Things to Do—and Not Do—in the Dark
Early silent film etiquette admonition. (Photo: Library of Congress)
I've found a way we were ahead of our time at the St. George Theatre, the 2,672-seat movie palace I ran in its last dedicated-to-movies year (1976). In almost every way (audience size, variety of offerings, consistent heating or air conditioning) we were well behind the times, but when it came to making the audience feel completely at home, we rocked. Which is to say one of our biggest problems was crowd control. Local (urban) neighborhood audiences maintained a consistent level of chatter throughout a particular Kung Fu double feature (nobody noticed when we ran the reels out of order). Kids often walked on the backs of seats, which cost over a hundred dollars each to fix, and, in a general sense, the auditorium resembled a marketplace or bazaar, with a constant low buzz of conversation, picked up by the excellent acoustics of the hall. That was when action pictures drew out the locals. Weeks when more suburban audiences came from the other side of the island, they had their own way of expressing themselves, as when one Henry Winkler type chose the prom moment in Carrie, to scream "Fuck her!" at the screen. Staten Island was and is, in many respects, the frontier.
Across the harbor in Manhattan, audience noisemaking and activity are tabu except when they appear in more specialized situations (Rocky Horror Picture Show, which got its start at the Waverly in 1976 would be one example, and another, the sexual excesses at Variety Photoplays).
Otherwise, Manhattanites observe rigorous protocols, to this day, thanks to what remains of the Brahmin caste of serious movie watchers. Case in point: just Google "talking in a movie theater" and see what you get. When I did, the first thing that suggested itself was New York Times Crossword Answers, and the suggested offering was, "nono." Shushing is your punishment at Lincoln Center Cinemas, and the Paris, while it still exists.
Serious movie buffs may not be quite as zealous as opera-goers (you know, that thing about unwrapping the cough drop in advance of the opera, because, forget talking, just unwrapping is a sin at the Met). As I said...serious moviegoers may not be quite as zealous as opera-goers, but they're a close second. I don't know about the Bronx and Queens, but Manhattan and Brooklyn have their etiquette, and you better keep your comments to yourself.
I've always assumed L.A. is more or less like Manhattan; but recently I happened on an L.A. Times piece on the effect theaters with recliners and full-service food appear to be having on what activities people choose to do in the dark facing a communally-observed screen. The author, a movie reviewer who attends a lot of matinees, was actually complaining about diaper changing!
Now that's something nobody would have thought to do in 1976. The point Glenn Whip tried to make in his column is that "...by turning theaters into replicas of people's homes, you are essentially creating an atmosphere where moviegoers are lulled into thinking they can behave as if they are actually relaxing in their own living rooms..."
Of course, the problem of inappropriate behavior in theaters isn't confined to movie houses. Way back in 2014, but still relevant, theatergoers were complaining on broadwayworld.com about the behavior of other audience members — people who texted throughout the show and even videoed it. In one particular instance, the theater manager was pleased to be tipped off about the videographer, as cast members had seen her screen, but couldn't pinpoint the exact row. She was ejected.
Back in 1976, we didn't have anything like the tech we have today, which is why the world I describe in my posts seems almost medieval. No texting, selfies or apps possible back then; after a while you just had to settle in and watch! What a privilege! The "willing suspension of disbelief" to quote Coleridge was easily possible; these days, we have to struggle to suspend.
I'd like to refer back to Glenn Whip of the L.A. Times, who wonders if theaters should revert to using wooden church pews. That reminds me of how the first indoor movies, the nickelodeons, got their start: plain wooden benches, in some cases borrowed from funeral parlors. Great place to change a diaper!
Afterthought:
There are numerous lists of bad movie etiquette out there, a good thing, as it means some people actually remember their childhoods.
Shark in the Dark at the St. George
Japanese Movie Poster for the movie, Jaws
I remember three things about showing Jaws as a movie theater exhibitor. First, we painted the pillars outside our 2,672-seat St. George Theatre movie palace red and azure blue in anticipation of the crowds; we were a "buck fifty" theater, and Jaws was, by that time, only a year old but still a sensation. The special red plastic letters spelling out JAWS that we'd driven to Brooklyn to buy from another exhibitor, stayed on our marquee just one week, from May 12th to the 18th; that's the second thing I remember. After that week, the mechanical great white glided off to another second-run movie house, where, presumably, it brought in more bucks than it had for us. That shark (all three versions that Spielberg's guys built) turned out to be duds; "The great white turd!" the director was fond of calling it. In all of its manifestations, it malfunctioned much of the time, forcing the budding filmmaker to rely on the movie's musical theme to indicate the fictional shark's presence.
