Radio City Music Hall

Here’s a Program from December 1958:

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O Holy Night! “Auntie Mame” struck a chord with so many people (probably mostly everyone in the ‘40s and ‘50s) who had a “maiden aunt” in the family. Two world wars had depleted the male population sufficiently to produce a couple of generations with a noticeable cadre of unmarried women in their ranks.

Mine had started out her young adult life as a vaudeville songster on the RKO circuit and in Coney Island. There she had met and performed with Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, and many others who once brought down the house. The stories! Her career ended when vaudeville ended and my grandparents wouldn’t approve of her performing out-of-town. When she approached her eighties, she left Brooklyn and took an apartment near me in Tiny Town, not too far from Podunk (yes, there is a Podunk, 250 miles west of Times Square). We eventually knew that she was ready for a nursing home when, at our glittering dinner parties, she regaled friends of my generation with her familiar stories, now progressively emebllished, about how “I performed with ‘em all: Kaye, Sinatra, … and Elvis, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger, too.”

Before the play, there was the novel which I had read on the subway going back and forth to high school. Roz originated the role on B’way, but by the time I got to see the play, Greer Garson had taken over the part. That was a good choice, too, but it was Peggy Cass who tore us all apart with laughter. Those of us in the standing room could barely stay on our feet. She became a regular on the Jack Paar show, won an AA for the film, appeared in a couple of other shows (we went backstage to see her after “A Thurber Carnival”), and then that was that.

For the Christmas stage show, we sat close to the choral staircase on the right in the first row. My friend claimed that he had heard a Rockette fart. I didn’t, and I never believed him too much after that.

Recently TCM has been showing a short Robert Redford tribute to Natalie Wood. One gets to see beautiful letterboxed images from Inside Daisy Clover. This used to play fairly frequently on TV years ago and it never looked like this. While I remember that it was not an especially good movie projected at the Music Hall in Panavision it must have been something to see. Of course at the time everyone probably took it for granted.
Is there any screen couple today as beautiful as Wood and Redford?

Vito—

And my deepest thanks to you and those like you who gave us so much pleasure when you presented films with such care and style in those days. Yes, we indeed noticed, and are now delighted to express our gratitude.

REndres—

Thanks for your expert technical explanation of those maddening seams. The period I refer to extends from the Panoramic screen era of Summer ‘53 to some time around '56. “High Society” played there that summer (I didn’t see it there then); “Friendly Persuasion” was the Thanksgiving show. I don’t remember noticing seams before Summer '53, not even on the Magnascope screen for special sequences in “King Solomon’s Mines,” “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and other films of the early '50s.

Nor do I recall ever seeing a hot spot at RCMH in those years: much must have depended on where one sat (for me, often at the cross-aisle on either the right or left hand side of the orchestra: as a kid, no obstructive heads in front; as an adult, room to stretch my long legs).

Vito: I was a pint-sized nut about projection quality in those days. Now I’m just a crank.

The first film I saw at Radio City was “High Society” in 1956, so they may have gone to a seamless screen then as I don’t remember seeing seams. I was told that the screens the Hall used were Hurley screens and Mel Hurley almost gave them to the Hall for the publicity. At that point they changed the screen every six months. They may have tried to use a gain screen when Scope came in. I do remember being told that the screens were lenticulated, and that the lenticulations were embossed in the fabric at an angle to bring the reflected light up 5 degrees or so. That was a standard practice with the “MiracleMirror” screens Fox developed for CinemaScope for houses with a sharp downward projection angle. The curvature of the screen also helped distribute the light more evenly horizontally. Since the Hall couldn’t use a curved screen because of the loss of lines for scenery in the stage shows, a gain screen would have a hot spot and any deformation where the seams were would be more obvious. We did try a gain screen once when I was there, but it really displayed the faults BoxOfficeBill mentions — obvious seams and the hot spot that shifted as you changed seats. We switched to Technikote screens which were matte white, and although they were made up of panels, the seams weren’t noticeable from the audience. Ben Olevsky always pointed out that the Hall with its 19 degree downward projection angle and block wide width wasn’t suited for a gain screen. It may have been the experience with the screens that BoxOfficeBill is commenting about that convinced management of that.

I’m the crank who brought up the topic of visible seams in the screen several times in the past, notably in my post of 1 September 2004. I’ll stand by that claim to my last breath. Those seams enraged me as a kid in the early ‘50s.

