Return of the prodigal

It was barely noticed. It happened about a week ago now. One of the survivors of an alleged golden age, Paramount Pictures (bought and sold a few times since its founding), quietly announced that they were no longer releasing their product on film. The age of celluloid is ending; it is now an analog to digital, but the age of 'analog' is dead too. It gets confusing.

Two weeks ago, I was quite touched to receive notification that Delores had posted here, noting that I was, more or less, missing in action, and hoping that I was okay. An immediate reply was called for, I headed towards a response... and got sidetracked. Every day. For two weeks.

Its' not like I haven't been busy. I haven't really, but I do always seem to be occupied with something or other, even though I can't always say what that something or other is or was. I do remember some of what I was doing around the time Delores wrote.

I rarely go to the movies anymore. It's not that I don't want to. They are just so damned expensive now. One of the movie theatres here in Brattleboro closed a little while back. To tell the truth, it wasn't much of a move theatre.

From Jerry Lewis Twin, to First Cinema, to the Kipling... 
a former manager (my friend Brayton who tried to save it)
stands in front of the closed theatre, since torn down
 to make way for a discount supermarket.

It started life as a Jerry Lewis twin. At one point it was owned by a vice-president at Warners, and the subject of lawsuits. It was a bit of fun as long as your entertainment didn't need to be the movie. It was from the days not so long ago when screens were put at the end of hallways, some seats thrown in, sound of dubious quality added, and Lo! the suckers were separated from their cash. Our other theatre, the Latchis, is one of the survivors of an age when there was a bit more showmanship involved in everything from the auditorium's architecture to the presentation of vaudeville entertainments with a movie. Since the Kipling closed, it has moved from a concentration of what used to be thought of as art house product to standard commercial releases. Not the standard commercial releases of its heyday. The Saturday afternoon serials and B pictures of those days are now the A product, the major releases. Most have little more substance than comic books. Glorious comic books, to be sure. The special effects are great. But most of the product is empty headed nonsense. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But as much as I like corn, I can't eat a steady diet of it. And I can't say that I'm all that enthused about seeing movies like "12 Years a Slave", which from what I heard borders on what has been termed "torture porn".

The Latchis main auditorium, its ceiling restored, with the first new seats since it opened in 1938.

The thing of it is, two weeks ago I went to the movies - twice. The first was at our local library to see Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train", the start of an every other week film noir series. The host tapped to discuss the movies shown is a screenwriter who moved into the area a little while back. His main claim to fame is a co-author credit for the script of "Revenge of the Nerds".

Farley Granger and Robert Walker in "Strangers On A Train"
(If merry-go-rounds make you nervous, do not see this movie.)

A few days later, there was a special show at the Latchis of "Lawrence of Arabia" as a memorial to the late Peter O'Toole. I had mixed feelings about seeing it again. It's a wonderful movie, one I refuse to watch on tv. (So here's the trailer on an even smaller screen.) It really needs a big screen. A friend wanted to go and asked me to accompany him, otherwise I might have passed on it. I saw it when it was first released. I used to have a 16mm print which had been subtitled for the deaf. I always found it odd that it had the best sound of any 16mm print I ever owned.



I worked for Columbia (its releasing studio) when the 1989 restoration was done. That work started under studio honcho and filmmaker David Puttnam. His philosophy was to make only one or two big budget titles a year, with lots of little movies, all of which stood excellent chances at turning a profit. Of course they fired him - he had, after all, refused to make Ghostbusters 2. Dawn Steele was brought in to run the studio. She was famous for putting pictures of dollar bills on toilet paper. That's marketing, not filmmaking. She cancelled the restoration. In response, Martin Scorsese headed up a group of directors who forced a meeting in which it was very clearly stated that unless the project went forward, neither Columbia nor TriStar (sort of a sister studio - it's complicated) would ever release a picture from that group again. The work resumed. I saw the results in Boston in a 70mm print on a very, very large screen. I didn't want to disturb that memory. By the way, there was a special award for the restoration given at the next Academy Awards. It was accepted by Dawn Steele, who took all the credit for the project.

The reason I'm going on about all this is simple - both movies were presented via digital projection with their source material DVD's. Digital projection is okay, but it just isn't the same. The rich blacks of the film noir era in "Strangers on a Train" were mostly gray. And not very many shades of it, at that. (In those days, release prints had well over 20 shades of gray in them.) The image on Lawrence was a little less than it should have been as well. It wasn't helped by a problem the theatre has with one of its digital projectors which creates an image "artifact", looking sort of like the kind of streak created by dirty rollers and cheap chemicals in old style celluloid processing. The same streak, in the same place, was present in the new Hobbit movie over a month before. It amazes me that no one has seen to fixing it.