These failures were, according to Spielberg, the making of the movie, which became more Hitchcockian, (compare the shower scene in Psycho,which also relies on music and inference). Spielberg had to rely on John Williams' award-winning duh-dah-duh-da duh-dah-duh-dah, because, among other impediments, none of the pneumatic shark models ever entirely graduated from mechanical shark school.
Meanwhile, for us first-time movie exhibitors, the film bombed, failing to fill even a third of our two-thousand-seat main floor, despite the fact that the forties-era air conditioning was actually functioning. This movie had taken watchers of the previous summer by storm, becoming, in its release year, the first movie to exceed a hundred million dollars gross in U.S. film rental history. So why'd it bomb the following year at the St. George, sitting as that palace does, right up the hill from the finest harbor in the North Atlantic?
Why does any movie bomb in one place and not another? Audience, of course. Not for nothin' was that shark white. White, like its literary predecessor, Moby Dick; but the crew in Melville's novel (think Ishmael, think Queequeg).would have engaged our audience. Moby's cast of characters is diverse, which can't be said for Jaws. The wharves of 19th century sea towns, where those characters came from, were about as diverse as a contemporary New York subway car — or the streets of St. George, Staten Island.
Not so "Amity Island" (Martha's Vineyard, where Jaws was shot). Chrissie Watkins takes her fatal skinny dip there, in a community our mean streets crowd had little knowledge of, or interest in.Even though our patrons craved action, they also craved identity. So it's a no-brainer that J.D.'s Revenge, about a black law student possessed by the spirit of a thirties' mobster seeking retribution, did better numbers for us than Jaws; or that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with its richly-diverse cast of characters, drew twice the ticket sales. Dog Day Afternoon was polyglot in its larger street scenes and overall mean streets feel, which is what our audience was looking for; same can be said for Taxi Driver.
If I had a movie palace to run again (there's a Quixotic thought!), I'd think hard about who the audience is, and what or who they identify with. At least half our audience came from the 'hood. There just wasn't enough diversity available to keep us in business. Spike Lee would come along eventually; Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, his first student film, would play Lincoln Center in 1983, seven years after we'd left the St. George. We did run the previously-mentioned J.D.'s Revenge, a case of demonic possession, with a black/white slant. Horror/thriller movies starring black actors weren't there yet. J.D. was ahead of its time, as attested by James Evans of Starburst, writing in 2017 on Rotten Tomatoes, "Its appeal is certainly wider than simply a Blaxploitation curio and it transcends any labels to be a great thriller, horror film and social commentary." Horror involving black alienation does seem to have hit the mainstream recently with Get Out, which is aimed at just plain everybody.
Of course Jaws was a summer movie, the ultimate summer flick for its time, a great fun film, never expected to bear the weight of social commentary. Still, it didn't speak to at least half our audience, and I wouldn't be thinking about it in this light at all, if I hadn't been surveying empty movie seats. The shark, I guess, was, in the eyes of many of our patrons, what privileged people were scared of, far away in the coastal waters off Massachusetts — and in the communal imagination — where white girls skinny-dipped in the moonlight.
Afterthoughts:
The shark will return to our St. George Theatre tomorrow, Thursday, July 25. Movies aren't the theater's stock-in-trade anymore (true of most saved movie palaces), so it's unlikely the film will sell out and doubly unlikely it'll do better than it did forty-three years ago; still, I think I'll go.
"The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen," Spielberg reflects. See Wikipedia for a well-researched treatment of Jaws, including some of the whys and wherefores of the shark's malfunctions.
Social Horror is a well-respected genre. Here, for your edification, is a list of films, including an argument FOR Jaws as a member of the Social Horror genre, whose social subtext, Jeremy Sklar surmises, is our failure as a nation after the fall of Saigon, which ended the Vietnam War. This subtext, I believe, works, and no doubt delivered well in the white working-class 'burbs, just not in the 'hood.
