Movie Houses

MANY PEOPLE who are too young to recall what it was like to live through a blistering hot Baltimore summer without air conditioning. Relief from those sultry, airless days came slowly, beginning in the late 1920s and escalating in the 1950s.Among the first public buildings to employ air conditioning were the big downtown department stores. A 1931 item in Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s monthly newsletter announced that Stewart & Co. department store had air-conditioned its basement.In 1934, Hutzler Bros.

BALTIMORE AREA film buffs will have to get used to the word "megaplex." The Christmas Day opening of the 16-screen Loew's Theatres in White Marsh gave the region its third film-entertainment venue that fits that category.Some theater operators rigidly define megaplexes as places with at least 16 screens. Of course, that's semantic nonsense. When you get beyond eight or nine screens in a movie house -- in some U.S. communities there are as many as 30 screens at one location -- you're talking mega.

Despite its large population and prime demographics, the Towson area has been curiously lacking in movie screens over the years. For decades, two movie houses sat like bookends on York Road -- the Towson Theater to the north, the York Road Cinema to the south. Both had their ups and downs until finally being put out of business by the eight-screen Towson Commons complex that opened in 1992.Now the success of the Towson Commons theaters, a reflection of the national trend toward increased attendance at state-of-the-art facilities, has convinced two separate developers that local filmgoers don't necessarily wish to bypass downtown Towson for cinemas in Lutherville, Timonium and other suburban locales.

These long, post-holiday winter nights are the ideal time for watching videos. Yet for all the convenience of dropping by a local video shop and finding a film that seems to fit the mood, I still miss my grind-'em-out neighborhood movie house.Don't ask me precisely what the show was. In those flickering days of a movie marquee at every crossroads, the stars and the movies were not as important as the act of getting out and going -- as often as possible.There is a lot to recommend going into a video store and selecting from what seems like a thousand choices.

I SUSPECT that I'm not alone in lamenting the state of today's movie theaters. It's not just that movie houses today are filthy (popcorn, crushed paper cups, candy boxes and paper bags litter the floor). And it's not that so many of the movies are raunchy, lacking almost any artistic value. What really bothers me is that there are so few theaters right in one's neighborhood anymore.Of course, the key reason for the death of the neighborhood movie house was our affluence. For years, many Baltimoreans went to neighborhood theaters to keep cool and find entertainment within walking distance of home.

Does Bob Dorian have the greatest job in the world? He thinks so, and more than a few people would agree.For 10 years, Mr. Dorian has been leading the life of Riley, provided Riley was a movie nut. He watches movies and talks about them -- not as a critic, but as a fan. He travels from city to city, watching films in old, grandiose movie houses. He reads about movies incessantly, coming up with little yarns he can spin about the movies he's introducing.Tough life."I really do have a great job," Mr. Dorian says from the fourth row of Baltimore's Senator Theatre -- one of many cinematic ports-of-call he's visited during his decade as host of American Movie Classics, the cable channel that spotlights films from the '30s, '40s and '50s.

COME summer, when Hollywood traditionally offers up a big stash of films, Baltimore movie-goers have a definite advantage. Small towns with single multiplex theaters show only the big hits. Larger cities have theaters with competing films, allowing moviegoers a choice of, say, "The Flintstones" or the more off-beat "Kika."But not without certain prerequisites. For city movie fans, a car is a must. Catching the film of your choice -- especially an obscure one -- usually involves a hike to the county.

Historic Ellicott City could have a miniature movie palace like The Senator or the Charles if Jill Porter has her way.The Baltimore resident plans to reopen the Ellicott Theatre at the corner of Main Street and Old Columbia Pike and show artistic, second-run and classic films like those featured in the Baltimore movie houses."

Long-time Annapolis residents remember fondly the Capitol Theater on West Street, Circle Theatre on State Circle and the Playhouse Theatre on Main Street. For decades before and after World War II, these movie houses brought the magic of Hollywood to the sleepy Maryland capital. Then came the triple blow of television, home air-conditioning and suburbanization. One by one, these palaces of make-believe went dark.Life, however, is an ever-moving giant merry-go-round. Concepts that once appeared to have lost their vitality are rethought and reintroduced.

The time is the spring of 1941 and the place is South Broadway. Nobody calls the place Fells Point.A local movie camera operator cranks away on an open car along the street, showing the Latrobe Monument, the old Leader Theatre, a Provident Savings Bank branch, St. Patrick's Church and the Broadway Market. A Cloverland Dairy sign stretches across its Fleet Street entrance.It's all a wonderful, pre-World War II Baltimore neighborhood.The streets are jam-packed with shoppers. The boys wear knickers.