This week, I'll be running off to the library for the next title in the film noir series, "The Big Sleep". It's one of those projects where the story of the making of the film is as entertaining as the movie itself. Bogart, Bacall, a Raymond Chandler tale that makes no sense, a script partly written by William Faulkner...

Bacall : I don't like your manners.
Bogart:  I'm not crazy about yours. I didn't ask to see you. I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings...



It is really wonderful to be able to see these movies on a screen. When I was young, if you wanted to see something like this you studied the tv guide and probably stayed up late one night to catch it. I started collecting movies on 8mm and eventually 16mm just to have access to some titles. I worked in the revival and repertory business. Suddenly, in the 1980's, we were able to video tape movies off of tv on Beta and VHS. Then the studios released them in those formats, and laser discs, and DVDs. Now they are available online, streaming. The trailers and posters collectors spent years trying to track down can now be seen with a few taps on a touch screen. It's such a different world for movie buffs, for those who care. And luckily, here in Brattleboro, we have a library and a movie theatre which show them in public on occasions. No, it's not the same, but it will do.

to be continued...

(I hope)

 

P.S. Hi, Delores!

the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova...

My little town is undergoing some big changes. Again. It's always undergoing some big changes. Again. When I first moved here in 1995, I can remember crossing a dangerous intersection (nicknamed "malfunction junction", of course) by looking at the license plate of the oncoming car. If the plate was Vermont's you could just go, the person driving the car would stop to let you cross. If the plate betrayed a New Hampshire origin, you waited - that driver would run you over. If it was Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Jersey it was best to go in the opposite direction. All of that changed not long after September 11th, 2001 when there was a large influx of metropolitan expatriates. Within months, every time one of us got behind the wheel of our cars, we had to practice defensive driving to counteract the interlopers' offensive driving. Then they discovered that it was cheaper (and easier) to register their cars here; suddenly all the offensives had Vermont plates too. That was the tip off that things had changed beyond simple second home ownership.

Just off the main intersection of our town's Main Street (which runs parallel to the Connecticut River) is Brown and Roberts, a beloved local hardware store. But it's not just any hardware store. It's the kind of place where there are huge old wood filing cabinets which stand on old wood floors; the cabinets' many small drawers are full of various sizes of nuts, bolts, washers and other useful paraphernalia which can be purchased by the each rather than having to buy a huge box of something or other, most of whose contents will never be used. Buy what you need, not what you don't.

Brown and Roberts during the Strolling of the Heifers in 2011. The store to the picture's left, which used to be an A&P,
is now home to a florist and the Chamber of Commerce. To the far left you can see a little of the tower at the Brooks House.

When I first moved here, someone I knew was looking for one of those handles which one uses to lift the lids off of old woodstoves. They were hoping I could find one at one of the local flea markets. I went to Brown and Roberts, and sure enough they had a couple on hand. I know someone who bought a power lawnmower there. When they went to pick it up, it was already fully assembled - and came with a full tank of gas. It's that kind of place. A Home Depot opened in a strip mall on the edge of town, and couldn't compete. It seems people preferred the service they got at Brown and Roberts over the cheaper price they could get at Home Depot. The store is in the old Montgomery Ward building. While a number of people of a (ahem) certain age may remember the Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue, many don't know that there was also a small chain of retail department stores.

Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce 

The building's exterior here even has the "Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce" medallion designed for Montgomery Ward by sculptor J. Massey Rhind. When I first moved to town, the side of the building next to the Baptist Church had a large faded painted "Montgomery Ward" sign across the top. I'm sure I photographed it, but I can't find the pic anywhere. It has since completely faded away, or perhaps it was removed when they cleaned the building's exterior awhile back. It has just been announced that the business is being sold. The Putnam family has owned it for the last oh, fourty years or so. I don't know this for sure, but I assume that the "A.F. Roberts" that used to advertise in the local paper in the 1930s and 1940s is the original business.  In other words, it's been around for awhile. The purchaser owns several other hardware stores further upstate. It is being said that some members of the current ownership family are to stay on. I've been through enough of these kinds of purchases to know that they will most likely be forced out within a year and then watch out... but I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that the business survives with only minor changes. Now, as it happens, my radio show this week will include a 15 minute broadcast by the Ink Spots from July 12, 1939. I include such a broadcast just about every week, and usually read from the local newspaper of the day of the featured broadcast. The following, taken from microfilm, are part of my files from our local paper during mid July of 1939.

Note the old 3 digit telephone number. As with the ad below, if you right click
on the graphic, you can open a much larger easier to read version in a new window.

Another big happening, hopefully of a positive nature, is that a consortium of architects, lawyers and money has finally put all the pieces in place to take possession and begin rehabilitation of the Brooks House. The Brooks was once a luxury hotel, and was the largest "Second Empire" style building outside of New York City. It had restaurants, various stores, meeting rooms, and a ballroom. It is the largest commercial building in town to this very day, and dominates the main block and corner of downtown. It's Main Street façade used to have a two story wrought iron veranda over 40 feet long. When it was built, no expense was spared - it was in many ways a gift to the town by a resident who had gone to California and returned a wealthy man.

