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The Last Picture Shows: The Nation's Magnificent Movie Palaces Are Fading Away
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12020 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
2,566 Words |
| Author
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Elliott Stein
Elliott Stein is a film historian, critic, and writer
currently living in New York. |
The movie palace was one of America's great inventions. Yet few members of today's "youth audience," habituated to attending movies in shoe-box multiplexes with Band-Aid size screens, can understand the dictum of Marcus Loew, the founder of MGM: "We sell tickets to theaters, not movies. The show begins on the street." The last quarter century has seen the decimation of the palaces, those luxurious conglomerations of world architecture, the first total environments of our century. Most of them have been twinned, triplexed, piggybacked, or gutted, knocked to the ground and turned into parking lots or supermarkets that feature Turkey Loaf Specials in lieu of the glamour that was Clara Bow, Valentino, and Joan Crawford.
Most Glorious of All
A recent feature story in the New York Times (July 26,1987), entitled "Broadway's Grand Cinemas Are Fading Away," noted that with the demolition this year of three historic theaters--the Strand/RKO Warner Twin, the Rivoli /RA Twin (it was Broadway's Parthenon, with Doric columns and a pediment filled with a beautiful frieze) and Loew's State--Times Square "is losing almost every vestige of its moviegoing past." That is the understatement of the year. New York was home to the first movie palaces, built in the teens; in the twenties came the Roxy, the most glorious of them all. Now, not one New York movie palace survives from those decades intact and functioning as originally intended, whereas downtown Los Angeles can boast of a historic theater district where for block after block the old cinemas are alive and thriving.
The Three Giants
The three giants of picture palace design were Thomas Lamb, John Eberson, and the Chicago firm of Rapp and Rapp. Lamb studied architecture at Cooper Union and in 1913 designed New York's first deluxe movie house, The Regent, on 116th Street, the granddaddy of all the Paramount and Roxys. By a miracle, much of this superb theater has survived. For the last two decades it has housed the Corinthian Baptist Church and can be seen during Sunday service. Lamb designed all three of the last remaining Times Suare palaces demolished earlier this year--the Strand (1914), the Rivoli (1917) and Loew's State (1921)--and the Academy of Music (1926) on 14th Street, recently converted into the Palladium disco. His Hollywood Theater, designed for Warner Bros. In 1930, a magnificent French baroque house, became the "legitimate" Mark Hellinger Theater in 1949. Lamb's early work was often in Empire style but was also influenced by Robert Adam, the great eighteenth
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