Vito: The console was run by a #306 projectionist. I attended a screening of “Soldier Blue” with Ben Olevsky when the houses first opened while I was attending an SMPTE conference. Originally, I gather that Walter Reade people told Steve D'Inzillo that they would only need one projectionist since there would be a man at the console, and he said, “you’ll still have two men.” Ben and I went up to the booth after the show, and the man on the console was in the booth helping check in prints for the next day’s screening. We were told that they swapped positions during the day, with one man in the booth for one screening, and down at the console for the next.
That was a Zeiss automation system, with a drum in the booth that held pins for the cues. When I worked there I was looking at it one day while the show was on, and accidentally brushed a microswitch. I looked up and to my chagrin saw the main curtain closing in the middle of the feature. The console was gone, but the wiring to the drum was still active paralleling the wall switches for the curtains and lights.
hank.sykes — As a kid growing up in Streator, IL. I know what it’s like to be a fan of the RCMH in the Midwest. When I first got to see a show there in 1956 as a high school kid, I stood in the 3rd Mezz looking up at the booth ports and wishing I could see the booth. A vice-president at the Hall said when I told him that story, “Well, that ought to teach you to be careful what you wish for!” Glad to hear that RCMH still has a following in my home area.
Funny isn’t it? I never thought I’d say it, but sometimes the “old” ways do produce the best results. A “buzz” from the stage is absolutely unambiguous. No one can say that they didn’t hear a cue on the headset because someone was talking over it, or that there were distractions in the room. We actually got into an argument with a producer of an outside show which featured a lot of film clips about having the Stage Manager cue all of the film rolls with a stage buzz. The promoter couldn’t figure out how that would work better than someone verbally giving the cue. During the rehearsals he actually saw the light.
Having said that, the frontlight crew was amazing when I was there. They could be joking and carrying on various conversations on the headset, but always knew when to be quiet and pay attention. Given the number of lamp operators involved that was no small feat, and if anyone did miss their mark he heard about it right away. VariLites are great, but for sheer responsiveness to the conditions on stage, the professionalism of the Music Hall Frontlight crew was always a joy to watch.
Vito, thanks for the kind words. I’m glad you find my meanderings worthwhile, especially since you are the reason I started posting them in the first place. You had asked if I were “still with us”, and and after looking in the mirror I decided I was!
You asked about the spotlights at Radio City. If I remember correctly we had four lamp operators in both the North and South frontlight booths, plus another operator in Center booth and one or two up in D Cove. The interesting thing was that each operator ran two lamps at one time. The Kliegal carbon arc spots were in pairs and each pair was equipped with left and right hand controls, including the handles to drop the gels in place. I believe that each man kept one spot in flood and one tightened up for spot use, but that may have depeneded on a particular use. The exception was D Cove, where the operator ran one lamp, since those were always used to pick up specific points. (Mind you I wasn’t one of the “elite” Local #1 frontlight crew, so I may not be totally accurate, although the two FR10’s were operated by #306 men, and thus we were under the control of the Head Frontlight Operator, and spent a lot of time on headset with the frontlight crew during the shows.)
The D Cove spots were interesting because of the angle. In D Cove the band car didn’t look as if it were coming out of the pit — it looked as if it were coming right at you since the angle was so steep. Indeed, it was so steep that the yokes for the lamps instead of being set on stands on the floor were hung upside down from a beam in the booth, and supported the lamps from the top rather than the bottom. (In the Center Theatre there was no D Cove, but the similar booth was actually in the chandelier, which must have been pretty toasty given the wattage of the lamps lighting the chandelier itself.)
If you figure four operators in North and South Booth and one in Center, that accounted for 18 lamps plus at least two more in D Cove. (I’m trying to remember if they had reduced the crew in each booth to three men by the time I was there, but there were still more arc lamps used than in any other theatre, and it was because of the ability of each man to run two lamps at the same time.) In addition, before I started there, there were also “towers” in each entrance on stage with operators manning lamps. Costs forced their elimination, but I was fortunate enough to see what may have been the last performances of the “Undersea Ballet” with the original lighting when I was still in high school. That number featured a number of flown ballet members “swimming” across the stage at various heighths, and the lighting from the towers following them was particularly effective. (The ballet also featured Brenograph projections of giant fish swimming along the backdrop projected from Rear Projection.) All of the arc lamps were D.C. which accounted for the large number of generators mentioned in my post above.
The cues in the days before Clear Com headset communications were given by “buzzes” which could come from the stage or the Head Frontlight Operator, and could be heard in the house if one knew what he was hearing. As a high school student who was operating a carbon arc lamp in school productions and had seen a couple used at the stage shows I saw at the Chicago Theatre, I wondered if the Music Hall might have more, but was totally unprepared as I saw my first show there, and turned around to look at the booth and saw a wall of spots extending from 50th to 51st Street, plus Orchestra Conductor spots coming from D Cove! Radio City used arc lamps the way normal theatres used incandescent lamps hung on the front of the balcony. Until the current generation of computer controlled Vari-Lites there was probably no installation anywhere that equalled Radio City’s.
A couple of notes about the information above. I was Head Projectionist at the Hall during the “GWTW” 70mm screenings, and yes there were short intermissions. As Vito notes, we also played the music for the end of Pt. 1 and the start of Pt. 2, which did indeed increase the actual length. As a side note: “GWTW”, “2001” and “Dr. Zhivago” were the first films to play the hall in a roadshow format. We had discussions with the production staff about how to present the material. They wanted to feature the organ in addition to the music supplied with the film, and we discouraged them from doing that during the intermission, since the music at the start of Pt. 2 in each case was designed as “call-in” music to alert the audience that the 2nd half was about to start. It was also necessary to just close the “silvers”, the traveller curtain behind the contour, but not bring the contour in, since it would have muffled the call in music. House lights remained lower during the intermission, and the C cove fixed floods which were used in the stage show were used to light the silvers in a kind of random pattern as curtain warmers.
The intermission we had the most fun with was for Dr. Zhivago. I had seen it at the Palace Theatre in Chicago in 70mm and was impressed with the opening of the curtain for the 2nd half. At the end of the call in music, the screen is black, and then there is a dot of light in the middle. That dot grows to become the end of the tunnel the train carrying Zhivago and his family is going through. It continues to widen until the train comes zooming out into a full screen vista. At the Palace, the stagehand opening the curtain timed it so that it parted just ahead of the apperance of the dot of light and then continued to open just ahead of the tunnel mouth until the last moments when the wide image hit it as the train emerged. We worked with botht the front of house and stage crew to try to emulate the effect at the Hall. The silver traveller was operated by a motor with four selectable speeds, and we spent the first few shows finding the proper speed and timing to get them to open just ahead of the tunnel mouth. We finally did achieve a pretty good simulation of the effect.
The file cabinet referred to above is indeed a treasure trove, although I have some material from it at home, as I was afraid that it would someday just be thrown out by someone who didn’t know or care what was in it. I have the plan of the theatre which shows the auditorium in both a lateral view and from above done to scale. That particular plan enabled us to plan the lensing and screen sizing for all of the various film effects in the stage show as well as for video projector specs for the various concerts and award shows we did. Now it can all be done on computer, but then it was done with a ruler and a calculator.
