I was only at the Music Box once, and your report really captured the vibe of a unique theater run by people who truly love movies and showmanship. Well done.
Meanwhile foodies are also out of luck if they’re looking for snacks at the Loews in Lincoln Center where all of the concession stands have been shut down for health code violations. “It makes me sick knowing I’ve eaten all the food here before,” said local resident Nischala Dubey. Viewers planning to ride the Pineapple Express this weekend may have to look to the nearby Food Emporium in order to nosh during their moviegoing experience.
This comment was posted on another message board, but what exactly dies it mean?
>>Just left the 3pm at AMC of the 42nd showing of “TDK” and naturally, I was chanting like a mantra, “Please no idiots beside or in front of us, please no idiots beside or in front of us.” My mantra worked and JUST as the movie was starting a mother and 2 kids walked in and the the kid to my right’s excitement was so palpable, it was infectious. He was so cute.
As the movie continued, I noticed the kid kept darting his eyes towards me. I always eat a simple tray of sushi, (no, no chopsticks or anything bitches, I just like it because it’s easy to eat) but the kid very stealthily unwrapping his food from his bag and every time I looked he would stop and put it back in his bag and start all over again.
I so wanted to buy the whole family something, but I knew that definitely wasn’t the way to go.
The mother was so together, the kids were well behaved. Broke my heart.
I’ve been a contributor to this thread over the years, but these last weeks here have been so mundane, I dread seeing that number “12” clogging up my mailbox. I had to drop Radio City for the same reason — too many off-topic comments filling up my email.
However, any posts directly related to the Ziegfeld and its programming are always interesting.
I wonder why they kept the mezzanines closed at the premiere of Sex and the City. They could have easily seated all those left standing outside in the rain.
Big article about this theater’s future in today’s NY Daily News (Long Island section.) They’re looking to put in a major supermarket rather than the hodgepodge of stores that are there now. I’ll try to find a link.
Kit Kittridge will be on an exclusive run at the Ziegfeld for 11 days (June 20 to July 1), according to a full-color, full page ad in today’s New York Times.
Here is the text of the Times article about the old Globe facade and entrance: (sorry I couldn’t edit out the photo captions)
An Old Player for the Stage, Soon to Be Heard No More
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: April 5, 2006
Every so often, Times Square, that most public of places, will give up a secret it has harbored for decades.
Skip to next paragraph
Keith Bedford for The New York Times
A piece of the Globe Theater on Broadway near 46th Street is visible above the present scaffolding.
Enlarge This Image
R. M. De Leeuw
The white facade of the theater entrance as it appeared in 1910, when it opened.
Now on view near the corner of 46th Street â€" but not for much longer â€" is a fragment of the Broadway facade of the 96-year-old Globe Theater, which was hidden for a half-century behind jumbo signs far taller than its four stories.
Demolition is under way on the Globe and an adjoining 111-year-old building, 1551 Broadway, the home until recently of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and the Gaiety Male Burlesk theater. They are to be replaced by a two-story store that will have large signs and lights on top. “We look at it as a premier retail opportunity,” said Gerard T. Nocera, the chief operating officer of S. L. Green Realty Corporation.
The theatrical producer Charles B. Dillingham built the Globe in 1910 as an L-shaped structure with entrances both on Broadway and 46th Street. (The auditorium still exists, as does the 46th Street facade, which is a landmark.)
Today, a half-dozen windows and the trace of a cornice are all that remain of the Globe on Broadway. The pediments, garlands, cherubim, comic masks and tragic masks designed by Carrère & Hastings are nowhere to be seen. Yet this is unmistakably the “modest, jewellike front” described in 1910 by The New York Times.
It was at the Globe in 1916 that a young British-born actress named Lynn Fontanne made one of her first American appearances in “The Harp of Life,” giving a performance that The Times called “notably direct, eloquent and moving.” It was at the Globe that Fanny Brice sang “Second Hand Rose” in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921.
And it was at the Globe in 1953, during its cinema phase, that New Yorkers first peered through polarized glasses at a full program of stereoscopic films. Bosley Crowther of The Times was underwhelmed and leery of the 3-D craze, asking readers to imagine Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis appearing to be “so real and close they could reach out and almost touch you!
“One-dimension is quite enough for them!”
The Broadway entrance was severed from the rest of the auditorium four years later when it was reclaimed as a legitimate playhouse. Miss Fontanne returned for the reopening in 1958, appearing with her husband Alfred Lunt in “The Visit.” The theater was renamed the Lunt-Fontanne and the Globe disappeared for the first time. But not the last.
