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Going Attractions The Definitive Story Of The Palace 2019
Transcript
00:00:43Theaters are magic.
00:00:46You go into a theater, and I don't care if it's a small little local one in your hometown
00:00:51or something as grand as Radio City Music Hall.
00:00:55When you're in the music hall and the lights go down, it becomes intimate and fascinating
00:01:04and magical.
00:01:13So many people identify movies with some of the best times of their lives.
00:01:16They remember their first dates.
00:01:18They remember their first time out with their family.
00:01:20The first time they went to see a movie about being a doctor, being a politician, being
00:01:24an astronaut.
00:01:31There's something about seeing those stories on screen, and you get a chance to understand
00:01:38other cultures, other experiences, other places.
00:01:42We may never live those fantasies or those lives of the people we're watching, but we
00:01:47do it vicariously.
00:01:51You were giving people a complete escape from their ordinary lives.
00:01:56From the moment you walked into the lobby, plush carpeting, gilded relief work on the walls
00:02:02and on the ceilings, magnificent chandeliers, decor from different periods of art and architecture
00:02:08around the globe.
00:02:10This at a time when most people, most Americans, didn't have the opportunity to travel.
00:02:15They were places where the rich and the poor could rub elbows.
00:02:18They built these palaces to be the Disney of the day, so that you walk in off the street
00:02:23and you forget all of the troubles and all of the things that you had going on in your
00:02:27life because you're surrounded by this magnificent building.
00:02:34I remember coming here as a child and just being completely amazed and taken aback by
00:02:41the ornate beauty of the building.
00:02:47When I first started my job at Theater Historical Society, it was kind of eye-opening for me
00:02:53to learn that the places that I went to to see Broadway touring shows or the symphony
00:02:57were actually buildings that were built as movie palaces.
00:03:05Toward the end of World War I, up through the Depression, which is the early 30s, there
00:03:10was just a boom.
00:03:11That's the only way to describe it, a boom that led to the building of innumerable movie
00:03:16palaces, not theaters, but palaces, and ones you can visit today and still see and still
00:03:22enjoy a movie in.
00:03:29It seemed so incredibly lavish.
00:03:33You wonder how anybody could conceive of them or why they would build such structures just
00:03:38to go to the movies.
00:03:42As Marcus Lowe, the famous showman and businessman, said, we don't sell tickets to movies, we
00:03:48sell tickets to theaters.
00:03:50I first came into the Rialto Theater when I was probably eight years old.
00:03:54My mom was making an effort to educate me in old movies.
00:03:58So we'd go to Chaplin movies and Buster Keaton movies, and the Rialto was a revival house.
00:04:07When I was growing up, I always knew that my great-grandfather had owned a movie theater chain.
00:04:13It was called the Butterfield Theater Company.
00:04:15I wasn't super familiar with it, but I knew that my mom, growing up, never had to pay
00:04:20to go see a movie.
00:04:21And I just remember thinking, oh, my God, like, I wish that had been me.
00:04:27I have a great memory of going to the Ziegfeld Theater in New York when I was a kid.
00:04:30We were actually living in Charleston, South Carolina, and I was always going to mall multiplexes,
00:04:35and it was Gandhi.
00:04:35It was the kind of movie that had an intermission.
00:04:37It was people dressed up.
00:04:39It was fancy bathrooms.
00:04:41It's the kind of thing that sticks with you forever.
00:04:42I went to see Gone with the Wind in the Redford Theater in Detroit, Michigan, when I was
00:04:48in grad school.
00:04:49So you are awfully kind.
00:04:50I'm not kind.
00:04:51I'm just tempting you.
00:04:52I've seen Gone with the Wind probably hundreds of times in my life, but there's something completely
00:04:57different about seeing that movie on a big screen, the organ playing, and you're in a
00:05:02room with 1,200 people.
00:05:04I don't even remember the movies that I saw, but I was entranced by the building itself,
00:05:09by all the scary character faces in the walls, darkness, the color, the intensity, the sort
00:05:15of musty smell.
00:05:17And you come out and it had gotten dark, so the marquee was lighted up and the sidewalk
00:05:21was twinkling with the little crystals of mica they would put in it.
00:05:24There was a magic going on there, which I took for granted, of course, as everybody did.
00:05:28They were a part of life.
00:05:31Movies are one of the United States' most important cultural contributions.
00:05:35It's how we've broadcasted our culture around the world and how we've made that association
00:05:41between the United States and Hollywood.
00:05:42It's through the movies.
00:05:44So it's a very, very important national and cultural legacy, right?
00:05:47But we don't actually preserve the movie theaters.
00:05:51So those are some of our most important cultural landmarks.
00:05:53And yet when we come to time to economic development or redevelopment of a city or
00:05:58real estate development, someone's come in and take out a whole block to do something,
00:06:02people don't ask those kinds of questions.
00:06:04And so you have all these cities around the country where there's just nothing left.
00:06:08You can go to cities where they've torn down every movie theater they've had.
00:06:20So we can assume it's just an entertainment venue, or we can actually recognize that it's actually
00:06:25with a vibrant center of city life.
00:06:32Some of the first films to be shown and promoted in a big way in the 1890s were prize fights.
00:06:37But that was an event.
00:06:38And it was an event that was very successful.
00:06:41And they went from city to city and rented out big existing auditoriums.
00:06:45This is long before the Nickelodeon or the little storefront theaters.
00:06:49So they were really the beginning of what movies could be and eventually did become.
00:06:56When the movie business actually got going in the early 20th century, with Thomas Edison
00:07:00and everyone else involved, the early films were first not projected.
00:07:05They were shown on a, you know, on little eyepiece viewers.
00:07:08Where you would drop a penny in, you get a 30-second reel of film on a kinetoscope.
00:07:12These little cards that would flash in front of you on a little viewer and you'd crank this
00:07:16thing and you'd maybe put a coin in or something, they were in these little parlors, like an
00:07:20arcade in a way, where they're all lined up against the wall.
00:07:28Places like Automatic Vaudeville, run by a man named Adolph Sucher and other people around
00:07:31the country, began to open up these penny arcade parlors.
00:07:34And it was the first kind of chain store, if you will, build out of the moviegoing experience.
00:07:39People like Thomas Edison and others, rivals, and people who are ripping off Thomas Edison's
00:07:45patent, made a short, short film.
00:07:48And eventually some of them had stories.
00:07:50There was Thomas Edison with his kinetoscope, I believe.
00:07:55And then there were the Lumiere brothers in France.
00:07:59The two technologies kind of evolved around the same time and they were competing.
00:08:04And so one Nickelodeon would show Lumiere products and then somebody else would show
00:08:09using the Edison projector.
00:08:13We all know about the great train robbery in 1903.
00:08:16It may not have been the very first film to tell a story, but it's one of the first to
00:08:20use up a whole 10 to 15 minute reel documenting a story and making it seem pretty realistic.
00:08:27And then someone had the idea that projecting them meant you could show a lot of people a
00:08:31film at the same time.
00:08:33What was beginning to work was actually having seats set up and a projector in the back and
00:08:38making it a public experience of going to the movies.
00:08:43Folding chairs were brought into storefronts.
00:08:46I mean, it was as simple as that.
00:08:48I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which many say is the birthplace of the commercial
00:08:53movie theater.
00:08:54So in 1905, a gentleman named John P. Harris and his business partner, Harry Davis, they
00:09:01said, why don't we take the projector down the street to a storefront that we have, put
00:09:05a screen on the wall and 96 chairs and we'll show films continuously.
00:09:09They charged a nickel.
00:09:10They called it a Nickelodeon.
00:09:12It came from the word nickel, meaning American currency, you know, that it usually costs a nickel
00:09:17to get into one of these things.
00:09:18And then Odeon, which means an indoor environment.
00:09:22A lot of scholars consider that to be sort of the flashpoint because within a few years
00:09:27of that, people were opening Nickelodeons like crazy.
00:09:31It was kind of the Wild West.
00:09:33It was something of a free for all.
00:09:35Anybody who had access to a camera and film could make a film.
00:09:39And anybody who could set up chairs and a projector could show a film.
00:09:45Famously, Lowe's began this way.
00:09:47It was originally called People's Vodvo Company.
00:09:50And Marcus Lowe, when he went to go visit one of his penny arcades in Cincinnati, he went
00:09:54across the river to Covington and he saw a man projecting movies onto a screen.
00:09:58So he went back to his penny hippodrome and he took the second floor and converted into
00:10:03a movie theater.
00:10:05That was the changeover that began to happen where you would accompany the films with music
00:10:09and you could feed off of the crowd.
00:10:11So falls worked better, humor worked better, comedy worked better.
00:10:15Sometimes there would be someone standing behind the screen giving voice to actors, sometimes
00:10:21a singer in a little side stage.