The cabinet also contains the payroll books for the projection crew going back almost to the start in 1932. They were just plain school notebooks, but contain a wealth of infomation about crew sizes and pay rates not only for the main booth, but also Preveiw A and B and the rear projection booth on stage. We had a request from a projectionist who visited to keep a couple of the books as keepsakes and we gave them to him, but the rest are still there. A number of the daily show reports are in the cabinet as well, detailing not only the logged starting times for each event, but any mishaps that arose during the day. There is also a neat letter from Disney to Ben Olevsky detailing the magnetic track layout for “Mary Poppins” which has the wrong information. (Ben showed it to me the first time I was in the booth which was during the original run of “Mary Poppins”.) It is reassuring to note that the cabinet is still there, and hasn’t been discarded in the name of “progress”, and that there is still someone there who appreciates the material it contains.
On another note: that isn’t a generator room, but rather a rehostat room for the booth and the center spot booths. When I started there, carbon arc lamps were still in use in all positions, and the ballasts for the projection booth and center booth lamps were in that room, which is vented to carry away the heat generated by the ballast resisitance. The generator room itself was one of the most impressive places in the hall. All of the generators for all of the D.C. equipment used both for lighting and projection were in that room in the basement. I can’t remember how many generators were used, but there were probably over 20 of the size used in most movie theatres in those days. The main projection booth generators were huge. There were three of them, and they supplied power for the HyCandescent projection lamps as well as the FR10 spot lamps in the main booth and the Klieg spots and slide projector in the center spot booth. Two were alternated by show — when a new movie started, the generator supplying the projectors was switched. This enabled the other generator to be serviced during the movie, and then put on line for the stage show. At the next show change, they would once again be reversed, so that there was always a time they could be serviced. They still had three full-time generator technicians on duty, who not only took care of the booth generators, but also those for D cove and the two screening rooms. It was probably the largest generator room ever built for a theatre and was truely awesome!
The Ritz screened films for a brief period after 1972. I came to New York in 1974 and at some point probably a few years later, the Ritz once again started screening movies, possibly Kung Fu pictures. I remember going to one just to see the theatre itself. When I went to the balcony I found the projectionist was someone I had worked with in another theatre. He was sitting outside the booth in one of the theatre seats, with the booth door open. It was one of the most sparsely furnished booths I’ve ever seen, without even a chair or stool for the projectionist to sit on. Just two 35mm machines, and perhaps a motorized rewind or just hand rewinds. They may have requested Bill as a projectionist because he was Asian-American, and they might have felt he would be more familar with the material. It was fairly obvious that this wasn’t designed to be a long term operation, and indeed in a few weeks (if that long) the theatre closed as movie venue, which would explain the lack of ads or newspaper mention other than the original story about the theatre’s going back to running movies.
Lost Memory: If you check the “Gigi” listing in IMDb, under “external reviews” the Variety review lists the opening of the film at the Royale Theatre on a roadshow basis. That may be the only film that ever played there, so in may not qualify the theatre as a “cinema”, but at least one major picture played the house.
Ron – thanks. I’m a little obsessive about theatre layouts because figuring out viewing angles for various projection situations was a big part of what I did at Radio City where we were constantly dealing with the demands of touring concerts and television productions. I wish I had the knowledge that I gained there when I worked at the Plumb. All of the big names in vaudeville played the house (and the Majestic up the street), so Cahn’s data base was probably accurate as far as the stage layout. It would be interesting to see documentation of both the original house and the changes made by Publix. Even after the transition, there was still a ledge running the width of the balcony designed to hold lighting instruments. The booth was probably enlarged at that time as well, suspended from building beams over the last row of seats in the balcony with the capacity for two spotlights as well as the film projectors. Unfortunately, preservation of theatre plans wasn’t given much thought, so records are sketchy at best. That’s one of the great things about Cinema Treasures — it allows for a collective memory to keep at least some aspects of these theatre alive.
It occurred to me after some thoughts about the stage dimensions listed above that I had never seen the whole stage depth. Either the picture sheet was flown in, or the CinamaScope screen was anchored to the stage. Thus the stage would seem more shallow. There was an asbestos drop and a traveller in front of the screens so they sat upstage of the proscenium at least a few feet. When Dr. Silkini did his last show there, they tied the traveller against the CinemaScope screen which allowed enough depth for him to do his act in between it and the foots.
In the case of the 27' width, as noted above, the Scope sheet was curved which would have shortened the width of the chord across the screen. In addition, if the screen was upstage a bit, the image might have been 27' at the proscenium and then widened out a bit more before it hit the screen. The edge of the picture would have been slightly trimmed as viewed from the seats toward the front and at the outer edges of the seating area, but that wasn’t unusual in proscenium houses.
The pit would have indeed held just about six musicians.
At any rate, thanks to Ron Salters for coming up with the dimensions which probably remained as listed in the material he cites. Various people who lived in Streator have shared their memories over the years, and most of them mention the Plumb. It’s nice that it won’t be completely forgotten.
I might add that while the CinemaScope screen was slightly curved to the Fox specification, the curvature wasn’t deep enough to fit a 35' screen into a 27' proscenium, so some modification must have taken place.
When it became a Publix theatre and was given a newer look, they may have eliminated boxes along the sides of the auditorium to widen the proscenium. They may also have done so to add the organ pipe chambers. The CinemaScope screen was 35' wide and filled the stage to the proscenium edges. The projection booth was built over the last row of seats in the balcony, and the downward angle was about 23 degrees. This resulted in a significant keystoning of the picture. I can remember being in the house for the first showing of “The Robe” and noting that the edges of the picture actually hit the proscenium edge. That was later corrected when they had a chance to fine tune the projector apertures, but it does indicate that the proscenium had been widened at some point. It also seems to me that the stage was narrower than 33' deep. When I was growing up, the Plumb still had a stage show once in a while, but they consisted of performers from the WLS National Barn Dance or Dr. Silkini. While both shows carried a scenic drop before the CinemaScope screen was put in and couldn’t be flown, the performances could easily fit on a stage with less depth.
In response to the comment by Gerald DeLuca above, I’ve been told that the booth the projectionist is seen in is at the Olympia Theatre a few blocks north of the Midtown. I have the DVD and will have to take a look, but as I recall the projectors are at a downward angle that would be more appropriate for the Olympia which had a steep balcony and the equipment was the brands Loews used in many of their theatres at the time. That film was kind of legendary among projectionists here in New York, and I was always particularly interested because Chuck McCann, who played the projectionist, had been an usher at Radio City as was frequently cited by the staff when I was there.
Re: The saps question above — the theatre did reopen after the fire in 1974, but not as a Walter Reade house. It was a reduced fare theatre (I can’t remember whether it was just a dollar or a little more.) One of the projectionists on the crew at Radio City was also involved with Local #306 and was a little disturbed when I commented to him that when I went there, there were people in the balcony. He said the agreement to operate with a reduced crew was that the house use only the orchestra level seating in order to get the reduced operating costs. It was probably about a year later that the decision was made to turn it into a porno multiplex with strippers working the runway in the orchestra. When the city objected it became a sub-run theatre operated by the Elson family.