The defiantly flat screen at RCMH in 1953 consisted of eight panels @ 4'x70' sewn horizontally so that when the masking dropped for CinemaScope, the viewing measured 28'x70', and when the side masking moved in for regular projection, the surface measured 32'x55' or so.

You cannot see the dark lines in Warren’s picture because the screen’s whiteness bleaches out those details. But if you sat close enough to that screen at the time, you’d go mad looking at them.

The same was true of enlarged screens everywhere in the mid-‘50s, except that to achieve curvature, the panels were sewn vertically on frames set at slight angles to one another to yield an arc of 12:1. If I remember correctly, the Roxy’s CinemaScope screen consisted of sixteen such panels (= 64’ total width), and masking closed in to allow ten panels (= 40' width) of viewing surface for conventional projection.

I further recall that around the time of “Friendly Persuasion” (Nov. ‘56), RCMH finally installed a truly seamless screen. Or perhaps I was just going blind from teenage activities and didn’t notice the familiar old horizontal lines so much. Today, I’d be thrilled to see any screen at all.

Vincent—-
I saw many Cinemascope films at the Roxy and the Music Hall and never noticed any horizontal strips (even with my discerning eyes) at either theater. I would be interested in reading others views on this.

does any one know if they will put out the tv movis “legs” I have it on cassette, but really want it on dvd, thanks

The F word is used once in the stage version of “The Producers”, in a song (“The King of Broadway”) that wasn’t included in the film. “The Producers” hasn’t been rated yet; the version tested this week was a rough cut. For the record, only one of Brooks' films was rated R (“Blazing Saddles”).

From the Wishful Thinking Dept. Several internet sites, including Ain’t It Cool News, have reported that there was a test screening of “The Producers” in Edgewater, NJ several days ago. The posted comments have been very favorable, noting that the film comes across as a faithful adaptation of the Broadway hit as well as a throwback to old fashioned movie musicals (no “Moulin Rouge” here); the audience apparently applauded after the end of each number. Assuming these comments are accurate, what an ideal RCMH Christmas attraction this would have made.

Rockettes, the Schola Cantorum, the Corps de Ballet, or all of them is more than I remember. But I can barely imagine any of them dashing around in the spidery shift that the film’s star wore on screen. Not the Rockettes kicking, nor the Schola chanting from “Prince Igor,” nor the Ballet dancing to Offenbach. Whew.

Warren reports the inventor of Panavision’s crediting the film for the success of that process, which MGM introduced because Hepburn thought that CinemaScope made her look like a balloon in close-ups. The Program gets it wrong and lists the process as “Metrocolor and CinemaScope.” I can only hope that the Program also got it wrong about the stage show’s use of “Radium effects by Stroblite Co. and Black Light Eastern Corp.” If not, we all might have glowed in the dark after leaving the theater. Perhaps we did? What I most remember about the stage show, again mimicking the film, was the jungle scent of “Perfume, ‘Antilope’ by Parfums Weil, Paris,” blown in under the seats during the finale. Folks with serious allergies might have had trouble staying on for the picture that followed.

But then following you had two hit them out of the ball park with steroids home runs. I would have been thrilled with the equivilant of just one in all of the 70’s.

Here’s a Program from April, 1959:

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You can’t win ‘em all. Despite its great cast (with Chevalier direct from “Gigi”) and ads that promised a “really riotous romantic comedy,” I found the film a huge dud and completely forgettable. About a year ago, I tuned into TCM while it was being shown and asked myself in disbelief, “I saw that at RCMH?” The scene I watched exposed Kerr in a shower scene full-length nude behind an opaque tub enclosure, totally gratuitously and without any relevance to the plot. Gasp.

In his admirable, lucid, cranky New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson writes of the director and the late ‘50s that they represent “the worst of cinema, when production schedules had not shrunk to the new, smaller audience or begun to aspire to its higher standards. For a few years, major studios still churned out a pale version of their blithe past” (p. 627). We all have our prejudices, and I for one find many films from that era simply wonderful; but as a description of “Count Your Blessings,” I think Thomson’s estimate is right on target.

The Helvetian stage show provided its own whiff of decadence. Advertised as a “gigantic spectacle … featuring singers, dancers, native musicians, folk entertainers, especially brought from Switzerland for this extravaganza,” it has left no trace in my memory. Not even of the “Rock ‘n Yodel” by the Smeed Trio. It seems symptomatic that the Showplace Program abandoned its usual end-page announcement of the next attraction to offer instead a promotional raffle sponsored by laundry and dish detergent. The ad revenues likely offered some subvention for the stage extravaganza.