Movie Theatre History Research

http://www.davidandnoelle.net/moviehistory.htm

        My first experience in the Ambassador was also my first in any movie theater at a time when many Movie Palaces were beginning to fall to the wrecking ball. I was a child when I stepped into its palatial “Franco-Spanish Carnival” lobby, but when I saw the silver-gilt and crystal fantasy set with colorful “jewels” and dripping with heavy teal-blue velvet drapes I knew that this place, this experience of going to the movies, was something special, one that I would never forget.

             

The exterior and lobby of the Ambassador theatre, St. Louis, MO.

The Theatre images in this section are taken from postcards and

personal photographs in my collection.

 In the auditorium, Stan Kahn at the “Mighty Wurlitzer” organ filled the huge enclosure with the overture to the first in the series of “Cinerama” movies. As my mother and I settled into the plush velvet seats, I asked her in a whisper if this was a castle because there was a coat of arms over the stage. She laughed and said no, but as the lights dimmed I felt as excited and special as a princess in the fairyland of that beautiful theater.

In the auditorium of the Ambassador Theatre

The film began on the curtain and the curtain opened. I was lost in another dimension - a feeling I can now only compare to the separation from reality in time and space experienced in this computer age during a session in cyberspace - a virtual reality where I became part of the fabulous surroundings and an intimate observer of the story on the screen.

Many writers, entertainers and architects have noted this hypnotic feeling, this mood - the projection of the self into another dimension propelled both by the decoration and fantasy found within a Movie Palace and the fantasy of the film reaching out into the physical environment of the viewer. It has been called synesthesia - a sensation affecting one sense when experienced by another, such as feeling the emotion of color in a sunset or experiencing musical harmonies embodied in the architecture of a great architect like Andrea Palladio. The movie theater itself has been called “The House of Dreams”, a place to dream in where a patron easily falls under the spell of the “Wizard’s Wand”, the spell of “illusionland”; “an acre of seats in a garden of dreams” where the architecture projects the viewer to “patrons’ heaven”, a place to live with the characters on the screen, in another time and place; a rich self-contained world, excluding all reminders of reality, that dispels the belief that luxury and fantasy can happen only to other people.

        An expressive name for this physical and psychological environment might be “cinéspace”, the nirvana sought by architects, managers and showmen to bring the patron back time and again to the Movie Palace. The crafting of cinéspace began with the earliest store front theaters and was honed to a fine art from 1913, with the opening of the Regent Theatre in New York, to 1932, the opening of Radio City Music Hall and the end of the Movie Palace era. It continued and was shaped by new developments throughout the Great Depression, the War Years and the post-war baby-boom era.

        The careers of two important theatre architects, Carl and Robert Boller, stretch across this entire period, beginning in 1903 with the design of the LaBelle Opera House in Pittsburg, Kansas passing through the Movie Palace era with theaters like the Missouri Theatre in St. Joseph Missouri, the Granada Theatre in Emporia, Kansas and the Midland Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri, moving through the era of the small neighborhood theater in the 1940s and into the drive-in craze of the 1950’s. The story of their firm and their careers is important in the saga of the history and development of the concept ofcinéspace.