I once bought a ticket to a Grade Z movie here in the early 1970s just because I was so curious to see the interior. Its glory days were gone, but I sat in there for a couple of years soaking up the atmosphere and never regretted the investment of time and a couple of bucks. We had moviehouses then.
Enjoyed visiting this tiny theater. From the first time I visited there, for the great “Take the Money and Run,” to the last, I think the only dog I ever saw there was the picture with which the theater closed, “The Designated Mourner.” It was also one of the few times I was practically alone in there.
Does anyone recall the name of the drive-in theater that was just outside Augusta? I think it was between Downtown Augusta and Fort Gordon?
Also, what was the name of the drive-in just across the border in South Carolina, please?
And does anyone remember the name of a nice single-screen indoor theater just across the border in South Carolina that was newish in 1965? During the Christmas season in 1965 I saw “Boeing-Boeing” there and then returned for “Thunderball.”
When I spent a weekend in Youngstown as a child in 1952, there were three old theaters clustered within a stone’s throw in Central Square. Two were practically side by side; the third was directly across the street.
I think the Paramount was one of the “twosome” and sat to the left of its street-mate. They were the two nicer theaters, I believe. I saw “Where’s Charley?” (Ray Bolger) in the one to the left (possibly the Paramount). Didn’t get to the other one on the same side of thr street because it had a somewhat mature film, “Don’t Bother to Knock” (Marilyn Monroe).
The theater that sat across the street from the others was shabbier. I saw there a reissue western combo of “Dodge City” and “Virginia City."
Can anyone advise me as to which theater was which, please?
Ken, Any interesting changes in Atlantic City? Is there a functioning moviehouse of any kind within a mile or two of the area where the many Boardwalk and Atlantic Avenue theaters used to be?
That was it, Al. Thank you very much. It was the first time I caught “Beat the Devil,” the 1953 flop that in the 1970s was frequently referred to as a cult favorite but which never truly caught on even at that level.
That was one of the few times I was in the Waverly, if not the only one, although I had occasion to walk past the theater scores of times over the years.
Can anyone recall what classic film played at the Waverly on a double bill with the then-new “Gumshoe” in 1972? It was another gumshoe movie, but a classic – possibly “The Maltese Falcon,” which is my best guess.
Warren, I’ve spent the past month reading thousands of blog postings in Cinema Treasures, and I enjoy your verbal contributions as well as the few graphics I can access.
I’d love to be able to call all of your many PhotoBucket graphics, but unless they’re quite recent, they cannot be accessed. At least, not by me.
I know other people were able to access them shortly after they were posted because I see complimentary thank-you’s posted to you.
Do the PhotoBucket graphics become unavailable after a fixed period of time – maybe 12 or 24 months later?
Have you any alternative way of posting photos so they do not “expire”?
Saw “The Long Good Friday” there. Thought Bob Hoskins was the best gangster find since Cagney and Robinson.
I’d been interested in seeing the interior of the theater. I liked its oldness and its ornate decor, but it was not being maintained well. The experience was a little like being in a 42nd Street grind house but without all the snoring and the stench and the suspect behavior in those theaters.
On my next visit, George A. Romero’s “Creepshow,” which had been filmed in Pittsburgh from a screenplay by Stephen King, was playing there. I was walking by at about 10:40 p.m., en route from a Broadway show to my hotel, when I noticed a guy peering in through the door, as if trying to get someone’s attention inside.
I paused, tempted to explain the obvious – that the last show had begun upwards of an hour earlier and that the manager might have locked the door to prevent anyone from entering while he was checking the day’s receipts.
Just then the guy at the door gave up trying to get in the theater and walked away. It was Stephen King. He probably had wanted to count the house and/or sample a little audience response in the Times Square area.
I seldom went to the National because it was always playing wide-release films that had opened the same day in my hometown, Pittsburgh.
I do remember, though, being about a block away in December 1980 when a rowdy crowd awaiting admission to the first performance of “Stir Crazy” crashed through the plate glass window. Can’t recall if the theater went ahead with the first performances that morning and afternoon.
And I remember waiting on line outside the National one day when hordes of people kept line-jumping. You can’t win that kind of a situation when there’s no supervision. I gave up and left, thinking, “Life is too short.”
