The Fall of the House of Ushers

I once worked as a movie theater doorman when I was in high school. This was at the Sunny Isles Twin Theater in North Miami Beach, Florida, back in the late '60s when twin theaters were popular. I paid for my own wardrobe: a red blazer with black pants and a black clip-on bow tie. I tore the customers' tickets at my podium just inside the entrance and then told them where to go, so to speak. “Thank you, to your left.” “Thank you, to your right.” Each day I'd take my 15-minute breaks at the same time. I would put some popcorn in a paper hot dog holder and take it into one of the two auditoriums, where I sat in the back row in case I was needed. I got to see the same movie scenes over and over, so that for the longest time, for instance, I didn't know how Summer of '42 ended, but I could recite the movie theater scene by heart.

Audiences never saw a white screen in those days. We had our protocols, and that was the big one. The screen remained concealed behind red curtains, which only parted once the first preview began. (We didn't have commercials. You stayed home for those.) The ushers controlled the curtains from a panel behind the last row, on the other side of the wall. See, you didn't just walk from the auditorium right out into the lobby. You followed a curving walkway so that the outside noise was well removed, similar to the way upscale multiplexes with their stadium seating are today.

One time, the usher assigned to close the curtains at the end of the movie was busy with a spill, so he asked me to handle it. He must have told the projectionist, because as soon as I took my place at the panel, a wall phone rang next to it, very softly. “You know the cue?” he asked me. I said sure – how hard could it be? Come to think of it, the movie was Summer of '42. I knew the rule about white screens, so I figured I'd push the button just as the credits ended. Well, one by one, each actor appeared beside his or her name, one clip dissolving into the next, when halfway through, the phone rang. “You missed it! You were supposed to close it on the druggist's face! What are you, blind?” I would come to miss that slavish dedication to decorum. The guy was actually yelling, it meant that much to him.

Auditoriums weren't the only things bigger then. The ushers and I had a secret hiding (and make out) spot. We would pass through the curtains at the front of the auditorium and off to the side, under the EXIT sign, enter the short hallway leading to a door to the parking lot, make an immediate left through another door that required a key, climb up a few steps in the dark, and voila – we were behind the screen! Also behind that screen were two enormous black speakers – I mean, 2001-monolith big, or so they seemed. That made our hiding spot especially loud, but we got used to it after half a minute or so. I would tell a third employee to cover for us in case anyone came looking, and one of the female ushers and I would take the key with us and sit down there in the noisy dark, either eating popcorn from our paper holders or else rushing through a few minutes of awkward teenage passion. We all went there sooner or later; it was one of the unspoken compensations for our crummy salaries. If we were by ourselves or with someone of the same sex, there was something else to do, and this was sometimes the best pastime of all – the screen was pocked with thousands of holes for the sound to go through, and we could put our faces right up against it and see through to the other side, with the audience looking right at us. We never considered ourselves voyeurs; it wasn't like we were peeking at a girls' (or boys') shower. This vantage point was especially entertaining when we showed our midnight movies on the weekends. I was behind the screen when a full house comprised of mostly teenagers settled in for Yellow Submarine. Plenty of joints were passed around, and couples had no compunction about displaying some explicit PDAs in the front rows, an activity normally reserved for the very back. More than once, my co-workers and I returned to the lobby pretty much buzzed for what was left of the night.

Twin theaters represented a transition between (1) the original movie palaces and their smaller, single-screen offshoots, and (2) the boxy multiplexes whose developers must have figured, hey, if two screens work, why not 16? I don't remember much kvetching when theaters like the Sunny Isles started popping up. I still sensed the excitement a new movie could bring when it wasn't competing with more than one other movie in the building. I noticed two things about the evening weekend crowds that filled the lobby: they mostly talked about the movie they were about to see and not merely the day's events, and, at 17, I marveled at the venomous looks women gave to other women who didn't seem to notice. It was a full body assessment, too; the glares ran from head to toe. I imagined these women were feeling much envy and self-doubt.  I wondered if this was just a Miami thing. Only in Southern California years later would I see women as well as men take such care about their appearance in public and seem so critical of how others looked.

I went to lots and lots of movies in lots of theaters growing up. I guess you could call the old Rosetta my spiritual home. It wasn't a palace by any means, but it was still awesome to a seven-year-old. Popcorn would never taste as good again, and you held your cup under a spout in front of the soda machine, first for the crushed ice and then for the drink. Sometimes it was just crushed ice; sometimes it was just soda. Sometimes you got both but all over the place. It was a crap shoot.

