We Miss You Roxy

...He knows nothing about shows or pictures, cares less and completely relies on the idiotic press campaigns smashed together by the major studios...

...Everyone, including the maid if one had one, went to the movies...

...The manager...

...To be sure, movie houses were basically an industry, but one that depended upon heart and imagination for its success...

...a one-hour IRT train ride...

...Quite a few theaters are now run by executors of estates and businessmen whose interests lie completely elsewhere...

...He had to be a man of peculiar taste, prodigious energy and ingenuity, and had to have at his command a dictionary of theater (both technical and esthetic) that was simply fantastic...

...The person responsible for the shows eventually became a national figure...

...Another major difference is the quality of the showman himself...

...The sense of intimacy between the show on stage and the audience, and all the reactions that this implied, is apparently gone forever...

...and a lunch or dinner at Gluckstern's or Lindy's...

...His entire staff handed in their resignations immediately, to go where Roxy would go—Hoboken, Chicago, Los Angeles, what did it matter where...

...When Roxy quit the Roxy Theater, there was a headline story in the New York Times with his picture on top of the page...

...Daniel Talbot runs the New Yorker Theater, an uptown movie palace specializing in revivals, which contains 900 seats from the old Roxy...

...In the '20s and '30s there were a few large chains that grew overnight into empires and controlled practically all American theaters...

...He offered a program that consisted of "classical" symphonic music, a stage spectacle usually based on a Biblical event, an organ recital, a vaudeville show, plus a currently popular Hollywood movie...

...He recently edited Film: An Anthology for Simon and Schuster...

...Here you had everything, staged with fantastic attention to detail and to overpowering the audience...

...Such films as Applause and Love Me Tonight (movies that influenced the basic esthetic vocabulary of European film-making) were part of the program at theaters like the Paramount and the Criterion...

...Often, in fact, he is in the movie business only for the real-estate potential of the property on which his theater is located...

...The principal showman of that era was Samuel L. Ropthael— known to America as Roxy...

...And the new kind of film is seen in a new kind of house: the cold, electronically controlled Art Theater...

...The executive vice president...

...One was a Bronx neighborhood movie on Saturdays, an all-day affair involving front-row seats, yelling, fidgeting, fighting and bombarding friends with paper pellets...

...Today, a personnel agency would surely enter the breach...

...In any case, consider the difference in sheer vitality between the older experience, which would provide days of conversation, as against the drive-in bit, with the baby asleep in a basket on the back seat while husband and wife suffer loneliness in the front...

...I can still remember going to bed at the end of the evening with my brain spinning so hard that I had to rest the entire following day...

...I would trade 40 bars of Erno Rapee's overtures or Jesse Crawford's organ music for 40 driveins...

...When the antitrust action led to the divorce of theaters from their large production owners, houses were picked up by individual entrepreneurs, almost all of them ordinary businessmen who wanted to milk out a buck by reducing overhead and playing cheap exploitation shows...

...From the endless contact with organs, Oriental-Byzantine architecture and decor, dancing girls, tuxedoed ushers and waiters, Viennese waltzes and Park Avenue movie comedy, I had enough cultural ammunition to last me plenty of street-corner nights...

...A freelance booker...

...Gone is the incredible detail, devotion and singular vision that went into the mere construction of one of those old movie palaces...

...The old showman has been replaced by an anonymous businessman whose style, dictated by the urgencies of speech and patchwork, totally lacks beruf and care...

...Drive-in movies, let us quickly add, can be fun for teen-agers, but that has nothing to do with the screen...

...Reading The Best Remaining Seats as I did, in an effusion of nostalgic empathy with the writer, I tried in all fairness to think of at least one showman operating today who was worthy of shining Roxy's spat-covered shoes...

...Indeed, simply because film-making was so profitable at the time and so many features were produced, the sheer force of number insured a good run of films...

...Why not the image of the movie house...

