“The Artist” is a charming movie, deserving of all the Golden Globes awards it received, and then some. (Watching that otherwise uninspired awards show, who wouldn’t want to see the movie after Uggie the Dog took to the stage with the rest of the cast and got the biggest laugh of the night?) By all means, see this movie, and see it on the big screen, as my dear husband and I did recently. As a tribute to moviemaking and movie stars before “talkies”, it should be seen as it might have been back then, when going to the movies was a Big Event and a reason to get dressed up. (For those of you who loathe the inevitable audio input from uncouth audience members, “The Artist”, a mostly silent movie, was so engrossing that the audience was silent!) Better yet, if you are fortunate enough to live anywhere near one of this country’s remaining movie palaces from that era, see it there.
We saw “The Artist” in just such a movie palace, the legendary Tampa Theatre. There is one shot in “The Artist” taken from the vantage point of the stage of a similar theater, looking out at the packed house. My immediate reaction, looking at the rows of cloche-hatted flappers and their Brillantined male companions gazing raptly at the screen, was “That’s us!” But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tampa Theatre is at its best before the lights go down.
Behold:
This glorious performance venue was the brainchild of theater architect John Eberson, who was known for his “atmospheric” theaters of the Twenties. Here, quoted in the Tampa Tribune in 1926, the year Tampa’s finest theater opened, is Eberson’s description of his vision for a Florida theater: “I have been wintering in Florida for the past several years, and it is from this state that I got the atmospheric idea. I was impressed with the colorful scenes that greeted me at Miami, Palm Beach and Tampa. Visions of Italian gardens, Spanish patios, Persian shrines and French formal gardens flashed through my mind, and at once I directed my energies to carrying out these ideas.” He succeeded, in spectacular fashion, in Tampa and all over the United States.
Step into the auditorium and you’ll find yourself in “a lavish, romantic Mediterranean courtyard replete with old world statuary, flowers, and gargoyles. Over it all is a nighttime sky with twinkling stars and floating clouds.” Even this verbiage, from the theater’s website, doesn’t do the interior justice. From the moment you pass under the blazing marquee and through the double doors, It’s a softly-lit, magical twilight world of stucco facades, balconies, and rooftops under a starry sky, the walls and doorways so intricately carved that the eye hardly has time to take it all in before the show, especially once “The Mighty Wurlitzer Theatre Organ” rises up from below the stage.
Volunteer organists provide a rousing set of tunes before most shows, seated at this majestic instrument, surrounded by its pipes on all sides. As showtime nears, the organ and organist sink down again below the stage. The last we see of the player and instrument is an upraised hand giving a jaunty wave as the last notes float out from the pit. (Until just before her death in 2010 at the age of 107, theatergoers were often treated to organ accompaniment to afternoon screenings of Keaton and Chaplain classics by the legendary Rosa Rio. She started out as a glamorous young woman playing music for the original silents of the ’20’s and was just as glamorous and gifted at the keyboards as a centenarian. She was a true original.)
Eberson’s career designing movie houses lasted only seven years, but the “golden age” of the movie palaces spanned three decades, from the opening of the Regent in New York in 1913 to 1946, when a staggering 4 billion movie tickets were sold. During this time, over 4,000 movie palaces were constructed coast to coast. In each, and in countless small-town theaters as well, the suspension of disbelief required to watch a movie (and so brilliantly evoked in another recent ode to early cinema, Martin Scorcese’s “Hugo,”) began at the door. Theater architect Thomas Lamb, designer of the Regent, in speaking of his work, posited that “to make our audience receptive and interested, we must cut them off from the rest of city life and take them into a rich and self-contained auditorium, where their minds are freed from their usual occupations and freed from their customary thoughts.” This is the movie palace experience; a feast for the senses before the first reel. Sadly, much of that experience was lost in the post-war exodus of movie-goers to the suburbs, where they watched movies under the actual night sky at drive-in movie theaters. But happily, some theaters remain where one can experience that magic. With “The Artist,” there has never been another time to do so.
Photos courtesy of Tampa Theatre
The Artist: http://weinsteinco.com/sites/the-artist/
Tampa Theatre: www.tampatheatre.org
Rosa Rio interviewed on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5559593
Movie Palaces: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/palace/
