One Summer: America, 1927

seemed crazy that such a huge and popular business could be struggling, but it was. The problem was that turnover was so rapid that few individual pictures made much profit. Programmes were sometimes changed three or even four times a week, so there was a constant need for more product. Studios were churning out as many as four new films a week, a rate that was clearly incompatible with quality. When somebody pointed out to MGM chief Irving Thalberg that it was wrong to put a beach scene into a movie set in Paris since Paris patently is not on any coastline, Thalberg looked at the person in astonishment. ‘We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris,’ he replied.
    As audiences became more discerning in where they sat, if not always over what they watched, cinema owners built bigger, more sumptuous cinemas in the hopes of coaxing in more people at higher prices. Big cinemas began to appear from about 1915 (a reminder that while Europe was at war America was at the pictures), but the golden age of the picture palace was the 1920s. Cinemas were built on a scale that was truly epic, with auditoriums that could seat 2,000 or more patrons in an atmosphere of opulence greater than any they had experienced before. People, it was said, went to Loew’s cinemas just to enjoy the well-appointed toilets.
    Architects borrowed freely and imaginatively from any culture that had ever built on a grand scale – Persian, Moorish, Italian Renaissance, Baroque, Meso-American, gilded French. Egyptian became especially popular after the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922. At the Tivoli in Chicago the marbled lobby was said to be an almost exact copy of the king’s chapel at Versailles, except presumably for the smell of popcorn.
    The problem was that movies alone couldn’t fill such a large volume of seats. Cinema owners had to provide extra attractions – musical performances, newsreels, serials, a comic turn, perhaps amagician or other novelty act, dance demonstrations, a round or two of a popular game called Screeno. Some of the big cinemas spent as much as $2,800 a week on orchestras alone. Increasingly, the film became a minor feature of the entire package.
    In 1927, an industry insider named Harold E. Franklin produced a book with a dull title but a worrisome message. Motion Picture Theater Management outlined with clinical precision the grim economics of motion picture screening. Rent on a typical new movie palace took roughly a third of gross receipts, and advertising swallowed up half as much again. Orchestras lopped another 15 per cent off the intake, and live entertainers typically took about 7 per cent more. When all the fixed costs of staff salaries, utility bills, maintenance, property taxes and so on were factored in, the profit in even the best-case scenario could never be more than a sliver of overall takings.
    Despite the economic risks – indeed, folly – of building ever larger cinemas, owners somehow persuaded themselves that the answer was to keep doing so. The first half of 1927 alone saw the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, where patrons could enjoy movies from within the sanctum of a faux Buddhist pagoda; the 3,600-seat Norshore in Chicago, whose interiors were a confection of costly rococo; the similarly ornate and gleaming 3,100-seat Proctor’s Eighty-Sixth Street Theatre in New York; and the granddaddy of them all, the vast, bejewelled Roxy Theatre on Fiftieth Street at Seventh Avenue in New York. Everything about the Roxy was without parallel. It seated 6,200 people. The dressing rooms could accommodate 300 performers. A 118-piece orchestra made every movie a symphonic as well as a visual experience. An organ so massive it needed three men to play it provided musical interludes. Fourteen Steinway pianos were on permanent standby. The air in the theatre was cooled and freshened by giant machines in the basement. Drinking fountains dispensed ice-cold water – a thrilling novelty. The Roxy even boasted its own ‘hospital’ where, as the literature proudly noted, ‘even a majoroperation can be performed if necessary’. So dazzling was the infrastructure that even Scientific American sent a reporter to write a feature. A cartoon in the New Yorker showed a child in the lobby asking her mother in hushed awe, ‘Mama, does God live here?’
    Building the cinema was estimated to have cost between $7 million and $10 million. The money came from a film