Roxy Theatre

My Mother commented once that the most expensive movie she saw in her younger days was “The Best Years of Our Lives” which was a whopping $4.00 in it’s first release. She said the price was unheard of.

Re: great “low” prices of tickets to movie palaces (and musicals) in the “olden” days

While it is indeed probably true that tickets to the movies and the great movie palaces were great bargains (and great entertainment values!) in years gone by, it should also be remembered that people MADE a lot less money in those days too, and that prices for other things — including other forms of entertainment — were also correspondingly lower in those days too.

In other words, it’s important to account for inflation across the board and not just selectively when comparing prices from one era to another. What is “really” more accurate (to the extent that one can be accurate about such things in the first place — it’s stubbornly tricky) is to compare the RATIO of prices within one era to the RATIO of prices within another era. For example, a more accurate way of making such a comparison would be to say that the price of a ticket to a musical was, say, eight and a half times more than that of a movie in 1960, versus, let’s say, eleven times more than that of a movie in 2004. (Don’t know if this is true, just guessing here.)

If I remember correctly, in the early 1960s (too late for the Roxy, but as far back as my memory of these things go) prices were as follows (wasn’t earning money yet, so don’t know about wages):

15 cents for bus or subway fare to go to the movies; 50 cents for a child’s ticket ($1.00 for an adult’s ticket); 15 cents for a slice of pizza, before or after the movie; about $8.60(?) for top price to a big Broadway musical on Friday or Saturday night — both Wednesday and Saturday matinee prices seemed to be about one-half that (even without “twofers”) though. Don’t remember what the cost of a ticket to the Grand Tier of the Metropolitan Opera was, but I think it was “considerably” more (maybe in the $20 range?) than the top price of a Broadway show.

I say all this because although prices for tickets to Broadway musicals, for instance, are indeed higher than what they were in the past (even accounting for inflation), it is not quite as dramatic as it is often made out to be. (Although the cost of tickets for musicals have probably, indeed, outpaced inflation because of higher labor costs and much more technically elaborate scenery, etc.)

To paraphrase the great line said by Gloria Swanson (as Norma Desmond) — (I think it was something like) “It’s not that pictures got bigger, it’s that the people got smaller” — “It’s not that plays and musicals got expensive, it’s that everything else ("records,” home movies, etc.) got so much cheaper."

P.S. — I’m very surprised that a top priced ticket to “Follies” (whose poster design does indeed seem to consciously evoke that great Life Magazine picture of Gloria Swanson in the ruins of the Roxy — the photo is reproduced on the last page of Ben Hall’s “Best Remaining Seats”), would have cost only $7.50 in the early 1970s. I distinctly remember higher prices than that even in the early 1960s, and a collection of reviews of Broadway musicals (“Opening Night on Broadway,”[?] by Suskin[?]) includes posters of Broadway musicals that show higher prices than that, also earlier than the 1970s.

I attended the World Premiere of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” at RCMH last May. The theater was packed, and I was sitting in the orchestra section, about 20 rows from the stage on the right side. There was a really pronounced echo in the theater, and I was very surprised. At times it was so bad, you couldn’t understand the dialogue. I thought with all those people, the standard acoustical reverb that you normally hear in such an immense theater would have been dissipated.

I am too young to have seen any shows at the Roxy. Were the acoustics similar in that showplace?

From Frank S. Nugent’s 1939 NY Times review of “The Wizard of Oz”, it establishes that it opened at The Capitol:

“By courtesy of the wizards of Hollywood, The Wizard of Oz reached the Capitol’s screen yesterday as a delightful piece of wonder-working which had the youngsters' eyes shining and brought a quietly amused gleam to the wiser ones of the oldsters.”

You must be right. Somebody once told me “The Wizard” played at the Roxy which was strange since they showed mainly 20th Century-Fox Films. Did Shirley Temple ever appear live at the Roxy? I remember one of my cousins said they saw her there.

I meant to say the curved CinemaScope screen of the Roxy in my last comment. The curvature gave more depth and enjoyment. It’s a matter of taste. If you had noisy people sitting in front of you; neither theatre was a pleasure; often there were no empty seats to change to. We recently attended a Broadway show and the people kept talking and ruined the show for us. Why do people spend over $100 just to talk? This is off-topic, so please forgive me!