I saw my first two movies there with my mother. The first one was King of Kings, the Jeffrey Hunter version. I learned that Jesus looked like a surfer and his mother was 40 years old when he was born. She was also 40 when he died. Simon Peter looked even older. It was odd that my mother took me to see this, because she was irreligious.  But she also loved movies.  The other movie was 13 Ghosts, a typical William Castle flick in that it came with a gimmick, in this case Illusion-O, in which audience members were given oversized 3-D glasses, each containing one red filter and one blue. If you wanted to see the ghosts, you looked through red filter, and, if not, the other one. That was an easy choice for me – I spent half the movie happily avoiding any ghosts at all. Then Castle cheated. A comely lass gets up to close her noisy bedroom shutters during a thunderstorm. She's just about to step away from the curtains when out pops – a monster. Not a ghost, but a monster, cobwebbed and grotesque, and there was no lens for avoiding this. It was my first lesson in betrayal. I told my mother I was going out. She assumed I meant the restroom. After a few minutes, she got worried and went to check on me. I wasn't in the restroom. I wasn't in the lobby. I was out on the sidewalk, talking to strangers. Trust became a very big thing with me.

As I got older and started going to movies with friends instead of with Mom, I expanded my horizons and went to theaters I needed buses to reach. I remember the Loews 167^th Street Twin opening to considerable fanfare. The first movie to play there was Goodbye Columbus, and it was playing in both auditoriums, something I only ever saw happen one other time, when the theater booked The Godfather. For the grand opening, though, Richard Benjamin, who played Neil Klugman, had recorded a greeting that was piped in before all five showings that first day. Not before or since have I heard an actor do that. He was funny, too, because he couldn't pronounce “Loew's”; it came out “Low-ees.” Five performances per day was how movies were scheduled, unless they were road show productions, which were closer to three hours with an intermission and could cost as much as $3 instead of the usual $2. The times for most features were 2:00, 4, 6, 8, and 10. Also, you could stay to watch the movie a second time. I watched Columbus on opening day at 2, 4, 6, and 8. Do that often enough and you start turning into the characters.

Miami and Miami Beach had its palaces (the Olympia, the Carib), its theaters just as old but more modest (the Cameo, where movies were followed by the Israeli national anthem, which brought elderly Jewish audiences to their feet), and theaters that would live on in some other incarnation: the Cameo transformed itself into an intimate concert venue, the Sunny Isles turned into a Walgreen's, and, alas, the Rosetta degenerated into the Rex, a porno house. One theater multitasked.  I forget its name, but it was on tony Lincoln Road, and would you believe it featured a live vaudeville act after each showing of the movie? In 1976? I wondered why a revival of The Graduate only ran for an hour, then found out somebody had sliced it up to make room for the comics, jugglers, and the brassy brunette who once interrupted a song to say with great enthusiasm, “What would the world be like if everyone had a song in their heart?” My date turned to me and whispered, “It would be pretty quiet.”

I don't want to be one to lament the old days and kvetch about the new, like the geezer I'm threatening to become, but honestly, the moviegoing experience isn't what it was. How can it be? Movies are so widely accessible through so many avenues now that a person can keep up with the latest releases and never leave the living room. Also, more and more people just don't want to be in a theater these days. THX surround sound, the aforementioned stadium seating, IMAX – in some respects, the moviegoing experience is better than it's been in years. But once you're in there, you have to contend with TV advertisements, behind-the-scene plugs for TV shows, nearly ten minutes' worth of coming attractions, concessions that you would never dream of paying that much for in a supermarket, and maybe the biggest negative of all – the ubiquitous glow of cell phones, which can make you feel like you're sitting at a drive-in surrounded by fireflies. Those cell phones could ring at any moment and ruin the show, whereas at home you have options. But that defeats the purpose when moviegoing has so much to do with community and sharing. Is Spinal Tap really as funny at home as it is in a full house on Saturday night?

I live in Boise, Idaho, these days, where my favorite theater is the Flicks, home to independents, foreign films, and documentaries. No stadium seating, but then again, no commercials, either. Just three previews that begin on time and an audience that understands the etiquette of public places. Oh, sure, sometimes I miss the Rosetta/Rex, with its torn seats and luminous clock beside the screen. If I ever returned to Miami, I might be tempted to ask the cashier if I could walk inside just for old time's sake, not to stay for Genitals Prefer Bonds or whatever they're showing.  Just to take one quick look around and retrace my steps from the entrance to the popcorn counter, from the popcorn counter to the serendipitous Coke machine (or condom dispenser now), and from there to the curtained doorway, beyond which once lived a Technicolor Jesus and a boy too scared to look through the blue filter.