Challenge issued to those hating how things turned out

We are were we are because …….

1.Theaters (1 SCREEN) Need to much space so the rent and or taxes are to high.
2.Projection unions refused to negotiate with companys in the 80s to reduce overhead on smaller theaters.
3.Heating and ac costs have made the 1 screen theater near impossible to survive.
4.American craftsmanship and care for detail is extinct.
5.The malling of America ..were all should be uniform .has ruined theaters.
6.Inconstant product.

MONEY ,MONEY .MONEY…………..THATS HOW WE ARE WERE WE ARE!

With all due respect longislandmovies, I agree with all your above points, however, maybe on long island the union projectionists would not concede, but here in New Jersey, I know (because it happened where I was working), we kept giving back and giving back, until finally it was almost not worth going to work. And the theatres ended up closing anyway. Over here what killed our downtown palaces was A) shopping malls with theatres, and B) the politicians let all the downtowns go to hell, so no one went anymore. I hate it that all the great places my dad worked in when I was a kid are gone. Only now do people realize this, but as always its to damn late.

TheatreBuff1, I can’t help but be curious as in what way do you see single-screen palaces returning? Can you illustrate a business model where this could be? Especially given that all has continually moved away from single screen, stand alone theatres for over fifty years.

But too, I still believe everything about the industry is business driven. I’ve yet to see anything that says otherwise. A coorelation could be drawn within the recorded music industry and it’s evolution from vinyl to tape to plastic to downloads. What’s even more interesting is the companion live concert business and how it’s evolved and the direction that’s headed, what with the profound changes happening right now and the lack of developing new talent.

But I digressed and will get back to the base, which still tells me all that’s happened is strictly business. Maximizing profits is and will remain the driving force.

I had an idea I posted to a theatre some weeks ago about building from scratch a brand spanking new movie palace. Since building one with the usual material from the roaring 20s would cost so many tens of millions (and the owners' bottom line would not likely be making a profit to cover costs), I propose somewhere in Las Vegas where there is an abundance of money, to build a brand new movie palace using faux but strong material, with fiberglass, etc. Build it like they would’ve done in the past and introduce this to a newer generation of theatergoers.

In response to brucec, the scenario that he describes is pretty much how the beautiful Jefferson Theater, Charlottesville, Va. (1912), limped along and survived to the present. It’s currently undergoing a complete restoration and will re-emerge as a wonderful concert hall. Not only is it’s balcony being reopened from the small twin that was created by enclosing it in 1981, but a smaller balcony above that (which was once segregated seating and has been completely walled in and inaccessible for years) is being opened up as well. And the theater survives to tell its history: both glorious and shameful.

schmadrian The impact of dvd was in the late 90s not 1990?

It’s easy to blame the demise of the single screen theatre and indeed, many social ills on “the powers that be”. Politicians, urban flight, greedy business executives, unruly patrons, etc. have all contributed to the current state of affairs. Volumes could be written about any of these things.

In the end, however, the reason single screen palaces died is because people stopped going. The reason multiplexes work is because people do go. Business reacted to changes in social behavior and lifestyle. Business did not cause these changes. Downtowns were gutted not because of corrupt politicians, but because people stopped supporting the businesses that were rooted there. (And they voted for corrupt politicians.)

The reason why most mainstream movies suck is because that’s what people want to see. That’s where the grosses are and that’s what pays the theatre bills. Better quality movies are everywhere, but people don’t go to see them. Mainstream Hollywood and exhibitors cater to those who buy the greatest number of tickets, and mainstream society continues to get dumber. These movies don’t “insult much of the audiences intelligence level” (apologies to Love movies-hate going), they embrace it! People make their choices for themselves. Hollywood doesn’t make the choices for them.

The notion that the demise of the single screeners and the great theatre experience has been the result of the never-ending quest for the almighty dollar may have some credibility, but in the end, that dollar is given freely by those whose collective bargaining power far outweighs that of the theatre chains, the politicians and even Wal-Mart. To suggest that people have nothing do with the sorry state of affairs is absurd. They have everything to do with it.

To address schmadrian’s challenge as to what could have been done to avoid it, the answer is nothing. People lament the loss of the downtowns and the neighborhood theatres while they drive to the suburban multiplex.

The remaining single screen theatres are perhaps more threatened now than at any point in history. Digital Cinema will not save them because it is cost prohibitive and the business model doesn’t work. Digital cinema will more likely be the death knell for the struggling independents.

Many of the remaining theatres are transitioning into the public sector where they are purchased and operated by 501c3 boards of directors and volunteers who don’t have a vested interest in the “business” and often do not know how to manage the (often public) monies that become available to them. So we have “community” theatres and performance venues that host a variety of events attended largely by the local socialites. Maybe we even get the occasional classic or independent film.

