Roxy Theatre
153 W. 50th Street,
New York,
NY
10020
153 W. 50th Street,
New York,
NY
10020
83 people
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bobb:
Good to see someone cared enough to present Carousel that way after so long. Any plans to expand the project?
Fifty years after its first release the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles screened the world premiere showing of Carousel in CinemaScope 55. The film was presented with its original aspect ratio of 2:55.1 with a fully restored 4-track stereo soundtrack. Although the print had its flaws the stereo sound was amazing and it was wonderful finally seeing Carousel as it was originally filmed. The audience burst into applause during the FOX fanfare announcing a CinemaScope 55 presentation.
HERE’S AN INTERESTING/FUNNY ARTICLE FROM THE APRIL 17 NY TIMES ABOUT THE NY MOVIE GOING…
‘The Aristocrats,’ Coming Soon to a Theater Near You
By DAMIEN CAVE
INUTES after I arrived at an Upper West Side multiplex on the opening weekend of “The Passion of the Christ” last year, a 40-ish man sitting beside me threatened to knock out a gentleman who had cracked into his knees by leaning back in an obviously broken chair. Both of them cried through the film and exchanged dirty looks afterward.
In the past year I’ve witnessed an array of such outbursts at theaters around the city. I’ve watched demanding young couples ask entire rows of people to move so they could sit together and neck. I’ve listened to teenagers talking on cellphones, crazy people talking to themselves, and not-so-crazy people talking to the screen.
As much as this boisterous expression often makes me long for a DVD and a large-screen television, it also makes me proud. At any moment, New Yorkers are likely to form an ad hoc community, booing at lame dialogue or confronting people who try to cut in line. No other city where I’ve watched a film, save perhaps Havana, can match New York for its active audience participation.
But the city’s moviegoing experience may be poised for a change. In the past few years, a trend of so-called first-class moviegoing has begun to spread. Amenities like assigned seats, waiter service and even piano bars are migrating from London and Tokyo to places like Los Angeles and even Louisville.
In New York, where a taste for pampering is part of our urban DNA, first-class cinema would seem a perfect fit. In fact, the market has already been cracked: since 2003, three theaters in the Loew’s 34th Street multiplex have had two rows of assigned, red leather seats that cost about $5 extra, a price that includes access to an usher who delivers concessions.
To a certain extent, the city already tried such an approach decades earlier. In the 1930’s, special seating was common at picture palaces like the Roxy, and for decades ushers made sure people sat where they belonged. During the 70’s, an upscale theater was installed in the basement of the Plaza, with assigned plush green seats available for an extra $1.50. The Ziegfeld tried assigned seating in the 1990’s.
These last two efforts failed. New Yorkers were unwilling to pay extra, or unable to abandon a first-come-first-served mentality. But the climate may be changing. National Amusements, one of the nation’s largest theater chains, plans to equip every new multiplex it builds with some form of premium seating; cities from Toledo to Philadelphia already have such amenities.
Could New York be next, I wondered. And if so, would it be treason for me to try to taste the future?
With Loew’s 34th Street the only option for a test run, I bought two tickets on Fandango.com for the 8:05 p.m. showing of “Hitch” on the night it opened, and felt prepared to be impressed. Maybe it was nostalgia for the picture palaces. Maybe, despite paying $30.98 for two tickets, I liked knowing that my wife and I could arrive late without fear of kinking our necks in the front row, or fighting our way through the eggbeater of legs and grumbles to reach the only remaining empty seats.
When we saw that the movie was sold out, we felt particularly pleased, though we did wonder a bit sheepishly if we would have to kick people out of our seats. An usher was standing at the two “guest express” rows, so that concern disappeared. Then we showed him our tickets.
“H7 and G7,” he said. Then, pointing to my wife, he added: “O.K., you’re in this row, and you’re behind her.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “The seats are not together?”
“No,” the usher replied. “I’m sorry.”
My wife and I complained. We hemmed, we hawed. We asked if we could sit together and then ask the people who came afterward to move. The usher told us to inquire at the guest services desk. It simply offered us a refund. We declined.
Later, I asked another usher if this sort of thing was common.
“Did you buy your seats from Fandango?” she asked.
“That’s the problem,” she said. “They just assign you the best seats available. If you want to pick your seats, you have to come to the box office.”
Worse, we weren’t even allowed to rejoin the general population. And a few minutes after we sat down, a group of three people hammered home the inadequacy of our “premium” choice. The three asked several people to move, and for $5 less per person, they managed to arrive later and sit together in a row only two feet behind me.