I have no complaints about the only three or four viewing experiences I had here, all of them in the early days when Worldwide was first run.
However, I did have one of those annoying bureaucratic experiences.
Because I was in NYC twice a year to review plays and films that eventually would open in my hometown of Pittsburgh, I tried to see a combination of six plays and movies (or a minimum of five) a say. Wednesdays and Saturdays two of them automatically were plays, with the movies before, between and, when possible, after.
To keep expenses down, I’d minimize breakfasts and lunches by getting through most of the day on moviehouse popcorn, large pretzels, etc.
One Monday in 1990 I arrived at Cineplex Odeon Manhattan Twin (as I think it was called then) on East 59th to buy some filling junk food and see both of its then-current features. It was already a minute or so before noon, so I had no time left to dine elsewhere even if I’d wanted to.
The young woman who seemed to be in charge, who wore her indifference like a medal of honor, told those of us waiting at the concession stand that the stand wouldn’t be opening because she hadn’t brought the extra keys. So much for lunch.
The next morning I set out on my Tuesday marathon, which was to begin at Cineplex Odeon’s Worldwide.
I wasn’t even thinking of it being the same circuit, but having just had the experience I had the day before at the Manhattan Twin, I took the precautionary measure of stopping at one of those MOM & Pop delis on Eighth Avenue and purchased a can of Pringles, just as a precaution.
I put it in the deep pocket of my overcoat, bought my ticket and headed to the Worldwide’s concession stand. Damned if a young lady in charge, with attitude to burn, wasn’t telling patrons at the concession stand that it wouldn’t be opening because there was no key.
I couldn’t believe the incompetence or the improbability that that would happen two consecutive days in theaters run by the same company.
It happened that my movie wasn’t to begin for several minutes, and there certainly weren’t many patrons in the whole building, so I strolled in the corridor for a moment, eating one Pringle chip at a time from the can in my overcoat pocket.
The same woman who had announced, without apology or regret, that the concession stand would not be opening, accosted me and told me I had no business bringing in food from the outside and that I would have to leave or get rid of it immediately.
I told her the cirumstances I’ve just mentioned and that it was lucky I has SOMETHING neat and easy to eat since the theater was not selling any of its own snacks that day. She didn’t yield a bit.
The fact that she and her supervisors weren’t satisfying their responsibility to the corporation nor to the patrons apparently hadn’t entered her head.
Just located that blog, Al, thanks to you. Never would have been able to figure that out, and I no longer get to NYC to see for myself. Will read it now.
By the way, his strikes me as another excellent example where it would help if the blog were electronically cross-referenced (maybe that’s impossible or too premature a request) or simply filed under the theater’s best-known identity.
Again, thank you.
This theater seems to have had uncommonly sharp waves of up and down. One of the ups occurred when “Serpico” opened here in December 1973, and lined stretched around the block. It broke some house records there.
On another front, can anyone tell me if there’s a Cinema Treasures blog for the now-defunct Worldwide Cinemas between Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue on, I think, West 49th or West 50th? Have tried all possibly variations on the name and keep coming up empty.
When the Strand became the Cinerama and its piggybacked Penthouse upstairs, it was quite nice. The roadshow “Finian’s Rainbow” was, I think, upstairs and another roadshow, maybe “Ice Station Zebra,” on the ground level. That was late 1968. By the time I saw “Black Caesar” there in 1973, I was disheartened by the fact the theater was deteriorating so quickly. And around the corner, the much smaller Cine Orleans, where I had seen “The Killing of Sister George,” was gone.
The Paris almost certainly is the single-screen art house I’ve visited most often in NYC, partly because it was such a classy high-grossing theater and therefore had access to the choicest bookings.
I had just returned from Vietnam to be discharged from the Army at Fort Dix and headed straight for nine days in NYC in August 1967 for a movie and Broadway binge (I was a whole year behind on movies and had seen only a couple of Broadway shows previously, so I was a kid in a candy store) before embarking on the rest of my life.
The first movie I saw after dropping off my duffle bag in a cheap hotel was “A Man and a Woman,” which I was aware was in its 52nd week at the Paris. Since then I’ve seen several dozen fine movies there including “Howards End,” “Remains of the Day,” “The Browning Version” and “Ladies in Lavender.”
