#359 The Magic of the Movie Theater

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2021

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In celebration of 125 years of movie exhibition in New York City -- from vaudeville houses to movie palaces, from arthouses to multiplexes. In the spring of 1896 an invention called the Vitascope projected moving images onto a screen at a midtown vaudeville theater. The business of movies was born. By the late 1910s, the movies were big ... and the theaters were getting bigger! Thanks to creators like architect Thomas Lamb and impresario Samuel 'Roxy' Rothafel, theaters in Times Square, New York's prime entertainment district, grew larger and more opulent. Even by the 1940s, movie theaters were a mix of film and live acts -- singers, dancers, animal acrobats and even the drama of a Wurlitzer organ. But a major court case brought a change to American film exhibition and diversity to the screen -- both low brow (grind house) and high brow (foreign films and 'art' movies). Today's greatest arthouse cinemas trace their lineage back to the late 1960s/early 1970s and the new conception of movies as an art form. Can these theaters survive the perennial villain of the movies (i.e. television) AND the current challenges of a pandemic? FEATURING: The origin story of all your favorite New York City movie theaters. boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Episode 359 of The Bowery Boys, The Magic of Movie Theaters.
0:09.1	Hey, it's The Bowery Boys.
0:10.6	Hey.
0:12.0	Support for The Bowery Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:15.4	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowery Boys.
0:24.9	Hi there, welcome to The Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:28.1	And this is Tom Myers. And we are so excited, Greg.
0:32.4	After one year of this, we're so excited to get back to doing all those things that we once
0:39.3	took for granted. You know, things like going to see a Broadway show. Eating at a loud
0:44.9	restaurant, shouting over people because you can't hear anything. I know I missed that.
0:50.4	And of course, of course, we miss going to the movies. So today, we're giving a little
0:57.8	Bowery Boys tribute to the movie theater by looking at the history of movie theaters in New York.
1:04.7	Yeah, the theaters themselves, the movie palaces of your great and small.
1:11.0	Now, movie going was already changing before the pandemic. So as we head back into our normal
1:17.8	social habitats here, what might we expect to be different? You might be surprised to discover
1:24.8	that many different kinds of movie theaters have thrived in New York. So could the future of
1:31.2	film exhibition be something that New York has already experienced? 100 years ago. The movies
1:38.9	were big. Okay, but movie theaters were actually getting even bigger. And in particular,
1:46.0	Times Square became the home to many so-called movie palaces. Lavish movie theaters that could
1:53.6	sit thousands of people. And the masses weren't just flocking here to see movies. They got an
1:59.6	entire bill of entertainment, singers, dancers, an orchestra or at least, you know, the drama of a
2:06.4	Whirlitz or organ. So one major question that we will be asking today is whatever happened to
	...

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