Art Levitt, the chief executive of Fandango, said that premium seating was “a pilot program only” and that the company and Loew’s were still working out the kinks.
Perhaps my experience was an anomaly. I asked a couple in front me for their opinion. “We love it,” the woman said, sipping a $4 soda. Turns out they were from Texas.
Actual New Yorkers were far less complimentary. Out of two dozen people I interviewed, most said they wanted nothing to do with perks like assigned seating.
“If I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t do it,” said Carl Goodman, a curator at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. “Once you’re in the theater, there should be no hierarchy.”
Devon McGoldrick, a graduate student at Columbia University who was waiting for “Million Dollar Baby” at Loew’s West 68th Street theater, added: “I think it’s ridiculous. They bring you concessions, right? From a public health perspective, how much lazier can we get?”
BUT a handful disagreed. Several parents said they welcomed the service because it meant they could arrive later and spend less money on baby sitting. Margaret Jones, a manager at Macy’s who was waiting to see “Meet the Fockers” in a nonpremium theater at the Loew’s 34th, added: “I’ve been a New Yorker for 30 years. I’m tired of it. I’d rather have some special attention.”
My own experience made me side with the critics. But I also left the theater strangely encouraged. The beauty of New York audiences is such that no single gimmick seems to radically alter why we go to the movies or what we do once we get there.
The words of Pauline Kael, the New Yorker critic, came to mind. In 1971, she described a Times Square theater in which an audience was enthralled with the film “Billy Jack.” It was a bustling place, she wrote, electric in expectation, and when a character “said there was no place people could get a square deal – not in this country, not in the world – a voice bellowed ‘New York!’ and the theater shook with laughter, and with solidarity.”
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We are culturally still in this same frame of mind. Look at Times Square. Look at what is happening at Astor Place and lower Broadway. Look at the modern buidldings going up in London and Paris. If anything it is getting worse. Its seems that we who speak here are in a derided minority.
“flush with the arrogance of Modernism”
You have no idea how that one statement pretty much says it all.
From talking to my parents and architects and my own humble research, I’ve come to the conclusion that the post WWII years, architecturally speaking, were one in which they threw the baby out with the bathwater. What I mean is that, yes, there were structures that frankly had oulived their usage and should’ve been destroyed. But there was eventually a wholesale destruction, especially during the 1960’s where too many viable structures were simply destroyed for money’s sake.
People thought that the sleek modernism was somehow reflective of a new hope…a new brighter future. This generation was fed this propaganda during the 1939 World’s Fair. They pictured these old structures (including Victorian homes) as gloomy places and out of date. Unfortunately, the lack of maintenance on these places (as one poster for The Roxy states above, it looked “tired” in the late 50’s) only helped to convince people that placed like the Roxy should be gotten rid of. And what was put in place of the Roxy? Has anyone ever seen it? I see it every single day and I still cannot believe what a pedestrian and completely unimaginative building they put in it’s place. Truly pathetic.
As Vincent says, it is sad how many palaces we lost even after Hall’s book came out in 1961, but we must remember that it was not for lack of trying on his part, and that the deals to clear the plots of land for new construction were already underway, publically or privately. Yes, perhaps if the book had come out ten years earlier it might have engendered more support for the great palaces Vincent mentions, but somehow I doubt it. Historic Preservation was only just getting off the ground in the ‘60s and in the 50s our nation was experiencing the brute force vitality of being the only nation to come out of World War II in anywhere near good shape, and with a booming economy flush with the arrogance of Modernism, few would have looked on the 'old’ movie palaces with any sentiment. They were after all, decaying and badly faded after regular maintenance stopped with their divestiture from the film studios which had been paying handsomely to keep them up, and movie palaces are not at all practical: they need LOTS of upkeep! Ben M. Hall was a man ahead of his time, so we must be thankful that his immensely readable and very heavily illustrated book came to us at all.
Unfortunately Hall’s book did little in the short run to end the slaughter. In the few years following its publication we were to lose 3 of the great houses Hall featured; the NY Paramount, the Capitol and the SF Fox. Then years later the Strand and the Rivoli.