One couldn’t help but notice over the years that the patrons were invariably older and more likely to dress up a little to go to the movies.
The only mildly negative experience I ever had at the Paris was when I attended “Vincent and Theo” and noticed that the balcony was open. (Is it always open?) Anyway, I decided to make that moviegoing experience a bit different by watching Altman’s film from the balcony. To my dismay, I could hardly make out the dialogue at all.
No one else here has indicated having a hearing problem in the Paris' balcony, so the acoustical problem that afternoon may have been a fluke, occurring only in a specific area of the balcony. That can happen, for example, if few orchestra seats are occupied and the sound lines somehow are caught off kilter.
The longtime manager of a bygone Pittsburgh legitimate theater/playhouse called the Nixon once explained there were a couple of acoustical dead spots in the front mezz of his theater. Later I found that was true in other theaters, especially in their balconies.
All that woodwork gave the Plaza a warm, especially distinctive feeling even among Manhattan’s nicest art houses. I remember walking past the Plaza in 1996, when “Grumpier Old Men” was still on the marquee, and noting the theater has closed, and thinking, “Omigod, not the Plaza, too!” And, folks, we keep losing the most cherished moviehouses one by one. And why was such a tony theater playing wide-release commercial films in its final year or so? Is it possible no art-film distributor would book its pictures into such a classy house on an exclusive basis?
Having had several rewarding visits to the Ziegfeld in its early years, including “Sleuth,” I was often dismayed when I vitied NYC in later years to find that it was temporarily closed (“for repairs” or otherwise). Until I read here the long lists of Ziegfeld bookings, decade by decade, and noted the many times the theater was closed for weeks at a stretch – and invariably during my twice-annual visits in early spring and late fall, I had no idea why my timing always seemed to be unlucky. It wasn’t just unlucky timing. I was always facing the probability that the theater would be closed when I happened to be in town. I did luck into a screening of one of the later “Star Wars” films once.
So, it’s like most multiplexes in that respect, Mike. I understand now. When multiplexes were new to Pittsburgh in the 1970s, movies would be advertised as to the specific auditorium they were in (Showcase East #3, etc.). Almost from opening day, though, they started renumbering the auditoriums from day to day so that if you were to see “Silent Movie,” advertised as being in #4, it would be in an auditorium labeled #4 when you arrived, but #4 moved up and down the corridor from largest to smallest. Not too long after, they stopped specifying the numbers altogether. FF may not re-label its auditoriums from day to day – or ever, but management may move the movies around from day to day. I can honestly say that in maybe 20 visits to the current FF, the movies were always where I expected them to be (I knew the three auditoiums well), but that may have been a matter of chance. I always regretted I could not make time to see the revivals. I was in NYC to review theater and all the new film releases I could squeeze in. Just didn’t have the time to catch the classics there.
Thanks for the clarification, YankeeMike. I’m an out-of-towner who subscribes ($25, I think, every so often) to the slick schedules for FF 1 and FF 2 and read every word on the FF 2 schedules, which I are more interesting to me because the movies are usually old favorites. I’m almost positive I’ve noticed that the more popular FF 1 movies sometimes move over to FF 3 for extended engagements, but I’ll concede it happens regularly for FF 2 revivals to move over (“Last Year at Marienbad,” “Contempt,” etc.). Did the recent UA festival really play in full – concurrently – on FF 3 as well as FF 2, or are you referring to the fact that four or five of the more successful UAtitles moved over to FF 3 as single features afterward (“Annie Hall,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Thieves Like Us,” etc.)?
As far as I know, the main means of finding out what’s at FF 3 is to check the log calendar on FF’s web site. I can’t remember ever seeing, or receiving in the postal mail, a printed version of the FF 3 schedule.
Having just completed a first reading of the entire Film Forum blog, I think we’ve reached a concensus or two:
1. We’re all in agreement that the programming surpasses the modest, artless, somewhat uncomfortable auditoriums with their smallish screens.
2. Everyone is grateful that Film Forum 2 survives as a revival house 25 years after home video killed off nearly every rep house in the country.