Brattleboro has always loved a parade. The wrought iron balcony on the
Brooks Hotel must have been a great place from which to watch one.

In the late 1800's, social events held there were regularly reported upon in the Boston and New York City newspapers. Mr. Brooks also donated a beautiful library to the town, which was torn down to become a parking lot for the US Post Office and Courthouse.

The original Brooks Library, long gone.

By 1970, the hotel had fallen on hard times and was "rescued" by someone who bought it, stripped it of its architectural details, and turned the rooms and suites into cheap apartments. Eventually his son took it over. I have met people in town who to this day have not forgiven that family for what they did to the building. And that was before the horrible fire in April 2011 which destroyed the roof and much of the interior. The exterior walls of the place were fine, as they were made of extraordinarily sturdy locally kilned redbrick, and were 16" thick on the first two floors, with the third floor being 14" thick. My dear friend Laura, over at Austanspace, used to live there and moved out two weeks before the fire, which displaced close to 80 people who lost everything.

- from 1942 -
"Community Owned"

Our local community radio station, WVEW-lp, had its studio, transmitter and antenna there. We lost everything too, and were off the air for just about a year. We almost lost our license, returning to broadcast mode one week before such an event would have occurred. The revamped Brooks House will still be a mixed use building. The first two floors are expected to be expanded local branches of two commuter colleges. The original architectural drawings put the branch of the Community College of Vermont in the old hotel kitchen and workers' quarters in the back wing on the parking lot. Those drawings haven't been updated, and were done before the State put in a considerable amount of money to consolidate and expand the colleges. The other two floors (actually a floor and a half) will be apartments; most will rent in a price range of around $2,000.00 a month. The original proposal also included a few special low priced apartments - provided the potential resident meets low income guidelines, they could get a place at only $950.00 a month! I don't know who they think will be able to afford such rents, but they are allegedly 90% booked.

 

The fire at the back of the building, center mansard - April 2011

I don't quite recall where this picture and the one above came from,
but they aren't mine. I think they were from a local paper.

 

The Brooks has been sitting empty and partially boarded up for over two years now.

Another big change will veer a little more towards the restoration department. Our beloved movie theatre, the Latchis, will close its original screen (the largest operating screen left in Vermont) for a couple of months while the seats and the ceiling are repaired. The theatre is part of another hotel complex, one of the few art deco buildings in the state. What is said to be the theatre's old "crying room" (for mothers toting infants, soundproofed with a window to see the screen and with sound piped in) became a second screen. The old ballroom upstairs was cut in half, and one part became a third screen. The other half still sits there unused, and since the closing of the other local theatre (a miserable excuse for a movie house, a fourplex which was originally a Jerry Lewis Twin) there has been discussion of making it into another screen. An attached storefront became a small fourth screen recently. The theatre used to be a small affair with an entrance just off the corner of Main street on Flat Street. In 1938, as an answer to the then big bucks Paramount Theatre which had opened the year before, the present hotel and theatre complex was built as a tribute to the head of the Latchis family who had emigrated to America and started in business with an outdoor fruit stand on that same corner.

The original Latchis Theatre, on the corner of Flat Street and Main.

 



The Latchis just after opening in 1938.



From 1945, showing the marquee which had been added over the hotel entrance.

The foyer floor is terrazzo marble (used throughout the hotel), the auditorium walls have frescoes depicting Greek myths, the ceiling has wood inlays depicting the constellations and contains long broken "starlight" bulb enclosures. When I moved to town, the theatre had a huge cinemascope screen built in front of the old proscenium. (Cinemascope used to require curved screens to be shown properly without distortion; they weren't as deep as Cinerama screens though.) The Cinemascope screen was dirty and had rips and holes in it. I befriended the projectionist and began a whispering campaign - almost everything shown there would fit within the reaches of the old proscenium. It wasn't too long before the cinemascope screen was torn down, and a new screen was fitted within the proscenium, improving the image considerably. I don't know if I played any part in that decision, but I'd like to think I did.

Nice little mock up someone made of the auditorium with a picture on-screen. The only problem is that 'Casablanca' was presented in a different frame ratio (closer to a square image) than the widescreen style presented here, which cuts off much of the image. For the film series I ran there, we managed to track down the proper lenses to do things right.

