Article in Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican August 4-10,2006

The Big Picture -- takes on film by Robert Nott

Throwing a light on the last picture shows

Sam the Lion died, the last picture show ended, and then the Royal Theater, located in a small town somewhere in Texas, closed down for good. You may remember these details from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The Last Picture Show, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel and featuring the late Ben Johnson in an Oscar-winning turn as Sam the Lion. Though the book and film focused on growing up in a small town in the early 1950s, the death of Sam and his beloved cinema served as a metaphor for the way things were changing — too fast, perhaps — for the film’s characters.

Howard Stein is a kindred spirit to the Bogdanoviches and McMurtrys and Sam the Lions in this country. Stein’s photo series, Last Frame of Picture, which captures dead, dying, or (in a very few cases) vibrant small-town cinemas, is a paean to a community spirit that is long gone in most places. It’s part of a double-pronged exhibit, Two Views From the American Road, which opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 4, at Rush Creek Gallery, 315 Johnson St. (982-8293), and runs through Sept. 16. Philip Michelson’s series of photos, The Way of the West, is also on view.

“I’m very saddened by what’s happened in America — the homogenization of the culture reflected in franchises, malls, and big-box stores that make us lose our regional identities,” Stein told me by phone from his home in Oakland, Calif. “The cinemas were real icons of local identity at one time. While a lot of them were generic Hollywood things, there was an attempt in a lot of places to regionalize the theme and title of the theater. In this day and age it would be very rare for someone to build a theater that reflects local character.”

The cinemas Stein captured on film — not the big Fox or RKO or Paramount movie palaces that graced the larger metropolitan areas of this country from the 1920s on — were mostly momand- pop operations that sat a few hundred people. They were single-screeners; many opened as late as the early 1950s and just as many closed by the early 1980s, thanks in part to the advent of multiscreen cinemas, cable television, and home video options.

I recall the tiny Bijou Cinema in my mom’s home town of Cold Spring, N.Y. It was still operating in the 1970s (it closed in 1975) when I went to Cold Spring to visit my grandmother, who ran a little country store. One Sunday afternoon, around 1970, my cousins and I went to see a picture advertised as a “new” comedy. Imagine our surprise when the theater screened the 1952 feature Mr. Walkie Talkie, which starred character actor Joe Sawyer and a duck!

The Bijou is now home to an art gallery. Happily, Stein discovered that some of the old cinemas had been revamped into cultural centers housing performance-art groups, galleries, and educational facilities. Many others, he noted, have been converted into banks or churches. But most of the theaters he photographed are closed up, he said. Some have For Sale signs on them, some showcase old movie posters in the window.

“The two most popular posters I found were of Gone With the Wind [1939] and Shane [1953],” he recalled. “I don’t think these are posters that were reflective of what was playing at the theater at the time of their closure but rather a local attempt at preserving an image of what was, what had been, and trying to frame it with something that you could relate to.”

Stein, who has made his living as a photographer for 35 years, didn’t set out to make a visual history of small-town America’s movie houses. In December 2004 he and one of his brothers had the chance to drive cross-country from Florida to California. When they got to Natchez, Miss., Stein came across the faded, boarded-up Ritz Theater and photographed it. (This shot is in the exhibit.) They kept on driving west, and Stein kept on shooting small cinemas, using a 1950s-era rangefinder camera.

“If you go into a small town and drive around the main square, chances are very good that you will find a theater — or a bank in the spot where a theater used to be,” Stein said. “So from town to town we sought out theaters, and I sure found a lot of them.” He photographed about 75 cinemas; roughly 15 images will be in the Santa Fe show. For example, the now-closed Queen Theater, which Stein photographed in Bryan, Texas, still sports a crown on top of its vertical sign, a reminder that the grande dame was once something of a royal palace for the moviegoing public.

In a few cases, Stein managed to get some background information on his photo subjects. In Avon Park, Fla., he came upon The Hilans Theater, currently being used as a church. Stein tracked down a copy of the Hilans opening program and discovered that the cinema had been built and operated by a guy named Stein — no relation, to the best of the photographer’s knowledge. The Hilans opened April 11, 1950, with the MGM musical Nancy Goes to Rio.

Sometimes Stein discovered nothing more than the bare bones of a cinema. “Whether it’s out of pride or nostalgia or the economics of demolition, I found a number of theaters that were just facades or buildings where the roof had collapsed,” he said. “You’d see the facade, this image of a lovely theater, and then walk around the back and, in some cases, there was literally nothing there. Most of the theaters I saw that were closed looked like they had been closed for a substantial amount of time,” he added.

Like the grander movie palaces of yesteryear, the small-town cinemas began fading away in the 1960s. Stein thinks cultural change helped kill off the little theaters.

“Maybe this [exhibit] will play to an older audience, people of my generation who grew up with these buildings,” explained Stein, who was born in 1948. “I have a hard time getting young people interested, because their filmgoing experience is not built around these cinemas. “There was once a community feel to going to the movies. They may have given away prizes, china, something like that, and offered a newsreel so it made it more of a shared cultural experience. Now it’s a different thing with all the media access we have. The uniqueness of going to share a film is long gone. I think it’s just another experience that’s faded into the sunset.”

Stein will be flying to Santa Fe for the Rush Creek reception. Afterward, he plans to tour New Mexico by car to photograph some of this state’s old movie houses. I recommended he check out the Lyric Theater in Carrizozo. When I drove through there last summer, there was a notice on the Lyric’s front door regarding restoration plans for the cinema. If they did bring it back to its former glory, I’d drive down there at least once to experience that long-gone, small-town, communal filmgoing experience, even if all I get to see is a comedy with Joe Sawyer and a duck.

©2006 Rush Creek Editions