3. It’s interesting that Film Forum devotes two of its screens (the largest and smallest, I believe, if they’re numbered in sequence of capacity), to obscure new releases from around the world, including a lot of movies that otherwise would have no arthouse/specialty house booking at the tonier theaters (Sunshine, Lincoln Plaza). And yet …
4) Despite the fact Film Forum 1 plays exclusively new arthouse releases and FF 3 tends to pick up moveovers from FF 1 (though sometimes from FF 2), at least 90 percent of the comments on this blog are about reissues/classics and festivals of such.
5) It may not satisfy the nonprofit status of Film Forum to alter its programming balance, but couldn’t there be even greater concentration on oldies than on new pictures? In other words, why not have the Sidney Lumet festival running in FF 2 while the United Artists Festival is in FF 3 and give many of the pictures an extra day or two? We’ll all probably go to our graves wishing Frank Rowley still had a rep house to program.
Thanks, John and Warren. That all adds up for me. As a nonsmoker, I would never have made my way up a full flight of stairs to the balcony to sit among smokers. But a few steps up to enjoy stadium seating back then – definitely.
I was only at the Elgin three or four times, always for revivals in the pre-video era. But I remember it being one of the NYC theaters where I was cold to the bone during at least winter visit. I have to assume it was run on the cheap in those final years.
An Elgin memory: Seeing “The Lady From Shanghai,” for the first time, in the 1970s. It was on a double bill of revivals, I think with “Gilda.”
Was there a balcony? I seem to recall being upstairs.
In any event, I was engrossed in the movie. Suddenly a cat leaped up on the seat beside me, startling the wits out of me. You can imagine what I thought it was at first. But then, that’s almost certainly why a cat was in there roaming freely.
Had an identical experience watching “Fade to Black” some time later in one of the steeply raked upstairs auditoriums at the Mayfair/DeMille, which by then was called the Embassy 2,3,4. – Ed Blank
Back when we had so many one-screen theaters, we had no way of knowing that eventually they’d be all but extinct and that we’d never get in them again. St. Marks Cinema may not have been special, but like all theaters a few years ago, it was one of a kind. Each had a feel all its own. – Ed Blank
I once bought a ticket to a Grade Z movie here in the early 1970s just because I was so curious to see the interior. Its glory days were gone, but I sat in there for a couple of years soaking up the atmosphere and never regretted the investment of time and a couple of bucks. We had moviehouses then.
Enjoyed visiting this tiny theater. From the first time I visited there, for the great “Take the Money and Run,” to the last, I think the only dog I ever saw there was the picture with which the theater closed, “The Designated Mourner.” It was also one of the few times I was practically alone in there.
Does anyone recall the name of the drive-in theater that was just outside Augusta? I think it was between Downtown Augusta and Fort Gordon?
Also, what was the name of the drive-in just across the border in South Carolina, please?
And does anyone remember the name of a nice single-screen indoor theater just across the border in South Carolina that was newish in 1965? During the Christmas season in 1965 I saw “Boeing-Boeing” there and then returned for “Thunderball.”
When I spent a weekend in Youngstown as a child in 1952, there were three old theaters clustered within a stone’s throw in Central Square. Two were practically side by side; the third was directly across the street.
I think the Paramount was one of the “twosome” and sat to the left of its street-mate. They were the two nicer theaters, I believe. I saw “Where’s Charley?” (Ray Bolger) in the one to the left (possibly the Paramount). Didn’t get to the other one on the same side of thr street because it had a somewhat mature film, “Don’t Bother to Knock” (Marilyn Monroe).
The theater that sat across the street from the others was shabbier. I saw there a reissue western combo of “Dodge City” and “Virginia City."
Can anyone advise me as to which theater was which, please?
Ken, Any interesting changes in Atlantic City? Is there a functioning moviehouse of any kind within a mile or two of the area where the many Boardwalk and Atlantic Avenue theaters used to be?
I had not realized that only the Atlantic Avenue theaters stayed open in the off-season.
Interesting that, despite its reduced circumstances, this was the last surviving moviehouse from the good old days.
That was it, Al. Thank you very much. It was the first time I caught “Beat the Devil,” the 1953 flop that in the 1970s was frequently referred to as a cult favorite but which never truly caught on even at that level.
That was one of the few times I was in the Waverly, if not the only one, although I had occasion to walk past the theater scores of times over the years.
