a parody of an American Airlines ad then running on TV — went something like this: “With our big screen to the north and our snack-stand to the south, we’re the St. George Theatre, living from hand to mouth.”
The St. George Theatre ended its days as a movie house with our departure in 1977, the same year Loew’s Kings in Brooklyn and a number of other great old palaces went dark. Our luminous — if grape soda-stained screen, burned up a few years after we departed, in a backstage fire that would have taken down the house if the theater’s protective asbestos fire curtain hadn’t fallen and stopped the progress of the blaze. The St. George has survived, a home, these days, for live entertainment; but, for our theater, a dedicated single screen, with its carefully-preserved curvature to allow for distortion, is probably a thing of the past.
It’s sad, but several generations have grown up never knowing the effect of films like Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, or The King and Iin widescreen processes such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision or Todd-AO. William Paul argues that “Both the architectural screen and the technological screen have changed...in ways that directly affect our perception of the movie image.” He also notes, “The screen itself might have influenced the development of film style.” [1]
In an age when more and more households don’t even own a TV (the final irony!) hardly anybody knows what watching an epic on a giant screen actually feels like. Still, there are exceptions! In New York City, the venerable Paris (with balcony seating!) still boasts a pristine single screen, not a palace, but hey. And, Lordy, you can always go to L.A.: they have so many restored single screen or older theaters in that town, you should plan to stay for a year. Check out The Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd., and the Vista on Sunset Drive, just for starters. Seattle’s Cinerama Theater is, I’m told, a wonder.
There are scads of single-screen houses listed in Cinema Treasures. How many of them boast a screen big enough to do justice to Lawrence of Arabia (Super Panavision 70) is anybody’s guess, but I remain, as always, optimistic.
Note: I wrote this post several years ago (yes, I confess, this is mostly a re-run), and interestingly, it seemed to predict something that has come to pass. Lawrence of Arabia was reissued this year on actual film in, of course, 70 mm and, thanks to Tarantino and Nolan and others, has appeared on wide screens nationwide, including — and for me especially — the United Palace in upper upper Manhattan, where I was privileged recently to see it, and enjoy an upward-at-the-dome gaze during intermission. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, quite like an epic of that caliber in a pristine palace.
[1] Paul, William, 1996, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology and the Motion Picture Screen,
in The Movies: Texts, Receptions and Exposures, eds. Laurence Goldstein and Ira Konigsburg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 245-6.
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