Radio City Music Hall

Vito, I believe they took the pipe for the Golds/Silvers traveller out for our “Snow White” presentation since they needed to hang a tree leaf piece in that position. While I think of the traveller as being “the Golds” I think the control board has the switching marked as the “Silvers” so both colors must have been used at one time or other. The curtain was acoustically transparent, so for the roadshows we did with Entre'act music we didn’t bring the contour in because it acted as a high frequency filter as it came down. The traveller was motor operated from the same panel as the contour, and could travel at four speeds. I had seen “Dr. Zhivago” in 70mm at the Palace in Chicago, and was impressed that after the intermission music as the picture started (with the train carrying Zhivago going through a tunnel) a point of light appeared on the screen and got bigger as the train approached the mouth of the tunnel. The stagehand in Chicago opened the curtain just ahead of the growing spot of light up until the train exited the tunnel and you saw the curtain a moment or so before it cleared the screen. I mentioned that to our house people, and when we ran “Zhivago” the light board and stage manager and control board operator tried the various traveller speeds and timing until they were able to recreate the effect. I think they had some fun doing it, as it wasn’t just the usual open/close cycle the traveller was used for. By the way, there was also a light set in between the contour and the proscenium at the top of the arch which mirrored the footlights below. Apparently it didn’t work all that well since I never saw it used although it was there when I started at the Hall, and I saw it from the catwalk above the proscenium. It also was removed to make way to hang other pieces.

But Vito you are speaking of a time when having a naked screen in front of you was as unseemly as having a completely naked individual on stage in front of you.
We have gone 180 degrees.
(yet ironically people in general are more physically prudish and uncomfortable with themselves than ever.)

BOB I hope you got to see Home From the Hill at the Music Hall. One of the films I most want to see. The Walter Reade was going to show it during a Minnelli festival(or was it Mitchum?) but then they canceled it. Maybe a good print no longer exists.

Gustavelifting—

From the audience’s perspective, the traveler curtain was behind the contour curtain, and at the end of films was synchronized to close as the countour descended.

Here’s a Program from February 1960:

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Our hearts were broken when Kay Kendall died a few weeks before this film opened at RCMH. I shall never forget thinking, as the great contour curtain descended and the traveler curtain closed on the final frame, that we’d never see her again. Then we went to a bar, drank a lot of beer, and argued about whether a young senator from Massachusetts named “Jack” could ever be nominated for president, as so many pundits were predicting he might be. Shortly afterwards, that young senator tossed his diaper into the ring.

Hey RichePipes,

Nice to see you here. Please read what I’ve written about Ray Bohr (all good, of course). Hope that you will be able to share more about the Music Hall with us.

Organ-ized

i just saw a ad for KISS ME KATE
when it opened at raido city
it open in wide screen only
but when it open at the lows metroplitan
in brooklyn it was in 3 dimension and
wide screen

What about the great casting of Capucine? One of the most beautiful women to grace the screen at the Music Hall.

Variety is on line through LexisNexis only back to 1993. Various libraries have it on microfilm or in the original paper editions or in some combination of the two.

Here’s a Program from September, 1960:

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I truly don’t know why I went to see the movie, though the great casting of Genevieve Page, Patricia Morison, Martita Hunt, Lou Jacobi, and Marcel Dalio must have made it worthwhile. I remember joining my cynical college friends in heckling some of the grosser Hollywood lines about nineteenth-century high cultcha. Something tells me that one of us knew someone in the GW University chorus which performed in the stage show. Certainly the photo on the program’s cover could have been of any of us, except that we’d never give up our chinos or turtle necks to wear tuxes or gowns for any reason, not even to appear on RCMH’s great stage if we could.

In addition to the bound volumes of Variety film reviews, the N.Y. Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center should have Variety Magazine complete on microfilm. (Where I live, U.R.I. has it all on microfilm.)

>> Shane has a big Latin American stage show(makes sense) and its kicked off with Gilbert and Sullivan?!!!

I guess all you can say is …That’s showbiz!

I never saw that ad for “North by Northwest” before, it was always the plane in the air running picture.

Here are ads copied from microfilm in 1972, my first year of college. That explains the poor quality – microfilm readers have improved quite a lot since then – but I’m glad I still had them. The first is in two parts, from 1953:

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The next is from 1959:

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