Two unrelated questions:
Can anyone recall what classic film played at the Waverly on a double bill with the then-new “Gumshoe” in 1972? It was another gumshoe movie, but a classic – possibly “The Maltese Falcon,” which is my best guess.
Warren, I’ve spent the past month reading thousands of blog postings in Cinema Treasures, and I enjoy your verbal contributions as well as the few graphics I can access.
I’d love to be able to call all of your many PhotoBucket graphics, but unless they’re quite recent, they cannot be accessed. At least, not by me.
I know other people were able to access them shortly after they were posted because I see complimentary thank-you’s posted to you.
Do the PhotoBucket graphics become unavailable after a fixed period of time – maybe 12 or 24 months later?
Have you any alternative way of posting photos so they do not “expire”?
Two recollections of the Embassy from 1982:
Saw “The Long Good Friday” there. Thought Bob Hoskins was the best gangster find since Cagney and Robinson.
I’d been interested in seeing the interior of the theater. I liked its oldness and its ornate decor, but it was not being maintained well. The experience was a little like being in a 42nd Street grind house but without all the snoring and the stench and the suspect behavior in those theaters.
On my next visit, George A. Romero’s “Creepshow,” which had been filmed in Pittsburgh from a screenplay by Stephen King, was playing there. I was walking by at about 10:40 p.m., en route from a Broadway show to my hotel, when I noticed a guy peering in through the door, as if trying to get someone’s attention inside.
I paused, tempted to explain the obvious – that the last show had begun upwards of an hour earlier and that the manager might have locked the door to prevent anyone from entering while he was checking the day’s receipts.
Just then the guy at the door gave up trying to get in the theater and walked away. It was Stephen King. He probably had wanted to count the house and/or sample a little audience response in the Times Square area.
I seldom went to the National because it was always playing wide-release films that had opened the same day in my hometown, Pittsburgh.
I do remember, though, being about a block away in December 1980 when a rowdy crowd awaiting admission to the first performance of “Stir Crazy” crashed through the plate glass window. Can’t recall if the theater went ahead with the first performances that morning and afternoon.
And I remember waiting on line outside the National one day when hordes of people kept line-jumping. You can’t win that kind of a situation when there’s no supervision. I gave up and left, thinking, “Life is too short.”
Thank you, William. I had not realized that search tool was there. I tried it successfully just now. It will save me a lot of time.
I have no complaints about the only three or four viewing experiences I had here, all of them in the early days when Worldwide was first run.
However, I did have one of those annoying bureaucratic experiences.
Because I was in NYC twice a year to review plays and films that eventually would open in my hometown of Pittsburgh, I tried to see a combination of six plays and movies (or a minimum of five) a say. Wednesdays and Saturdays two of them automatically were plays, with the movies before, between and, when possible, after.
To keep expenses down, I’d minimize breakfasts and lunches by getting through most of the day on moviehouse popcorn, large pretzels, etc.
One Monday in 1990 I arrived at Cineplex Odeon Manhattan Twin (as I think it was called then) on East 59th to buy some filling junk food and see both of its then-current features. It was already a minute or so before noon, so I had no time left to dine elsewhere even if I’d wanted to.
The young woman who seemed to be in charge, who wore her indifference like a medal of honor, told those of us waiting at the concession stand that the stand wouldn’t be opening because she hadn’t brought the extra keys. So much for lunch.
The next morning I set out on my Tuesday marathon, which was to begin at Cineplex Odeon’s Worldwide.
I wasn’t even thinking of it being the same circuit, but having just had the experience I had the day before at the Manhattan Twin, I took the precautionary measure of stopping at one of those MOM & Pop delis on Eighth Avenue and purchased a can of Pringles, just as a precaution.
I put it in the deep pocket of my overcoat, bought my ticket and headed to the Worldwide’s concession stand. Damned if a young lady in charge, with attitude to burn, wasn’t telling patrons at the concession stand that it wouldn’t be opening because there was no key.
I couldn’t believe the incompetence or the improbability that that would happen two consecutive days in theaters run by the same company.
It happened that my movie wasn’t to begin for several minutes, and there certainly weren’t many patrons in the whole building, so I strolled in the corridor for a moment, eating one Pringle chip at a time from the can in my overcoat pocket.
