Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace (Passion River, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The third documentary on film history shown on TCM June 7 was Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace, written and directed by April Wright in 2019. Its subject was the huge film theatres built by the major studios in the late 1910’s and throughout the 1920’s, which were not only palatial in scope and size but in décor as well. The idea behind them was to give anyone who could afford a ticket a sense of what it would be like to live surrounded by luxury, with hand-painted murals, an impeccably dressed and groomed wait staff, and your every need attended to in person. Even the lounges – the waiting rooms in front of the restrooms – were de luxe. The big studios that owned their own theatres – MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, RKO and, to a lesser extent, United Artists – built these almost literal movie palaces during the boom years of the 1920’s because they were taking in so much money they could afford to. In a way the story of the big movie palaces is that of the decline of urban America; after World War II Americans (white Americans, anyway, since openly racist policies on the part of federal agencies kept most people of color from exiting the urban areas even if they could have afforded to) moved en masse to the suburbs. Once-thriving downtowns became dead zones, as private automobiles replaced public transportation and the all-important question regarding the viability of a public business became, “Is there parking?”

The death of the movie palace is both a symptom and a symbol of the death of the inner city altogether; the photos in this film of the once-grand movie palaces literally and figuratively decaying through the years are heartbreaking. So-called “urban renewal” put the last nail into the coffin of the movie palaces; they were literally torn down en masse as emblems of the “blight” that had to be “redeveloped” before the cities could return to being safe environments for white people again. The movie palaces were also victims of bigger changes in the movie business itself. First there was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in an antitrust lawsuit brought against Paramount and the other major studios, that resulted in a ruling that movie production companies could no longer own their own theatre chains. This effectively ended the studio system in general and in particular dealt a death blow to one actor’s career; he was Ronald Reagan and he’d been a mid-level star at Warner Bros. and Universal-International in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s until the court-ordered divestment between studios and theatres cut off the market for his movies because he wasn’t a big enough star to take advantage of the new markets opened up for the true superstars of the day. (That’s why, when Reagan took office as U.S. President in 1981, antitrust enforcement virtually ceased; Reagan quietly allowed movie studios to buy theatres again and overall the administration blocked any efforts to keep companies in all industries from merging with each other. This not only fit in with Reagan’s pro-business ideology, it expressed his lingering disgust with what forced divestiture had done to his film career.)

Even worse was the advent of television, which took off in the early 1950’s; families that had once gone out to movie theatres now stayed at home and watched the “Boob Tube” together, at least partly because in-home entertainment eliminated the need for a baby-sitter. Also undoing the movie palaces and the large mass audiences they had depended on for their financial viability was the rise of small, independent “art houses” that showed foreign films, mostly made in countries that had looser movie censorship than the U.S. and could therefore depict relationships in general and sexual relationships in particular with greater frankness and honesty than U.S. films. The old movie palaces either physically crumbled (it took a lot of upkeep to maintain those elaborate façades and interiors, and as the theatres passed out of the studios’ hands, their new owners simply didn’t bother) or fell into dilapidation and seediness. Some of them became “grind houses,” showing cheap, tawdry movies and sometimes serving otherwise homeless people who found them really cheap places to spend the night, albeit they frequently peed or crapped on their floors. Some started showing out-and-out porn, especially once the success of the 1972 film Deep Throat established that there was a mainstream market for porn (at least until the advent of home video a decade or so later moved porn back into the privacy of individuals’ homes).

Some became venues for live performances, including the Oakland Paramount and the Fox in downtown San Diego, which became homes for symphony orchestras (ironic given that many of the big film palaces started out as vaudeville theatres), while others (particularly in Los Angeles) became venues for rock concerts. Still others were purchased by mega-churches – and, as a number of the talking heads pointed out in this documentary, churches actually turned out to be good stewards of the venues, carefully maintaining and improving them. But the true heroes of this movie are the theatre preservationists like Richard L. Fosbrink, Bob Boin, Jerald Gray (an African-American financier and private-equity capitalist who took it upon himself to restore the old Avalon New Regal Theatre in Chicago as a way to revitalize the South Side) and Rosemary Novellino-Mearns (who spearheaded the drive to preserve New York’s Radio City Music Hall after its owners announced in 1976 that they were going to tear it down; she worked there and her campaign began as a drive to save her own job as well as those of the other employees), even though one of the lessons of this movie is that any commercial enterprise is vulnerable to the changing tastes of its patrons as well as circumstances beyond its control that can render even a seemingly thriving business obsolete after just a few years (anyone seen a Blockbuster Video lately?).