Both the Roxy and the Radio City Music Hall gave my family pleasure. We can compare them but they both had their own specialties. It’s like comparing London, Paris and New York. All these places are/were special. The RCMH had a better value(stage show and film) while the Roxy was more ornate, had a nicer CinemaScope screen, but until “Rains of Ranchipur”, had no stage show. In my opinion, the Roxy showed better films; I think they even showed “The Wizard of Oz”. I can’t find a comprehensive list of films shown at the Roxy. As spomeone pointed-out RCMH screened more family-oriented films, such as “Mary Poppins”. The RCMH screen seemed to be flat as opposed to the flat screen of the RCMH according to my memory. I love them both and it breaks my heart when I pass the spot where the Roxy used to be.

Regarding the reputations and relative popularity of the Roxy vs. Radio City Music Hall:

I was looking through a 1939 guidebook to NYC, the “WPA Guide to NYC,” and noticed that the entry for the Roxy is less than five lines long and comes at the end of a paragraph that includes info about the Casa Manana nightclub (across the street from the Roxy) and the Brass Rail restaurant (just south? of the Roxy). This listing is similar to the listings for the other Times Sq. movie palaces: the Strand (3 ½ lines); the Rivoli (essentially 5 lines); the Capitol (1 ½ lines); the Continental [Warner Hollywood or Mark Hellinger] (2 ½ lines).

However the the entry for Radio City Music hall takes up almost an entire page! (It’s just two lines short.)

Here’s the entry for the Roxy: “The ROXY, Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street, is the most elaborate of the first-run motion-picture houses in the Broadway district. The huge oval lobby, highly ornate in its decorations, can accommodate three thousand patrons, about half as many as the auditorium itself. The Roxy opened in 1926, representing an investment of fifteen million dollars.”

So it would seem that in 1939, Radio City Music Hall had a much higher profile, and was considered more of a wonder, than the Roxy.

By the way, another poster mentioned something like the Roxy was of one era and the Radio City Music Hall was of another. While I don’t disagree with this — they do seem to be of two different eras — isn’t it fascinating that these two theaters, representing these two “eras,” were built only five and a half years apart! For instance, imagine comparing something that opened on December 27, 2004 with one that opened on March 11, 1999!!!

This says two things to me:

1) They were very tumultuous times! And they were. Just for some quick for instances, in 1927, the year the Roxy opened, I believe NBC and CBS radio networks were also founded. (NYC got its first radio station, WEAF, only in 1922.) And Vitaphone became the rage later on in 1927. Also I think the Paramount and probably many, many more other movie palaces were also built or under construction in 1927.

2) The “old fashioned” architectural style of the Roxy made it seem prematurely “old.”

Originally I was thinking this about the Roxy’s interiors as being less photogenic, but looking at some of the photos of the Roxy on various websites, I think this is also true of its exterior architectural design.

For one thing it’s design does not appear to have aged well, even in a short period of time — city dirt, grime and soot really “show” on its ornate architecture. But dirt, grime and soot actually form a somewhat attractive “patina” on Radio City Music Hall’s (and Rockefeller Center’s) sleek modern walls — or are at least less unattractive in my opinion. (I remember watching them steam clean the walls of Rockefeller Center and at first thinking how wonderful they would look when they were clean. But I was then surprised when my reaction was that it really didn’t make that much of a positive difference (the way it did with ornate St. Patrick’s), and in a way it seemed to me that something was actually lost. Looking back, I think this is because on the large plain walls of Rockefeller Center, the soot forms kind of a marbelizing pattern on the large plain walls — “decorating” them in a way with sweeping modernistic dark columns!)

I also noticed that the Roxy had an ENORMOUS, exposed, and very prominent, lot line wall facing busy Sixth Ave. that was left “undesigned” — it just had some ugly firescapes on it. In contrast Radio City Music Hall facades incorporated its firescapes behind very handsome grilles.

So it’s easy for me to see how people can see the Roxy as being “old fashioned” and of a different “era” even though it was built only five and a half years before RCMH!

Plus one of the “wonders” of the Roxy was the P.T. Barnum-like Roxy himself and his proto-Disney like obsession with “presentation” — one can imagine him rather than Disney as coming up with the idea that employees such as ushers and ticket takers were “characters” rather than just employees. So it seems likely to me that when Roxy and his Roxy “magic” left the Roxy Theater for RCMH, some of the air inevitably left the Roxy balloon and it became more of just a very big, ornate theater.

The Roxy presented stage shows from the day of its opening until 16 Sept ‘53, when “The Robe” premiered and the theater suspended its live shows. In the late '40s (I’m not sure exactly when), the Roxy had added a small ice stage. It lowered the central stage elevator, flooded and froze the cavity, and used it for skating acts accompanying the conventional stage presentation with the toe-dancing Gae Foster Roxyettes. It called its m and f ice-skaters the Roxy Blades and Belles, and put them before the footlights during summertime shows (perhaps to cool off patrons with the power of suggestion).