Always loved this theater — as a run-down cinema, as a playhouse, as a lovely, post-playhouse cinema (it was funny to see something like “Beat Street” here, with chandeliers and red velvet trimmings!) and as a rock concert venue. Broke my heart when they tore it down.
Text of Variety article (by Dade Hayes) posted April 2, 2008:
One of the boldest moves in Gotham exhibition this decade is taking shape along a quiet stretch of West 23rd Street.
The Clearview Chelsea West Cinemas, a somewhat unlikely center of gravity for the film biz in recent years, has been acquired by the School of Visual Arts. The school, which signed a 26-year lease to operate the site, is renaming it the Visual Arts Theater and renovating inside and out under the guidance of noted designer Milton Glaser.
Tonight’s premiere of “Cook County” in the Gen Art Film Festival, will mark the end of the 1963 theater’s days as a commercial house. After several months of rehab, a new repertory/special event venue will hope to satiate the screen-starved Manhattan industry.
“It’s great. There’s nowhere to go but up in terms of repertory cinema in New York,” said Kent Jones, a contributing editor at Film Comment and assistant programmer at the Film Society at Lincoln Center. “When I got to town (a generation ago) there were dozens of them.”
SVA’s goals are different from those of IFC, which turned the old Waverly into a largely firstrun site that opened in 2005. But they are also notably more ambitious than those of NYU, which bought the former Art Theater on Eighth Street and turned it into classrooms and smaller screening rooms that seldom offer public shows.
“Some people were disappointed when we didn’t close a deal for the Gramercy Theater, which is now the Blender Theater at Gramercy, because that’s closer to the core of our campus” on the eastern end of 23rd Street, said SVA spokesman Michael Grant. “But in terms of the physical space it seems to me that it works out even better.”
The 20,000-square-foot Visual Arts will maintain two auditoriums that currently seat 350 and 550. They will be upgraded with digital and 3-D projection gear as well as 35mm and even 70mm projectors.
Though it may not have quite the national profile of NYU or Columbia, SVA has spent aggressively in recent years to advertise itself, boosting undergrad enrollment this decade by 25% and the graduate ranks by 45%. Notable film alums include “Zodiac” DP Harris Savides, thesp Jared Leto and animator Bill Plympton.
The new theater gives SVA a presence in a fashionable downtown nabe favored by party planners and film bizzers largely due to logistics.
“I always liked doing red carpets there because there’s not a lot of foot traffic and the two screens are on one level,” said Donna Dickman, VP of publicity for Focus Features, which has preemed star-studded films such as “Evening” and “Broken Flowers” at the site. “In L.A., everyone drives, so there are a lot of feasible places to have big premieres. But here, you need subway access and easy logistics, which that place definitely has.”
Industry screenings will still definitely happen at the Visual Arts. SVA has also been in talks with the major guilds as well as Women in Film, the Cinematheque Francaise, the Museum of the Moving Image and the National Board of Review about partnerships.
For Clearview, a Cablevision subsid since 1998, the loss of the Chelsea West is minimal given the continuation of ops across Eighth Avenue of the Chelsea, a sister multiplex. The two sites had always been booked as a unit, so distribs often didn’t know where on 23rd Street they would be playing until opening day.
The Chelsea West has the 60s aesthetic of Clearview’s flagship Ziegfeld uptown, and indeed began its life as a single-screen house with a balcony and a large capacity.
Grant wasn’t able to speculate about the exact nature of programming, noting only that tie-ins were set with the Museum of the Moving Image. Gene Stavis, an SVA faculty member and onetime American rep for French film biggie Henri Langlois, will be the director of the theater.
International fests and series will definitely be a possibility, with spotlights on Iran, Turkey, Canada, Israel and France already under consideration.
Burger King invariably picks the worst locations in NYC; it’s a wonder they’re still in business here.
There was an Orpheum theater in the new movie “Elegy” which was set in New York but I believe filmed in Vancouver. Is it this one?
I scoured the LIU website and there was nothing new about either the athletic enter or the Paramount. Stayed tuned.
I was there the other day and there were signs around, but no signs of construction. I wonder where the screen will be.
Great post, David.
I was only at the Music Box once, and your report really captured the vibe of a unique theater run by people who truly love movies and showmanship. Well done.
