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The office of that old theatre opened out on a canopy via a set of French windows. It’s since been encased in glass blocks, but when the weather was hot in the old days and the windows were all open, many’s the night I’ve seen the night marshal come up and tell the manager and the salesman, “Either stop screaming at each other in that kind of language or I’ll throw you both in jail.” Chances are he would then sit down, light up his stogie and listen in on the buying session.
The salesman even had to argue against the law in that town. The old marshal would reminisce about Francis X. Bushman and Henry B. Walthall, the Little Colonel in “Birth of a Nation.” He was a great show fan, a great old guy, but a helluva poor marshal. He never arrested a single salesman.
The old projection room, in which I ran my first picture, solo, looked just the same except where we used to have a turntable they had a wrack of stereophonic sound. We were greater in the eyes of the patrons with our disks than they are with their magnetism.
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I’ll never forget that first picture. The projectionist called me just before Sun
day school. Said he was sick and that I’d have to take care of the show. Of course I said I couldn’t, but he said I was it. Mid I was. My heart was in my throat from 1:30 to midnight that day, but I never missed a changeover. “Roaring Twenties” with Jimmy Cagney, Frank McHugh and Priscilla Lane. I swear it’s the same story line Metro had last year in “Love Me or Leave Me.”
I remember one epic we screened one night after the second show, called “Death on the Diamond.” We sat and hollered at the umpire, smoked in the theatre and hooted when the action left the playing field. I think Robert Young made it. What a pitcher! Beaned the would-be murderer from the pitcher’s mound. Incidentally, how about that for a title? You think they have bad titles now? They were no better 25 years ago. You’ve just forgotten them.
Do any of you remember a picture called "Eskimo”? That was the name of a real “biggee” back in the early ’30s. I remember we put on a colossal campaign with prepared newspaper heralds for it and ran it four big days. I was sold on it long before seeing it and worked hard to put it over. When playdate
came, I had intestinal flu so bad I couldn’t eat and was bedfast the first three days. On the fourth night I struggled down to the theatre and got my head in the aisleheacl just as this big Mala— that was the name of the Eskimo hero (I’ve got a memory like an elephant)—was taking a big bite of dog. Seems he’d had to kill it to have something to eat himself. Needless to say this did less than a whole barrel of the then non-existent penicillin would have done to cure my flu. After 1 came back from the restroom the impact of “Eskimo” was somewhat less than terrific on my dim and dizzy consciousness.
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It was fun going back a quarter of a century with my old classmates, but I think it was more fun just spending a couple of hours in the old theatre, chasing the ghosts that started haunting me in those hopeless depression years and which still are chasing and beckoning me on today.
I guess I’m just in love with the motion picture business.
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