Back in the day the Latchis Theatre was the first cinema outside of a major city to play 'Gone With the Wind'. When the 'Wizard of Oz' was shown there, some of the Muchkins participated in a special parade which marched down Main Street to the Theatre to welcome the movie to town. For a few years, I ran a Sunday afternoon classic and art film series there. Our first film? The then newly made IB Technicolor print of 'Wizard of Oz', of course. (It was the first IB process Technicolor print made in over 30 years. It was glorious, even better than earlier old IB prints I'd seen. Including myself, there were four people in the audience - the theatre manager didn't like the idea and 'forgot' to put the special screening in their ad. The Paramount (which burned out in the early 1990's) would show serials on the weekend, but the Latchis had stage shows with a minimum of 5 acts of Vaudeville. The non-profit which now owns the complex has plans to eventually rebuild and update the stage and dressing room areas. Now if they would only fix the balcony. (The 700 seat auditorium would then seat close to 1200.) The following short video shows a good bit of the theatre's interior.

 

 

Another local business, Renew Salvage, which used to strip architectural and reusable pieces of old buildings being rehabbed or torn down, for sale to builders and restorers, has just closed its doors.
Town government is going through changes too with the election of a, how shall I put this? - bizarre group of people to the Selectboard. Not long after the last round of elections, one Selectman suddenly got a new job elsewhere and resigned. (If I'd been in better health I'd have helped him pack up if it could have gotten him out of here quicker.) His appointed replacement was the lowest vote getting candidate in the last election, the one who doesn't know anything about the town or town government. The guy who missed by just a few votes wasn't appointed. Nor was the guy who lost by a slightly larger margin. The current Board wanted someone who would "go along". Then our Town Manager suddenly got a different job and resigned. Brattleboro has gone through a lot in the years I've lived here. I moved here just after a Walmart had opened across the river in New Hampshire. They'd wanted to have a store in Vermont, but the state refused to have them. So they built across the river where they could destroy the economy of the downtown of the area which is said to be the state's biggest financial generator. They almost succeeded. Brattleboro fought back, starting with "buy local" campaigns in the late 1990's, promoting ourselves as an art town, using the Latchis for film series and live events, a first Friday of the month downtown Gallery Walk, & etc. We've weathered quite a few storms (literal and figurative) since then. Whatever is or isn't happening, it seems more and more evident that big money is moving into Brattleboro. I begin to wonder how many years are left before those of us on smaller incomes, some of the very people who worked so hard to help keep the town vital, will be forced out. I hope it doesn't come to that.

The April Fool

Most of my morning has been spent working on this post. Everything looked great, lined up the way I wanted, etc. That was in the Chrome browser that Blogger allegedly prefers. When I looked at it in the Internet Explorer Web Browser, it was a bit of a mess. I've spent two hours fighting to get the text and photos to line up properly. And I just can't seem to win this one. Sorry, I have other things to do and I'm leaving it the way it is.

The morning was appropriately groggy. So was I. The very first email I opened contained news that at the last minute the Vermont Views website, which was listing our community radio station (which I run) as "non-profit of the month" had changed its mind. As I sank into a resigned sigh, the words "April Fool!" entered in my consciousness. There was an audible low guttural growl which emerged from somewhere within my being. It's April. The poet called it "the cruelest month". The poet may have been right.

Over the last two weeks, I've started many a post for the blog, only to abandon them all for various reasons. I had a cataract removed and was laid low for three days by reactions to the surgery. One partial post was forsaken when there were problems at the radio station which resulted in the rest of my day, and most of the next, being spent in email correspondence. I no longer feel in control of my time. I wonder if I ever really was.



Unpacking at the new WVEW studio

Yesterday was Easter. I became a bit lost in reverie. I spent most of last Easter working with the radio station's engineer wiring our new studio It had been almost a year since the fire at the Brooks House which had taken us off the air.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 - logging into a computer to
turn on the transmitter and return WVEW to the air. 

We lost everything in the fire - our transmitter was in the studio and our antenna was on the roof. When something like that happens, the station is given one year to get back on the air or lose its broadcast license. Before we left the studio that day, I logged onto one of our new computers and used it to turn on our new transmitter which was now located (with our antenna) at a school on a hill on the outskirts of town. For a few brief minutes, we were on the air. I called Laura over at Austanspace and asked her to tune us in. She heard us. It was real, it worked. While we were working in the studio, the Easter Zombie Walk made its way through downtown. It's an annual local tradition. I hope it was held this year, I haven't been able to find anything on it - I had wanted to go out and photograph it. I made my way out to Austanspace's Shire for Easter dinner. That morning, I'd also put up an Easter blog post which addressed my love for those absurd biblical era movie spectaculars. I'd intended to do another one this year. How on earth did I get all that done? And that list of accomplishment is decidedly meager compared to what I used to accomplish on any given day  during my years in New York City. At any rate, two days later, after calling an early halt to the station's Board meeting, I ushered the Board members into our new studio, logged in once more to the transmitter, and returned our station to broadcast mode. This year, I accomplished - nothing much. And I was busy from the moment I got up until the moment I went to bed.