The article in the gothamlostandfound column is wrong in one respect. A wall wasn’t put down the center of the balcony — TWO walls were put down the balcony to divide it into two houses on the left and right, with the space between them a pathway for the image from the center projector in the booth to hit the downstairs screen. This made for a limited width picture downstairs where the screen had been the width of the proscenium for 70mm presentation, but as designed it would have been used to only show 1.37 aspect ratio porn films in between the strippers' performances.
The Ultravision Theatres were developed for the Wilby-Kincey (sp?) circuit. Glen Berggren who later was to work for the Schneider Optical company among others was deeply involved in the engineering of the projection system which was unique at the time. In the days when these theatres were developed 35 and 70mm film projection was still largely done with 2,000' reels, since originally carbon arc lamps were stil predominant. This meant a “keystone” in the projected image since two projectors were used and both couldn’t be on the screen center line. Ultravision used an image “multiplexer” with both projectors pointed directly at each other parallel with the screen. They projected the image into mirrors so that both projectors put out just one image that was centered on the screen. In addition, all of the projection elements were carefully matched, from the mirrors in the lamphouses to the lenses, and the gate and traps in the projectors were carefully adjusted. This along with a curved screen that preserved the focus across its surface gave a picture significantly sharper than most of the theatres in those days. The use of xenon lamps further improved the image. (These days of course, the use of platters and just one projector in the booth per screen has eliminated the need for the multiplexer.)
The theatres were equipped for either 4 or 6 track magnetic sound from 35 or 70mm. prints. One of the interesting stories Glen told was that when one of the theatres opened (possibly this one), the first three or four pictures happened to have stereophonic tracks which had become a relative rarity for 35mm by that time. No one in the audiences commented on the superior sound, which must have been a disappointment. However, when the first optical/mono picture played a number of audience members complained to the manager, “What happened to your sound? It used to be so good!”
One of the two ABC/Plitt theatres in Century City in Los Angeles was also equipped for Ultravision as well as the W-K theatres in the South.
They didn’t flash from just before 1974 on, much to the delight of the sound department. The triggering of the three layers of neon created “pops” in the P.A. system that were hard to get rid of. There was much rejoycing when they stopped. There was also the problem of meeting the city code which forbids flashing signs on 6th Avenue. The Hall would have been grandfathered since the neon was designed to flash in 1932 before the ban was instituted, but while the three levels of neon were restored during the restoration, I’ve never seen them flash and I can see the part of the marquee from our office window. They did change some of the neon to yellow which they claim was part of the original design, and restore the blue neon in the coves of the vertical pieces. They also changed a layer on the vertical “Radio City” lettering to blue which makes the overall look of the words slightly different than the words as they appear horizontally, although they claim that that too was part of the original design.
Actually, the row of windows right above the marquee at the 6th Ave./ 50th St. corner were in the publicity office when I was there. Later it beacme kind of storage space and I’m not sure what’s there now. Above that the offices aren’t part of Radio City, but are part of what was the RKO building. In between the corner publicity office and the 1st Mezzanine Men’s Room is an electrical room with a circuit breaker panel and steps leading up to a window that opens out to the marquee, which is different than the other windows in the row. This provides access for maintenance. For the 50th Anniversary picture that appeared in Life Magazine, the Rockettes, Music Hall executives and Peter Allen all lined the marquee for a two page photo, with the rest of the cast and crew under the marquee. Access was from that room. The windows to 51st St. beyond that on the 2nd floor are offices in the office building.
It occurs to me that I made an error in my description of the booth at the Luna yesterday. While it probably is of little interest, for the sake of accuracy: the booth was relocated to the roof, but the ports were in the back wall of the auditorium very close to ceiling level, not cut through the ceiling. The booth was reached by a long steep staircase through a door cut in the back wall of the auditorium, and the structure did extend above the roof line of the theatre itself, looking somewhat like a tar paper shack from the outside.
The booth that WAS put on the roof and did project through the ceiling of the theatre was at the Majestic up the street. The Majestic started out as a legit theatre, and the original projection booth was on the roof of the building next door. A feud developed between the owner of the building and the theatre, and the theatre was told to get its booth off the roof of the building. It was relocated to the top of the theatre, and was reached by going out a door at the back of the balcony, up a ladder to the roof, and then going into the booth by climbing down another ladder inside. The business agent said the operators did have a ladder inside the booth they could lower out the spot port and climb down to the balcony if the weather was too hazardous outside to navigate the external ladder.
According to the B.A., one of the reasons the Majestic was closed was that they couldn’t run CinemaScope pictures because the space between the beams for the projection ports wouldn’t allow the wider stage-filling format. That may explain why the Luna, which had ranked below the Majestic in terms of bookings managed to remain open, and the more prestigious theatre closed (as mentioned above, the Luna did premiere “The Robe” in Kankakee.)
It would be interesting to know if the Balaban & Katz Foundation has been able to save the architectural plans and revisions to theatres such as the Luna. B & K often made changes to keep up with the times. The Orpheum, a Rapp & Rapp B & K house in Galsesburg had anoteher, larger booth added at some point. That booth was removed when the theatre was restored and the original booth put back into service. Probably a slight case of architectural correctness overcoming practicality, since the newer booth would have been more flexible for the current theatrical use. Since B & K had to install motion-picture equipment in older theatres that they acquired, the plans for those theatres and their modifications would open a treasure-trove of information about them today.
The Luna was actually open until the late ‘60’s, operated by L&M Theatres after being taken over from Balaban & Katz. My first full time job as a projectionist was supposed to be at the Luna, as the crew there was to go to L&M’s Meadowview Theatre when it opened in 1967. I had checked out the booth and was all ready to start there when the Business Agent said the Luna crew had looked at the equipment being installed at the Meadowview and decided to stay at the Luna (actually, the Meadowview’s 4 track stereo sound system was taken out of the Luna.)
A couple of years after Meadowview Theatre in the Meadowview Shopping Center opened, L&M took over what had been the Majestic Theatre just across N. Schuyler from the Paramount (and originally another B&K house). The Majestic was closed for several years, but a developer was turning the building into a mini-mall. The stage area was bricked in and turned into stores, and the theatre balcony was removed making it a one floor theatre that copied the shopping center look of the times. The rest of the equipment was removed from the Luna and moved to the Majestic, now renamed the Town Cinema, although xenon lamps and a solid state mono sound system were installed. At that point the Luna was closed and demolished.
L&M and Plitt Theatres (the successor to Paramount Publix Balban & Katz) had an unusual booking arrangement between Kankakee and Joliet. Plitt had opened a shopping center theatre in the Hillcrest Shopping Center in Joliet just a couple of weeks before L&M opened the Meadowview. While Plitt retained the large Paramount Theatre in downtown Kankakee, L&M operated the large downtown Rialto in Joliet. They both had one other theatre in each town (the Luna was the L&M operation in Kankakee.) They would put the top two films available for the month at the top of a list. One month Plitt would get first pick, and the other top film would go to L&M. The next month they would switch who got the first pick. All other films were put into three groups. If Plitt got first choice for the Paramount in Kankakee or Hillcrest in Joliet, then L&M would get first choice of the three remaining groups of pictures. Thus if Plitt got first choice of the top film, and the other automatically going to L&M, then L&M would get first choice of the three groups of remaining pictures. Then Plitt would get second choice, and the third group would go to the remaining theatre — in Kankakee, the Luna until it closed. “The Graduate” was originally included in that third group until it began to get “buzz”, and was moved to the Meadowview for a four week run(pretty long in those days).