This is certainly better than a shuttered theatre or some insensitive adaptive reuse, but I don’t think it’s what people have in mind when they wax nostalgic about the “good ol' days” of the thriving downtown movie palaces and the neighborhood cinemas.

People have the power to affect change. But do they have the passion?

I am only one person, but for myself, I can only say that I avoid multiplexes whenever possible and prefer to give my time, money and energy to smaller neighborhood theaters that remain on Long Island like Manhasset Cinemas, Great Neck Squire, Hampton Arts Theater, etc. (although, sadly, none of them are single screens). Last week I was forced to see Martin Scorcese’s SHINE A LIGHT at the Loews Rosevelt Raceway multiplex because it was one of the few (if not the only) theater on Long Island that was showing the film. I wanted to see the movie and I didn’t want to travel into NYC to do it, so it was that or nothing. Fortunately, it was the middle of the work day, so I was the only one there! That will probably never happen to me again. Damn!

You know, I’ve been in the Hamptons every summer for the last 30 years, but I’ve never managed to get to a movie at Sag Harbor or the Movie at Montauk. It was always too far to drive and the movie times never seemed to work out with my family’s schedule. Sad.

LIM, perhaps you’ll recall a town battle over the original Sag Harbor Cinema marquee letters that took place back in 2006 (I think). The fight was instigated by the late Roy Scheider’s wife when they were planning to trash the letters in lieu of something new. I think the battle was won, but I don’t remember if the original letters are back on the marquee.

The factors that contributed to Philadelphia, PA’s downtown movie palaces' onetime success were twofold. One, it was when Philadelphia was the region’s major population center, and two, the palaces went hand-in-hand with full employment in Philadelphia at that time combined with everyone working in the field of their choice. And people got turned off by them when those two factors changed. Keep in mind that movie palaces are icing on the cake. And nothing wrong with that. But you take away the cake, and just the icing alone can’t stand up very well. And what is such a huge turnoff about fully-restored movie palaces today is that they’re propped up icing on the cake without the cake.

And in Philadelphia’s case when it met its demise, absolutely it was bad politics responsible. We can say, ultimately it was the people themselves who were to blame because they were the ones who voted for these politicians. But to that I say, not so fast.

Assuming you’re all familiar with Marc Antony’s funeral oratory in Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR, Antony could’ve capitalized on the mistaken way that average Roman citizens saw things following Caesar’s assassination and built upon that misinformed momentum. But instead, he masterfully brought that crowd around to seeing things as they really were. In Philadelphia’s case when it hit an economic snag, the politicians of that time did not do that. Instead, they ruthlessly exploited the crowd’s misperception for all it was worth, both by fully disrupting people being able to work in the fields of their chosen professions combined with developing the Philadelphia suburbs which by rights should’ve been kept as farmland. At a time when it was upon Philadelphia itself to modernize in many respects so that people would want to continue living and working there, this needed transition was blocked by the politicians of that time and blame for how bad things became in Philadelphia when this modernization didn’t happen was diverted elsewhere. The average person has a difficult time being able to grasp this, and the politicians at that time exploited that difficulty on the average person’s part for all it was worth. Interesting to note, and with a bit of irony, I was attending high school in Philadelphia back when all this was happening. And when it came to teaching Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR, we 13 year olds who couldn’t even begin to fathom Shakespeare on our own were told to take the text home, read it in the course of a single night, and answer the questions in back. The corrupt Philadelphia public school system exploiting our academic laziness, which I know now in hindsight but I didn’t know then, we thought that was “great.” For how were we supposed to know any better? But, according to you, Quasimodo, that’s no excuse; your take is that we should stop blaming the politicians; that “It’s easy to blame the politicians when things go wrong when it’s ultimately our fault,” and all that.

Fortunately in the years I was growing up in Philadelphia the poorly run public schools had competition: The movie theaters. The movie theaters had the power to open our eyes and raise our awareness levels to things that would’ve passed over our heads otherwise, calculatingly so in the public schools' case. But look what happened, and this was all purely politics, believe me. The theaters were shut down based on this and that lame and misleading excuse, but the public schools, more corrupt today than ever, they still remain.

And some might treat this as the “final resolve,” that what was done was done, it can’t be undone, and so let’s move on. But you can’t move on with something that’s totally askew from what it’s supposed to be, at least not for much longer. And we are right there at that point now. The sharper among us know that. The in-between exploiters don’t want to hear it. And the everyday people who you’re so quick to lay the biggest blame on, Quasimodo, are totally clueless.

Anytime…

Schmadrian, a question to you, if I may. I find it odd that you insist there is some nefarous “personal connection” in the demise of the picture palaces. Why do you insist that there is? In your most recent writing above, you point out the example of the transistor radio, which, as a business decision, evolved into todays' I-Pod. Did the ‘people’ have anything to do with this progression? I think not, other than to have responded positively to the initial testing or product roll-out.