00:10:23Often, almost always, as a matter of fact, a piano player, that was an art in itself.
00:10:28The piano player had to be really good at improvising.
00:10:31This was a national trend.
00:10:33You know, it gets a lot of celebrated coverage in New York and Chicago and cities like that.
00:10:38But it was national, it was regional, it was even rural.
00:10:40Cincinnati, Covington, Charleston, Dallas, small towns in Iowa.
00:10:45People began to want to watch movies everywhere.
00:10:49And it began already by 1907, what Harper's Weekly referred to as Nickel Madness.
00:10:53It was a national and soon global phenomenon.
00:10:55And then suddenly a saturation point.
00:10:57There were so many Nickelodeons everywhere.
00:11:00The Warner Brothers also started in the Pittsburgh area, and they opened a little theater called
00:11:06The Cascade outside of Pittsburgh.
00:11:08They ran that for a few years, but then they thought, well, wait a minute, the money is
00:11:12more in making movies.
00:11:14And many people in those early days felt they could make money off the movies, but they had
00:11:19to deal with the patents folks and Thomas Edison.
00:11:22And that's why a lot of the production moved from the East Coast, New York, and then Chicago.
00:11:27They moved out to the West Coast.
00:11:32Of course, C.W. Griffith entered the scene at the end of the first decade of movies and
00:11:37gave more rhythm, tempo, purpose, pace, and dramatic clarity to the storytelling.
00:11:45And hired very talented and very camera-friendly actors, like Mary Pickford.
00:11:51There was no such thing as a movie actor.
00:11:53They had to come from someplace.
00:11:55Most of them came from the stage.
00:11:57People like Lillian and Dorothy Gish.
00:11:59Some of them had circus trainers.
00:12:02Charlie Chaplin was part of a famous music hall troupe.
00:12:05In England, they called Vaudeville Music Hall.
00:12:08That's when Max Sennett heard about this young fellow, Charlie Chaplin, and signed him to
00:12:13a contract.
00:12:13And that was at the end of 1913.
00:12:17And there was an entire segment of African-American vaudeville entertainers that would travel the
00:12:22country just going in that circuit of African-American vaudeville theaters.
00:12:27And there were quite a few black filmmakers in, like, the early 1900s, such as Oscar Michaud.
00:12:34And that part of our heritage isn't celebrated as much as it should be.
00:12:40Some of the movie theaters that we think of as palaces were actually originally vaudeville theaters.
00:12:44Vaudeville houses that I've noticed have a much higher ceiling.
00:12:49The balcony is a lot steeper, and that's so that people on stage and people on the balcony
00:12:55could see the people on the stage and people on vaudeville performers, their voice could
00:12:59reach up to the upper portions of the balcony.
00:13:03The vaudeville theater, you had a desire for intimacy with the stage.
00:13:08There was an attitude of see and be seen.
00:13:11You tell a vaudeville house from a strictly movie house because the vaudeville house has
00:13:15box seats on the side and sometimes on the main floor as well.
00:13:18The people sitting in the box didn't have the finest view of the stage, but everybody
00:13:23in the audience could see them, which they cherished.
00:13:26This particular building that we're in was built before the movie theater era, so this
00:13:32was built for live performance.
00:13:34A movie theater house is bigger in that way.
00:13:37It's longer and narrow.
00:13:38It's easier to see the screen.
00:13:42The vaudeville circuit built a number of these houses.
00:13:44They would travel from city to city to city.
00:13:47One of our local vaudeville companies was Fanchin & Marco.
00:13:51Fanchin & Marco was based downtown.
00:13:54They had a studio in Hollywood area.
00:13:56They sometimes worked with Sid Grom and sometimes were a competition, but they would do what
00:14:00they called ideas, what Sid Grom would call prologues.
00:14:03The individual vaudeville acts turned into these really programmed, dramatic, large shows.
00:14:10There were attempts at feature-length films in the early 1910s.
00:14:13Sarah Bernhardt made a famous five-reel film about Queen Elizabeth, one of her famous roles
00:14:17from the stage.
00:14:18The Italians made films like Cabiria, which were imported here by a handful of theaters.
00:14:24And then D.W.
00:14:25Griffith famously started becoming more ambitious in trying slightly longer films, then slightly
00:14:30longer, and eventually making The Birth of a Nation.
00:14:32So everybody realized that that's where things were heading.
00:14:38Movies were considered third-rate entertainment.
00:14:41Maybe the top entertainment would, of course, be opera, play, classical music.
00:14:45Somewhere below there, maybe the second rung, might be the vaudeville house.
00:14:51The movies in the early 1900s were primarily for the lower-middle classes.
00:14:57Bit by bit, as movies established themselves and started to shed their tawdry reputation as
00:15:06being kind of low-class entertainment, people thought about the idea of building what today
00:15:11we call purpose-built theaters.
00:15:15And that became, you know, a whole new era.
00:15:21As you move into the 1910s, the movie business really began to boom in terms of the movie exhibition
00:15:26business.
00:15:27Let's start with an example.
00:15:29If you look at Roxy in the 1910s, you could see the progression of movie palaces by his own
00:15:37career.
00:15:37The showmen were people who lived for their own persona that they created.
00:15:42They created a brand.
00:15:44You could rely on the fact that if you went to a Grauman Theater that night, or Roxy Theater,
00:15:49or something put on by Balabed and Katz, or certainly with Fanshawe and Marco, even if
00:15:52the film wasn't good, the evening was going to be great.
00:15:55In 1913, in February, in New York, the Regent Theater opens, and it's the first purpose-built
00:16:01deluxe motion picture theater.
00:16:02It actually was not a success.
00:16:03So, Roxy was brought in to essentially upgrade its capabilities and certainly its revenues.
00:16:10By the time you get to the Strand in 1914, they thought, we'll open the Strand for a
00:16:14few months.
00:16:15We'll have people come for movies, and then we'll go to musical comedy.
00:16:18We'll do live theater like we had planned.
00:16:20Well, the Strand was a huge hit at 3,000 seats.
00:16:23So, they never returned it to its original, attended its day in a movie theater.
00:16:28The critics are writing about the elaborate cars and dress of the people who are coming,
00:16:32that it's become fanciful for all classes.
00:16:35Then you have the Rialto, which was opened in 1916.
00:16:38The Crossroads of the World, 42nd, 7th.
00:16:41It's a huge success.
00:16:42The Regent, the Strand, the Rialto, and the Rivoli, from 1913 to 1917, even just in this
00:16:48small area of New York, you could see that this area that had always been dominated by
00:16:53legitimate theater was suddenly being taken over more and more by movies.
00:16:56That's what led to the confidence that Nesmore Kendall and Edward Bowes had in opening up the
00:17:00Capitol Theater in late 1919.
00:17:02This is a 5,300-seat theater that they opened without any studio backing.
00:17:09So, to have gone from a theater when you were hoping that the Regent would do well at 2,000
00:17:14seats to 5,300 seats expressly for movies shows you that meteoric rise of movie theaters from
00:17:21that period from 1913 to 1919.
00:17:24The Capitol was the really beginning, in a way, of that sense of scale that 20s brings you.
00:17:30That's not to say there weren't many, many of the theaters, the Groundman's Million Dollar
00:17:34here in Los Angeles, Central Park in Chicago, but there is something about the Capitol opening
00:17:38at the very end of the 1910s that just is a signpost of what's going to be coming in the
00:17:441920s.
00:17:46Belbin and Katz was a chain that got started on the southwest side.
00:17:52The first theater was going to be the Central Park Theater.
00:17:55This was 1917.
00:17:58The second theater was the Riviera, and it became so successful that Barney said,
00:18:05Oh, it's got to be bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:18:07And it became the Tivoli Theater.
00:18:10It was 3,600 seats.
00:18:15He said, Okay, let's do another theater.
00:18:18Let's do it downtown and make it our headquarters.
00:18:21And that was the Chicago Theater, which opened the same year, 1921.
00:18:28The money was just flowing in.
00:18:31So they talked with Rap and Rap, just build us the biggest, most extravagant theater, and
00:18:38it became the Uptown.
00:18:44In 1920, Roxy was brought back to New York to reopen the Capitol Theater.
00:18:49He was the director of presentations from 1920 to 1925.
00:18:52And one of the things that he pioneered at the Capitol Theater was the transmission of
00:18:57his stage shows and his own performers over WEAF, which later became part of NBC.
00:19:03But when Roxy left, he did leave so that he could start his own theater, the Roxy Theater.
00:19:11And it was not only that he was going to be named for him, which, of course, was a nice
00:19:15moment if you have a famous nickname, but it was because he had that kind of draw.
00:19:19They needed his name, his track record to create all the money needed for what would
00:19:24then be the largest movie palace in the country.