Here’s the pertinent paragraph:
Meanwhile foodies are also out of luck if they’re looking for snacks at the Loews in Lincoln Center where all of the concession stands have been shut down for health code violations. “It makes me sick knowing I’ve eaten all the food here before,” said local resident Nischala Dubey. Viewers planning to ride the Pineapple Express this weekend may have to look to the nearby Food Emporium in order to nosh during their moviegoing experience.
This comment was posted on another message board, but what exactly dies it mean?
>>Just left the 3pm at AMC of the 42nd showing of “TDK” and naturally, I was chanting like a mantra, “Please no idiots beside or in front of us, please no idiots beside or in front of us.” My mantra worked and JUST as the movie was starting a mother and 2 kids walked in and the the kid to my right’s excitement was so palpable, it was infectious. He was so cute.
As the movie continued, I noticed the kid kept darting his eyes towards me. I always eat a simple tray of sushi, (no, no chopsticks or anything bitches, I just like it because it’s easy to eat) but the kid very stealthily unwrapping his food from his bag and every time I looked he would stop and put it back in his bag and start all over again.
I so wanted to buy the whole family something, but I knew that definitely wasn’t the way to go.
The mother was so together, the kids were well behaved. Broke my heart.
.
I thought there was an appealingly earthy rock-and-roll edge to his singing; at least it was all in key.
Thanks, Bill, for your eye-witness account. Always welcome.
I’ve been a contributor to this thread over the years, but these last weeks here have been so mundane, I dread seeing that number “12” clogging up my mailbox. I had to drop Radio City for the same reason — too many off-topic comments filling up my email.
However, any posts directly related to the Ziegfeld and its programming are always interesting.
PierreCity, you’re a nut. (But I mean that in a nice way.)
In other words, never mind.
Emily Litella
The gas station is now gone, too, as this is part of the site for the new Nets arena development.
I wonder why they kept the mezzanines closed at the premiere of Sex and the City. They could have easily seated all those left standing outside in the rain.
Big article about this theater’s future in today’s NY Daily News (Long Island section.) They’re looking to put in a major supermarket rather than the hodgepodge of stores that are there now. I’ll try to find a link.
It doesn’t like to be called a blog.
Kit Kittridge will be on an exclusive run at the Ziegfeld for 11 days (June 20 to July 1), according to a full-color, full page ad in today’s New York Times.
Nice!
Shubert, like the showmen; not Schubert, like the composer.
Here is the text of the Times article about the old Globe facade and entrance: (sorry I couldn’t edit out the photo captions)
An Old Player for the Stage, Soon to Be Heard No More
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: April 5, 2006
Every so often, Times Square, that most public of places, will give up a secret it has harbored for decades.
Skip to next paragraph
Keith Bedford for The New York Times
A piece of the Globe Theater on Broadway near 46th Street is visible above the present scaffolding.
Enlarge This Image
R. M. De Leeuw
The white facade of the theater entrance as it appeared in 1910, when it opened.
Now on view near the corner of 46th Street â€" but not for much longer â€" is a fragment of the Broadway facade of the 96-year-old Globe Theater, which was hidden for a half-century behind jumbo signs far taller than its four stories.
Demolition is under way on the Globe and an adjoining 111-year-old building, 1551 Broadway, the home until recently of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and the Gaiety Male Burlesk theater. They are to be replaced by a two-story store that will have large signs and lights on top. “We look at it as a premier retail opportunity,” said Gerard T. Nocera, the chief operating officer of S. L. Green Realty Corporation.
The theatrical producer Charles B. Dillingham built the Globe in 1910 as an L-shaped structure with entrances both on Broadway and 46th Street. (The auditorium still exists, as does the 46th Street facade, which is a landmark.)
Today, a half-dozen windows and the trace of a cornice are all that remain of the Globe on Broadway. The pediments, garlands, cherubim, comic masks and tragic masks designed by Carrère & Hastings are nowhere to be seen. Yet this is unmistakably the “modest, jewellike front” described in 1910 by The New York Times.
It was at the Globe in 1916 that a young British-born actress named Lynn Fontanne made one of her first American appearances in “The Harp of Life,” giving a performance that The Times called “notably direct, eloquent and moving.” It was at the Globe that Fanny Brice sang “Second Hand Rose” in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921.
And it was at the Globe in 1953, during its cinema phase, that New Yorkers first peered through polarized glasses at a full program of stereoscopic films. Bosley Crowther of The Times was underwhelmed and leery of the 3-D craze, asking readers to imagine Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis appearing to be “so real and close they could reach out and almost touch you!
