Once There Were Palaces

Every week, at least a couple of times, I try to check out what is going on news wise in the world of movie theaters. This week I saw a headline that stated that there were only three movie theaters left in the City of Milwaukee. There are similar stories coming out of downtown Chicago where there are two theaters and 18 screens. In Chicago, the country’s third-largest city, around 1.2 million people live on the south side. In downtown Detroit, the closest theater is nine miles away and requires crossing into Canada. In New Haven Connecticut, the residence of Yale University, there are no theaters.?

?Like hospitals, post offices, schools, churches, and parks, theaters at one time made up the ingredients of what it means to live in a city. Theaters are aspects of a neighborhood that unfortunately we take for granted, but like record stores and? bookstores demonstrated, they can increasingly become an endangered species.

?Once movies evolved from shorts to feature length movies revenues exploded. Audiences stayed at theaters for longer periods of time, ate more concessions and dedicated a good part of their leisure time to the act of movie going.? Since audiences stayed longer the premise in which the movie was presented had to be part of the equation of why people go to the movies. This gave rise to the great downtown theater. Some of these buildings were so over the top in their layout and design that they became known as movie palaces.

These palaces demanded a certain distribution pattern. Movies would play first in these downtown icons. Then the movie would make its way into the suburban markets and finally the smalltown markets. Many of the movies made for example in 1940 played for as long as a year at downtown theaters and second run before they were removed from distribution. Now release holds in modern times are far far less. There are examples of movies like “The Pom Pom Girls” playing for a year, “Phantom of The Paradise “ played for 3 years and “The Ballad of Caleb Hogue” played for 18 months.

?Movie historians often refer to 1939 to 1940 as key years in “Hollywood’s Golden Era”. From a box office perspective things were none too rosy, “Gone with The Wind” was a huge success, but in 1940 it was a petunia in an onion patch. The overall state of the movie economy was shaky at best. The war or threat of war depending on your Nation of residence had severely reduced the foreign markets for the studios. After enjoying a post-depression boom, business was down 5%. Contrary to today to counter the loss studios began to increase both the quality of the movies released and the number of the movies released. A glut of quality pictures caused the market significant agitation. Gone with the Wind countered that trend; that movie by itself accounted for 50% of the total industries profits for the year 1940.

?A slow erosion started to take place, stars and star directors started calling their own shots, away from the traditional sense of studio control. Major independent producers like Frank Capra, David Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, and Walter Elias Disney started to strike out on their own. Under the Paramount Decree whose legal foundation started in 1939, Chaplin began to independently produce, “The Great Dictator” a cinematic poke in the eye to Adolph Hitler.

The Variety industry analyst of the day, Roy Chartier made the following comment on the state of the industry,? "The war, and any boom resulting from that industrially in this country, might mean generally renewed vitality in theater receipts. It also might mean nothing and, so far, it hasn't except in a very isolated way through stepped up grosses where production has spurted, notably steel centers." I find it interesting that the increased box office reflected? the economic activity tied to war production.

?The movie palaces and their sway began to get a tad tattered. Once a showcase for studio power, they quickly became problematic, impulsively built and not maintained. With the onset of both television and the impact of the Paramount Decree, the pattern of distribution was forever altered.

The market has a mind of its own, look at the movie exchange system and regional distribution patterns. The drive-in arose out of the rising post war car culture, numbering 4000 screens at one time.? The great downtown theater struggled and in some major cities like New York and Chicago, they became grindhouses.? Most of the great downtown movie? palaces' decline was accelerated by the shifting of release patterns and the launching of wide releases. The soup for these grand old ladies of cinema was watered down.

?Real estate promoters would look at placing multiplexes nearby, taking the final breath of life out of these institutions. Soon the downtown multiplexes would find themselves in a similar position as the mall real estate boom took hold. Downtown theaters became rarer and rarer.

?The world is an odd and cyclical place. What is past is truly prologue and in the back of my mind, as office based real estate becomes less valuable as a result of the work at home trend, an iteration of the great downtown theater might rise again. This time driven by the deep need to create traffic flow and a consortium of increasingly desperate landlords. Rob Arthur John Sullivan Laura Peralta-Jones Domenico Del Priore Gianluca Chakra Steve Winn Shawn Dawes Tony Franks Patrick von Sychowski Kevin Mitchell @