This meant the Luna did by and large play films of lesser quality although I remember the B.A. telling me that it was equipped with CinemaScope before the Paramount for the opening of “The Robe”. They did play a bunch of soft core X rated features and motorcycle flicks before it was closed.
The Luna had a balcony suspended by chains, and I was told that originally the booth was located at the back of the balcony, and with audience movement, the picture would bounce up and down on the screen. By the time I was scheduled to work there, the booth had been moved to the roof, and an opening made in the ceiling for the projection beams. One of my favorite stories was that the Luna had a magician for a children’s show, and one of the pigeons didn’t return to the stage. They looked everywhere for it. The next day when the opeator went to start the show he practically had a heart attack when he opened the lamp douser and the heat caused a pigeon to fly out of the lens barrel where it had been comfortably nesting overnight!
Judging from the size and stature of the audience, the screening probably took place in one of the two screening rooms. Preview A was the larger room used by Radio City for screenings for the cast and crew of the stage shows during their dinner breaks. Preview B the smaller of the rooms (used by RKO as their screening room) was the more comfortable of the rooms with comfy Art Deco chair instead of the fixed theatre seating of the big room. The rooms were across the hall from the small rehearsal hall, and Ben Olevsky who was Head Projectionist at the time remembers the Rockefellers hosting parties having catering and bars set up in the rehearsal hall so guests could adjourn for screenings in the Preview rooms.
Years later we screened clips from Ginger Rogers' films for Ginger
Rogers, who was about to star in one of our Summer Spectaculars in
the small room. It felt like a throwback to the ‘30’s to be screening that material for that person in that Art Deco room.
ziggy: Thanks for the Christmas wishes.
The newsreel footage that was lost was of the opening of the “RKO Roxy”. The Chief Operating Officer of the Hall had a business relationship with Technicolor, and recommended I take the footage to them. I walked into the head of the lab’s office with the film in a can, and he pulled the blinds on his office window closed, put out his cigar, and opened the can. He took one look and said, “Get it out of here!” I asked if anything could be done, and he repeated, “Get it out of here!” I picked the can up and put it under my arm to leave, and he said, “No. Put it under the other arm. That way if if blows up on the way back, it’ll only take out a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took the can back to the Hall held out at arm’s length!
Ziggy: Since I’ve been out of the Hall for a decade now, the decision is no longer mine. Actually, they had formed an Archive in 1979, prior to which I tried to deal with the film library.
A lot of the film was from travelogues which Leon clipped scenes from and used in the stage shows. We also had a lot of historical footage of the Rockettes and the opening of the Hall from newsreels and the “March of Time”. While, as I mentioned above, I was able to get much of the RKO newsreel footage to the Museum of Modern Art, some of it was nitrate and lost to age (I was particularly upset to find a reel of the opening of the Center Theatre had started to bubble and couldn’t be saved, since there was very little documentation on the Center.)
Another complication was the rights to the footage. The Sherman Grinberg stock footage library bought out the RKO newsreel library, so we couldn’t use the footage we had without an agreement from them. It became easier to just contract them to supply the footage rather than deal with material we had.
I’m not sure what happened to Leon’s footage, since it was just one case of 16mm four minute reels. It did come back from the L.A. transfer, so presumeably it’s still in the Music Hall Archives. They now have a full time archivist to tend the material, and since it still turns up on specials such as the recent Music Hall history on the MSG channel, I presume it’s being cared for.
paljoey: The only film we had of the stage shows was taken by Leon Leonidoff with his 16mm camera. He wrote to me after he left asking if I could return it, but I didn’t know what he was asking about. After his death I found a case containing the footage buried in with hundreds of reels of 35mm film I always felt badly about not being able to return it to him.
When we were doing the 50th Anniversary Show, a producer on the West Coast asked for footage to incorporate into intersticial montage sequences than ran on a scrim between numbers. I sent Leon’s footage along with our prints of RKO newsreel footage about the theatre to them with the admonition that they reassemble what they used. Unfortunately, the footage all came back in short sections which we never had a chance to reassemble even if we could figure out what went where.
In reality, Leon’s footage (which did include clips from “Bolero” as well as “Rhapsody”) wasn’t very complete. 16mm rolls for non-professional use only lasted about 4 minutes so only the highlights of a number were seen (some photographed from the electric bridges at the sides of the stage).
We did give the nitrate RKO newsreel footage to the Museum of Modern Art, which is how we got the copies we used in our shows. The rest of the materials went to the Music Hall Archive which is now off-site, so we’re not sure how much is still in existence (there was a plan at one point to send it to Bonded in N.J. for proper storage in a film vault.) And yes — one of the most interesting parts of the job when we were there was working with the production people to edit footage for the stage shows and then integrate the projection into the set pieces. I must confess I’m a little envious about the freedom the producers now have with video projection and wall capability to expand the range of effects. Even the Metropolitan Opera is now using digital video to expand the artistic capability of its producers and scenic designers.
I work in a screening faciiltiy which does quite a bit of work for Steven Soderbergh, and we’ve been screening “Che” from early versions to the current roadshow version that is being released in some cities this week. It would indeed be ideal at the McClurg. The first half is in Scope, and the 2nd half after intermission is “Flat” or 1.85 aspect ratio. Both halves are preceeded by an Overture with maps on the screen highlighting locations in the respective half. There is also exit music for both halves. Their office is releasing a cue sheet with the picture that will include pictures taken from our screen showing the relationship of the subtitles to the frame. There are no plans to release the roadshow version on film, and all screenings will be done digitally, but it’s definitely the sort of thing the McClurg large house would have done.
There may have been a little contemporary “lip syncing” in Breen’s performances. A few years ago we were told to clear all nitrate film out of the Music Hall’s archives. At one point I could just kind of sneak it out, but the growth of enviorenmental awareness precluded just throwing it out. Firms were charging a fee to dispose of nitrate stock.
As an alternative, we offered it to the Sherman Grinberg stock footage library, since we had used their services for effects for our stage shows. Among the rolls of film, one which puzzled me was one labled “Breen”. Thinking it was a reference to the Breen of the Motion Picture Code who had ties to Rockefeller Center we took it to Grinberg’s office. The woman who was their main archivist put the footage up on a projector and said, “That’s Bobby Breen singing.” She remembered both his film and live performances in the New York area. Apparently, someone was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to do the number of shows a day required, or wanted a back-up, but it’s quite possible that audiences of the time who thought he was singing were actually hearing a 35mm film recording of his voice mixed with the live orchestra.
It only managed 14 weeks in its initial run at the Opera House in Chicago, but as I recall that was both because the new opera season supplanted it, and because the Opera House patrons were dismayed that their venue was stooping to such crass entertainment as the motion-picture.