Although I have always been fascinated by movie palaces, probably the two publications that piqued my interest were Ben Hall’s ‘Best Remaining Seats’ and David Naylor’s ‘American Movie Palaces’. I have reread them many times (often enough that I recognized immediately that the captions and the cross sectional floor plan of the Roxy on the site must have been ‘borrowed’ from Hall’s book). I had to wait a long time to get my own copy since it was not available locally, even several years ago. While in California I left an order with a book store in Pasadena which specializes in searching for out of print and hard to find publications. Approximately a year later they contacted me that they had a used copy of the first edition available. I’m sure there are many book stores that offer a similar service.
Benjamin does well to give due credit to the BEST REMAINING SEATS… since it is still the Landmark book it was when first published in 1961. The late author, Ben Hall, would have been delighted at the preservation of so many fine movie palaces around the nation and around the globe partially due to his book. Yes, the book is out of print, but if one looks, one can still find the first edition which was issued only in hardbound, and that edition is the only one with the 5 color plates (frontispiece and 4 pages); the captions for which were retained in later editions even though they were gone due to the latter day publishers being too cheap to reprint them.
One need not avoid the two subsequent editions of 1975 and 1987 in softbound since they contain all of the sparkling text of the gifted writer, but also revised captions for some photos for those theatres that had passed away in the intervening years. If you will miss the color plates that much, go to any library having the first edition and COLOR copy the color plates and insert them into the other edition you buy and, Voila!, you have a duplicate of the first edition! Do not miss reading his wonderful way with words which will infect you with his enthusiasm for his subject. If you can’t find it at local book stors, go to www.Amazon.com and type in the title; they often have used copies available.
P.S. — My post was not meant as a criticism of the virginia.edu website, as it does properly credit the photos and, by putting them on the web, it does make the photos of an out-of-print(?) book available for wider discussion on the internet.
Also, the pages I mentioned were from the edition that I have. The virginia.edu website may be referring to pages of a different edition of the book.
From a brief glance, it seems to me that about 80% of the photos (and possibly the info, too) on the virginia.edu websites are but a brief sampling from the wonderful Ben Hall book, the “Best Remaining Seats.”
For example, (and I’m not sure of this, since I don’t have my copy handy), I believe that the “floor plan” (really a “section”) that is shown on the website is a scan of page 82 from the Ben Hall book, and that the rest of the drawing, the missing “floor plan” of the auditorium itself (properly speaking, more of an “elevation”), can be found on page 83. PLUS on page 128, the Hall book has a genuine floorplan of the (first floor) of the Roxy theater. (These were the diagrams discussed in my January 7, 2005 post, above.)
For those of you who live in or around New York City: a few weeks ago I was at the Strand Bookstore (Broadway and 12th St.) and saw that they had about two or three used copies of “Best Remaining Seats” for sale. I didn’t check out the price, but the Strand is famous for its great prices. (They also had a seemingly brand new copy of the “Cinema Treasures” book for ½ price.)
I think anyone interested in movie palaces would really be floored by the Ben Hall book — there is so much unbelievable stuff in it (like reproductions of newspaper ads and pages from opening night commemorative booklets, etc.)
Go back one “level” on the site I gave above and you’ll get quite a very, very nice website on movie palaces. They have an extremely nice photograph of the interior of the Roxy. For the first time, I really get a sense of how MASSIVE that sucker was.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/PALACE/
Check out this nice website:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/PALACE/credit.html
I hope you can see some of this stuff. There’s a particularly fascinating floor plan of the Roxy. They show everything but they down show the full auditorium. Still, it’s fascinating.
It seems like for most of its history the Roxy audience was looking at drapes. When were its magnificent proscenium and decorative boxes covered up never to be seen again?
And here’s a photo of the ‘40’s drapery treatment:
View link
The photo comes from the magazine “Marquee,” vol. 2, no. 3 (1979), p. 16.
My memory is that, instead of using the projection room at the front of the balcony, the Roxy used one at the top rear, perhaps for the very reasons of ghosting that you cite.
I recall rear projection for Disney’s “Peter Pan” in Feb. ‘53, “Call Me Madam” in April '53, and “Bus Stop” in Sept. '56, when I sat in that vast balcony. But I also recollect claims that CinemaScope55 was projected from the front booth for “Carousel” in Feb. '56 and “The King and I” in June '56. I saw the latter there then and I remember an elongated flood of light issuing from the front booth.
The contour arrangement produced an impressive effect, especially when accompanied by traveler curtains behind it. As I strain to recall the pre-‘52 old days, I believe that the great red curttain parted in opera-style fashion, with tewo giant swags. But I might be confusing it with the drapery treatment that framed the stage throughout the forties..