The same woman who had announced, without apology or regret, that the concession stand would not be opening, accosted me and told me I had no business bringing in food from the outside and that I would have to leave or get rid of it immediately.
I told her the cirumstances I’ve just mentioned and that it was lucky I has SOMETHING neat and easy to eat since the theater was not selling any of its own snacks that day. She didn’t yield a bit.
The fact that she and her supervisors weren’t satisfying their responsibility to the corporation nor to the patrons apparently hadn’t entered her head.
Just located that blog, Al, thanks to you. Never would have been able to figure that out, and I no longer get to NYC to see for myself. Will read it now.
By the way, his strikes me as another excellent example where it would help if the blog were electronically cross-referenced (maybe that’s impossible or too premature a request) or simply filed under the theater’s best-known identity.
Again, thank you.
This theater seems to have had uncommonly sharp waves of up and down. One of the ups occurred when “Serpico” opened here in December 1973, and lined stretched around the block. It broke some house records there.
On another front, can anyone tell me if there’s a Cinema Treasures blog for the now-defunct Worldwide Cinemas between Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue on, I think, West 49th or West 50th? Have tried all possibly variations on the name and keep coming up empty.
When the Strand became the Cinerama and its piggybacked Penthouse upstairs, it was quite nice. The roadshow “Finian’s Rainbow” was, I think, upstairs and another roadshow, maybe “Ice Station Zebra,” on the ground level. That was late 1968. By the time I saw “Black Caesar” there in 1973, I was disheartened by the fact the theater was deteriorating so quickly. And around the corner, the much smaller Cine Orleans, where I had seen “The Killing of Sister George,” was gone.
The Paris almost certainly is the single-screen art house I’ve visited most often in NYC, partly because it was such a classy high-grossing theater and therefore had access to the choicest bookings.
I had just returned from Vietnam to be discharged from the Army at Fort Dix and headed straight for nine days in NYC in August 1967 for a movie and Broadway binge (I was a whole year behind on movies and had seen only a couple of Broadway shows previously, so I was a kid in a candy store) before embarking on the rest of my life.
The first movie I saw after dropping off my duffle bag in a cheap hotel was “A Man and a Woman,” which I was aware was in its 52nd week at the Paris. Since then I’ve seen several dozen fine movies there including “Howards End,” “Remains of the Day,” “The Browning Version” and “Ladies in Lavender.”
One couldn’t help but notice over the years that the patrons were invariably older and more likely to dress up a little to go to the movies.
The only mildly negative experience I ever had at the Paris was when I attended “Vincent and Theo” and noticed that the balcony was open. (Is it always open?) Anyway, I decided to make that moviegoing experience a bit different by watching Altman’s film from the balcony. To my dismay, I could hardly make out the dialogue at all.
No one else here has indicated having a hearing problem in the Paris' balcony, so the acoustical problem that afternoon may have been a fluke, occurring only in a specific area of the balcony. That can happen, for example, if few orchestra seats are occupied and the sound lines somehow are caught off kilter.
The longtime manager of a bygone Pittsburgh legitimate theater/playhouse called the Nixon once explained there were a couple of acoustical dead spots in the front mezz of his theater. Later I found that was true in other theaters, especially in their balconies.
All that woodwork gave the Plaza a warm, especially distinctive feeling even among Manhattan’s nicest art houses. I remember walking past the Plaza in 1996, when “Grumpier Old Men” was still on the marquee, and noting the theater has closed, and thinking, “Omigod, not the Plaza, too!” And, folks, we keep losing the most cherished moviehouses one by one. And why was such a tony theater playing wide-release commercial films in its final year or so? Is it possible no art-film distributor would book its pictures into such a classy house on an exclusive basis?
Having had several rewarding visits to the Ziegfeld in its early years, including “Sleuth,” I was often dismayed when I vitied NYC in later years to find that it was temporarily closed (“for repairs” or otherwise). Until I read here the long lists of Ziegfeld bookings, decade by decade, and noted the many times the theater was closed for weeks at a stretch – and invariably during my twice-annual visits in early spring and late fall, I had no idea why my timing always seemed to be unlucky. It wasn’t just unlucky timing. I was always facing the probability that the theater would be closed when I happened to be in town. I did luck into a screening of one of the later “Star Wars” films once.