00:19:26And that theater opened on March 11th, 1927, with, again, almost 6,000 seats.
00:19:32And it was a sensation.
00:19:36It's kind of the peak of the movie palace moment.
00:19:39There were three conductors.
00:19:41There were three different organs, massive Kimball organs.
00:19:45There were stage shows.
00:19:46There were ballets.
00:19:47There were operettas.
00:19:49There was every manner of entertainment on that stage.
00:19:53Even the integration of live performance backed by motion picture projection, in addition
00:19:57to the feature film.
00:19:58But Roxy himself was never satisfied with anything.
00:20:02And so as the years went on from 27 to 28 to 29, he began to look for a challenge.
00:20:08He was plucked away by the Rockefellers and by RCA and RKO for a new project, which would
00:20:13be two theaters open at the same time at the new Rockefeller Center.
00:20:17He had always integrated live performance and movies.
00:20:19And now, here in 1932, Radio City Music Hall was only going to be a place for live performance,
00:20:25a kind of elevated vaudeville.
00:20:26And RKO Roxy Theater, which was 3,500 seats, was going to be a place for movies, with, of
00:20:32course, his famous Roxyettes, which he had had since the original Roxy.
00:20:42When Radio City Music Hall opened, December 27, 1932, S.L.
00:20:49Rotherfeld was his name.
00:20:50And everybody called him Roxy.
00:20:51And the musical was basically his idea.
00:20:54It had the Rockettes.
00:20:56It had a ballet company.
00:20:57It had a singer, a chorus of singers.
00:20:59It had a full symphony orchestra.
00:21:02That's what was on stage.
00:21:04It had costume designers, set designers.
00:21:06It had a full costume shop up on the eighth floor where they made all the costumes.
00:21:11There was a, in the basement, was a full scenic studio.
00:21:14Everything was made there.
00:21:17He wanted Radio City Music Hall to be the showplace of the nation.
00:21:21And that's the name it got.
00:21:23And he didn't want films.
00:21:25He wanted just stage presentations.
00:21:28And so that's what they did on opening night.
00:21:32And it was a bomb.
00:21:33It was a serious, horrible bomb.
00:21:37And so Roxy exited the theater that night in a stretcher and went into the hospital at three
00:21:50o'clock in the morning.
00:21:51And so the board of directors went, the only way we're going to make this thing work is
00:21:57to put movies in here.
00:21:59And The Bitter Tea of General Yen, starring Barbara Stanwyck, was the first film.
00:22:03It opened January 11, 1933.
00:22:08And that was, that's all they wrote.
00:22:12It became the most famous movie palace in the world.
00:22:16The reason they were able to build great theaters like this was that they were owned by the movie
00:22:22studios who developed the product that was shown in them.
00:22:25The people who ran the movie studios and ran the film companies, many of them were known,
00:22:30in part because they named their companies after themselves.
00:22:32Marcus Lowe, of course, had Lowe's.
00:22:35MGM was a division of a company called Lowe's Incorporated.
00:22:39Well, Lowe's was a movie theater company.
00:22:40So Lowe's ran the theaters and built and operated the theaters that just happened to show MGM movies.
00:22:48Marcus Lowe built five wonder theaters in New York, all open at the same time, one in
00:22:52each borough.
00:22:53One missed.
00:22:53There was the one in Staten Island that never got built.
00:22:55It was in Jersey City.
00:22:58Fox the same.
00:22:59William Fox was a hard-driving man who built a large Fox theater chain.
00:23:05Fox didn't build that many theaters, but they were glorious ones in Detroit and St.
00:23:10Louis and Brooklyn and San Francisco.
00:23:12Grandest of the grand.
00:23:14And they would show their own product.
00:23:16RKO Radio Pictures was kind of a conglomerate for its time because it was built of several
00:23:21components.
00:23:22The Keith Albee Vaudeville Theater Circuit and the Orpheum Theater Circuit and the Radio
00:23:28Corporation of America, or RCA, run by David Sarnall.
00:23:32Warner Brothers, of course, which also swallowed up the first national picture company from
00:23:37the silent era, had a buying spree of movie theaters in the late 20s and early 30s.
00:23:43But in many cases, there were companies like Paramount, so Adolf Zucker's name was a little
00:23:47less known.
00:23:48Zucker presided over various combinations of companies that became Paramount, and Paramount
00:23:54owned its own chain of theaters.
00:23:56They used the theaters, for instance, to actually understand their audience.
00:23:59Before, there were Gallup and research groups that, you know, Fox could phone a movie theater
00:24:04operator in Oakland and say, how's my movie going to play up there?
00:24:08What do you think?
00:24:10Columbia didn't own its own theaters.
00:24:13Universal didn't own its own theaters.
00:24:15So they were dependent mostly on independent theaters, mom-and-pop theaters, smaller theaters,
00:24:22and occasionally lucked out and had a film that was so appealing or created such demand,
00:24:28that got into the bigger theaters.
00:24:30They were identifiable brands, and they brought you a certain kind of film.
00:24:34From the 1910s through the 1940s, many of the best deluxe, first-run movie theaters
00:24:42in the country were run by Warner Brothers, Fox, RKO, Lowe's, Paramount.
00:24:47So they constrained a lot of trade.
00:24:53The other type of theater you had that was built, you know, in the early 1900s, I mean,
00:24:59the 19-teens, was the neighborhood-style theater.
00:25:02I call this a neighborhood movie palace.
00:25:05To me, it's got the same romance and the same elegant details, but it's on a smaller scale.
00:25:11Some of them were very modest affairs, but they still offered the experience of going
00:25:16into a nice place and sitting down comfortably and watching a movie on a screen bigger than life.
00:25:22There was a tremendous appetite, hunger for moviegoing.
00:25:26And people in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, even drifting into the 50s, used to go to the movies
00:25:32sometimes two or three times a week.
00:25:34People would have come to see their favorite stars, Douglas Fairbanks, in films like The
00:25:41Mark of Zorro, The Black Pirate, The Thief of Baghdad, Mary Pickford, in films like Little
00:25:48Annie Rooney, and Sparrows, Charlie Chaplin, and The Kid, and The Gold Rush, and The Circus.
00:25:55The list goes on and on and on.
00:25:57And the studios got into the business of building and developing stars.
00:26:04The star system was born in the late 1900s, early 1910s.
00:26:09As you begin to have Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, these became
00:26:14national stars.
00:26:15And the national stardom meant collecting, collecting fan magazines and photographs.
00:26:20There was merchandising.
00:26:22People who think merchandising is a modern phenomenon ought to look back at what you could buy or get
00:26:27as a giveaway or a premium in the teens and 20s, featuring all of these stars.
00:26:35I collect stuff like that.
00:26:37I keep finding more of it and more and more and more, whatever you want to call it.
00:26:41Cigarette cards, collector cards, souvenir stamps, souvenir spoons, anything you can think of.
00:26:52Movie stars were our heroes, our heroines, our idols.
00:26:58And that hasn't changed all that much.
00:27:02Each of the studios would have under contract a stable of stars, and they were assigned parts.
00:27:10They would pretend, oh, yes, I was looking over a script, and I decided I might do this.
00:27:16No, no, the boss told them, you get on stage and this is your job.
00:27:20Mary Pickford was a very shrewd young woman.
00:27:23And she was possibly the first to realize, and it came as a great shock to her, that the famous
00:27:33players' company run by her friend
00:27:36and in some ways mentor Adolf Zucker was booking dozens of films to theaters on the lure of getting her
00:27:47films.
00:27:48And if they didn't book her film, they wouldn't get the other stuff and vice versa.
00:27:52But her films were the ones that were really bringing in the big bucks and the big crowds.
00:27:58So she renegotiated her deal with Mr. Zucker and said, no, no, no, no, no, you can't sell a whole
00:28:04block.
00:28:04We used to call it block booking.
00:28:05You can't sell a block of movies on the strength of my movie.
00:28:09My movie gets sold individually.
00:28:11That was a milestone.
00:28:13Charlie Chaplin renegotiated as he moved from one company to another
00:28:18to the point where he was getting an unheard of sum of money in the teens.
00:28:22Before income tax, by the way.
00:28:24And eventually, in 1919, Mary, her future husband Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and the great director P.W. Griffith
00:28:34banded together and started a company called United Artists.
00:28:39It was not just a name, it was a philosophy.
00:28:42They were artists who united together to sort of control their own destiny, control their
00:28:47own finances, have complete power over the movies they chose to make and how they would
00:28:53be released and distributed.
00:28:57In 1926, it said, Mary Pickford traveled to Europe and saw some of the Moorish-style cathedrals
00:29:06in Spain and fell in love with them.
00:29:10When she returned to Hollywood, she said, I want a theater that looks like that.