For alert readers who are wondering what the third thing I remember about showing Jaws at the St George is, it's a moment behind the candy case. It was my shift, and the movie had just begun, along with its terrifying midnight swim — which claims with agonizing slowness the life of the swimmer. From the candy stand, you could easily see through the glass into the theater. As the swimmer's head disappeared below the waterline, I can remember needing, suddenly, to find something below counter level to clean. Whatever it was, it kept me down there till the screaming stopped. Spielberg's a master.
What's Happenin' at the Palace
A headline splashes across the screen, by Movietone News
Once upon a time people lived at their local movie palaces, well almost. In the nineteen thirties and forties, citizens of the U.S. of A. saw roughly 3 movies a week in a theater, but that's not all they saw. According to Manuel H. Rodriguez, who grew up in the thirties on Manhattan's East Side, "Going to the movies typically meant seeing two movies, a cartoon, occasionally a short subject, and, if we went on Saturday afternoon, a serial that continued week to week for 12 weeks... " There was Keno Night (a gambling event involving luck and a big wheel) and/or Dish Night, when you could get the gravy boat for that china set you were slowly collecting. The local theater, palace or otherwise, functioned as a kind of babysitting service on Saturday afternoons; you could drop the kids off with enough money to cover the shows and candy. Sometimes an organist rose on a lift from below the stage and played songs everyone could sing along with, aided sometimes by a bouncing ball and lyrics on the big screen.
I've mentioned cartoons, Mickey and Donald and Bugs and their kin, but an important preparation for movie-watching was newsreels, Pathe and Movietone and their British counterparts. There was no nightly news waiting on a screen at home. Though you could listen to nightly radio, and the president's special fireside chats, or New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia reading the funny papers on Sunday morning, most of the information you got for the week, at least the imagery — soldiers taking Guadalcanal or the blimp Hindenburg blowing up in Lakehurst, NJ — was contained in Newsreels, America's (and Britain's) first ever documentaries.
A friend I mentioned in a recent post, grew up in the theater I later had a hand in running, the St. George, a 2,672-seat palace in Staten Island, New York. Last month, the New York Philharmonic played a free concert there, and she recalled, while we sat in the balcony, everything she could, from the perspective of her eighties, about growing up at the St. George Theatre. For her and others born in the thirties, the St. George, and its smaller Deco sister down the street, the Paramount, were full-service institutions, almost womb-to-tomb.
Womb-to-tomb, really? I did find a bad video of a woman in the act of giving birth at a multiplex, but you wouldn't want to see it. People do begin bringing children to movie theaters very early in their lives (check out Fandango's Stars to Strollers program). I myself was introduced awfully early (aged two) to rom coms, thanks to an adolescent sister.
Conversely, since there were movie theaters, people have died while watching in the dark, and are still doing it. Fuller details on this interesting if morbid movie theater occurrence can be had in the "Afterthoughts," at the end of this post, but I will stop long enough here to note that, from 1933, when the movie Freaks caused a miscarriage, through, over the years, a series of heart attacks, strokes, and alcohol poisoning, at least 11 people have been taken out of one or another theater feet first, mostly after viewing horror movies. One interesting exception is the death of Ole Bentson, a Belgian, who died laughing at A Fish Called Wanda in 1989, the year of its release. But I digress.
It was not uncommon in my 1950's childhood to walk in on a movie fifteen minutes late, planning to sit through the end and, after the cartoons and previews (yes, and MovieTone News) watch the beginning of the movie, until you recognized the part where you'd come in. That was because we weren't so much going to a movie as going to "the movies;" the film or double feature was simply a phenomenon that capped the experience of visiting the movie palace itself, with its various diversions.
While we were running the St. George, in 1976, certain neighborhood kids, enamored of the stained velvet seats and craving an endless supply of Snickers, tried really hard to live at the St. George all night long, sneaking upstairs and hiding under seats. No one ever achieved this fantasy, thanks to the vigilance of our ushers and "bouncers" who knew the kids by name, but the dream persisted, testified to by the sound of sneakers retreating on the fire escape stairs outside the balcony. Good thing too: what if somebody had died? — perhaps of sugar poisoning?
Afterthought 1:
As opposed to the figure cited in the beginning of this piece (patrons of the 1930s watched approximately three movies a week), current movie house patrons watch roughly three movies a month – quite a fall.