Vito: The console was run by a #306 projectionist. I attended a screening of “Soldier Blue” with Ben Olevsky when the houses first opened while I was attending an SMPTE conference. Originally, I gather that Walter Reade people told Steve D'Inzillo that they would only need one projectionist since there would be a man at the console, and he said, “you’ll still have two men.” Ben and I went up to the booth after the show, and the man on the console was in the booth helping check in prints for the next day’s screening. We were told that they swapped positions during the day, with one man in the booth for one screening, and down at the console for the next.
That was a Zeiss automation system, with a drum in the booth that held pins for the cues. When I worked there I was looking at it one day while the show was on, and accidentally brushed a microswitch. I looked up and to my chagrin saw the main curtain closing in the middle of the feature. The console was gone, but the wiring to the drum was still active paralleling the wall switches for the curtains and lights.
hank.sykes — As a kid growing up in Streator, IL. I know what it’s like to be a fan of the RCMH in the Midwest. When I first got to see a show there in 1956 as a high school kid, I stood in the 3rd Mezz looking up at the booth ports and wishing I could see the booth. A vice-president at the Hall said when I told him that story, “Well, that ought to teach you to be careful what you wish for!” Glad to hear that RCMH still has a following in my home area.
Funny isn’t it? I never thought I’d say it, but sometimes the “old” ways do produce the best results. A “buzz” from the stage is absolutely unambiguous. No one can say that they didn’t hear a cue on the headset because someone was talking over it, or that there were distractions in the room. We actually got into an argument with a producer of an outside show which featured a lot of film clips about having the Stage Manager cue all of the film rolls with a stage buzz. The promoter couldn’t figure out how that would work better than someone verbally giving the cue. During the rehearsals he actually saw the light.
Having said that, the frontlight crew was amazing when I was there. They could be joking and carrying on various conversations on the headset, but always knew when to be quiet and pay attention. Given the number of lamp operators involved that was no small feat, and if anyone did miss their mark he heard about it right away. VariLites are great, but for sheer responsiveness to the conditions on stage, the professionalism of the Music Hall Frontlight crew was always a joy to watch.
Vito, thanks for the kind words. I’m glad you find my meanderings worthwhile, especially since you are the reason I started posting them in the first place. You had asked if I were “still with us”, and and after looking in the mirror I decided I was!
You asked about the spotlights at Radio City. If I remember correctly we had four lamp operators in both the North and South frontlight booths, plus another operator in Center booth and one or two up in D Cove. The interesting thing was that each operator ran two lamps at one time. The Kliegal carbon arc spots were in pairs and each pair was equipped with left and right hand controls, including the handles to drop the gels in place. I believe that each man kept one spot in flood and one tightened up for spot use, but that may have depeneded on a particular use. The exception was D Cove, where the operator ran one lamp, since those were always used to pick up specific points. (Mind you I wasn’t one of the “elite” Local #1 frontlight crew, so I may not be totally accurate, although the two FR10’s were operated by #306 men, and thus we were under the control of the Head Frontlight Operator, and spent a lot of time on headset with the frontlight crew during the shows.)
The D Cove spots were interesting because of the angle. In D Cove the band car didn’t look as if it were coming out of the pit — it looked as if it were coming right at you since the angle was so steep. Indeed, it was so steep that the yokes for the lamps instead of being set on stands on the floor were hung upside down from a beam in the booth, and supported the lamps from the top rather than the bottom. (In the Center Theatre there was no D Cove, but the similar booth was actually in the chandelier, which must have been pretty toasty given the wattage of the lamps lighting the chandelier itself.)
If you figure four operators in North and South Booth and one in Center, that accounted for 18 lamps plus at least two more in D Cove. (I’m trying to remember if they had reduced the crew in each booth to three men by the time I was there, but there were still more arc lamps used than in any other theatre, and it was because of the ability of each man to run two lamps at the same time.) In addition, before I started there, there were also “towers” in each entrance on stage with operators manning lamps. Costs forced their elimination, but I was fortunate enough to see what may have been the last performances of the “Undersea Ballet” with the original lighting when I was still in high school. That number featured a number of flown ballet members “swimming” across the stage at various heighths, and the lighting from the towers following them was particularly effective. (The ballet also featured Brenograph projections of giant fish swimming along the backdrop projected from Rear Projection.) All of the arc lamps were D.C. which accounted for the large number of generators mentioned in my post above.
The cues in the days before Clear Com headset communications were given by “buzzes” which could come from the stage or the Head Frontlight Operator, and could be heard in the house if one knew what he was hearing. As a high school student who was operating a carbon arc lamp in school productions and had seen a couple used at the stage shows I saw at the Chicago Theatre, I wondered if the Music Hall might have more, but was totally unprepared as I saw my first show there, and turned around to look at the booth and saw a wall of spots extending from 50th to 51st Street, plus Orchestra Conductor spots coming from D Cove! Radio City used arc lamps the way normal theatres used incandescent lamps hung on the front of the balcony. Until the current generation of computer controlled Vari-Lites there was probably no installation anywhere that equalled Radio City’s.
A couple of notes about the information above. I was Head Projectionist at the Hall during the “GWTW” 70mm screenings, and yes there were short intermissions. As Vito notes, we also played the music for the end of Pt. 1 and the start of Pt. 2, which did indeed increase the actual length. As a side note: “GWTW”, “2001” and “Dr. Zhivago” were the first films to play the hall in a roadshow format. We had discussions with the production staff about how to present the material. They wanted to feature the organ in addition to the music supplied with the film, and we discouraged them from doing that during the intermission, since the music at the start of Pt. 2 in each case was designed as “call-in” music to alert the audience that the 2nd half was about to start. It was also necessary to just close the “silvers”, the traveller curtain behind the contour, but not bring the contour in, since it would have muffled the call in music. House lights remained lower during the intermission, and the C cove fixed floods which were used in the stage show were used to light the silvers in a kind of random pattern as curtain warmers.
The intermission we had the most fun with was for Dr. Zhivago. I had seen it at the Palace Theatre in Chicago in 70mm and was impressed with the opening of the curtain for the 2nd half. At the end of the call in music, the screen is black, and then there is a dot of light in the middle. That dot grows to become the end of the tunnel the train carrying Zhivago and his family is going through. It continues to widen until the train comes zooming out into a full screen vista. At the Palace, the stagehand opening the curtain timed it so that it parted just ahead of the apperance of the dot of light and then continued to open just ahead of the tunnel mouth until the last moments when the wide image hit it as the train emerged. We worked with botht the front of house and stage crew to try to emulate the effect at the Hall. The silver traveller was operated by a motor with four selectable speeds, and we spent the first few shows finding the proper speed and timing to get them to open just ahead of the tunnel mouth. We finally did achieve a pretty good simulation of the effect.
The file cabinet referred to above is indeed a treasure trove, although I have some material from it at home, as I was afraid that it would someday just be thrown out by someone who didn’t know or care what was in it. I have the plan of the theatre which shows the auditorium in both a lateral view and from above done to scale. That particular plan enabled us to plan the lensing and screen sizing for all of the various film effects in the stage show as well as for video projector specs for the various concerts and award shows we did. Now it can all be done on computer, but then it was done with a ruler and a calculator.
