Radio City Music Hall

A little insight into better times from Variety, August 8, 1951

RIVALRY MOUNTS FOR B’WAY PIX: DEMANDS SOARING WITH HOT BIDDING

Product jams at a couple of spots and intensifying rivalry within the ranks of both distributors and exhibitors are resulting in sweeping departures from traditional booking practices in N.Y.’s showcase sector.

There’s a rift between United Paramount Theatres’ flagship house, the Paramount, and Paramount Pictures. UPT refused to go along on Par’s terms on “Rhubarb” and consequently the pic has been booked for Harry Brandt’s nearby Globe. Par’s “A Place in the Sun” is set for the Capitol marking the first time the Loews house will serve as a first-run outlet for Par.

Columbia and City Investing Co., operator of the Astor and Victoria, disclosed a deal yesterday (Tues.) for a continuing tieup. This is designed to guarantee the two theatres a constant source of supply and, of course, provides Col with important showcase outlets.

The long runs of Metro’s “The Great Caruso” and the current “Show Boat” are forcing three films, which normally would play the Hall, elsewhere, including “Place in the Sun”. Other two are Par’s “Here Comes the Groom” and Warners’ “Streetcar Named Desire”.

WB’S “Capt. Horatio Hornblower”, which follows “Show Boat” at the Hall, also is expected to hold for a long run and this will further aggravate the booking jam Conditions… (article continues)

Warren, I wonder if we bumped into one another at that Sinatra show.
My sister,(a bobbysoxer in every sense of the word) and I attended his shows. As for “Singin in the Rain”, I can close my eyes and still see those lines wrapped around RCMH.

After the war, did anybody really care what was playing as long as the Rockettes were kicking up their heels?

Where were you when the lights went out?

Sounds like good news…I haven’t been to the Christmas show in nearly five years!!! They should do spectaculars on other holidays besides Christmas and Easter, such as Halloween, 4th of July, and Thanksgiving. As for movies, all of the three Cablevision-owned landmarks in NYC (The Ziegfeld Theater, MSG, and RCMH) all have shown movies in the past. The last movie that MSG showed was Godzilla (1998) during its gala premiere in NYC. MSG, before Cablevision took over, was owned by the former parent company of Paramount, which divested its movie theater business a few years before being taken over by G+W. The last show I went to at the hall was “Celebrity Jeopardy” late last year. It was really good.

Here is a postcard I bought on my very first visit to NYC (and RCMH) way back in November 1976. The postcard view is from 1961:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kencta/439012383/

REndres: Not too sure about the wall fabric; the 1979 update was awful and I have a few issues with the 1999 remodeling, but the acoustics are still great. I went to the recent New York Theater Organ Society concert and had a friend stand at opposite sides of the auditorium, front to back and 50th to 51st Streets. We carried on a normal conversation and did not ever have to raise our voices. Now if we can just get a movie in there…

REndres: In regard to Dr. Zhivago, it’s a case of, “What goes around the intermittent, comes around the intermittent.” :) On the prints that played the hall, was the soundtrack advance on the 35mm ones as well? We know the Hall did not start playing 70mm until 1970.

I remember the incredible echo a film would make playing the hall. I was four years old the first time I saw a movie there. My grandparents and I always sat in the three seats at the front of Aisle E alongside the lighting console. It was so overwhelming it was hard to tell if the film was in sync or not. By the time I started working there in 1979, films were no longer a part of the show.

DavidM: While the Music Hall did have special prints made, it wasn’t to eliminate overtures, intermission music, etc. Those cuts could be made to any print (and all too often were outside of the cities in roadshow engagements). The print could just be rolled down to just ahead of the start point of the picture, or the film could be physically cut. One of my most embarassing moments came about because of this, but I think it was a case of “Payback”. When in college in my home town in Illinois I had seen the roadshow presentation of “Ben Hur” at our local Great States theatre, complete with stereophonic sound and all of the music intact. When the film came to our drive-in I was curious to see what they would do, so a friend of mine and I drove out behind the drive-in to watch the start the first night. The overture played to much honking since there was no picture, and then when the picture came up, it was out of frame because someone had spliced the music portion with no picture on incorrectly. I, with all the smugness of a college student, snickered. Years later at the Hall, when we played “Dr. Zhivago” in 70mm as a re-run, I checked the print in, thought the music was spliced on correctly and watched in horror as the MGM lion came up on the Music Hall screen on the first show out of frame. I figured it was a case of delayed justice!

Our prints were special beacause they were frequently printed a couple of points lighter than normal density, since any lamp that could generate the standard footlamberts on a screen our size would also burn a hole in the film. We also had the soundtrack advanced two frames on many of our 70mm prints. At the Hall if the sound is in sync with the picture at the screen, it is four frames out of sync by the time it reaches the back of the Third Mezzanine. A two frame track advance would put the sync at the front of the First Mezzanine, which was both an average middle of the house location, and where the executives sat. We also had the advantage of getting a number of our prints pulled from the camera negative which gave us a better picture in terms of sharpness than prints pulled from later generations. Because of the necessity of striking the number of prints now used in day-and-date releasing on multiple screens, today’s prints are pulled even further down in the printing chain.

REndres: Did the Music Hall get special prints made for films that ran elsewhere as a Roadshow? I was a child when I saw The Great Race and The Happiest Millionaire at the Hall. Did those in the booth cut out the Overture, Intermission, etc. for the Music Hall presentation?

Radio City never ran roadshows until 1974 when they played repeat engagements of “2001”, “Gone With The Wind” and “Dr. Zhivago”. The reason was the length — they were considered too long to do with a stage presentation. In 1974 we did the above three and “Singing In The Rain” as a kind of warm-up for another 70mm film “The Wind and the Lion”. All three of the repeats played one week each with the same stage presentation. We later did “The Sound of Music” also in 70mm and with an intermission, and another release of “GWTW” to celebrate its 50th Anniversary, although that was a stand-alone presentation with no stage show. I successfully argued against having a live organ interlude during the intermissions of the roadshow presentations when we were doing the stage shows, explaining that the EntreActe music was to serve as “call-in” music indicating that the second half of the feature was about to start. Recorded Overtures were a bit tricky. We had a short overture that accompanied “The Slipper and the Rose”, and management wanted to play it before the first show when no organist was scheduled. The union projection crew agreed not to charge an hour of overtime for starting early, but the musicians objected, saying we were replacing the organist with recorded music. They said that if we played the recorded overture before every show it would be O.K., but to do it only when no live organist was present was not.

The life of S.L.Rothafel would make a great movie if done creatively.

No, the Roadshow presentations mostly played over at the Broadway theatres (Capitol, Rivoli, Criterion, State & Warner, Mayfair, Astor). They may have played a print or two that featured a overture or exit music, but that was not always a true feature of what a Roadshow movie was.