00:29:15So she was the driving force that created the theater we're sitting in right now, which
00:29:19was the flagship of that company, the United Artists Theater, on the corner of what was
00:29:24then 10th Street, now called Olympic, and Broadway.
00:29:35Downtown in cities, there always tended to be a cluster of theaters.
00:29:39There would be an MGM theater and a Lowe's theater and an RKO theater because they were
00:29:45competing and they wanted to be near each other.
00:29:47You see many photos, vintage photos, or even a photo postcard showing a lineup of theaters
00:29:53on a main street of a major city.
00:30:06Los Angeles is special because it was the entertainment capital of the world.
00:30:10We do have two historic theater districts, so all the movies were premiering, not in Hollywood,
00:30:15but in downtown.
00:30:16There was over 100 theaters just downtown L.A., which is amazing.
00:30:22And then later, Hollywood came into being.
00:30:26Sid Grauman built the Egyptian and then the Chinese, and that sort of put Hollywood on
00:30:32the map as a place to go see films.
00:30:38The movie palace, especially the neighborhood movie palace, became part of the neighborhood.
00:30:42Often it was named after sometimes the street that it was on, sometimes the neighborhood
00:30:46itself.
00:30:46And they always had a big sign in front, and that was the name of the neighborhood.
00:30:52One way to make it a destination on a main street of a medium-sized town or a big city
00:30:58was to have a big, elaborate, brightly lit marquee, and then what they used to call a blade.
00:31:04The blade marquee is the vertical one that's attached to the front of the building, and it's
00:31:08usually just the name of the theater.
00:31:12Chicago had an interesting situation happen.
00:31:15The theater we're in now, called the Music Box, you see the letters there, but there's no
00:31:21backplate behind it, just the stroke of the letters.
00:31:24Chicago initiated attacks on the square foot area of signs, so the theaters rebuilt them
00:31:29just with the letters, so they'd have a minimum of square footage.
00:31:36They usually had a box office.
00:31:38Many times it was a standalone little island booth.
00:31:41Sometimes it was built into a side wall.
00:31:43If you're lucky, you had a forecourt, an outside lobby area that was off the sidewalk.
00:31:49Then walk into an interior lobby, and in the 1920s and 30s, the interior lobby was really
00:31:55just a congregation space.
00:31:56There was no concession stands.
00:31:58When you walk into Radio City Music Hall, the first room that you see is the lobby, and
00:32:04they call it the Grand Foyer.
00:32:05And it is very dramatic.
00:32:08A secret about that, there are mirrors three stories tall, and they are backed with gold
00:32:15leaf, not silver, like most mirrors.
00:32:18And they wanted it that way, so it ensured a soft, warm glow fell over the guests.
00:32:23And it does, it has a very unusual, interesting lighting when you go in there.
00:32:29It's just beautiful.
00:32:30It's got a, kind of hushes everybody, as a matter of fact.
00:32:35The rug in the lobby, that's my favorite part, the bejeweled flying carpet, as I like to refer
00:32:40to it.
00:32:40I believe it's plaster, but it's textured to appear as if it's fabric.
00:32:44And of course, it's got glass jewels that shine whenever the light hit them.
00:32:48It's sort of similar to the columns, it's, it's a little bit more textured, but these
00:32:53glass jewels are throughout the property.
00:32:55The lamps are actually Tiffany lamps, which I did not realize.
00:32:58So that's pretty cool.
00:32:59My mom told me that.
00:33:00The Michigan Theater was built in the late 20s, and that was built as a movie palace.
00:33:05And so it was modeled off of the opera houses of the 1800s.
00:33:10And so you've got this barrel ceiling.
00:33:13Both of the staircases sweep down in a bit of an arc.
00:33:17This lobby is breathtaking, spectacular.
00:33:21You don't see lobbies like this.
00:33:23I mean, maybe I've seen them in Europe at some of the cathedrals.
00:33:27It's unique to this country.
00:33:29So this is the money shot.
00:33:32This is the highlight of the building.
00:33:33But there are others.
00:33:35There was a mezzanine lobby up to the stairs that would feed the balcony.
00:33:38Or if it was a bigger theater, it might feed a mezzanine level and a balcony.
00:33:42You might even have three lobbies.
00:33:44And then you have the main auditorium.
00:33:52The balcony.
00:33:57And there are a gallery, or it could be a mezzanine and then a balcony.
00:34:01They just had different names for these parts.
00:34:05It's a very wide open space because of that fabulous ceiling.
00:34:10It just feels big.
00:34:15The level of detail throughout the property is, as I said earlier, it's excruciating.
00:34:21Like, you know, when you come in here, every time I've owned it for two and a half years,
00:34:24and every time I come in here, it's something new that I notice.
00:34:26And that's just the level of detail.
00:34:28And, you know, they really took their time.
00:34:30And when I first came in here, I thought that, you know, maybe it was some, like, method of 3D
00:34:36printing plaster that they used
00:34:38because of the intricacy and the detail in all of the designs.
00:34:41But when you look really closely at some of this stuff, you can see that it's actually hand-painted.
00:34:46So there were people in here hand-painting every facet of the design, which is just incredible to me.
00:34:51I can't even imagine how much labor that took.
00:34:54You know, they don't build it like this anymore.
00:34:57These films were all silent.
00:34:59But pretty early on, the smart owners of theaters, even storefront theaters, realized that sitting in silence was not very
00:35:06entertaining.
00:35:07And they hired pianists.
00:35:10Eventually, the pianists became theater organists.
00:35:14And organ companies like Wurlitzer started manufacturing theater organs specifically for movie theaters.
00:35:26The organ's played before and after the film.
00:35:30Organ grills on either side of the proscenium, you'll see some sort of big ornamental frame.
00:35:36There was a Wurlitzer organ, and apparently that's in some rich guy's house in California.
00:35:44Because these pipes are in the walls of the theater, you could feel the vibration of that organ throughout the
00:35:52entire theater.
00:35:54And if you were in the dressing room, you could feel it vibrating in the wall.
00:36:01It was very dramatic.
00:36:02It was very cool.
00:36:04And then, in the great, great theaters, there were complete orchestras, sometimes symphonics, symphony orchestras.
00:36:16All meant to accompany the silent film.
00:36:20The time that the movie palaces were created was a time when people needed an escape.
00:36:25Going through the Depression, going through the World Wars.
00:36:28This was a place that everyone, rich or poor, could come and escape those things and go into another world.
00:36:41You didn't live in a mansion.
00:36:42You didn't live in a palace.
00:36:44But you could walk to that movie theater and almost experience what the rich people experience.
00:36:49When you went into the theater, the whole atmosphere was yours.
00:36:53You could live in a small apartment with a hot radiator by the window.
00:36:57But you could enter into a palace.
00:36:58You could sit in a throne.
00:36:59It didn't cost very much.
00:37:01For less than a dollar, they could come to a place like this.
00:37:05And feel pampered, too.
00:37:08Uniformed ushers, ticket takers, people who were trained with almost military precision to be courteous and polite to a guy
00:37:16who maybe was a streetcar conductor.
00:37:20Everyone was treated well.
00:37:21Well, that was part of the idea, too, that an ordinary person could come to a place like this.
00:37:29We've done some oral history work with Cherry Balaban-Robbins, and she is the daughter of A.J. Balaban, who
00:37:37was part of the Balaban and Cat's chain here in Chicago.
00:37:40And they built all of the great movie palaces here.
00:37:42And she said that her father always said that everyone that came in the door was a prince and a
00:37:48princess.
00:37:48And they all paid the same amount, and they all deserved to be treated like a prince and a princess.
00:37:53They wore crisp uniforms, they had white gloves, they had flashlights, they had rules and regulations and training.
00:38:02They were the front lines.
00:38:03They represented the owners and the operators.
00:38:06They were inspected every morning, they had to get dressed in two uniforms, and they'd appear in that beautiful grand
00:38:13foyer.
00:38:13And like the army, they would go down and make sure that they were all properly, and if they weren't,
00:38:19fix it.
00:38:22One of the appeals of going to the movie house was that you were treated this way, and that you
00:38:25could go to an elaborate bathroom.
00:38:27A lot of these theaters had what was known as the women's powder room, which was a room directly in
00:38:32front of the women's bathroom, or the men's smoking room.
00:38:36It used to be a treat when I was young, and my parents used to take me there.
00:38:40My brother and I would, can we go downstairs to the lounge, because we wanted to go into those rooms.
00:38:45Because they were just like something you never saw before.
00:38:53And the women's lounge looks like something out of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie.
00:38:58The men's lounge, there's a painting in there called Men Without Women.
00:39:03It's very Art Deco.
00:39:04It's got all symbols on it of menhood.