The cabinet also contains the payroll books for the projection crew going back almost to the start in 1932. They were just plain school notebooks, but contain a wealth of infomation about crew sizes and pay rates not only for the main booth, but also Preveiw A and B and the rear projection booth on stage. We had a request from a projectionist who visited to keep a couple of the books as keepsakes and we gave them to him, but the rest are still there. A number of the daily show reports are in the cabinet as well, detailing not only the logged starting times for each event, but any mishaps that arose during the day. There is also a neat letter from Disney to Ben Olevsky detailing the magnetic track layout for “Mary Poppins” which has the wrong information. (Ben showed it to me the first time I was in the booth which was during the original run of “Mary Poppins”.) It is reassuring to note that the cabinet is still there, and hasn’t been discarded in the name of “progress”, and that there is still someone there who appreciates the material it contains.
On another note: that isn’t a generator room, but rather a rehostat room for the booth and the center spot booths. When I started there, carbon arc lamps were still in use in all positions, and the ballasts for the projection booth and center booth lamps were in that room, which is vented to carry away the heat generated by the ballast resisitance. The generator room itself was one of the most impressive places in the hall. All of the generators for all of the D.C. equipment used both for lighting and projection were in that room in the basement. I can’t remember how many generators were used, but there were probably over 20 of the size used in most movie theatres in those days. The main projection booth generators were huge. There were three of them, and they supplied power for the HyCandescent projection lamps as well as the FR10 spot lamps in the main booth and the Klieg spots and slide projector in the center spot booth. Two were alternated by show — when a new movie started, the generator supplying the projectors was switched. This enabled the other generator to be serviced during the movie, and then put on line for the stage show. At the next show change, they would once again be reversed, so that there was always a time they could be serviced. They still had three full-time generator technicians on duty, who not only took care of the booth generators, but also those for D cove and the two screening rooms. It was probably the largest generator room ever built for a theatre and was truely awesome!
The Ritz screened films for a brief period after 1972. I came to New York in 1974 and at some point probably a few years later, the Ritz once again started screening movies, possibly Kung Fu pictures. I remember going to one just to see the theatre itself. When I went to the balcony I found the projectionist was someone I had worked with in another theatre. He was sitting outside the booth in one of the theatre seats, with the booth door open. It was one of the most sparsely furnished booths I’ve ever seen, without even a chair or stool for the projectionist to sit on. Just two 35mm machines, and perhaps a motorized rewind or just hand rewinds. They may have requested Bill as a projectionist because he was Asian-American, and they might have felt he would be more familar with the material. It was fairly obvious that this wasn’t designed to be a long term operation, and indeed in a few weeks (if that long) the theatre closed as movie venue, which would explain the lack of ads or newspaper mention other than the original story about the theatre’s going back to running movies.
Lost Memory: If you check the “Gigi” listing in IMDb, under “external reviews” the Variety review lists the opening of the film at the Royale Theatre on a roadshow basis. That may be the only film that ever played there, so in may not qualify the theatre as a “cinema”, but at least one major picture played the house.
Ron – thanks. I’m a little obsessive about theatre layouts because figuring out viewing angles for various projection situations was a big part of what I did at Radio City where we were constantly dealing with the demands of touring concerts and television productions. I wish I had the knowledge that I gained there when I worked at the Plumb. All of the big names in vaudeville played the house (and the Majestic up the street), so Cahn’s data base was probably accurate as far as the stage layout. It would be interesting to see documentation of both the original house and the changes made by Publix. Even after the transition, there was still a ledge running the width of the balcony designed to hold lighting instruments. The booth was probably enlarged at that time as well, suspended from building beams over the last row of seats in the balcony with the capacity for two spotlights as well as the film projectors. Unfortunately, preservation of theatre plans wasn’t given much thought, so records are sketchy at best. That’s one of the great things about Cinema Treasures — it allows for a collective memory to keep at least some aspects of these theatre alive.
It occurred to me after some thoughts about the stage dimensions listed above that I had never seen the whole stage depth. Either the picture sheet was flown in, or the CinamaScope screen was anchored to the stage. Thus the stage would seem more shallow. There was an asbestos drop and a traveller in front of the screens so they sat upstage of the proscenium at least a few feet. When Dr. Silkini did his last show there, they tied the traveller against the CinemaScope screen which allowed enough depth for him to do his act in between it and the foots.
In the case of the 27' width, as noted above, the Scope sheet was curved which would have shortened the width of the chord across the screen. In addition, if the screen was upstage a bit, the image might have been 27' at the proscenium and then widened out a bit more before it hit the screen. The edge of the picture would have been slightly trimmed as viewed from the seats toward the front and at the outer edges of the seating area, but that wasn’t unusual in proscenium houses.
The pit would have indeed held just about six musicians.
At any rate, thanks to Ron Salters for coming up with the dimensions which probably remained as listed in the material he cites. Various people who lived in Streator have shared their memories over the years, and most of them mention the Plumb. It’s nice that it won’t be completely forgotten.
I might add that while the CinemaScope screen was slightly curved to the Fox specification, the curvature wasn’t deep enough to fit a 35' screen into a 27' proscenium, so some modification must have taken place.
When it became a Publix theatre and was given a newer look, they may have eliminated boxes along the sides of the auditorium to widen the proscenium. They may also have done so to add the organ pipe chambers. The CinemaScope screen was 35' wide and filled the stage to the proscenium edges. The projection booth was built over the last row of seats in the balcony, and the downward angle was about 23 degrees. This resulted in a significant keystoning of the picture. I can remember being in the house for the first showing of “The Robe” and noting that the edges of the picture actually hit the proscenium edge. That was later corrected when they had a chance to fine tune the projector apertures, but it does indicate that the proscenium had been widened at some point. It also seems to me that the stage was narrower than 33' deep. When I was growing up, the Plumb still had a stage show once in a while, but they consisted of performers from the WLS National Barn Dance or Dr. Silkini. While both shows carried a scenic drop before the CinemaScope screen was put in and couldn’t be flown, the performances could easily fit on a stage with less depth.
In response to the comment by Gerald DeLuca above, I’ve been told that the booth the projectionist is seen in is at the Olympia Theatre a few blocks north of the Midtown. I have the DVD and will have to take a look, but as I recall the projectors are at a downward angle that would be more appropriate for the Olympia which had a steep balcony and the equipment was the brands Loews used in many of their theatres at the time. That film was kind of legendary among projectionists here in New York, and I was always particularly interested because Chuck McCann, who played the projectionist, had been an usher at Radio City as was frequently cited by the staff when I was there.
Re: The saps question above — the theatre did reopen after the fire in 1974, but not as a Walter Reade house. It was a reduced fare theatre (I can’t remember whether it was just a dollar or a little more.) One of the projectionists on the crew at Radio City was also involved with Local #306 and was a little disturbed when I commented to him that when I went there, there were people in the balcony. He said the agreement to operate with a reduced crew was that the house use only the orchestra level seating in order to get the reduced operating costs. It was probably about a year later that the decision was made to turn it into a porno multiplex with strippers working the runway in the orchestra. When the city objected it became a sub-run theatre operated by the Elson family.