"Jubilee" Jim Fisk

Today is the birthday of James (Jubilee Jim) Fisk. He was one of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Born on the other side of the state, his family moved to Brattleboro when he was a child. His father became the owner and manager of a hotel on the corner of Main and Elliot Streets, known as the Revere House, in the days when Brattleboro was a resort town famous for its "water cure". At the age of 15, he ran away and joined the circus. There are reports that he made a fair amount of money by smuggling cotton during the US Civil War. He became a stockbroker working in the office of Daniel Drew, another famous thief of the financial world. (Drew's money founded a Methodist Seminary which expanded to become Drew University, which I attended in 1968-1969.) Daniel Drew was the kind of guy who used to have his cattle drink water to increase their weight just before their price per pound sale. His shady deals became known for using phony and unauthorized stocks, thereby lowering their value. Such stock were soon called "watered down" in his dubious honor.

At the offices of Daniel Drew, Jim Fiske hooked up with Jay Gould. Together they assisted Drew in manipulating the price of Erie Railroad stock, which they swindled away from Cornelius Vanderbilt. They eventually swindled the Erie away from Drew for good measure. They were openly allied with New York City's notoriously corrupt mayor "Boss" Tweed in the bribing of judges and legislatures. They also caused a financial panic which ruined many investors when they convinced President Grant to purchase and hold on to gold; they had the United States Assistant Treasurer in on the deal while they manipulated the price. For their offices, Gould and Fiske bought the Pike Opera House building at 23rd Street and 8th Avenue in NYC.

Samuel Pike had purchased much of the old Clement Clark Moore estate and built upon it a five story opulent 1,800 seat opera house which cost over a million dollars, unheard of at the time. Although the area quickly became a theater district, Pike was never able to lure patrons away from the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Within a year of its opening, Pike closed it. Fisk and Gould bought it and spent another million renovating the building, renamed it the "Grand Opera House", and became theatrical impresarios as well as financiers.

Pike's Opera House

Josie Mansfield

Now, Fisk had married young, and lived apart from his wife. She stayed in Boston with a close female companion. He also purchased a building close to the Opera House and had a secret tunnel built to connect the two. The apartment was for his mistress, Josie Mansfield, an actress.

Edward Stokes

  Mansfield's affections were soon shared with one of  Fisk's employees, Edward Stokes.  Stokes left his wife and children and moved in with her. Together, they attempted to bribe Fisk through the use of letters which detailed some of his underhanded dealings.  Fisk refused to pay up, and started a public relations battle. Stokes was arrested on charges of embezzlement. (It's a long story.) One year to the day of his arrest later, nearly bankrupt and ruined, Stokes shot and killed Jubilee Jim Fisk on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel. Fisk was 36 years old.

Fisk's body was brought back to Brattleboro for burial in the Prospect Hill cemetery where a large monument was erected to his memory. The monument's central stone is surrounded by four scandalously underdressed (i.e. bare breasted) women, each of whom holds something connected to Mr. Fisk. One holds pieces of railroad track. One, a money bag. Another holds a steamship (another Fisk story). The last holds an emblem of the Opera House.

Fisk's story became the subject of a 1937 movie, "The Toast of New York", bears a great resemblance to part of the plot for the movie "Citizen Kane", and was the subject of several best selling books. Edward Stokes served four years of his prison term before being paroled. Fisk had given freely to charity and was in held in esteem by many - upon his release, there were numerous threats made against Stokes who spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder and feeling hunted. Fisk's wife died in poverty in Boston. Josie Mansfield made her way to Paris where she married before returning to the states. The rest of her story is unknown. She was rumored to have lived under assumed names in Boston, and in New Jersey where she allegedly died, as per a report in the New York Times. There is one published report that she found her way back to Paris where she died at the American Hospital. There are also newspaper reports that, paralyzed and in dire poverty, she entered a convent in South Dakota to avoid the poorhouse, passed and was buried in an unmarked grave.

The Grand Opera House puttered on for many years, never very successfully. It was purchased and turned into a movie theatre, the RKO Grand in 1938. It continued operating until 1960 when it was  closed, slated for demolition when the Ladies' Garment Union began  redevelopment of the area into the Penn South residential apartments for union members and their families. Two weeks later, it burned to the ground. It was eventually replaced with a nondescript three story office building, the memories of Robber Barons, the Grand Opera House, Jubilee Jim, his mistress, and the Gilded Age long gone.

A current view of the corner of 23rd Street and 8th Aveue, New York City

A note or two about my little town

Sometimes, most of the time in fact, I really love the town in which I live. It has been my intention to start writing a bit about it and telling a few of its stories.