Picture Palaces did not die as an entertainment delivery system, they evolved. Did single screen theatres die because people no longer wanted to go to see movies? No. The owners closed them after the people were turned to the new 3, 4 and 6 screen theatres, which held a substantial advantage over those single screeners. To be sure, many palaces were cut up into multiple screening rooms, and they survived for a while, until competition built newer and larger edifices. It’s the evolution of the exhibition BUSINESS.

As for the Palaces' themselves, many have been razed to make way for other uses, the land being too valuable to leave vacant. Still others were saved, remaining closed, because there was no market for anything else and the cost of demolition was extreme. Some of these theatres that have been reclaimed, finding new use as performance spaces, do so at peril, particularly when the programming choices are limited. In the end, they’ll succeed if the program choices result in success at the box office. As some like to say, it’s all about butts in seats. Always has been and always will be.

Schmadrian, you should make it clear to everyone that the vantage point you’re writing from, perhaps what you mean by “the bigger picture,” is Toronto, Canada, where you’re currently residing. And it’s still not clear to what degree you’ve ever ventured out of Toronto down into the lower 48, or however Canadians refer to the states that make up the continental U.S.

There’s now a massive megalopolis that exists on North America’s eastern seaboard that did not back when movie palaces were at their height. Some refer to it as the “Bos-Wash” megalopolis (meaning between Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.) but I’ll go one better by calling it the Tor-Key (rhymes with dorkey) megalopolis, in that it now spans from Toronto, Ontario all the way down to Key West, Florida. That is, non-stop urban/suburban/exurban sprawl every step of the way between those two points. And you’re located at the top edge of it.

In the course of movie palaces giving way in the face of this emerging megalopolis, for the most part it was a matter of redistribution of movie-going audiences, a spreading out of that distribution. And with city-based theaters, along with the cities themselves, failing to modernize in the face of this. It seemed like a good idea at the time (from the early 1960s onward), but now in hindsight we know much better. Which is why it’s strange that Schmadrian keeps speaking of the demise of movie palaces and single-screen theaters in terms of “how things turned out,” as if it’s a “final resolve.” For no, the final resolve has not come yet. What we’re seeing now is only temporary. As temporary as the Nazi Third Reich was I would say.

TheaterBuff1: “Schmadrian, you should make it clear to everyone that the vantage point you’re writing from, perhaps what you mean by "the bigger picture,” is Toronto, Canada, where you’re currently residing. And it’s still not clear to what degree you’ve ever ventured out of Toronto down into the lower 48, or however Canadians refer to the states that make up the continental U.S."

Actually, I don’t reside in Toronto.

For the record, I’ve lived in the US. I’ve travelled extensively in the US. I spent the better part of a decade living in the UK, have travelled to Europe and Africa. I have the farthest thing from a parochial worldview you could imagine…which is what your ‘observation’ insinuates. (Frankly, it seems to me that you’re certainly not one to be throwing stones in this particular arena.)

As for your sustained insistence that ‘What we’re seeing now is temporary’… Honestly, I don’t even know where to start. But I think for the sake of propriety, I’ll take whatever comments I do feel good and proper to respond to you with off this thread and email you privately.

One thing I have learned throughout my life, having grown up next to the US (an experience that TheaterBuff1 would have absolutely no concept of), having travelled and lived elsewhere, is that by and large, a country’s citizens are often its worst observers. Certainly its least objective. Given that America has, as part of its social DNA a need to see things from its own myopic, isolationist point-of-view (save in those arenas where its self-interests are paramount), I find your comment again, amusing.

What’s most fascinating for me though, is your insistence to judge things from a wholly different point of view than I do, constantly corralling elements such as over-the-top historical references (the Nazis) or the dramatical (‘Julius Caesar’) into the discussion, while for me, it all comes down to a few basic elements, not complicated at all, nothing worthy of the pseudo-academic slant you seem intent on imposing. Where jingoism gets invoked. Where the awful sights and sounds of partisan/corrupt politics gets tossed into the mix. At its core, the whole ‘What happened to our movie palaces?’ is an elementary riddle with an elementary solution, not one with any catastrophic inferences, nothing that deserves to be recorded as some kind of portent of things to come, and certainly not due any soap-boxing. Political discourse isn’t required, and it’s only a discussion involving social issues insofar as consumerism goes, the simple laws of the free-market system prevailing. The very act of you declaring ‘My argument is that an economy based on pillaging is not sustainable.’ is, to a great extent, a non sequitur of sorts. Why do you find it necessary to try to elevate the discussion to another level, bringing notions into play that -although they clearly are important to you, seem to be something you’ve invested a good deal of anima in- aren’t germane to the core issue at hand?

