First package of excerpts of BIOGRAPH TIMES.
Edited for submission.
BIOGRAPH TIMES: Repertory Cinema
by F.T. Rea
1971: On what I remember as a bright morning, it was in early July of 1971, I went to a construction site on the north side of the 800 block of West Grace Street. Mostly, it was a big hole in the orange dirt between two old brick houses.
A
friend had tipped me off that she’d been told the owners of the
movie house set to rise from that hole in the ground were looking for
a manager who knew something about movies and could write about them.
She also said they were hoping to hire a local guy. Chasing the
sparkle of that opportunity I met David Levy at the construction
site.
Levy was the Harvard-trained attorney who managed the
Biograph Theatre at 2819 "M" Street in Washington. D.C. He
was one of a group of five men who, in 1967, had opened Georgetown’s
Biograph in an old building that had previously been a car
dealership. Although none of them had any experience in show biz,
they were hip young movie lovers whose timing had been impeccable --
they caught a pop culture wave.
The golden age of repertory cinema was waxing and they happened to be living in what was the pretty good market for their venture. They did well right from the start. With their success in D.C. to encourage them, a few years later the same five, plus one, looked to expand. In Richmond’s Fan District they thought they had found the right neighborhood for a second repertory-style cinema.
At the time I was working for a radio station, WRNL, so I gave Levy a few tapes of some lighthearted radio commercials I had made for what had been successful promotions. About 10 weeks after that first meeting with Levy I was offered the manager’s position for the new Biograph.
At 23-years-old, I could hardly have imagined a better job for me existed. At least not in the Fan District, the neighborhood in which I then lived with my wife, Valerie, and 21-month old daughter, Katey. This happened three years after Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia merged to become Virginia Commonwealth University in 1968. The Biograph's location was adjacent to VCU.
Although a couple of film societies at VCU were active on campus at that time, other than local film critic Carole Kass' History of Motion Pictures class, the school, itself, was offering little in the way of classes about movies and filmmaking. There were a few cool VCU professors who showed artsy short films and occasional features in their classes.
Mostly, independent and foreign features just didn’t come to Richmond, pre-Biograph. The dominant movie theater chain, Neighborhood Theatres, would run a half-dozen, or so, European films in a good year.
*
1972: On the evening of Friday, February 11, 1972, the Biograph adventure got off the ground with a gem of a party. In the lobby the dry champagne flowed steadily, as the tuxedo-wearers and colorfully outfitted hippies mingled happily.
A trendy art show was hanging all over the walls. The local press was out in force to cover what was an important event for that little commercial strip in the northeast edge of Richmond's Fan District. The feature we presented to over 300 invited guests was a delightful French war-mocking comedy — “King of Hearts” (1966); Genevieve Bujold was dazzling opposite the droll Alan Bates.
In the wake of news stories about the party celebrating the Biograph's arrival, the next night we opened for business with a pretty cool double feature: “King of Hearts“ was paired with “A Thousand Clowns“ (1965). Every show sold out.
On the opening night's staff were: cashiers Cathy Chapman and Susan Eskey; ushers Bernie Hall and Chuck Wrenn. A few weeks later Chuck was promoted to assistant manager and Susan Kuney was hired as a third cashier. For the first few months that team smiled and sold the tokens for entry through the turnstile and the buckets of popcorn (slathered with a butter-like product).
The Biograph’s printed schedule, Program No. 1, was heavy on documentaries; it featured the work of Emile de Antonio and D.A. Pennebaker, among others. Also on that first program, which had no particular theme, were several titles by popular European directors, including Michaelangelo Antonioni, Costa-Gavras, Federico Fellini, and Roman Polanski. Like this first edition, each of the next several published programs covered about six weeks and offered mostly double features.
My bosses in D.C. called our style of operation “repertory cinema.” Which, to us, meant a curated mix – a smorgasbord of worthwhile old, new, domestic and foreign flicks.
After
the opening flurry of interest in the new movie theater, with long
lines to nearly every show, it was surprising to me when the crowds
shrank dramatically in the months that followed. Among other things,
that suggested to me how important the publicity surrounding the
Biograph's opening had been.
As VCU students had been a
substantial portion of the theater’s initial crowd the slump was
chalked off by the owners to pretty weather, exams and then summer
vacation. In that context, the first summer of operation was opened
to experimentation aimed at drawing more customers from beyond the
immediate neighborhood.
That plan gave me an opportunity to do more with a project my bosses had put me in charge of developing – Friday and Saturday midnight shows. By trial and error Chuck and I learned what sort of movies lent themselves to offbeat promotion and performed well at the box office.
Early midnight show successes were “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “Yellow Submarine” (1968), “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” (1971), and an underground twin bill of “Chafed Elbows” (1967) and “Scorpio Rising” (1964).
The third member of the midnight show promotion team was Dave DeWitt, who then worked for WGOE-AM. He produced the radio spots. Dave and I happily shared the copy-writing chore. WGOE was a popular daytime station aimed directly at the hippie listening audience.
Dave, Chuck and I came to understand there were two essential elements to promoting midnight shows: Radio spots had to be created and run on WGOE. And at Chuck's urging, I created cartoonish handbills/flyers that were posted on utility poles, bulletin boards and in shop windows in high-traffic locations. Both of those elements needed to show a sense of humor.
