By the time you read this, I will have added another birthday to my list of attributes.
Which birthday? Let’s just say I was born into Harry Truman’s presidency.
OK, I hate coyness about age. 73rd.
In my early years in Brooklyn, we did not have a television or a telephone. Evenings were spent talking, listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, Duffy’s Tavern (important listening because my uncle ran the local tavern just next to the police station), and The Shadow, and reading newspapers and books.
We had four movie theaters in our neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. They were the American, the Winthrop, the Meserole, and the RKO Greenpoint. In any given week a person could see 22 films without leaving the neighborhood. They weren’t always first run, they were often re-releases, and admission was cheap. 25 cents for a triple bill on Saturday.
Distribution of film was so different then. In the major cities you had the major entertainment venues. New York’s Times Square and associated parts of Manhattan. That’s where the important films started their journeys. Then they would move out to sections of the other boroughs. In Brooklyn, that was the area around Fulton Street which was a major shopping district with numerous major department stores and four theaters: the Lowe’s Metropolitan, the RKO Albee, the Brooklyn Paramount (later to be fabled in rock n’ roll legend by the live shows sponsored by Alan Freed and Murray the K), and Fabian’s Fox (also a home of Murray the K’s rock n’ roll shows after the Paramount closed). These grabbed the major films after they left Times Square and added new releases which hadn’t made the cutoff for Times Square. There might even be double bills here. The second feature would be something that had never been on the short list for Times Square.
After a week, maybe two if it was really successful, the film would then move into the neighborhoods like Greenpoint, each of which had its own theater(s). In Greenpoint, the next stop for the films was the Greenpoint or the Meserole. Films from the Albee and the Fox would gravitate toward the Greenpoint; the Meserole would get the ones from the Metropolitan and the Paramount. This was based on extant, and often old-time agreements with the studios, distribution agreements with the studios.[i]
The film would rest there for a week. On a rare occasion, two. Then in another week or two it would find its way to the American and the Winthrop. Both were owned by the same man; each was at an opposite end of the neighborhood. They changed bills four times a week. A new show would appear every Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Saturday would be a triple bill; the others would be doubles.
Saturday would be matinee/kids fare: westerns, horror and science fiction, Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis, plus a serial, cartoons, and a short. The other three weekly programs were a combination of “new releases” fresh from Times Square and relatively recent adult pictures.
Neither theater would show the same films within a, say, two-week period, but they would show the same programs. Except for the Saturdays, they were discreet to each theater.
I should mention that I lived around the corner from the American, a five-minute walk from the Greenpoint, and a ten-minute walk from the Meserole. The Winthrop required a five-minute bus ride and a ten-minute walk.
As long as we are mentioning public transit, I should mention that Greenpoint was on the Brooklyn-Queens border. We were a short fifteen minute bus ride from three other theaters in Sunnyside, Queens, New York. They did not seem so directly connected with previously existing distribution systems, but did get the films on their own times. They all did a conventional weekly double bill schedule.
So, another six films each week, occasional duplication. That made it easy to see films – movies as I would then have called them.
My parents loved movies. In the years before WWII, in the early years of their marriage, they went to NYC’s clubs, plays, movies frequently. In one of their favorite watering-holes, they struck up a casual acquaintance with Monty Woolley, the Princeton professor turned movie star with The Man Who Came to Dinner. A sleek ballroom dancer of vaguely (and probably false) European ancestry asked my mother to go on the road with him as his headlined dancing partner. She preferred staying with my father, who shortly thereafter went off to war with General Patton. My mother never regretted either.
As I grew into the years when I could go to films, they took me. My first film was a Roy Rogers programmer. I remember a fistfight at the top of a water tower. Roy won.
I also remember spending most of my time – and my father’s – studying the fire hose located at the back of the auditorium and asking him to let me play with it.
Over the years, my friends on the block always knew that my parents and I, and later my mother and I, after my father died too young, went to the movies. There was no jealousy I ever saw. I went, they didn’t.
But on those days when the weather, or other random circumstances, prohibited punch ball or stick ball, we would gather somewhere safe and dry. Never in someone’s home; parents or siblings might be there. One wouldn’t want that. Stoops were great.
Sometimes we’d play board games. Cards were not big in my group. Sometimes we’d talk about movies we had seen. The most fun was going over the ones most of us had seen. Once we pieced together the story of Them!, the giant ant film of the 50s. So many of us had a recollection of the film that we decided to act it out in front of the buildings on our street in Brooklyn, a reasonable stand-in for the southwestern desert.
As roles were assigned, much against my passionate protests, I was assigned the role of the self-sacrificing hero cop. I didn’t want to die saving the two kids. But I had to. We had to be faithful to the movies.
I mention all this because I learned how to tell stories through these experiences.
We didn’t always act out the films. Usually when only one of us (generally me) had seen it that person became the storyteller.