Apropos of people dying in movie theaters, here's a list, cobbled largely from the very interesting blog, looper.com:
1933, Freaks, a movie about the real lives of what were then called "midgets" (now Little People), a movie so upsetting to so many that it was withdrawn from circulation. A woman at a preview is reputed to have had a miscarriage while watching it.
1955, at The Creeping Unknown a 9-year-old boy suffered a ruptured artery.
1973, during the Roman premiere of the famously haunted Exorcist, audiences had to fight their way through a torrential downpour, accompanied by thunder and lightning, in order to get in to the theater. Many inside claimed to hear a horrific, almost demonic cry, coming from outside once the film started rolling. At one showing, a woman was so frightened she passed out in the theater and broke her jaw when she fell. She later sued the filmmakers suggesting that subliminal messages caused the accident. Warner Brothers settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
1975, Jaws. On September 9 of that year, a forty-five-year-old man in Chicago had a heart attack, despite the efforts of two doctors attending the movie to revive him.
1986, Aliens. A man in India died of a heart attack.
1989, A Fish Called Wanda.The aforementioned Belgian died laughing while watching Kevin Kline shove french fries up Michael Palin's nose (an admirable way to die, in my opinion!). That scene in the movie apparently resembled comic dining room antics familiar from his own family...
2004, The Passion of the Christ. In Wichita, Kansas, a woman died during the crucifixion scene; while in Brazil a pastor, who had rented the movie and theater for his congregation, slipped away peacefully.
2009,The Avatar.In Taiwan, a man died of high blood pressure.
2010, The Twilight Saga. In India, a 27-year-old man was found dead clutching an empty whiskey bottle. (This and the death of the nine-year-old boy are the saddest of all, I think.)
2015, Gari Gadi. A man died of a heart attack in Hyderabad.
2016, The Conjuring II. A man in India died, after being sent to a local hospital. His body was "remanded" to a second hospital, perhaps for an autopsy, and then it disappeared, having been sent in a cab! Weird! Sequel?
Recently in Thailand, a 77-year-old British man passed away quietly while watching a horror flick, Charlotte Comes Home.
Last but not least, beware of fancy recliners in theaters nowadays; a patron in a theater in Birmiingham, England, died after getting his head stuck between the footrest and the seat; he was trying to pull his cellphone out from between seats and suffered a heart attack. No movie was mentioned.
Not counting the thirteenth example (which was clearly a mechanical mis-hap) and the one that involved an empty whisky bottle, heart attacks, high blood pressure, miscarriages, compulsive laughing that dangerously raises the heart rate, and burst arteries all seem clear indicators of emotional response to what's on screen. What is a movie, after all, if not a shared dream?
The Rise and Fall of Midnight Movies
Scene from El Topo
The father of the midnight movie is dead, that's right, Ben Barenholtz. In case you never heard of him, he managed the Elgin Theatre in the seventies, a once-cherished art house in Manhattan. Berenholtz saw a 1970 screening at MOMA of the then-obscure El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky's acid Western (with Christian and Buddhist overtones). He was blown away and booked it immediately for midnights at the Elgin. This may sound normal enough to post-Rocky Horror generations; but midnight wasn't in the theater time clock back in 1970. Who would come to a movie at such an hour? Well it turns out, residents of the city that never sleeps were happy to fill the Elgin's roughly six hundred seats, many of them repeat patrons of the film, lining up under the Elgin's Deco marquee every single night. Then the limo crowd appeared, despite (or because?) Berenholtz hadn't done a lick of publicity. His strategy was an early example of going viral, all word-of-mouth.
A few weeks into El Topo's successful run, none other than John Lennon, already a fan of the movie, bought the rights to it, and Berenholtz lost his plum. No problem: he'd created a need and he found ways to continue to fill it, with John Waters's gross-out classic, Pink Flamingos ('71) and, when that had exhausted the audience, Perry Herzell's The Harder They Come ('72). Other theaters began to copy-cat: The Waverly with Romero's Night of the Living Dead, for instance. That movie had been around for a while, since '68, but Flamingos and Harder had arrived entirely via the midnight bracket, a slot that was ideal for the oddball, the surreal, or any movie that paired well with reefer.
At the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I was involved in trying to fill the seats of in 1976, we booked Reefer Madness as our first midnight title, then some tamer fare: Yellow Submarine and Woodstock. It was the year Rocky Horror would make its debut — as a midnight movie and performance vehicle across the harbor at the Waverly — but we couldn't get our hands on that kind of fare in Staten Island. For one thing, we couldn't afford the deposit on any kind of fresh indie. Then there was Gabe; paying the projectionist to stay past midnight cost time-and-a-half, a shocking twenty dollars an hour, and that was a full shift — till six A.M. — whether he went home at 3 or not.