So, it’s like most multiplexes in that respect, Mike. I understand now. When multiplexes were new to Pittsburgh in the 1970s, movies would be advertised as to the specific auditorium they were in (Showcase East #3, etc.). Almost from opening day, though, they started renumbering the auditoriums from day to day so that if you were to see “Silent Movie,” advertised as being in #4, it would be in an auditorium labeled #4 when you arrived, but #4 moved up and down the corridor from largest to smallest. Not too long after, they stopped specifying the numbers altogether. FF may not re-label its auditoriums from day to day – or ever, but management may move the movies around from day to day. I can honestly say that in maybe 20 visits to the current FF, the movies were always where I expected them to be (I knew the three auditoiums well), but that may have been a matter of chance. I always regretted I could not make time to see the revivals. I was in NYC to review theater and all the new film releases I could squeeze in. Just didn’t have the time to catch the classics there.
Thanks for the clarification, YankeeMike. I’m an out-of-towner who subscribes ($25, I think, every so often) to the slick schedules for FF 1 and FF 2 and read every word on the FF 2 schedules, which I are more interesting to me because the movies are usually old favorites. I’m almost positive I’ve noticed that the more popular FF 1 movies sometimes move over to FF 3 for extended engagements, but I’ll concede it happens regularly for FF 2 revivals to move over (“Last Year at Marienbad,” “Contempt,” etc.). Did the recent UA festival really play in full – concurrently – on FF 3 as well as FF 2, or are you referring to the fact that four or five of the more successful UAtitles moved over to FF 3 as single features afterward (“Annie Hall,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Thieves Like Us,” etc.)?
As far as I know, the main means of finding out what’s at FF 3 is to check the log calendar on FF’s web site. I can’t remember ever seeing, or receiving in the postal mail, a printed version of the FF 3 schedule.
Having just completed a first reading of the entire Film Forum blog, I think we’ve reached a concensus or two:
1. We’re all in agreement that the programming surpasses the modest, artless, somewhat uncomfortable auditoriums with their smallish screens.
2. Everyone is grateful that Film Forum 2 survives as a revival house 25 years after home video killed off nearly every rep house in the country.
3. It’s interesting that Film Forum devotes two of its screens (the largest and smallest, I believe, if they’re numbered in sequence of capacity), to obscure new releases from around the world, including a lot of movies that otherwise would have no arthouse/specialty house booking at the tonier theaters (Sunshine, Lincoln Plaza). And yet …
4) Despite the fact Film Forum 1 plays exclusively new arthouse releases and FF 3 tends to pick up moveovers from FF 1 (though sometimes from FF 2), at least 90 percent of the comments on this blog are about reissues/classics and festivals of such.
5) It may not satisfy the nonprofit status of Film Forum to alter its programming balance, but couldn’t there be even greater concentration on oldies than on new pictures? In other words, why not have the Sidney Lumet festival running in FF 2 while the United Artists Festival is in FF 3 and give many of the pictures an extra day or two? We’ll all probably go to our graves wishing Frank Rowley still had a rep house to program.
Thanks, John and Warren. That all adds up for me. As a nonsmoker, I would never have made my way up a full flight of stairs to the balcony to sit among smokers. But a few steps up to enjoy stadium seating back then – definitely.
I was only at the Elgin three or four times, always for revivals in the pre-video era. But I remember it being one of the NYC theaters where I was cold to the bone during at least winter visit. I have to assume it was run on the cheap in those final years.
An Elgin memory: Seeing “The Lady From Shanghai,” for the first time, in the 1970s. It was on a double bill of revivals, I think with “Gilda.”
Was there a balcony? I seem to recall being upstairs.
In any event, I was engrossed in the movie. Suddenly a cat leaped up on the seat beside me, startling the wits out of me. You can imagine what I thought it was at first. But then, that’s almost certainly why a cat was in there roaming freely.
Had an identical experience watching “Fade to Black” some time later in one of the steeply raked upstairs auditoriums at the Mayfair/DeMille, which by then was called the Embassy 2,3,4. – Ed Blank
Back when we had so many one-screen theaters, we had no way of knowing that eventually they’d be all but extinct and that we’d never get in them again. St. Marks Cinema may not have been special, but like all theaters a few years ago, it was one of a kind. Each had a feel all its own. – Ed Blank