00:39:08A razor and a pipe and all that, all the things that men do without us.
00:39:12And there were dressing tables with mirrors.
00:39:15They actually supplied makeup for the ladies.
00:39:19Theaters had little banners on the marquee that said, come on in, it's cool inside.
00:39:23And it was.
00:39:25Whether it was the early process of air cooling or later air conditioning, that was your mecca during a heat
00:39:31wave.
00:39:31Because not many houses had air conditioning in those days.
00:39:35What's wonderful about this era of movie palaces in the 20s and 30s is the amazing creativity and design.
00:39:41They were building fantasies.
00:39:42I like to call the sort of general architectural style Hollywood fantasy.
00:39:46That's the beautiful thing about an older art house is you go in and it usually has a theme.
00:39:50Then you had this particular type that walked in and it was like walking into a Spanish courtyard or a
00:39:56Persian courtyard.
00:39:58John Eberson, his style was like the theater that we're sitting in now.
00:40:03A dark blue ceiling with twinkling electric stars in it.
00:40:06A projector that caused clouds to move across.
00:40:09It looked like a night sky and around the edges it would look like a small village in Spain.
00:40:17John Eberson, who's the architect of this building, designed it as a study in Moorish revival architecture.
00:40:24And you can see it in the facade behind me here.
00:40:26You know, it's very like courtyard-ish, very Moorish, Middle Eastern influenced.
00:40:32And if you look very closely, there are different parts around the auditorium and the lobby.
00:40:35They're written in English, but they're stylized as Arabic.
00:40:40There's one behind me that says, please be seated, I beg you.
00:40:43And then, you know, there's several others.
00:40:45Another architect from New York, Thomas W. Lamb, who probably did more theaters than anybody else, was more refined.
00:40:51He chose the Adam style, the Adam brothers being decorators in the 18th century in England,
00:40:56who did a lot of what they call the great houses over there.
00:40:59I don't know why they would choose these themes.
00:41:01I think it was just because they were building so many of these theaters.
00:41:04The architects could go wild.
00:41:07There was a certain drive for novelty and a tremendous drive for grandeur.
00:41:13And it depended often who the architect was.
00:41:15There was a great firm in Chicago, two brothers, Cordelius and George Rapp.
00:41:20Rapp and Rapp.
00:41:21They got enamored of the palace at Versailles.
00:41:23Rapp and Rapp designed this theater, the Los Jersey, as well as the Kings and the Uptown in Chicago.
00:41:34And then you have these amazing murals, many of them by Heinz Bergen and his company, and of all styles.
00:41:41So he had things that were very, very Baroque, very classical, all the way to the ones that he did
00:41:47in the Wiltern Theater,
00:41:48which are streamlined, deco, geometric shapes.
00:41:53The fresco you see behind me depicts some of the United Artists' stars of that period.
00:41:58Not just the four founders, but some others like young, dashing Ronald Coleman is there.
00:42:02Rudolph Valentino is there.
00:42:04And when modern audiences get to see a film in a theater like this, today it's a special experience.
00:42:11Oh my gosh, look at that.
00:42:14Well, a hundred years ago, it was an everyday experience.
00:42:18I can't imagine it either, that this is where you would go on an ordinary Friday or Saturday night to
00:42:25see a new movie.
00:42:26The big transformation came with sound movies in 1927.
00:42:32Al Jolson was there on the screen.
00:42:33He sang a song.
00:42:35That hadn't been done before.
00:42:37Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet.
00:42:40Wait a minute, I tell you, you ain't heard nothing.
00:42:43You want to hear two, two, twisty?
00:42:44All right, hold on, hold on.
00:42:50Two, two, twisty, goodbye.
00:42:54And people hadn't, they had not heard anything yet from a movie.
00:42:57It was a precious saying that he made in that one sentence.
00:43:06After the First World War, people thought that prosperity and the joyous good times would go on forever.
00:43:11Eventually, the Depression was going to come along.
00:43:14Nobody knew that was going to happen.
00:43:15Once you got into the 30s, that's when it was getting harder and harder to be a real success.
00:43:22These were very, very expensive buildings.
00:43:24They had to pay for all the upkeep in terms of heat, electricity, fixing carpets and upholstery, and paying staff.
00:43:32It's an incredibly expensive operation.
00:43:35When the 30s hit and the patronage died off, they were trying to figure out how to keep these buildings
00:43:41alive.
00:43:42Hollywood suffered from a series of real body blows in the late 40s and into the early 50s.
00:43:46The first was the U.S. consent decree.
00:43:50Paramount was sued by the government under an antitrust lawsuit, and it went to the Supreme Court,
00:43:55and they decided that this movie studios could not own theaters anymore.
00:44:00No longer could MGM count on its films being shown in Lowe's theaters and taking money out of one pocket
00:44:06and putting it in another,
00:44:07which changed the entire way movies were made and financed in Hollywood.
00:44:12Then there was television, and television caught on pretty darn fast.
00:44:18By the early 50s, not everybody, but a lot of people bought television sets, and that became a magnet.
00:44:25People would gather in Uncle Joe's apartment because he had a television set.
00:44:28When that happened, I think that's when theaters started to decline.
00:44:33And then tastes changed, and the streamlined look of the 50s and 60s that was reflected in automobiles
00:44:40and other kinds of modern design caused some theaters to change their marquees.
00:44:45Your little reader boards, your little rectangular marquees were replaced with angles
00:44:49so that people could see them as they were driving quickly by.
00:44:52Many of the marquees that have those angles, those aren't the original marquees.
00:44:55In the early 20s and, you know, going into the 30s, you didn't have concessions in the movie theater.
00:45:00In the case of the Michigan, sometime in the 50s probably is when they added that in,
00:45:05and, you know, they started selling popcorn and soda.
00:45:07The movie palaces were downtown.
00:45:10After the Second World War, people began to move into the suburbs.
00:45:13The American dream is to have your nice little house and yard and your car.
00:45:19People left the cities, and then the baby boom happened.
00:45:22So the industry responded very smartly.
00:45:25They developed drive-in theaters.
00:45:27You could put the kid in the back seat.
00:45:28You could watch the movie.
00:45:29I mean, this was just one blow after another to the way they had done business as usual for decades.
00:45:36People did go to the movies.
00:45:37The attendance was pretty much cut in half in those years.
00:45:40Hollywood didn't quite know what to do.
00:45:42A bunch of crazy guys in New York came up with a system called Cinerama,
00:45:46which came out of World War II, a training device that trained aerial gunners.
00:45:50They converted into three panels on a curved screen, a regular curved screen, and it became very immersive.
00:45:57They tried selling this to Hollywood.
00:45:59Everybody came out and looked at it and was pretty impressed with it.
00:46:02But, my God, you know, three projection booths.
00:46:05You've got all this film and a giant screen you've got to put in and all this stuff.
00:46:09It became impractical for them.
00:46:11So they just kind of walked away from it.
00:46:16And then when Cinerama hit in 1952, it went gangbusters.
00:46:20I mean, literally a movie playing in a movie theater for three years straight, you know, and you can't get
00:46:24tickets.
00:46:25They're reserved seat.
00:46:27That's the shock that hit Hollywood.
00:46:30It stayed pretty successful for about 12 years or more.
00:46:34The immersive part of Cinerama sound is the fact that sound would follow something on the screen.
00:46:39So it almost had an extra dimension of realism, as Lowell Thomas would say, it was more real than real.
00:46:46Cinerama hit so hard, Hollywood knew they had to do something.
00:46:50That's when they developed cinemascope and stereophonic sound.
00:46:54Celebrities and the man in the street crowd Hollywood's famous boulevard to attend the Cinemascope premiere of How to Marry
00:46:59a Millionaire,
00:47:00the first romantic comedy to be filmed in the new miracle medium.
00:47:04They came up with Cinemascope, they started shooting the rope, and it became a big success as well.
00:47:10These were all invented with the specific purpose of drawing people out of their homes and back into movie theaters.
00:47:17If you wanted to show widescreen Cinemascope, you had to somehow widen your theater, your proscenium.
00:47:23If you wanted to hear stereophonic sound, you had to have a porous screen.
00:47:27That's when the silver screen started to disappear.
00:47:30Paramount came up with something called Vistavision.
00:47:32Then there was Technorama, Technoscope.
00:47:34There's all these various widescreen scopes and ramas all over the place.
00:47:38But it was expensive for theaters to do that.
00:47:40This is in the 50s.
00:47:42People were starting to come back to the movies again.
00:47:45The theaters really evolved and did lots of stuff, you know, in the 50s, maybe even in the early 60s.
00:47:50You could win plates.
00:47:51There was a bingo night.
00:47:53There was always something going on at the local movie theater.