I recall seeing two such shows in Summer ‘48, one accompanying the Dan Dailey musical, “Give My Regards to Broadway,” the other accompanying Betty Grable’s effort with Ernst Lubitsch, “That Lady in Ermine.” The latter’s Viennese theme extended into the ice show, with the Blades and Belles performing unseasonable waltzes.

In December ‘52, the Roxy closed briefly for alterations, shamefully covering up its proscenium’s glorious Spanish retablo with a new contour curtain, and also adding an all-ice stage illuminated by neon lights embedded in the permafrost (the display was called “Ice Colorama”). At this point, the feet-on-the-ground Roxyettes became twenty-four ice-skating Roxyettes. The theater initiated this format with that year’s Christmas show, headlined by “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

All-ice stage shows (without the neon Colorama) resumed with the Christmas show of ‘55, “The Rains of Ranchipur.” A couple of presentations with negligible 20C-Fox films (“The Lieutenant Wore Skirts” and “Bottom of the Bottle”) intervened before “Carousel” opened on 16 Feb '56, with an ice show (“Gala Paree”) somewhat abbreviated because of the film’s longer-than-usual length.

Las Vegas-style neon: yes, that’s an apt description, on the stage and on the marquee.

I’m a little dizzy reading all this.

Benjamin mentions that Ben Hall’s book was essentially an ode to the Roxy, and in that he is essentially right (it is a standard literary tool to select a subject to be the focus of a book so as to make the narrative more personal and relevant to the reader), but it might surprise him to know that while I will defend the Roxy if necessary, it was and is not my favorite movie palace. It was a themed decor if by that one means that the decor can be realistically identified as of a particular period, as opposed to mere ‘anonymous’ or eclectic ornament to create a modest attempt at decor, such as was characteristic of most opera houses. The Roxy’s decor was basically Spanish Baroque, but it, like virtually all movie palaces, was not pure and depended upon a liberal interpretation of any theme designation. RCMH, in contrast, was a more pure theme, in that it was an Art Deco/Art Moderne interpretation not dependent upon styles of ornament to define it. For this reason and others, it is probably best that one not describe the Music Hall as being a movie palace, even if its erection did realistically mark the end of that era, coincidentally. The Music Hall really falls into a class of its own, not only due to its gargantuan size, but also due to the show policy that it promoted and then succeeded in delivering for longer than many true movie palaces/presentation houses existed! It could be called a “Presentation House” by virtue of its performances with films, but it is really more in the category of a ‘Pagentorium,’ (my own coinage for lack of a better term), a less populated class of specialty structures such as the OLYMPIA in London of 1911, though such structures may be more akin to the Civic Auditorium class than theatres. Note Simon Tidworth’s photo of this on page 198 of his excellent book: “Theatres: An Architectural and Cultural History,” Praeger Publishers, London and New York, 1973. (He makes the sad statement on his page 187: “The interwar years belong to the cinema, an architectural romance in its own right, but one that regretfully cannot be told here.”)

Too much speculation about the Roxy’s ownership and that of the land beneath it would be counterproductive, so I suggest that Benjamin or any other New Yorkers interested in this matter go to the Register of Deeds or such other local office as contains the records of legal land ownership and contracts for constructions, to determine once and for all who owned the land in question and whether or not there was a legal tie between the hotel and theatre owners. This may be tedious research, but history is founded on finding facts such as these. Date of construction of the original hotel should also be there, along with its chain of ownership through the years. Who knows but that Roxy himself may be mentioned among the documents. If any reader is in the Chicago area, the collection of author Ben Hall is maintained at the Theatre Historical Soc. headquarters outside of Chicago (www.HistoricTheatres.org) and one might go to their Archive to see if Mr. Hall had retained any such records.

How wonderful to remember the Roxy and the Radio City Music Hall. I believe the Music Hall always had the stage show in the 50’s and 60’s with the film, so my mother, may she rest in peace, always preferred RCMH, no matter what the film. As a young kid, I didn’t appreciate the live stage show; and I preferred the Roxy. Later on, the Roxy added a live show with the “Roxyettes” ice skaters. I believe it started with “Carousel” in CinemaScope 55. I know there was no live show with “The Robe”. I always thought the Roxy’s screen was wider but the Music Hall’s screen was higher. Both theatres were wondrous when you compare them to the cineplexes of today with small screens, no curtains, no live shows, a zillion commercials, over-priced refreshments. The good ole days!