Despite the tameness of our midnight fare, just putting "12 AM" on the marquee as a start time caused concession sales to rocket.
People already ate dinner at our stand, which had, I am proud to say almost a half-century later, the highest per capita sales in all five boroughs of New York City. The hot dogs were all-beef Kosher, the rolls individual Italian breads baked fresh daily, the mustard Dijon, the popcorn, fresh-popped with real butter. Add in the Good 'n Plenties, Charleston Chews, Snickers (frozen and otherwise), the Haagen Dazs and whatever. Then factor in the midnight hour and pot smoke thick enough to induce a contact high in non-smokers, and you have munchie heaven.
Case in point: a large wide-eyed patron in a leather jacket stumbles up to the glass case and slaps down a ten dollar bill. "Let me know when this is gone," he declares. That bill would be worth $43.08 today. Needless to say, he had to have assistance carrying back into the auditorium the groceries he'd purchased. God bless reefer and Reefer Madness...
Midnight movies as a genre, the ones that lasted, wrapping lines around the block, were all cult films, building their campy reps on their late night success. There is no equivalent to the excitement they generated in the seventies, when simply going to a movie at midnight seemed illicit.
The Venn diagram of cult films and midnight movies has a large overlap: so a Bruce Lee action pic and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert ('94) and Eraserhead ('77) share places on a list I found at Mentalfloss.
The genre has mostly exhausted itself, but there are some exceptions, like The Room, 2003 (Tommy Wiseau) which the aforementioned Mentalfloss post cites as "a film so bad that you can't help but be compelled by it." Now that calls for forty dollars' worth of concession stand groceries!
1. Ben Barenholtz, whose obit appeared in this most recent Sunday New York Times, had an interesting life, before and after he managed the Elgin Theatre. That he survived the Holocaust in an earlier phase of his life is remarkable.
2. After its acquisition by John Lennon, El Topo fell from box office grace. If you want the full story on that, here it is, well worth your time, a short beautifully produced piece with interviews: Jodorowsky, Barenholtz and others — worth it for generous clips from the movie itself.
3.The Elgin lasted as a movie theater until 1978, when it began its transformation into The Joyce, a venue for dance performance. For a good shot of it in its Elgin days, check out the youtube clip in Afterthought 2.
​4. Just in case you have trouble getting your mind around the fact that going to a late-night movie was, back in the seventies, kind of edgy, consider late-night television. NBC's The Tonight Show,which debuted on TV in 1954, had itself been a major experiment in programming. In his opening comments, Steve Allen thanked the viewing audience for being bold enough to stay up late on a week night and watch TV. It goes without saying, the streets outside were mostly empty.
4th of July and the Movies, Then and Now
Premiere 1942 Hollywood theater NY
1976, the bicentennial (200th) birthday party of American democracy, was a big deal. In New York Harbor, just minutes from the doors of the St George Theatre in Staten Island — a 2,672-seat movie palace I was then involved in running — a maritime party was underway, which included so many ships from all over the world you couldn't see the water for the hulls. people were streaming downhill to the ferry landing, jostling each other to stay on the sidewalk, a problem for us, because nobody seemed to notice that our theater doors were open.
Our popcorn was popping, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea graced both the marquee and the screen, and an usher stood hopefully at the ticket box; but hardly a soul paused to consider the coolness of our marble/red and gold lobby. Who wanted to see a bad interpretation of a Japanese novel, when the big show just down the hill was live? Leading the parade was the U.S. Coast Guard training vessel, Eagle, a sailing ship (alias Horst Wessel) surrendered to the U.S. by Germany as war reparations following WWII.
The war that brought us that ship had been a "good guys' war" (if there is such a thing), but the war in Vietnam, which had just ended, had been a travesty that cost thousands of lives and pitted generations and social groups of Americans against each other. Two days prior to the Bicentennial celebration, Vietnam had become one nation, its capital in Hanoi. Still, Americans love a party; we also love to forget, so, from coast-to-coast, we did just that, celebrating our two-centuries-old War of Independence, ironically, the war Ho Chi Minh himself had studied, in hopes of modeling Vietnam's battle on our own.