The article in the gothamlostandfound column is wrong in one respect. A wall wasn’t put down the center of the balcony — TWO walls were put down the balcony to divide it into two houses on the left and right, with the space between them a pathway for the image from the center projector in the booth to hit the downstairs screen. This made for a limited width picture downstairs where the screen had been the width of the proscenium for 70mm presentation, but as designed it would have been used to only show 1.37 aspect ratio porn films in between the strippers' performances.
The Ultravision Theatres were developed for the Wilby-Kincey (sp?) circuit. Glen Berggren who later was to work for the Schneider Optical company among others was deeply involved in the engineering of the projection system which was unique at the time. In the days when these theatres were developed 35 and 70mm film projection was still largely done with 2,000' reels, since originally carbon arc lamps were stil predominant. This meant a “keystone” in the projected image since two projectors were used and both couldn’t be on the screen center line. Ultravision used an image “multiplexer” with both projectors pointed directly at each other parallel with the screen. They projected the image into mirrors so that both projectors put out just one image that was centered on the screen. In addition, all of the projection elements were carefully matched, from the mirrors in the lamphouses to the lenses, and the gate and traps in the projectors were carefully adjusted. This along with a curved screen that preserved the focus across its surface gave a picture significantly sharper than most of the theatres in those days. The use of xenon lamps further improved the image. (These days of course, the use of platters and just one projector in the booth per screen has eliminated the need for the multiplexer.)
The theatres were equipped for either 4 or 6 track magnetic sound from 35 or 70mm. prints. One of the interesting stories Glen told was that when one of the theatres opened (possibly this one), the first three or four pictures happened to have stereophonic tracks which had become a relative rarity for 35mm by that time. No one in the audiences commented on the superior sound, which must have been a disappointment. However, when the first optical/mono picture played a number of audience members complained to the manager, “What happened to your sound? It used to be so good!”
One of the two ABC/Plitt theatres in Century City in Los Angeles was also equipped for Ultravision as well as the W-K theatres in the South.
They didn’t flash from just before 1974 on, much to the delight of the sound department. The triggering of the three layers of neon created “pops” in the P.A. system that were hard to get rid of. There was much rejoycing when they stopped. There was also the problem of meeting the city code which forbids flashing signs on 6th Avenue. The Hall would have been grandfathered since the neon was designed to flash in 1932 before the ban was instituted, but while the three levels of neon were restored during the restoration, I’ve never seen them flash and I can see the part of the marquee from our office window. They did change some of the neon to yellow which they claim was part of the original design, and restore the blue neon in the coves of the vertical pieces. They also changed a layer on the vertical “Radio City” lettering to blue which makes the overall look of the words slightly different than the words as they appear horizontally, although they claim that that too was part of the original design.
Actually, the row of windows right above the marquee at the 6th Ave./ 50th St. corner were in the publicity office when I was there. Later it beacme kind of storage space and I’m not sure what’s there now. Above that the offices aren’t part of Radio City, but are part of what was the RKO building. In between the corner publicity office and the 1st Mezzanine Men’s Room is an electrical room with a circuit breaker panel and steps leading up to a window that opens out to the marquee, which is different than the other windows in the row. This provides access for maintenance. For the 50th Anniversary picture that appeared in Life Magazine, the Rockettes, Music Hall executives and Peter Allen all lined the marquee for a two page photo, with the rest of the cast and crew under the marquee. Access was from that room. The windows to 51st St. beyond that on the 2nd floor are offices in the office building.
It occurs to me that I made an error in my description of the booth at the Luna yesterday. While it probably is of little interest, for the sake of accuracy: the booth was relocated to the roof, but the ports were in the back wall of the auditorium very close to ceiling level, not cut through the ceiling. The booth was reached by a long steep staircase through a door cut in the back wall of the auditorium, and the structure did extend above the roof line of the theatre itself, looking somewhat like a tar paper shack from the outside.
The booth that WAS put on the roof and did project through the ceiling of the theatre was at the Majestic up the street. The Majestic started out as a legit theatre, and the original projection booth was on the roof of the building next door. A feud developed between the owner of the building and the theatre, and the theatre was told to get its booth off the roof of the building. It was relocated to the top of the theatre, and was reached by going out a door at the back of the balcony, up a ladder to the roof, and then going into the booth by climbing down another ladder inside. The business agent said the operators did have a ladder inside the booth they could lower out the spot port and climb down to the balcony if the weather was too hazardous outside to navigate the external ladder.
According to the B.A., one of the reasons the Majestic was closed was that they couldn’t run CinemaScope pictures because the space between the beams for the projection ports wouldn’t allow the wider stage-filling format. That may explain why the Luna, which had ranked below the Majestic in terms of bookings managed to remain open, and the more prestigious theatre closed (as mentioned above, the Luna did premiere “The Robe” in Kankakee.)
It would be interesting to know if the Balaban & Katz Foundation has been able to save the architectural plans and revisions to theatres such as the Luna. B & K often made changes to keep up with the times. The Orpheum, a Rapp & Rapp B & K house in Galsesburg had anoteher, larger booth added at some point. That booth was removed when the theatre was restored and the original booth put back into service. Probably a slight case of architectural correctness overcoming practicality, since the newer booth would have been more flexible for the current theatrical use. Since B & K had to install motion-picture equipment in older theatres that they acquired, the plans for those theatres and their modifications would open a treasure-trove of information about them today.
The Luna was actually open until the late ‘60’s, operated by L&M Theatres after being taken over from Balaban & Katz. My first full time job as a projectionist was supposed to be at the Luna, as the crew there was to go to L&M’s Meadowview Theatre when it opened in 1967. I had checked out the booth and was all ready to start there when the Business Agent said the Luna crew had looked at the equipment being installed at the Meadowview and decided to stay at the Luna (actually, the Meadowview’s 4 track stereo sound system was taken out of the Luna.)
A couple of years after Meadowview Theatre in the Meadowview Shopping Center opened, L&M took over what had been the Majestic Theatre just across N. Schuyler from the Paramount (and originally another B&K house). The Majestic was closed for several years, but a developer was turning the building into a mini-mall. The stage area was bricked in and turned into stores, and the theatre balcony was removed making it a one floor theatre that copied the shopping center look of the times. The rest of the equipment was removed from the Luna and moved to the Majestic, now renamed the Town Cinema, although xenon lamps and a solid state mono sound system were installed. At that point the Luna was closed and demolished.
L&M and Plitt Theatres (the successor to Paramount Publix Balban & Katz) had an unusual booking arrangement between Kankakee and Joliet. Plitt had opened a shopping center theatre in the Hillcrest Shopping Center in Joliet just a couple of weeks before L&M opened the Meadowview. While Plitt retained the large Paramount Theatre in downtown Kankakee, L&M operated the large downtown Rialto in Joliet. They both had one other theatre in each town (the Luna was the L&M operation in Kankakee.) They would put the top two films available for the month at the top of a list. One month Plitt would get first pick, and the other top film would go to L&M. The next month they would switch who got the first pick. All other films were put into three groups. If Plitt got first choice for the Paramount in Kankakee or Hillcrest in Joliet, then L&M would get first choice of the three remaining groups of pictures. Thus if Plitt got first choice of the top film, and the other automatically going to L&M, then L&M would get first choice of the three groups of remaining pictures. Then Plitt would get second choice, and the third group would go to the remaining theatre — in Kankakee, the Luna until it closed. “The Graduate” was originally included in that third group until it began to get “buzz”, and was moved to the Meadowview for a four week run(pretty long in those days).