I got to do that a lot, sometimes to a rapt audience.
That’s how I started learning to write films, although I didn’t know it then. I tried to tell the film stories that I had seen. The more I told them the more I intuited that I need to mention the details so I did. That made me more sensitive to the details as I was watching films.
I was a rolling stone gathering a lot of moss.
_______________
MANY YEARS LATER, EARLY 1980s
We had been visiting as we usually did, Rafe (Samson Raphaelson) and I. Talking about films, writing, Columbia, Jolson and Chevalier. A couple of friends, separated by about 60 years, and a life lived and one just trying to kick into gear.
Dorshka, Rafe’s wife of many decades, had come in (having advised me on my arrival that it would have to be a shorter evening than usual because the doctors were insisting that Rafe get his rest) multiple times and Rafe would each time assure her, “soon.” Finally, we did call it a night, well after midnight. Rafe walked me to the door, watched me the few feet to the elevator, and as was always his want stood watch until the elevator arrived. He said, as did I, “so long,” or “See you,” or “Take care,” or one of the other casual valedictions we use which have no meaning other than “I’m/You’re leaving now.” But the human face, when it is in touch with its body’s soul, is so eloquent that we knew, Rafe and I, that he and I knew that we were saying a more terminal good-bye, that we wouldn’t see each other again, on this plain, if at all.
One of the things we had talked about that evening was a driving vacation I would be embarking on in about a week. It would take me from my home in Brooklyn to Galveston, TX., to visit my college roommate and his wife where he was doing post-doc medical work at the University of Texas branch there.
As I was making my way there, I stopped to nourish myself and my car at a highway rest stop. I saw a display of tourist-oriented post cards and thought I should send one to Rafe as he had been very enthusiastic about the journey. I immediately had a dark feeling that it would be inappropriate. I didn’t get the card.
Within an hour of my arrival at my friends’ home in Galveston two days later, Dave, my former roommate, asked me if I had known a Samson Raphaelson at Columbia. I told Dave that Rafe was a great friend and teacher. Dave told me Rafe had died two day before. As Rafe had written the original “The Jazz Singer” and numerous other plays and films, including some for Hitchcock and Lubitsch, his was a passing of note.
I marveled at the connection Rafe and I had had. I remembered then, as I do often, one specific evening Rafe and I had spent together. I often hope that some of my students have had with me such an experience that Rafe gave me, I believe, without his being conscious of it. On the other hand, knowing how wise Rafe was about writing and other things, he may have planned it entirely.
I had brought him what I thought was my first mature script. It was a detective story around a murder in a prep school in Brooklyn. Prior to going to Columbia, I had spent a year teaching English at a prep school in Brooklyn. I shall comment on that no further.
He and I had planned to meet this particular evening to talk about the script. We met for about three hours. I said little. At the end I managed to thank him and to say that I would go over all he had said. Having expected to receive nothing but adulatory praise, I had not brought with me pen or pencil. Rafe made no mention of this.
When I hit the sidewalk, I felt like the sidewalk wanted to hit me, but that I wasn’t worth the effort. From Rafe’s Central Park West apartment, I had a walk of about ten blocks south and three east to get to a convenient subway stop. There were other trains closer, but walking this distance meant I would spend less time in the subway. Always a resolution to be desired.
I also needed to exert some energy to walk off the anger that was surfacing in me about how Rafe had treated my terrific script.
As the walk progressed, I felt the energy of the anger realigning itself. I heard Rafe talking about specific moments in the script, wanting more from or about characters. Some points were too unclear, others were too easy.
If my walk had been done by Looney Tunes, all these figures would have been swirling around my head as I navigated Seventh Avenue to 53rd Street, bumping into and off each other as I moved up to 5th for the subway by MOMA.
I also would have realized that the chaos had diminished, and I was no longer angry at the disrespect shown my talent by Rafe.
I realized that Rafe had been talking to me, not as a student, but as a fellow writer. The New York City subway had never felt as much like Renoir’s Golden Coach as it did that night.
I had arrived. Not that I was guaranteed a big paycheck. Or even a small one.
But I was a writer.
_________
Rest in Peace: Tommy Kirk.
In Memoriam: George W. Hunt, S.J.; Samson Raphaelson; Andrew Sarris; Stefan Sharff.
_________
Willow Entertainment Media Staff: Mel Bilecky; Selma Jasarevic
Editorial Consultants: Steve Carosso; Chris McAteer.
Contact info: Feel free to respond to my comments here on line. Feel free also to email me at donophontom@gmail.com. Please be aware that I will feel free to quote, with attribution, in future posts any email received at this address unless the sender specifically requests either anonymity or that no reference be made whatsoever to the comments rendered.
[i] . After the Supreme Court’s Consent Decree in the late 40s, the major studios had had to divest themselves of all the distribution networks they had built up since the 20s, but they still maintained those connections.
Gonna Say it Now 