...If you saw Breathless at the Fine Arts, or Rocco and His Brothers at the Beekman, you were involved in neither the escapism nor the queer, kitschy vision of the old Roxy...

...The picture, and only the picture, is now the thing...

...His idea of a show was literally to transport the audience from everyday reality into pure escapism by creating an atmosphere that suggested something out of the Arabian Nights...

...Today the drive-ins are the mass moviegoing experience...

...Many of us these days, given to captiousness of one sort or another, find different things in our daily lives on which to hang the hat of hostility toward a world we seem increasingly to hate...

...the effect was nervous and cerebral...

...I know a fellow now who can install 600 seats in a theater in just about the time it took the artisan to complete part of one frieze out of hundreds of friezes at the Roxy...

...I can imagine, with the deepest awe, the staggering amount of psychic and physical energy that went into their making...

...Such programs were regular continuous-performance presentations and they played all over the country, to all audiences, urban and hick...

...At times this was so formidable a family affair that it included at least three cousins and three aunts and uncles from all over the Bronx and Queens coming along in caravan...

...Hall's book contains the whole story: the exploits of the architects and showmen of these unbelievable theaters, the programs, the staffs and the theater operations, the old philosophy of theater presentation, the chain rivalries, the shennanigans...

...And comparing today's form of theatrical mass entertainment with that of the '20s and '30s, the era of Roxy begins to seem disturbingly like some Incan age of glory...

...Movie-going, in short, is a far different experience in the '60s than it was in the old days...

...There is absolutely no one who corresponds to these heavyweights on the American film-making scene...

...a neatly pressed navy blue suit...

...Now, the height of film-going experience in New York consists mostly of high-flying foreign imports—Bergman, Antonioni, Visconti, Fellini, Resnais, et al...

...Not only couldn't I name such a personality, I couldn't even figure out who is responsible for the shows at the Radio City Music Hall, the Paramount or any of the still existing (though renovated) movie palaces...

...This is an expert, pleasantly nostalgic account of the vanishing "movie cathedral": the Roxy, some of the Loew's theaters in New York, the old Capitol, Rivoli, Rialto and Paramount theaters, and a host of others constructed in the 1920s when the movie business spread throughout the country like wild mushrooms...

...They play the latest Hollywood RKO-Loew's circuit product almost exclusively and, with few exceptions, this is junk...

...These reminiscences are occasioned by reading a fascinating memoir of the "golden age of the movie palace," Ben M. Hall's The Best Remaining Seats (Potter, 266 pp., $15.00...

...This may augur well in terms of Cinema, but it is a long way from the American movie experience of 25 or 30 years ago...

...Decades ago theater-going had to be a lively affair...

...While there was a generous amount of film garbage turned out in the '20s and '30s, too, by current standards the number of excellent movies being produced was huge...

...It meant getting up at 5 A.M...

...The other was a Sunday or holiday visit to either Radio City Music Hall or the Roxy...

...Possibly because, if we follow Siegfried Kracauer's theory of movies and extend it to the whole show that once encapsulated them, we come across the truth he made so elementary: Movies have the power of telling us a lot about the life around us, whether we look for (or like) it or not...

...after a restless night...

...The result was that in all key theaters in the major cities, shows were produced with all the preparation that went into a major Hollywood production...

...You obviously went to be disturbed...

...As long as the theaters were owned by men of heart (who may not have necessarily appreciated the high quality of some of their offerings), there was a chance of seeing a worthwhile movie...

...One goes to the new Art cages in search of a psychic cultural event...

...From that time (roughly the mid'40s) on, the average independent exhibitor in America has been basically a neighborhood shopkeeper running a grocery-store operation...

...Roxy left in a furious outburst, charging that the theater owners were pikers...

...The entertainment then went to movie houses all over the country on a revolving basis...

...A man like Roxy was roughly equivabe lent to a Sam Goldwyn or Cecil B. DeMille...