This meant the Luna did by and large play films of lesser quality although I remember the B.A. telling me that it was equipped with CinemaScope before the Paramount for the opening of “The Robe”. They did play a bunch of soft core X rated features and motorcycle flicks before it was closed.
The Luna had a balcony suspended by chains, and I was told that originally the booth was located at the back of the balcony, and with audience movement, the picture would bounce up and down on the screen. By the time I was scheduled to work there, the booth had been moved to the roof, and an opening made in the ceiling for the projection beams. One of my favorite stories was that the Luna had a magician for a children’s show, and one of the pigeons didn’t return to the stage. They looked everywhere for it. The next day when the opeator went to start the show he practically had a heart attack when he opened the lamp douser and the heat caused a pigeon to fly out of the lens barrel where it had been comfortably nesting overnight!
Judging from the size and stature of the audience, the screening probably took place in one of the two screening rooms. Preview A was the larger room used by Radio City for screenings for the cast and crew of the stage shows during their dinner breaks. Preview B the smaller of the rooms (used by RKO as their screening room) was the more comfortable of the rooms with comfy Art Deco chair instead of the fixed theatre seating of the big room. The rooms were across the hall from the small rehearsal hall, and Ben Olevsky who was Head Projectionist at the time remembers the Rockefellers hosting parties having catering and bars set up in the rehearsal hall so guests could adjourn for screenings in the Preview rooms.
Years later we screened clips from Ginger Rogers' films for Ginger
Rogers, who was about to star in one of our Summer Spectaculars in
the small room. It felt like a throwback to the ‘30’s to be screening that material for that person in that Art Deco room.
ziggy: Thanks for the Christmas wishes.
The newsreel footage that was lost was of the opening of the “RKO Roxy”. The Chief Operating Officer of the Hall had a business relationship with Technicolor, and recommended I take the footage to them. I walked into the head of the lab’s office with the film in a can, and he pulled the blinds on his office window closed, put out his cigar, and opened the can. He took one look and said, “Get it out of here!” I asked if anything could be done, and he repeated, “Get it out of here!” I picked the can up and put it under my arm to leave, and he said, “No. Put it under the other arm. That way if if blows up on the way back, it’ll only take out a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took the can back to the Hall held out at arm’s length!
Ziggy: Since I’ve been out of the Hall for a decade now, the decision is no longer mine. Actually, they had formed an Archive in 1979, prior to which I tried to deal with the film library.
A lot of the film was from travelogues which Leon clipped scenes from and used in the stage shows. We also had a lot of historical footage of the Rockettes and the opening of the Hall from newsreels and the “March of Time”. While, as I mentioned above, I was able to get much of the RKO newsreel footage to the Museum of Modern Art, some of it was nitrate and lost to age (I was particularly upset to find a reel of the opening of the Center Theatre had started to bubble and couldn’t be saved, since there was very little documentation on the Center.)
Another complication was the rights to the footage. The Sherman Grinberg stock footage library bought out the RKO newsreel library, so we couldn’t use the footage we had without an agreement from them. It became easier to just contract them to supply the footage rather than deal with material we had.
I’m not sure what happened to Leon’s footage, since it was just one case of 16mm four minute reels. It did come back from the L.A. transfer, so presumeably it’s still in the Music Hall Archives. They now have a full time archivist to tend the material, and since it still turns up on specials such as the recent Music Hall history on the MSG channel, I presume it’s being cared for.
paljoey: The only film we had of the stage shows was taken by Leon Leonidoff with his 16mm camera. He wrote to me after he left asking if I could return it, but I didn’t know what he was asking about. After his death I found a case containing the footage buried in with hundreds of reels of 35mm film I always felt badly about not being able to return it to him.
When we were doing the 50th Anniversary Show, a producer on the West Coast asked for footage to incorporate into intersticial montage sequences than ran on a scrim between numbers. I sent Leon’s footage along with our prints of RKO newsreel footage about the theatre to them with the admonition that they reassemble what they used. Unfortunately, the footage all came back in short sections which we never had a chance to reassemble even if we could figure out what went where.
In reality, Leon’s footage (which did include clips from “Bolero” as well as “Rhapsody”) wasn’t very complete. 16mm rolls for non-professional use only lasted about 4 minutes so only the highlights of a number were seen (some photographed from the electric bridges at the sides of the stage).
We did give the nitrate RKO newsreel footage to the Museum of Modern Art, which is how we got the copies we used in our shows. The rest of the materials went to the Music Hall Archive which is now off-site, so we’re not sure how much is still in existence (there was a plan at one point to send it to Bonded in N.J. for proper storage in a film vault.) And yes — one of the most interesting parts of the job when we were there was working with the production people to edit footage for the stage shows and then integrate the projection into the set pieces. I must confess I’m a little envious about the freedom the producers now have with video projection and wall capability to expand the range of effects. Even the Metropolitan Opera is now using digital video to expand the artistic capability of its producers and scenic designers.
I work in a screening faciiltiy which does quite a bit of work for Steven Soderbergh, and we’ve been screening “Che” from early versions to the current roadshow version that is being released in some cities this week. It would indeed be ideal at the McClurg. The first half is in Scope, and the 2nd half after intermission is “Flat” or 1.85 aspect ratio. Both halves are preceeded by an Overture with maps on the screen highlighting locations in the respective half. There is also exit music for both halves. Their office is releasing a cue sheet with the picture that will include pictures taken from our screen showing the relationship of the subtitles to the frame. There are no plans to release the roadshow version on film, and all screenings will be done digitally, but it’s definitely the sort of thing the McClurg large house would have done.
There may have been a little contemporary “lip syncing” in Breen’s performances. A few years ago we were told to clear all nitrate film out of the Music Hall’s archives. At one point I could just kind of sneak it out, but the growth of enviorenmental awareness precluded just throwing it out. Firms were charging a fee to dispose of nitrate stock.
As an alternative, we offered it to the Sherman Grinberg stock footage library, since we had used their services for effects for our stage shows. Among the rolls of film, one which puzzled me was one labled “Breen”. Thinking it was a reference to the Breen of the Motion Picture Code who had ties to Rockefeller Center we took it to Grinberg’s office. The woman who was their main archivist put the footage up on a projector and said, “That’s Bobby Breen singing.” She remembered both his film and live performances in the New York area. Apparently, someone was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to do the number of shows a day required, or wanted a back-up, but it’s quite possible that audiences of the time who thought he was singing were actually hearing a 35mm film recording of his voice mixed with the live orchestra.
It only managed 14 weeks in its initial run at the Opera House in Chicago, but as I recall that was both because the new opera season supplanted it, and because the Opera House patrons were dismayed that their venue was stooping to such crass entertainment as the motion-picture.