I am haunted by a sign I saw on a ticket booth at the movie theater.
Due to limited seating, theaters will be cleaned between showings.I spent the first hour of the movie trying to figure out how theater size dictated the frequency of cleaning.
There was no mystery about the first part. Limited seating, indeed. The theater was jam-packed with about 30 people. The screen was only slightly larger than a cereal box, and the sound quality reminded me of my old 45 RPM record player after I had dropped it down the stairs. This was what movies have come to: small moments in small rooms. A TV room with noisy strangers and sticky floors.
"As you've probably discovered," says Jerry Rule, spokesman for United Artists theaters, "large theaters are not as frequent today as they were in the days of the art deco movie houses. We have some art cinemas in multiplexes that seat 40. They're for the smaller pictures that are not going to get a large audience."
The idea that a movie theater should have only 40 seats ought to be alien to every American. People who remember the theaters of the '20s - their walls dripping with ornamentation, balconies rising up into the darkness above, a gilded ceiling high overhead - must look at these barren concrete toolsheds we call movie theaters and laugh.
When people talk about the great movie theaters of the past, they're usually referring to the lost palaces of the big cities. But small towns had their movie palaces as well - as anyone who grew up in a medium-size city with a downtown not yet sucked dry by the malls will tell you.
Each city had its aged queen, the big house built for traveling shows, opera, the latest Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler. My hometown of Fargo, N.D., had - and how inventive! - The Fargo. When I met the theater it was decades past its prime. The screen was stretched across the vacant stage like a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign on a store window; it wasn't big enough to fill the proscenium, and darkness leaked from the deserted backstage, a black frame around an empty canvas.
You imagined abandoned dressing rooms back there, locked and stuffed with forgotten props and bits of scenery. Beneath the stage you could make out the remains of the orchestra pit, the musicians long disbanded. A pipe organ that hadn't drawn breath for 20 years sat in the corner, huddled under a shroud.
The place had a sad and dusty dignity. It was also full of ghosts. The floor bore the marks of bolts that held down the old seats, and you could see where the aisles had been before a rather desultory renovation had put in new seats. The present laid uneasily over the past, and sitting in the theater watching some dull film it wasn't hard to imagine the seats that once fit into those marks on the floor, the people who held those seats, the spectacle that had rolled across the prairie for one night of entertainment.
Even the smaller theaters were more generous with space than today's theaters - narrow but impossibly high, at least to a child. As high as church and usually more fun. Even the ones that had no glamor had character, a sense of identity absent in the cookie-cutter multiplexes of the suburbs.
The Roxy, for example, was a porn theater that occasionally ran Disney movies, as if in penance. The screen bore huge scratches, like some big beast had swiped at it with claws, and the entire place stank. There were usually a few drunks who had come in expecting "Fantasia" to be something other than elephants dancing around in tutus. Not the best place for Disneyesque virtues. We didn't like going there; it made a kid feel unsafe. Besides, they never ran previews of the porno films.
Up the street was a tired and neglected theater called the Towne. I was taken there to see many Disney movies, each of which, it seems, starred Dean Jones, Don Knotts, a cat and a Volkswagen. The Towne had been crudely stripped of all ornamentation, and was always underheated and overlit - the lights blazed bright until showtime, at which time they crashed down abruptly, setting the mood at gunpoint. Even as a kid, I could tell that the Towne was doomed.
Strangest of all the Towne's attributes were the lights on the ceiling - three or four blinking dots high above. When the house lights were turned on full strength, they look pitiful and out of place, as if they'd gotten lost for an audition for the marquee outside. Once the lights were down, the dots looked vaguely threatening, pulsing on and off in the darkness above for no good reason.
It wasn't until years later at a theater in Minneapolis when I realized what the dots were. This theater was a neighborhood jewelbox the size of the Towne, meticulously restored to Jazz Age opulence. A Spanish-style balcony ran the length of the theater above our heads, filled with shrubbery, vases, plaster columns. The ceiling was lit with muted pinks and blues, and hidden machines projected clouds that moved lazily around the make-believe sky. Sitting in the theater was like reclining on a hillside at twilight.
Up above, I noticed, were those dots again, except now there were dozens. Blinking away, just like the lights of the Towne.
Now, of course, I realized what they were: stars. If the Towne had been anything like this theater, those scars on the walls had been where they'd stripped away the scenery and special effects equipment. The Towne had probably been the pride of its time; farmers and townspeople gathered Saturday nights under that benign and fantastic sky, ready to visit places far more interesting than Fargo.
All that was left by the time I got there were the stars, just three or four still struggling.
The Towne has been ripped down; the Fargo has been restored, and the Roxy (now the Broadway) still pumps out bad pornography. My only link to my hometown theaters is a poster I found in an antique store. It heralds the arrival of the dance team of Yolanda and Veloz at the Fargo Theater in the winter of 1937 for a "tap-dancing extravaganza." The couple are wearing evening clothes, bent over in a chastely suggestive tango. It was probably a bad show. That they were playing Fargo in the winter speaks much of their career.
But still. No one ever danced at the multiplexes. And no one ever will.