Box Office Bill wrote: “but the angle of projection from the upper balcony was so sharp that the moving fabric were cast deep shadows over the screen."
Bill: The projection room at the Roxy was set in the front of the balcony because Roxy himself thought a "head-on” throw with no angle gave a better picture quality. Could you clarify? Was there another projection booth?
I chatted a while ago with a former New York projection equipment installer who said this “head-on” throw in the Roxy caused shadows. He also said it caused ghosting inside the lens which sometimes affected what was seen on the screen.
Was this contour arrangement better than the original huge curtains? I always thought there was nothing like seeing a big curtain the width of the stage, opening and closing a movie.
I know this is going to stir up an uproar among the Roxy-ites here, and I apologize for that up front, but in the interest of wide-screen historia, which is my field, i feel compelled to ask this question: does anybody have photographs of the Roxy CineMiracle installation in 1958. I know that most Roxy fans hated it, but i really would like to see photos. At least one person on this thread has acknowledged that he saw the presentation. BGW, photos of the Hollywood Chinese also appreciated. Thanks loads, Vince
BoxOfficeBill is to be commended on providing such illuminating information that is all to often lost to history; we are the richer for it. The photo he links to does show the contour curtain I asked him about, since in many theatres such was only mounted as a decorative border since it is much cheaper to rig that way. I should have know that there would be only the best at the preeminent ROXY. Thanks, Bill.
And here’s a photo from Theatre Catalog magazine, 11th ed., 1952-53, p. 212:
View link
The photo was taken between the Roxy’s remodelling in Dec. ‘52 and the advent of CinemaScope in Sept. '53. The screen is shaped in the conventional old 1.33 ratio. You can see the ruber mat on the ice stage beneath it.
And you can see that the Roxy did not use standard screen masking at this time. The picture sheet, framed in the thinnest of black borders, descended in front of softly lit blue curtains, and was advertised as reducing harsh contrasts and being soothing for the eyes. Upon introducing CinemaScope, the Roxy adopted conventional black adjustable masking for the new medium.
Jim Rankin has asked whether the contour curtain at the Roxy from Dec. ‘52 to its closing was fully functional. Well, yes, if by “functional” you mean that it rose and fell with a waterfall effect before and after each segment of the performance.
I remember that it moved at a slow, even rate but, unlike the one at RCMH, did not appear capable of being opened by only some of its cables to create different patterns. It draped in eighteen swags (four more than the fourteen at RCMH), some of unequal width as three narrow ones framed each of the sides and two extra-wide ones dominated the center.
The top valance, which shamefully covered the original Spanish retablo (you could still see some of the latter from the upper balcony), supported the curtain in an undulating design that curved in, then out, then in again, flaring outwards at each side, so that the curtain hit the stage in a wavy line.
I also temember that the curtain, lightly fringed on bottom, did not exactly touch the stage, likely because a puddling ice surface might have soaked any portions that did. As a result, during entre-acts you could see the movement of stagehands' feet behind the scant inch of exposure. The same was true of the black masking at the bottom of the screen: about ten minutes before the end of the film, you could see that stagelights had been turned on and that stagehands' feet were scurrying in preparation for the show.
Contributors to this site have rightly remarked that the Roxy was famous for allowing portions of the screen to remain dark at the beginning and ends of screenings. That’s true. The contour curtain rose and fell majestically, but the angle of projection from the upper balcony was so sharp that the moving fabric were cast deep shadows over the screen. Lavender-lit traveller curtains operated simultaneously behind the contour, but the shadows still remained.
Another problem was glare from the ice stage reflecting upon the screen; to remedy it, a sixty-foot-long rubber mat lay beneath the screen during the feature film. It disappeared before the Fox Movietone News and coming attractions which preceded the stage show. For all that, the projection and sound were flawless, with the latter better to my ears than its echoic equivalent at RCMH.
Your’re right. In the final shot of Sound of Music don’t the Von Trapps escape into… GERMANY?!!!
In the “Aviator” it showed Howard Hughes watching some of the “Jazz Singer” at the Chinese Theatre. You can see that its the same theatre they used for the premiere of “Hells Angels”.
But That’s Hollywood for you.
Your right but that kind of thing really bugs me like in Annie where Camille is playing at the Music Hall. It ruins the movies credibility(in fact I believe even Pauline Kael complained about it in her review of the movie.)
They might have just taken liberty in the show and said the Roxy. Because the Criterion in Times Square was not as well known as the Roxy, Rivoli or the Music Hall.