The Marquee's the Message

Marquee recently spotted at the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver, Washington. (Reconsidering Cinema @coenesqued)

​Whaddaya do with a marquee when there’s no movie to show?  Across the U.S., while some theater chains are opening, with masks and social distancing, smaller single-entrepreneur operations will probably remain closed for some time, aching, in many cases, for (even beyond income) the fellowship of the community. One clever operator, Jordan Perry, of the Lake Theatre & Cafe in Oswego, Oregon felt estranged from his patrons, so got out the marquee letters and crafted this message:  

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PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE  
WAS REALLY GOOD 
(IT’S ON HULU)    

Haven’t seen it, but it sounds good...  
 
Marquees can sometimes speak for themselves. At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat palace I had a hand in running in 1976, we never had an opportunity, or the inclination, to spell out anything but the feature or features we’d managed to get our desperate hands on. Still, the marquee seemed to have a life of its own, as when, one windy April day, I discovered. 

We’d only been open about a month, and things had not been going well. Too late, we knew we couldn’t trust the landlord. The feature advertised on the marquee, "SMILE" — an indie about teen beauty contestants that’s since become a classic — was drawing pathetic numbers, as had several previous features. Running a movie house? Who were we fooling?

I walked out of the lobby, heading uphill for home, still under the marquee. As I emerged, a gust of wind dislodged an unsteady letter, and most of the word, "SMILE" came tumbling down, rearranging itself on the pavement before me to spell out “LIES.” The big lie, of course, was that we could fill enough seats to keep the place open.

Returning to the subject of recent quarantine messages, Dan Wyatt, owner of the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver, Washington, has been doing a little quarantine marquee work.
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Dan is a Back to the Future enthusiast who recently reminded his patrons,

MARTY YOU MUST NOT
LEAVE THE HOUSE
ANYTHING YOU DO COULD
HAVE SERIOUS REPERCUSSIONS
ON FUTURE EVENTS

Speaking as a retired theater operator, that’s a lot of letters! If nothing else, it’s a fortune in S’s! Of course, the days of cast-aluminum marquee letters have passed, a good thing: if plastic letters fall off a marquee you’re walking under, they probably won’t give you a concussion. But more importantly, they won’t break, the way brittle cast aluminum letters did, shattering and considerably reducing your stock. W’s and M’s can work as substitutes for each other, but there is no replacing an S. We would never have had enough of those to make it through "REPERCUSSIONS," let alone the whole five-line message.
 
Had there been a pandemic in 1976, I’d have kept the concession stand open for socially-distanced carryouts. The message on the marquee, assuming we had enough S’s?  

BEST HOT DOGS ON THE EAST COAST
FRESH POPCORN, REAL BUTTER!
COME BACK & WE’LL GET THE EXORCIST

And we did get it, by the way; that one week we filled all our seats.

Afterthoughts:
1. For even more Covid-era marquee creations, don’t miss the New York Times piece that sparked this blog post. Thanks, Julia Carmel.
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2. For a glimpse of what it was like on Tuesday nights, when we changed the marquee, back in the day...