Just yesterday, for instance, I started the day by hosting a Friday morning radio show on our all volunteer community radio station. Most of the two hour time slot was spent in a free wheeling discussion with Daryl Pillsbury, who works nights on the maintenance staff at our local hospital. I first met Daryl when he was the sole voice for the working class on the Selectboard which manages our town. He later spent 8 years as our county's representative in our State Government. Several years ago, he and another local citizen created the Heat Fund, a non-profit (no one gets paid a cent) which raises money to provide emergency fuel assistance in our county.  He'd come in after getting off work to promote the Heat Fund; we also talked politics and his work for the Marijuana Resolve (which he helped start) whose goal is to end the legal insanity and attendant costs of criminalizing pot smokers. By 9am I was training a new radio station participant, an older man who has spent years as a local realtor, whose show mixes advice on real estate with 1950's and 1960's rock and roll. As each song plays, he makes hand gestures as though he were performing the choreography of a doo-wop group. As I made my way to the post office, I ran into two different friends, both requiring stops for quick discussions. After running other errands, I attended the kick off of our holiday season at the tree lighting in the center of town. The tree is in a "vest pocket" park, which is a story or two in itself. Santa was there. As was a young father with his 3 or 4 year old son, both on Dad's bicycle standing off to one side. The Dad asked his son if he wanted to go over and meet Santa. The boy hid behind his Dad's legs and confessed that Santa Claus scared him. The park sits at the main intersection in town, in front of a Thai restaurant. By the time I made my way home, I'd had another training for another new DJ (Friday is our most difficult day to fill and it is filling up). Today, Santa will arrive via tractor, a yearly event in which he is, I believe, accompanied by Alfred, our local black drag queen (well, the famous one, anyway) who will be dressed as an elf. The annual sing-in of Handel's Messiah also takes place this afternoon. It has professional soloists, but those attending get to sing all the choral parts. There's lots else going on today - all in a town of 12,000 people. Well, it is the third largest town in the state.

Lest you think that I am joking about the Messiah Sing-In, here's an odd bit of video from You Tube. At the beginning of the video, there is a brief shot of the interior of the Centre Congregationalist Church where the event takes place. The church used to be on our town common, but was moved to Main Street and rebuilt close to the center of town back in 1843.



As I was starting the preparations for my regular radio show this week, I was thinking that I might use some of my research for a post. It was quite a surprise, therefore, to find that Laura over at the Austanspace blog had written about our Community Radio Station. As a part of my show, which covers the big band era, vocalists, songwriters, etc. I usually finish with a 15 minute or half hour broadcast from that era which is from the roughly the same week we are in, just a different year. As part of the set up to that finale, I read the news from the local paper published that day. As enjoyable and oddly familiar as the news might be, I think I get my biggest kick from the old advertisements. Here's a few examples from the paper of December 2nd, 1938:

This ad (above) was on the bottom of the front page!

The above ad was from one of the three movie theatres in town in 1938, the Latchis. 

It is part of the Latchis Hotel, one of the few art deco buildings in the entire state of Vermont.

The Latchis in 1938, the year it opened.

The opening was delayed due to the Hurricane that October, which hit the area pretty hard.

Above is the auditorium as it appears today, barely changed from the days when there were weekend stage shows (usually 5 acts of vaudeville) along with the movie. Many years ago I was successful in getting a series of Sunday matinees of classic movies played there. But the story of the Latchis, and my little part in its history, are stories for another day. In the meantime, I have a radio show to put together, and a gentle snow, the first able to leave a bit of accumulation on the ground, is falling. I must make coffee and stare out the window for a bit. 

The loss of Ocean City's movie theaters, and what came after

When I read the article which started Sunday's post, and which stated that the Strand and Moorlyn Theatres on the Ocean City, NJ boardwalk may have closed for good due to the cost of digital conversion, I found that I had to do a little more digging in my files, memories, and on the internet. I'd known that the Strand had been multiplexed, and I'd already researched the fate of the other Boardwalk movie theaters well over a year ago. But I wanted to know a little more - something wasn't sitting quite right. So here is what I've managed to dig up and my impressions of it all:

When I lived there, there were three other movie houses on the boardwalk. They were all pretty much big old barns, harkening back to the days before tv, when filling a thousand plus seats a couple of times a night wasn't all that difficult for a hot title - everyone went to the movies then. In the 1970's, the economics of running such places tended towards futility. Aside from the Strand, there was also the Moorlyn, the Village, and the Surf.

The Surf as it is today, with a small marquee to list its shops.

There isn't much out there about the Surf. The other three venues were owned by the Shriver family, but the Surf was owned by someone else. I can't even find pictures from its days as a movie house. I don't know what happened or when, but it seems like it was the first to go. Built as a venue for stage shows and vaudeville in the early 1900's, the building now houses a mini-mart of stores. It was where I saw "Woodstock" on its original release, projected on a screen so large that any of the three side by side panels the movie often used would easily dwarf most screens of our day. I seem to recall it being twinned early on, and that it stayed open at least one winter.