*
On
September 13, 1972, a George McGovern-for-president benefit was
staged at the Biograph. Former Gov. Doug Wilder, then a state
senator, spoke. We showed "Millhouse" (1971), a documentary
that put President Richard Nixon in a bad light.
Yes, of
course, I was warned by scolds – some of them well-meaning – that
taking sides in politics was dead wrong for a show business entity in
Richmond. Moreover, taking the liberal side only made it worse.
However,
the two most active partners who were my bosses, Levy and Rubin (who
was a geologist turned artist) were delighted with the notion of
doing the benefit. They were used to doing much the same sort of
shows up there. So with the full backing of the boys in D.C., I
didn't hesitate to reveal my left-leaning stances on matters touching
politics.
Also in September “Performance” (1970), a
somewhat overwrought but well-crafted musical melodrama -- starring
Mick Jagger -- packed the house at midnight three weekends in a row.
Then a campy, docu-drama called “Reefer Madness” (1936) sold out
four consecutive weekends. We were clearly on a roll.
The midnight shows were going over like gangbusters. To follow “Reefer Madness” what was still a little-known X-rated comedy, “Deep Throat” (1972), was booked as a midnight show. The Georgetown Biograph was already experimenting with playing naughty midnight shows, so we chimed in. In Richmond, we had played a few films – like "Midnight Cowboy" (1969) – that had earned an X-rating, but they had been more artsy than vulgar.
Thus, this was our first step across the line to hardcore porn. As “Deep Throat” ran only an hour, master prankster Luis Buñuel’s surrealistic classic short film (16 minutes), “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), was added to the bill, just for grins. The staff came to refer to it as, "The Dog."
It should be noted that Buñuel’s first film, like "Deep Throat," was also branded as totally obscene in its day. Still, this may have been the first time that particular pair of outlaw flicks ever shared a marquee. A couple of weeks after “Deep Throat” began playing in Richmond, out of the blue, a judge in Manhattan slammed down the gavel and ruled it to be obscene.
Suddenly the national media became fascinated with it. The star of "Deep Throat," Linda Lovelace, appeared on network TV talk shows. Watching Johnny Carson tiptoe around the premise of her celebrated “talent” made for some giggly late-night television in 1972. Thus, we found ourselves on runaway train of a cultural phenomenon. In other cities judges promptly followed the lead of the New York judge and ruled the movie too smutty for their neighbors to see.
A couple of weeks later, in Richmond's Fan District, to be sure of getting in to see the Biograph's midnight show, savvy patrons began showing up as early as 11 p.m. It became the thing to do. Standing in line on the brick sidewalk for the talk-of-the-town midnight show frequently turned into a party. There were nights that parts of the queue resembled a folding-tables, tailgating scene in the RFK parking lot at a 1972 Redskins game.
A band of Jesus Freaks took to gathering on the sidewalk, across the street from the theater, to issue bullhorn-amplified hellfire warnings to the patrons waiting in the midnight show line. Of course, it only boosted West Grace Street's film noir tone. And, don't forget, in this time, the bars in Richmond closed at midnight. Anyway, that's how the midnight show at the Biograph became THE chic after-party destination for the 1972 Holiday Season.
Playing for 17 consecutive weekends, at midnight only, “Deep Throat” and the Buñuel short subject grossed over $30,000. That was more dough than the entire production budget of "Throat," which was America’s first skin-flick blockbuster. Those timely midnight show grosses conveniently made up for the disappointing performance of an eight-week program of venerable European classics at regular hours. It included ten titles by the celebrated Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman.
*
Question: In our first year we had defined "repertory cinema" by what we did; so what had the management team learned from that experience?
Answer: Running split weeks with doubles features, plus midnight shows, sure chewed up a lot of product. We screened over 200 different feature length titles.
Note:
Here's a sample of what was the first year's array of double
features. The reason for choosing to put 12 of the twin bills we ran in 1972 on the list is that was typical of our calendar style programs published during that year of learning the ropes.
Feb. 21-23, 1972: “Z” (1969) & "The
Battle of Algiers" (1966).
Mar. 17-20, 1972: “Gimme
Shelter” (1970) & “The T.A.M.I. Show” (1964).
Apr.
12-13, 1972: "Bell Du Jour" (1967) & "A Man and a
Woman" (1966).
Apr. 16-18, 1972: “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) & “Drive, He Said” (1971)
June
1-7, 1972: “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1969) & "Klute"
(1971).
June 14-18, 1972: “Putney Swope” (1969) &
"(Warhol's) Trash" (1970).
June 29-July 2, 1972:
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb" (1964) & “M*A*S*H” (1970).
Sept. 21-24,
1972: "Citizen Kane"(1941) & "The Magnificent
Ambersons" (1942).
Oct. 9-11, 1972: “The Third Man”
(1949) & "Breathless" (1960).
Nov. 17-19, 1972:
“Duck Soup” (1933) & "Horse Feathers" (1932).
Dec.
7-10, 1972: “The Producers”(1968) & “The Graduate
(1967).
Jan. 25-28, 1973: "The Conformist" (1971) &
“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1971).
– 30 –
Word count 1,973.
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