There is some kind of party going on in D.C. this year, and for a lot of reasons, I won't be there. I'm not even planning a picnic at home. Already weary of firecrackers — and the practice sessions in our neighborhood that lead up to everything seeming to explode at once – we're off to the movies.
What better time to be in a darkened hall with popcorn than the night when gunpowder reigns? Pass it on: the movies are as American as a buttered ear of corn. So if you crave quiet, you know where to go. I'd even settle for Sailor Who Fell...that old doggie we showed to practically nobody forty-three years ago. I'm happy to say, however, that Yesterday,a fantasy about the Beatles, is on-screen in a theater I have two free passes to, and the dark beckons. Okay, it isn't a movie palace; you have to hunt around here to find one that's showing a movie these days. But the Loew's Lincoln Square has pretty big screens, good enough for the likes of me on the 4th.
I fished around to see who else might think of the 4th as a damn fine time to go to the movies, and happened on an article in Esquire.Justin Kirkland's idea of "The Six Best Movies to See in Theaters on the 4th of July"isn't mine, except for one movie, Yesterday.But I agree, more or less, with his opening statement:
While some good ol' Americans might celebrate the big day with cheeseburgers and fireworks, the best of us know that the real ticket to a laid back Fourth is inside a cold movie theater with a bag of popcorn bigger than your head.
Amen! He lists as the other five movies he'd consider seeinG on the 4th: Spider Man: Far From Home, Midsommer (which does sound interesting, just not on the 4th), Pixar's Toy Story 4, Child's Play, and The Dead Don't Die.
Other than Yesterday, possible movies I'd like to counteract the explosiveness of the 4th with: Amazing Grace, Halston, Late Night, and a Les Blank double-feature, Chulas Fronteras and Del Mero Corazon, (two docs from the late seventies on Mexican American culture that are playing in Manhattan at the Metrograph).
There are, however, movies that either feature July 4th or are simply saying something about what it is to be American, and someday it might be interesting to put together a personal film festival of them: Jaws (which we should have shown at the St. George on the 4th, but had already blown away in late May, a month too early), Glory, about a black regiment in the Civil War — the movie that introduced me to Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman. Of course, there's good old Yankee Doodle Dandy — worth it just to see James Cagney dance his way up the proscenium walls of a theater on both sides of the stage, Hidden Figures — about black women mathematicians who put NASA into space, Independence Day (even though it is an Oliver Stone flick), and Saving Private Ryan.There are so many possibilities; add your own. Of the above, I wish I could have shown Glory on the big grape-soda-stained screen at the St. George, but it came out in 1989, more than a decade after our time as theater operators. So it goes.
Have a good (noisy or quiet) 4th, you guys, whatever your preference is...
I'm giving the last word to our second president, John Adams, one of the signatories of the document that severed our ties with King George III, across the pond. Adams was writing his wife, Abigail:
I am apt to believe that it [independence] will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
1. Adams, in his letter to Abigail, was actually referring to the 2nd of July, since it took about two weeks for all the signers to sign, and the first ones had done so on the 2nd. Still, we can blame and praise him, for our noisy carryings on. The violence implicit in his statement might have something to do with the risk each signer was taking in a perilous time; as Benjamin Franklin remarked back then, "...gentlemen, we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." And so they did hang together in the collegial sense, giving us the opportunity to do that, as well as to pursue happiness, and to expand our numerous tribe.
2. In a spooky coincidence, John Adams died on the 4th of July, fifty years after he and his colleagues signed the Declaration, in 1826. He and Thomas Jefferson had had a life-long rivalry, though they respected each other immensely. As Adams was dying, he is reputed to have whispered, "...Thomas Jefferson still survives..." Alas, Jefferson (who hoped Adams was still alive) had died a few hours before, on that same July 4th. Odd and wonderful: they went out together, two remarkable firecrackers.
3. For a sense of how desperate NYC was in the mid-seventies, and what it was like to view the tall ship parade on July 4, 1976, check out these narratives.
4. Here's the Esquire article on going to the movies on the 4th of July:
5. And finally, a clip of James Cagney as George M. Cohan, dancing his way up the proscenium walls. Apologies for an ad you'll have to skip...Cagney was an old hoofer from Vaudeville, before he played tough guys in gangster flicks.