00:47:55I can remember in the 50s, they had cartoon shows for kids where you'd have, like, you know, 30 cartoons
00:48:01or something, you know, big extravaganza on a Saturday.
00:48:04And, of course, parents loved that because all the kids were down at the movie theater.
00:48:07They could go off and do what they wanted to do because the babysitter movie theater was going to cover
00:48:12them with all the Tom and Jerry cartoons they could handle.
00:48:19I can remember going to the Alger Theater.
00:48:21I think the admission was 12 cents on Saturday afternoon.
00:48:25Five cartoons, three cereals, and the guys dressed up in tinfoiled Martians or whatever they might be.
00:48:32And the sound of, yay, coming from the audience every few seconds is something significant happen.
00:48:393D in the 50s was an interesting thing, and king of the gimmicks was William Castle, who came up with
00:48:45all kinds of things, emergo, illusiono, all these various things that were kind of cheap tricks, but they were fun,
00:48:52cheap tricks.
00:48:54One of them was with the movie The Tingler, a Vincent Price movie.
00:48:57They would have these old aircraft parts that had vibrators on them, and they would put them under a bunch
00:49:02of seats in the auditorium.
00:49:03At a certain point in the movie, these would kick in, and they'd vibrate, and you'd get a jolt or
00:49:09skeletons flying from the balcony down towards the stage.
00:49:13A guy named Hans Ladd invented something called Scentivision.
00:49:16And so they decided to come up with a scenario based on an old detective novel, and they added all
00:49:21these smell elements to the film so that they could pump them into the theater.
00:49:25And how they did that was a bunch of little vials that would hit and go through a tube and
00:49:30come out on almost every other seat in the theater.
00:49:33That's all part of showmanship. They were thinking outside the box every minute.
00:49:38Now, road shows were usually extra-large movies, like Lawrence of Arabia, Mutiny on the Bounty.
00:49:44Those were real event movies.
00:49:45If you wanted to see that movie, you had to drive to the big city, and there would be an
00:49:49overture to begin with to get you in the mood for the movie.
00:49:51And then the lights would dim slowly as the music is building towards its crescendo, and then the curtains would
00:49:57open with perfect timing, and the MGM line would growl.
00:50:04You almost got goosebumps, because they took the time to do that right.
00:50:11Going to the mid to late 1960s, you have a period of racial division, social division.
00:50:22Some of the cities continued to thrive, others did not.
00:50:29And in many cities, the downtown areas became somewhat deserted, in some cases, run down.
00:50:40People were no longer patronizing the stores that had been there, because there was an equivalent out in the suburbs.
00:50:49Retail, as well as entertainment, killed the theaters.
00:51:02The movie theater was popular in 1938, is now, you know, hardly gets anybody in it, but bums and stuff,
00:51:08to get warm.
00:51:09There was a point where someone told me in Los Angeles, in one of the theaters, where a lot of
00:51:14bums would come in, because you could get in for like a dollar or something, you know.
00:51:17They'd be urinating on the floor.
00:51:18And at the end, the cleaning crew literally took hoses and just watered down the whole floor for the next
00:51:23day's show.
00:51:24I mean, that's how bad it got in some cases.
00:51:32You've also got the elevation of crime.
00:51:34And if it isn't an elevation of crime, it's a notion that crime is elevating.
00:51:38That sort of sets the stage for the 1970s.
00:51:45The city was a mess during that time.
00:51:48It was hard to get tourists to come in, because the city became dangerous to some people.
00:51:52I lived there, so I was sort of used to it.
00:51:54But there were certain sections in that area that you didn't go to.
00:52:01People ask me, you know, well, how was the block?
00:52:04You know, are people getting robbed all the time?
00:52:06And it's like, well, there's not really much going on out there.
00:52:09I mean, the jerk chicken store across the street is closed.
00:52:12And, you know, there are a couple of other buildings across the street that, you know,
00:52:16were once functioning when the theater was open, but are now closed.
00:52:19There are communities like the south side of Chicago across the nation.
00:52:23But, of course, this is one of the larger examples of what happens when there is strategic disinvestment in a
00:52:32community.
00:52:32And, unfortunately, the Regal sort of was on the back end of all of that.
00:52:40The theaters had to change.
00:52:41That's the way it goes.
00:52:43Everything changes.
00:52:44And so, moving away from some of the first-run product, they had to go to other programming.
00:52:51Some of them became what they call grindhouses, as they did on 42nd Street in New York City.
00:52:59Some of them stayed open all night, attracting a somewhat seedy audience.
00:53:10Some of them showed blaxploitation films because they weren't going to be shown in the suburban theaters.
00:53:24Which are kind of a huge success between, say, 1971 and 1975.
00:53:29You've got martial arts films, which are increasingly coming over from Asia and also being homegrown.
00:53:34And then you have even hybrids, mixing of all those.
00:53:37So soon there's a difference in terms of even the content that movie theaters are showing.
00:53:41People could live vicariously through that, too, because, you know, there's the villain again, there's the bad guy, and there's
00:53:46Bruce Lee.
00:53:51So it did work for a while.
00:53:52The art house is growing.
00:53:53Independent film is growing.
00:53:54You have people who are going to film schools, and they're interested in seeing art films and European films.
00:53:59Avant-garde cinema, experimental cinema, independent films, global films.
00:54:03You have the adult films, which are drawing off the same kind of importation of European art films, which have
00:54:08higher sexual content.
00:54:10All of a sudden, those are becoming more mainstream, and soon the adult film industry figures out that they can
00:54:15actually have mainstream theatrical films in movie theaters, capped, of course, by the incredible success of Deep Throat.
00:54:2342nd Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue, all those fabulous theaters that were there turned into porno houses, and they
00:54:30let some of the theaters just go.
00:54:34And then you got into the Revival House era, and that's when I really became involved with a lot of
00:54:40the historic theaters.
00:54:41Best film education I ever got was in the Rialto Theater, the Vista Theater, the New Art Theater, where they
00:54:47were just showing classic movies every single day.
00:54:50Here on Broadway in Los Angeles, a good example of what happened to a lot of these theaters, some of
00:54:56them became Spanish-language theaters.
00:54:57If you've got people that speak Spanish, then you're there to serve the neighborhood.
00:55:07But what's really happening overall is that the giant movie palace makes very little sense in almost all of these
00:55:14instances,
00:55:15because you can't pack most of the movie palaces downtown with these kinds of movies.
00:55:20In some cases, the theaters changed hands, they were no longer owned by big corporations, and a lot of them
00:55:26were allowed to deteriorate,
00:55:28some rather sharply, and some rather grimly.
00:55:35A lot of those theaters just closed down, they shut down, they'd lost their constituency, they'd lost their advantage of
00:55:41a good location.
00:55:49These are large spaces, and if you're not filling every seat, heating them or cooling them, running the electricity is
00:55:56very expensive.
00:55:59Just the cost of cleaning this thing, all of the ornamentation collects dirt and dust and the marquee,
00:56:06with moving parts in the electronic circuits exposed to the weather.
00:56:11It's not surprising that those things started to fall apart.
00:56:14When the roof was leaking, they could put up with that for another year, but they turned on the air
00:56:18conditioning,
00:56:19and it kind of worked, then they went to fire up the boiler in October, and bang, it leaked all
00:56:23over the place.
00:56:24And an awful lot of these theaters closed.
00:56:33We had done one show at the Granada Theater in 1973 on Valentine's Day, and they wouldn't let us do
00:56:39another show there.
00:56:40So I started looking for another theater to bring our concerts to, and I came across this one.
00:56:45It was owned by the same company that owned the Granada.
00:56:47But we started on Halloween of 1975.
00:56:51They were still showing movies here, and they would take out a movie whenever we had a concert.
00:56:57Grateful Dead used to play here all the time.
00:56:59Bob Marley played here regularly.
00:57:01Frank Zappa, Genesis, Electric Light Orchestra, Prince, Rick James, The Kinks.
00:57:08When I walked in here that day, the bathrooms were barely functioning, and there were some other issues.
00:57:15So I said to the owner that you had to close this place.
00:57:21It's not habitable.
00:57:23It's going to keep continuing to deteriorate.
00:57:28When a theater has been vacant for so long, you have a lot of deferred maintenance is a really polite
00:57:33way of saying it.
00:57:34Then if you have vandalism, it gets even worse.
00:57:36A lot of the theaters that I've photographed are in pretty rough shape.
00:57:40I have put my foot through a balcony floor.
00:57:43I've had to climb over seats to get to the projection room because the stairs are gone completely.
00:57:50I've seen balconies that have completely caved in.
00:57:53I've seen ceilings that have completely caved in.
00:57:56I've also seen ones that look like someone shut down, shut them down, and walked out like two days before,
00:58:01and they're fine.
00:58:02I know the Los Valencia, a 3,000-seat theater, and they just gave it to a church for $10.