I admire your tenacity, but question its appropriateness. Especially given that this is a thread that I began, and unless I’ve missed it, you haven’t chosen to accept the challenge and toss into the ring even the most casual of offerings.

Schmadrian, I believe your knowledgeability of Toronto theaters is wanted at the following Cinema Treasures webpage where apparently somebody else who grew up in your neck of the woods doesn’t quite have your dark take on the growing up with theaters in Ontario experience. The CT link is: http://cinematreasures.org/news/18955_0_1_0_C/

Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse…
(Apologies to Bob Dylan, but I just couldn’t resist adding that on!)

TheaterBuff1: Well, if nothing else, you’re a fascinating person. Unfortunately, you also remind me of really ardent, nitrous-fueled born-again Christians who, during the course of a conversation (and calling it that is being extraordinarily generous) cannot seem to detach themselves from their own dogma, their own intractable mindset.

“Beautiful day today, isn’t it? I love this weather!"
"The Lord Jesus Christ is your personal saviour, and He loves you!"
"Uh…right. Do you follow sports? Basketball? Hockey? Baseball?"
"God bless the baby Jesus, he is your only path to salvation, you must do what is necessary to follow Him to Heaven."
"Well, then… Maybe we can disscuss the news."
"Good news, friend! God loves you and wants you in Heaven!”

You’re a highly intelligent person, that much is clear…but the way you seem fixated on the issues that are seemingly important to you, is a mystery to me. So much so that I’m really not inclined to pursue exchanges in this arena any further; my time is way too valuable to be taken up in this way. So I wish you the best with your passions…I hope they provide you with the sustenance you clearly require.

As for the ‘challenge’, it’s now closed. At some point I’ll be throwing up on the ‘…meaninglessly iconoclastic, a contradiction of that very worthwhile goal, perhaps a bit Talibanish, in fact.’ blog, a quick example of the kind of imaginative result I was looking for. Shame that nobody won the contest, and its movie passes. Oh, well; more cinema experiences for me.

Schmadrian, being as where you live is part of the megalopolis I’m highly critical of — in your case Hamilton, Ontario is it? — I feel it’s a bit difficult for you to see the forest because of the trees. And in that same vain I can only say of myself, “Look who’s talking.” For I did some research on Hamilton, which is located in a province I far more affiliate with Neil Young than the apparent reality of what it’s really like, and even reviewed recent photos of it, and my reaction was, “My gosh, this is just Philadelphia the way it is now all over again!” I see the same empty, formulaic attempts at urban renewal being used to whitewash over the same underlying depressing stories that go hand-in-hand with every northeastern rustbelt city now, whether it’s that city, or Detroit, or Baltimore, or Wilmington, or Buffalo or wherever. As in, boy, did our generation blow it big time or what? For look at the timeline for how this whole transition came about. Look at how it corresponds with those in our age group; in brief, what total chumps we were taken for, and with it now upon us to totally undo. Which to me is the only thing that makes sense right now. For we’ve got to undo this monster that was brought about by our own labor, by our own stupidly going along. And the question is how? That was what I was looking to movie theaters for. A means of breaking us out of this trance. For Hamilton is an awful place I’m going to tell you straight out. But I’m also going to tell you straight out that Philadelphia is, too. And all the other parts of this huge nonstop megalopolis we’re all living in together now are as well. We blew it. That much is true. But isn’t the right response to we blew it to unblow it? And in terms of how it is we blew it, I do think the elimination of well-run theaters played a big role in that. For when we allowed those theaters to slip away, what fools we were. What total fools! And isn’t it time to wake up now? Are we going to wait till we’re all in our 90s before we do so?

An update: I’m also a member of the Brattle Theatre now, too.

IMHO, Blu-Ray will have no more an affect than any of the other variants that have come along in the past 25 years. Actually, make that 60 years, as with the advent of television. Way back then, the industry’s come-back was wider and wider screens, better sound and 70mm. Today, it’s digital IMAX, as with AMC signing on to present same in many new markets.

Movies will survive to be first seen in theatres as long as the product itself is worthy of being seen on the “Big Screen.” If nothing more than trite, then it’s best left to the small screen.

For further evidence, watch the box office numbers, during this recession/depression. You just might be amazed.

MPoi, New movies, which are what I was referring to, are indeed a mixed bag. But when seeing some of the older films, many if not most that were ‘manufactured’ during the 30’s strictly to throw light and shadow on the screen, would not be considered ‘classics’ and as such, indeed would be called “trite.” You know, if one’s studied the history of film, those same films would be going “striaht-to-video.”

I got in on the tail end of going to the movies as being an event.I started in 1974 and by the time i finally got with GCC in 1983 the tide had long turned for the worst.Cops working first run shows? This should be the last POST.I SUMMED it all up!