“One-dimension is quite enough for them!”
The Broadway entrance was severed from the rest of the auditorium four years later when it was reclaimed as a legitimate playhouse. Miss Fontanne returned for the reopening in 1958, appearing with her husband Alfred Lunt in “The Visit.” The theater was renamed the Lunt-Fontanne and the Globe disappeared for the first time. But not the last.
Better desecration than demolition.
Thanks, Warren. That picture of Abbott and Costello pulling the Empire Theatre always puts a smile on my face.
Always loved this theater — as a run-down cinema, as a playhouse, as a lovely, post-playhouse cinema (it was funny to see something like “Beat Street” here, with chandeliers and red velvet trimmings!) and as a rock concert venue. Broke my heart when they tore it down.
Just let me know when! Glad to hear you’re in New York.
Text of Variety article (by Dade Hayes) posted April 2, 2008:
One of the boldest moves in Gotham exhibition this decade is taking shape along a quiet stretch of West 23rd Street.
The Clearview Chelsea West Cinemas, a somewhat unlikely center of gravity for the film biz in recent years, has been acquired by the School of Visual Arts. The school, which signed a 26-year lease to operate the site, is renaming it the Visual Arts Theater and renovating inside and out under the guidance of noted designer Milton Glaser.
Tonight’s premiere of “Cook County” in the Gen Art Film Festival, will mark the end of the 1963 theater’s days as a commercial house. After several months of rehab, a new repertory/special event venue will hope to satiate the screen-starved Manhattan industry.
“It’s great. There’s nowhere to go but up in terms of repertory cinema in New York,” said Kent Jones, a contributing editor at Film Comment and assistant programmer at the Film Society at Lincoln Center. “When I got to town (a generation ago) there were dozens of them.”
SVA’s goals are different from those of IFC, which turned the old Waverly into a largely firstrun site that opened in 2005. But they are also notably more ambitious than those of NYU, which bought the former Art Theater on Eighth Street and turned it into classrooms and smaller screening rooms that seldom offer public shows.
“Some people were disappointed when we didn’t close a deal for the Gramercy Theater, which is now the Blender Theater at Gramercy, because that’s closer to the core of our campus” on the eastern end of 23rd Street, said SVA spokesman Michael Grant. “But in terms of the physical space it seems to me that it works out even better.”
The 20,000-square-foot Visual Arts will maintain two auditoriums that currently seat 350 and 550. They will be upgraded with digital and 3-D projection gear as well as 35mm and even 70mm projectors.
Though it may not have quite the national profile of NYU or Columbia, SVA has spent aggressively in recent years to advertise itself, boosting undergrad enrollment this decade by 25% and the graduate ranks by 45%. Notable film alums include “Zodiac” DP Harris Savides, thesp Jared Leto and animator Bill Plympton.
The new theater gives SVA a presence in a fashionable downtown nabe favored by party planners and film bizzers largely due to logistics.
“I always liked doing red carpets there because there’s not a lot of foot traffic and the two screens are on one level,” said Donna Dickman, VP of publicity for Focus Features, which has preemed star-studded films such as “Evening” and “Broken Flowers” at the site. “In L.A., everyone drives, so there are a lot of feasible places to have big premieres. But here, you need subway access and easy logistics, which that place definitely has.”
Industry screenings will still definitely happen at the Visual Arts. SVA has also been in talks with the major guilds as well as Women in Film, the Cinematheque Francaise, the Museum of the Moving Image and the National Board of Review about partnerships.
For Clearview, a Cablevision subsid since 1998, the loss of the Chelsea West is minimal given the continuation of ops across Eighth Avenue of the Chelsea, a sister multiplex. The two sites had always been booked as a unit, so distribs often didn’t know where on 23rd Street they would be playing until opening day.
The Chelsea West has the 60s aesthetic of Clearview’s flagship Ziegfeld uptown, and indeed began its life as a single-screen house with a balcony and a large capacity.
Grant wasn’t able to speculate about the exact nature of programming, noting only that tie-ins were set with the Museum of the Moving Image. Gene Stavis, an SVA faculty member and onetime American rep for French film biggie Henri Langlois, will be the director of the theater.
International fests and series will definitely be a possibility, with spotlights on Iran, Turkey, Canada, Israel and France already under consideration.
Stoppit.
(And it’d be hard to dispute that a new DVD release tied into the first Broadway revival could have benefited both.)