It was there in 1970 that I saw a double bill, a re-issue, of  'Gold Diggers of 1935', and 'Footlight Parade', two of those slightly insane black and white Busby Berkeley 1930's musicals. The Gold Diggers movie includes the stunning "Lullaby of Broadway" number, one of the all time great musical hallucinations. By the time I left the theater for my walk home along a deserted boardwalk, I expected the path before me, as well as the nearby buildings, to turn into hundreds of dancing girls swirling in geometric patterns.

If my memory about the Surf being twinned is correct, then it must have been owned by the Frank family as part of their Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey circuit of theaters. The Franks get the dubious credit for creating the first twinned cinema and the multiplex.

And I definitely remember that the Franks and the Shrivers did not get along.

The other three venues were all owned by the Shriver family. Shrivers Salt Water Taffy, as well as their fudge, and the factory store are a longtime mainstay of the boardwalk. In fact, it was the first buisness on the boardwalk. It is also the home of the best salt water taffy I've ever had to this day.  If you drive across the main bridge to the island and continue directly to the Boardwalk, on your right will be the Strand and on your left is Shrivers. The family sold off the taffy business in 1959, but kept the theaters, several other businesses, and a good deal of prime real estate.

The Ocean City Boardwalk in 1964

The last of the Shrivers was Mrs. Helen Shriver Schilling. She, more than anyone else, was responsible for maintaining much of the older more genteel character of Ocean City and the boardwalk. But Ocean City fell into the hands of people who changed zoning regulations that allowed high rises in, and etc. They destroyed Ocean City, and turned it into an atmosphere redolent of cheap honky-tonks. In 1989, Mrs. Schilling sold the theaters. Her one proviso was that they not be sold to the Frank family, but to someone who would preserve them. They sold for over three million dollars. The buyer did not show up at the closing It later turned out that the Franks had bought the theaters through subterfuge. When they trashed the Strand, it was one of the Frank family who personally ripped down the silk main curtain with the image of Poseidon, tore it to shreds, and threw it into a dumpster behind the theater.

Somewhere along the way the Moorlyn was turned into a twin. In my day, it had a glorious neon marquee, which was preserved even after the initial conversion.

In the 1920's and 1930's, the Moorlyn had an upstairs ballroom. It had a vaudeville stage where the likes of W.C. Fields used to appear. Eventually, the Franks tore it all down and replaced it with a multiplex, with expensive apartments where the stage and ballroom had been/ Here's the new building on the Boardwalk, with a type of signage Mrs. Schilling would have abhorred:

Saddest of all is the fate of the Village Theater. The Village started out as Doughty's pier, sticking out into the ocean. It had a bowling alley, and was home to vaudeville and silent movies. Over the years, the ocean retreated. In 1927, much of that portion of the Boardwalk was destroyed in a terrible fire - but the pier survived. The new boardwalk was built where the ocean had been, and the entrance to the pier was changed to what had been the building's rear. For the remodeling work the theater, now situated alongside a boardwalk off-ramp, had sound equipment installed. An ingenious facade covered the awkward fit of the pier and its new circumstances, designed to resemble the buildings of an old fishing village.

The Village interior made geart use of wood. It was the smallest of the Shriver's Ocean City theaters, but it was a prestige house. It operated continuously until the sale to the Frank family in 1989. In June of 1990, it burned to the ground.

When Mrs. Schilling died, she left the town land she owned on the ocean side of the boardwalk, with a proviso that it never be built upon. The town is now trying to change that. She also left several lots near the boardwalk that are used for visitor parking, and did it in a way that the town hasn't been able to build there yet. And, she had set up her her estate in such a way that executors were instructed to offer the long time tenants of her boardwalk store front buildings a chance to buy their spaces as a co-op. All but one did. They were thus  preserved and saved from the garish primary colors cheap plastic world that the boardwalk became; a gentle reminder of a time when people cared about their community, when life was about more than a quick buck.

The passing of celluloid dreams

Things change.

My first music reproduction device was a 78rpm kid's record player made out of tin.

As a child, I had a record player
exactly like this one.

Before long records changed to 45rpm, then to 33 1/3 long playing lps. Soon there was high fidelity and then there was  stereo. All that in the space of 10 years Flash forward past home tape recorders, cassettes and the birth of mix tapes (sigh), CDs with clean but cold sound, to mp3s which allowed thousands of songs to be stored on a device the size of a slightly thick playing card, to mp3s which must be paid for and which have licensing and copy protections in them so you can't share them with your friends. It's a wonder they haven't come up with a way to make you pay every time you play a particular song.



TV in my lifetime changed from a small (except we didn't know it was small then) black and white flickering picture to large 19 inch sets that were designed as furniture for the living room. Color arrived in the mid to late 1960's (now there's a loaded statement).