00:58:08I think a church coming into a theater and restoring it was the best option for a lot of these
00:58:13spaces.
00:58:14And the United Artists, that was also used as a church by Dr. Gene Scott, the televangelist.
00:58:20He was a pretty good tenant.
00:58:22He ended up putting a lot of money into the restoration of the theater.
00:58:25Another one that is a successful church is the Academy in Inglewood.
00:58:30That's an S. Charles Lee streamlined modern theater, gorgeous theater, been in continuous use as a church, and they have
00:58:36really been good stewards.
00:58:38They've taken great care of it.
00:58:39They've restored elements of it, and it's a beauty.
00:58:43The church tenant, I wouldn't have thought of it, but it was a really interesting use for the historic theaters,
00:58:51and in some cases, very good.
00:58:53But eventually, the single-screen theaters had to compete with what was going on in the suburbs.
00:58:58The new theaters that came along were multiplexes built from the ground up, and they were nice.
00:59:04They offered all sorts of comfort and amenities that some of these older theaters couldn't.
00:59:08And what's more, they were in the right locations.
00:59:10But the worst part was that instead of having eight movies playing or 12 movies playing,
00:59:15a single-screen theater would live or die from week to week, and a lot of them died.
00:59:19Because they weren't filling these theaters with 3,500 seats anymore, they started to divide these theaters up.
00:59:27Cut the balconies in half, made them two screens.
00:59:30They cut the main theater sometimes into three or four screens.
00:59:34It ended up making pretty horrible movie theaters because the walls that would divide them were four inches thick with
00:59:40not a lot of sound absorption.
00:59:41So you ended up hearing the explosions in one versus the explosions in the other.
00:59:45Sight lines were terrible.
00:59:46Seats weren't really moved.
00:59:48It was a bad experience.
00:59:49When the big movies started happening in Jaws and Star Wars and all those other films started coming out,
00:59:55most people were already saying, I'm going to go off to the new multiplexes in the suburbs.
01:00:00That's where the parking is.
01:00:01That's where the air conditioning is.
01:00:03That's where it's safe.
01:00:04That's where I can go every hour on the hour.
01:00:07And that's where the investment was falling, and that's where the banks were lending,
01:00:10and that's where the people who were living who were going to buy the toys fueled the whole blockbuster industry.
01:00:14From 1975 to 1995, they had this very underwhelming kind of basic multiplex experience,
01:00:22which was spare, spartan, and designed for efficiency and profit.
01:00:27So these independent theaters were starting to lose traction,
01:00:29and they started to divest themselves of a lot of theaters,
01:00:33and they sold them off part and parcel.
01:00:36So these are the things that were all I can do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:38do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:38do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:40do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:43do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:44do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:45do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:46do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:46do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:47do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:47do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to
01:00:55do
01:03:55And after all these years, there was a sad announcement about that music hall today.
01:03:59I'm announcing the closing of Radio City Music Hall at the end of the 1978 Easter show on April 12th.
01:04:07What else are you, they said,
01:04:10we're going to close it?
01:04:10And after the Easter show, they're all out of the day, they're all out of the day, they're all out
01:04:34of
01:04:34the day, they're all out of the day, they're all out of the day, they're all out of the day.
01:04:56like that and you just keep going we had fabulous people help us and it was made a city landmark
01:05:04and
01:05:05then it was on the national historic landmark list and it's saved forever they can't do anything to
01:05:10it and though it doesn't run films anymore which breaks my heart maybe one of these days
01:05:18it'll come back i think people would get a kick out of going back in there and seeing it so
01:05:24big
01:05:26i think it would be somewhat shocking for many of us to go to a 5 000 seat theater to
01:05:32see a movie
01:05:32very different experience i worked at the chicago for a long time testified before the city council
01:05:40the theater organ that's in there and got it landmark and when the theater was saved we knew
01:05:46that the organ was saved it was just wonderful to go back in there and see all those people that
01:05:51walked in and their eyes would open up and it's also good to see things like the cinerama dome
01:05:58surviving because it was going to be torn down they were going to keep the dome but they were
01:06:03going to put a cuckoo root chicken or something in it and the whole town fought against it now the
01:06:07whole town may not have gone to the movie there that often but when they saw it was threatened
01:06:10they all got together put you know practically protest marches and convinced the theater company
01:06:17not to do anything with the cinerama dome and boy they're glad they didn't fortunately a number of
01:06:25them survive intact and a number of them survive intact enough that they can be brought back to
01:06:33their original glory and some of them have been the building was built in 1927 originally as the
01:06:38avalon theater and it turned into the new regal theater about 60 years later 1987
01:06:46it was about a 12 million dollar restoration that they had to do which is why it's so beautiful
01:06:50the city of chicago saved this property by landmarking it chicago is of course a city known for its
01:06:56architecture so that designation i think has really protected this building from demolition
01:07:05the fdic had taken over a bank which had foreclosed on the property and it was newly listed at the
01:07:11time my
01:07:12mother forwarded me an email saying that the building was being offered and i jumped right
01:07:16into it i mean i knew that the building being closed was really a blow to the community i'm a
01:07:22private
01:07:22equity investor so i like to figure out how things work and how i can make them better in particular
01:07:28with
01:07:28a focus on doing that for social good and i saw this as an opportunity to really revive the neighborhood
01:07:35i think the regal is the foundation of the south side of chicago and by extension the city itself
01:07:43we have an opportunity to revitalize the building and i think we can turn around
01:07:46what's happening this side of town there are no cultural entertainment outlets you know basically
01:07:55in this community and since the building has been closed this was a huge economic engine for the area
01:08:00and it really devastated the surrounding neighborhood we've got about six or seven
01:08:08million dollars upwards of ten that we're going to need to put into the building which fortunately
01:08:13is not as much as it could be but that being said it is quite a substantial amount our hope
01:08:18is to
01:08:19reopen the building to the community not just for entertainment purposes but also to culturally enrich
01:08:26the youth and to give them a creative outlet outside of whatever it is they might be doing now which
01:08:33isn't isn't too positive restoration can mean many things for instance the lowe's kings in brooklyn
01:08:41incredible restoration job in most senses but they did add elevators they did add cup holders
01:08:48there are certain concessions that we just have to make
01:08:52these places that you look around like we're in today they have a certain kind of architectural
01:08:58splendor that's not easily created with drywall i salute anybody and everybody who has a hand in
01:09:04saving these great theaters and finding a way to keep them alive it's not enough to save them you have
01:09:11to keep them going somehow you have to find a way to breathe life into them but it's worth the
01:09:17effort it's
01:09:17really worth the effort because once you tear it down you can't rebuild it once it's gone it's gone
01:09:24los angeles historic theater foundation it was founded in 1987 by a group of people who were
01:09:30upset that within a span of just a few weeks or months there were three theaters on broadway that
01:09:35were closed the theater business downtown was dwindling but these things were closed and turns into
01:09:41swap meets and turned into retail and it happened so quickly that there was this sort of desperate
01:09:45reaction we need to do something it is the largest movie palace district in the world
01:09:58with 18 standing theaters not all used as theaters but within an eight block range
01:10:03it's really an amazing resource that most people don't know about
01:10:09on the top of our watch list right now hollywood warner theater which was more recently known
01:10:14as the hollywood pacific one two three the owners originally came to the community and said we're
01:10:19going to demolish it and keep the facade only a number of us said that wasn't acceptable and we are
01:10:26now in negotiations with the owner to do a feasibility study fox inglewood really really are interested in
01:10:33making that a successful theater again it's been closed for quite a while there's a number of issues that need
01:10:41to be resolved as far as the safety of the theater and how it could be brought back and restored
01:10:46so
01:10:47we're really watching that one carefully the younger generation actually sees the value and is seeking it
01:10:54out we are screening more and more classics that anyone could get on netflix for free they can go and
01:11:03see it in the movie theater with with a thousand total strangers and every time they open their theaters
01:11:08they're getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of young people that want to come out
01:11:13and people are coming back my kids generation are frequenting these kinds of shows because they want
01:11:19that experience when i started this 30 years ago preservation was a dirty word and if you called
01:11:26yourself a preservationist you were some radical crazy person there's something about people who love
01:11:32saving buildings especially theaters the theater historical society goes back to ben hall who was
01:11:38a cultural historian and wrote the wonderful book about the best remaining seats book came about in
01:11:44response to when he looked out of the window of his office straight down he was looking at the roof
01:11:48of
01:11:49the roxy theater while they're demolishing it we've grown to have a significant archive a publication and an
01:12:01annual gathering our goals are to document and to celebrate these theaters i personally believe that
01:12:06landmark status is a really great thing to have not only does it offer up certain you know benefits and