Sometime in the early 1980's, I can remember walking the streets of Greenwich Village the night the Public Broadcasting Service presented a Metropolitan Opera performance "simulcast" in stereo on local radio stations and hearing what was it, La Boheme?, wafting through the windows of every single block on my way home. Then ABC began simulcasting music videos late on Friday nights. It wasn't long before tv sets had stereo built in. Along the way, there was BetaMax, VHS, Laser Discs, DVDs, and now we have available very large wall sized flat screen high definition surround sound stereo devices that mimic and rival the quality of movie theaters. And there's the rub.

Over the years, film has come in many sizes and formats. But it was film, celluloid. The images would be projected onto large screens, 20 to 40 feet wide. Those images had a special kind of magic. They captured and inspired our imaginations. And those images have changed over the years. Film stock used to be nitrate, which gave a special glow.

35mm nitrate image from the silent German film "Metropolis"

Nitrate film stock was unstable and flammable. Safety stock came in, but the rich blacks and silver glow of the images were gone. Stunning technicolor images (also with rich blacks) gave way to more economical and less complicated Eastman stock and its imitators, in which the colors were more subdued and quickly faded. There have been any number of other changes, from the size of the film itself to special lenses for widescreen, stereo, multi-channel  stereo Sensurround, various 3D systems, and etc.With each change, the way we perceive the image itself, and the story we are watching, has changed. But the image was still on celluloid.

Image from a 1950s era 35mm IB Technicolor print

Image from the Blu Ray DVD "restoration"
(Thanks to David Bordwell's website on cinema from which I purloined these two images.)

Many movie theaters now project digital images. Celluloid is being phased out. This was all predictable. Indeed, the only surprise to me is that it took so long. When I was put out of a job in film distribution in the mid 1990's, I fully expected celluloid to be completely gone within 10 years. But the time is now. Movie theaters are already having problems getting 35mm prints. There is about a year left. Theaters must either pay about $70,000.00 per screen to covert to digital, or they will find themselves out of business.

I can't begin to estimate how many 35mm prints in
cans like this I've slung around over the years

Most film images wash over you at the rate of 24 frames per second. There is a momentary display of a picture in a concrete all there at once image, interspersed by moments of darkness as a flywheel blocks the light while the next picture is brought before the light source, aperture, and lens. Persistence of vision creates the moving image.  (Ingmar Bergman used to note that people seeing his movies were really paying to sit in 20 minutes of darkness. He wasn't talking about his themes.) Digital images, on the other hand, are based on a scan line. One line is filled in by electrons hitting a display, skipping a line, going on to the next line, skipping a line all the way down an image. The electron beam then goes back and fills in the missing lines. Even though this happens very rapidly, the display never has a complete image on it - it is a mental process which puts this picture together. That process puts the viewer into an alpha state, accepting what is shown in a much more uncritical and relaxed fashion. This was detailed in a mid 1970s book "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television", which claimed that tv was, therefore, lulling people into passivity ripe for autocratic rule. This effect is not based on content - it is based on the psychological effects of watching tv - the problem here is the medium itself.

Aside from those scary implications, part of the sadness I feel over this change concerns the auditorium experience of going to the movies. Once, there were giant screens fronting a sea of seats in "an acre of dreams". As television took hold, the theaters became smaller, there were less seats, the auditoriums were less grand. When I was a kid, one entered the theater to music playing softly in the background. There were curtains in front of the screen. At the appointed time, the house lights would dim, the music would swell, colored lights would engulf the main curtain which would open as images began to appear on the screen. An inner curtain would close after the coming attractions, newsreels, cartoons and short subjects and reopen for the feature. Movie going was an experience, a shared worship. Today's smaller auditoriums still offer a shared experience, but the ceremony, the ritual of presentation, is gone. Most of the big old houses have been multiplexed, losing their balconies, their size, their prestige and their showmanship in the process.
(Check out my post on one of the great movie palaces, The Roxy.)

I could go on, but I won't. This article started because I looked something up. I stumbled upon a news story that the Strand Theatre in Ocean City, New Jersey might close for good - unable to afford the cost of digital conversion. It currently has five screens and is a shadow of its former self. I saw many a movie there before it was multiplexed. It was one of the homes, nay, the temples, of my celluloid dreams.

The Strand as it is now.

Back in its glory days when the Strand was new.

One entered through those doors, walked down the hallway past illuminated pictures of movie stars (concession stand on the photo left, which would have been on the right as you entered.)

Even the back of the auditorium was a grand and huge space. Well, the Strand did seat 1,200 after all.

As you entered the auditorium, art deco lighting greeted you.

The auditorium

Close up of the design on the main curtain

The Strand Theater has been listed for sale. I want it to survive, but its time has gone and it really ceased to exist years ago. In memory (was it real?) I see myself saunter past on a rainy windswept night, the glow of light reflected on the wet boardwalk, lost forever in my own noir world of blue neon dreams.