01:12:12if you can get tax credits to help offset costs of restoration those are wonderful things but it
01:12:17acknowledges you know if you have a plaque on the front of your building that says this is a
01:12:22landmark structure this place is important even to the casual passerby it adds a little more cachet
01:12:29a little more credibility a lot of them in new york city have landmark status for the exterior
01:12:34so that means that a group would come in do whatever they want to the inside as long as the
01:12:38facade is preserved
01:12:41saving a facade and destroying the theater it breaks my heart is it better to keep just the facade i
01:12:49suppose it is but it just makes me redouble my efforts to try to save the theaters that we have
01:12:57a couple of examples of that painful to me every time is the westchester near lax big beautiful towering
01:13:05deco structure they still have the box office and everything else is a medical office inside there's
01:13:10nothing in there another example is the golden gate in whittier and it's now just the theater
01:13:17building and it's a cvs pharmacy painful to go into and you see the rows of drugs and fluorescent lights
01:13:26but if you look above the fluorescent lights you can still see the theater and the organ and stuff like
01:13:32that i was in there once trying to take pictures and i i noticed this little six-year-old girl
01:13:38looking up at the ceiling with me you know while mom was shopping and you know just sort of watched
01:13:42as she was exploring this theater she was getting it she was seeing what was above
01:13:49and at one point she came over to me she said it's creepy and i said yeah it is she
01:13:55she got it she got
01:13:56a feeling for what was above the the fluorescent theater so in that case maybe it is good to save
01:14:01them in whatever condition we can and maybe someday they can be brought back as theaters
01:14:07the art house convergence is a resource for community-based mission-driven cinemas i think
01:14:12people have really begun to value these theaters we've seen an increase in the number of independent
01:14:18movie theaters over the last 10 years a lot of them lay dormant for a couple years usually in the
01:14:2370s
01:14:24maybe the 80s and then there would be a group in town that would rally around the theater there's
01:14:30a couple different types of movie theaters you have the repertory house and that's like here we're in
01:14:36the new bev in los angeles so that means that they're screening titles that are not currently first run
01:14:41but a lot of our theaters are showing foreign films documentaries american indies without a doubt you
01:14:48have to have passion to run an independent movie house movies are an important cornerstone for a
01:14:55community and that having a movie theater space which acts as more than just a movie theater it's
01:15:00not just that you're seeing things on screen it's that you're doing q a's after it's that you're having
01:15:04conversations about the movies out in the lobby after it becomes a community gathering space
01:15:12the best thing that happened to some of these movie palaces is that they became performing arts centers
01:15:17they added wings and dressing rooms backstage and sometimes they tried to deepen the apron of the
01:15:23stage so that they could accommodate touring broadway shows let's say or concert orchestra or ballet
01:15:29the key to keeping these large theaters alive and thriving is a multi-use model
01:15:36if you can offer a wide variety whether it's concerts and revival movies and special event movies
01:15:42if you can keep that variety going that's how you fill these seats
01:15:53the remainder of these movie palaces a lot of them have already been saved or already been demolished
01:15:59there are very few huge buildings the uptown chicago being one of them where people are still
01:16:03desperately hoping to save what are absolutely irreplaceable architectural structures
01:16:09you'll never see something like this again the detail that they put in here the things they
01:16:14thought of this was the nicest movie palace ever built in the country and the architects even said
01:16:22that you know it's not for today but for all time
01:16:29it was four million dollars to build in 1924 it's the largest freestanding theater in the country it has
01:16:36more square feet than radio city but radio city has more seats
01:16:42in 2008 when we purchased the theater if you remember the economy started to collapse so we bought it at
01:16:50the
01:16:50worst possible time i didn't know what we were going to do to save the theater i just knew it
01:16:55needed to be saved
01:17:03this theater is in relatively good condition we need to put in all new mechanicals all new plumbing all new
01:17:11electrical we need to add elevators we need to clean and restore the areas that need it those are the
01:17:17things that we're working on and we think it's a 60 to 65 million dollar restoration
01:17:29we're bringing it back to the way it was built and that's what it should be there'll be some minor
01:17:33changes that need to take place for the most part i'd say it's all going to be the way it
01:17:38was because
01:17:39it was designed so well we can't beat it
01:17:43it's good that we have the original architectural drawings because all we've got to do is follow
01:17:47what rap and rab did
01:17:52one of the most important things about getting the doors open here is this theater is the catalyst
01:17:57for bringing uptown back so once that's done once the theater is open it will spur
01:18:04all kinds of investment in the neighborhood we think that it's perfect for concerts and private
01:18:11events this is going to be chicago's music slash entertainment district because of the other theaters
01:18:19that are here right down the street you've got the ergon ballroom across the street you've got the riviera
01:18:24theater a couple doors down is the green mill and there are other theaters and other properties in the
01:18:29area that will go back and and become theaters again movie palaces are completely connected to the
01:18:38community you have generations of the same family who will have stories in the rialto this happens all
01:18:44the time i have people tell me oh my grandmother went on her first date here or my parents proposed
01:18:49after going to the rialto so you have all of these memories they're tied very closely to a rialto
01:18:55experience or to a theater experience the community needs the theater just as much as the theater
01:18:59needs the community culturally if we lose these places it takes away a sense of identity when you
01:19:07see a building like a classic movie theater it immediately puts you and gives you a sense of time
01:19:12and place it positions you as part of history it lets you feel the connectivity between all of the
01:19:19people that were there before you if you think about it things that are coming and going
01:19:25trends passing fads that kind of thing the movies are always going to be a destination for people
01:19:30people will always want to see movies in the movie theater there may be other trendy things that pop
01:19:36up that are keeping people from going for a period of time but they always come back to it just
01:19:41like
01:19:41you always go back to a museum you always want to go see the art in the place where the
01:19:46art is best viewed
01:19:48it's more than just caring about it because there's been great personal sacrifice that's come along with
01:19:53trying to keep this theater up it's something that future generations should always get to see
01:19:58fulfilling the statement of the architects not for today but for all time
01:20:18so one year when our daughter jesse was about nine there was a laurel and hardy evening at the los
01:20:25angeles theater she had seen laurel and hardy before so she already liked them but she sat in
01:20:32the theater and heard over 2 000 people rocking with laughter at these films that night i don't
01:20:42think she's ever forgotten it i know i've never forgotten i mean you can go to see a funny movie
01:20:46today you can go to see you know a new melissa mccarthy movie or the hangover or any any kind
01:20:51of modern
01:20:52movie and you can laugh but to be in a theater with over 2 000 people laughing like that is
01:21:00a
01:21:00pretty amazing experience i think the future of movie going is in independent cinemas that's where
01:21:07people are going to be in 10 years because those are the people that are thinking you know that are
01:21:12rooted in their community they're they know the people's names who come through the door so if you're a
01:21:18theater regardless if you're part of the large chain or not make sure that you reflect your community
01:21:25i got involved in the restoration of cinerama films besides the fact nobody else wanted to touch it was
01:21:32the fact that i had done a documentary about the history of cinerama and we had to find out some
01:21:36clever
01:21:37ways to get to show the examples and so when the documentary was over i'm ready to go on with
01:21:42the rest of
01:21:42my life right and and then the need came up for these films were rotting away in vaults and nothing
01:21:48was happening with them so the company that owns the assets then put a certain amount of money into
01:21:53a couple of tests and experiments took that on as sort of a you know crusade i guess and now
01:22:00i've to
01:22:00the point where we've literally restored almost all the centerama movies
01:22:06there's where you get into an interesting thing about historic preservation because a lot of people don't
01:22:10think well they say well it's built in the 50s and 60s it's not old you know or it's not
01:22:14a movie palace
01:22:15so it's not really important or you get a fight like the indian hills cine ramo um which got a
01:22:22landmark status from the city but the landmark status had no teeth and so they tore it down anyway for
01:22:27a
01:22:27parking lot so you have the national and westwood you've got all these theaters that were built in
01:22:33the 1960s the beakman in new york all of whom have been torn down with not nothing of the fanfare
01:22:38that the
01:22:38movie palaces get and so you need to understand all those theaters but if all the theaters are
01:22:43destroyed then how can you go back and look and see what it looked like in the 1950s and 60s
01:22:48and
01:22:48people left the cities and went into small towns and rural areas and suburban areas and began to go
01:22:53to the movie theaters in new places you can't because they're they're torn down so the preservation
01:22:58movement is one that needs to be focused on movie palaces but also needs to think about do we need
01:23:04to save a 1970s theater it's a question i get contacts from people who are traveling here from
01:23:13europe uh and they want to see our movie palaces because it's just an alien it's a foreign thing to
01:23:19them just to see a wait this was a this was a palace built just to watch a movie you
01:23:25know it's
01:23:25i get such great reactions
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