Joseph Armando Liberto, a 54-year veteran of Baltimore movie houses who managed the Stanley, once Baltimore's largest cinema, died of Alzheimer's disease complications Sept. 19 at the Northwest Hospital Center. The Catonsville Manor resident was 82. Born in Baltimore and raised on Greene Street in downtown Baltimore, he attended St. John the Baptist Parochial School and was a 1944 graduate of Mount St. Joseph High School. While in high school, he worked summers in his family's Lexington Market produce business.

With the addition of just one new movie house - November's opening of the Landmark Theatres in Harbor East - the number of Baltimore theaters skyrocketed by a whopping 33 percent. How times have changed. Over the past century, Baltimore has had more than 100 movie houses, from the palatial - the Grand, the Metropolitan, the Northwood, the Patterson - to the neighborly - the Blue Bell, the Community, the Plaza. But beginning in the 1960s, theaters began flocking to the suburbs. Parking was easier; the huge movie palaces of the silent era became too expensive to maintain; neighborhoods became places to move away from, rather than grow up in. Today, those theaters are gone, but many of the buildings remain - ghosts of a city's cinematic past.

I received a e-mail from an old friend, McNair Taylor, a retired city elementary teacher and Northwest Baltimore resident. He wanted to know why I hadn't included black-patronized film houses in last week's column. My short answer was segregation. In the heyday of my movie-going, the city's places of public accommodation were not open to all. In 1960 Baltimore, I mainly patronized neighborhood movie houses in Waverly and along North Avenue. Integration was coming, but it hadn't yet arrived.

Gliding into a parking space in front of Apex Cinema in Calvert County on a recent Sunday evening, Jennifer Mutchler stepped out of her dark green Neon with little time to spare before the 8:10 showing of the flick The Amityville Horror. The 20-year-old Huntington resident did not rush, however. She had purposefully arrived a little late. It has become part of her moviegoing routine. "I hate commercials before movies," Mutchler said. "I go to the movies to see movies, but I don't go to watch commercials.

Reisterstown-based R/C Theatres is selling seven of its 18 movie houses to Regal Entertainment Group, the country's largest theater chain, for $31 million, company executives said yesterday. Four of the theaters being sold are in Maryland, including Eastpoint 10 in Baltimore, Carrolltowne 6 in Eldersburg, Valley Mall 16 in Hagerstown and Westview 16 in Frederick. The other three are in Culpeper, Va., Carlisle, Pa., and Pinellas Park, Fla. The sale totals 76 screens, about half of the number privately owned R/C operates in five states.

IT'S DIFFICULT to imagine a more important time for a most important story, the one J.R.R. Tolkien brilliantly penned, to be beautifully retold on screen. The final chapter, the heroic resolution of the film version of that story is in movie houses now. But it is in Middle Earth's middle act that we find so much that reminds us of our world today. At the climax of director Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, an exasperated King Theoden of Rohan contemplates the destruction of his people by the brutal Uruk-Hai army, monsters 10,000 strong, when it barges through the gates of Helm's Deep, a previously impenetrable fortress and sanctuary for the people of Rohan.

Senator owner Tom Kiefaber's passion for historic movie houses has earned him another round of national kudos, with the National Trust for Historic Preservation giving him its 2003 "Business Leadership" award. Kiefaber, whose grandfather Frank Durkee once owned a chain of some 40 Baltimore-area movie houses, has spent more than a decade fighting to keep the 64-year-old Senator - the last of those theaters still under family ownership - open. That hasn't always been easy, given the frequent cash-flow problems inherent in running a single-screen theater in this age of the megaplex.

Tucked away in Federal Hill - and in the minds of many an old-timer - is a shell of a grand movie theater built in 1917 during the heyday of silent movies when tickets cost 10 cents. The cavernous McHenry Theatre quickly became the center of the neighborhood social scene and was the last of the area's golden-era movie houses when it closed in 1971. After being dark for three decades, the McHenry Theatre is making a comeback with one last picture show, for one night only. The theater - which opened May 26, 1917, with The Undying Flame starring Olga Petrova - will be converted into technology offices by early next year.

Baltimore's Senator Theatre moves its fight for survival to an even more visible national stage tonight, as it kicks off a History Channel program spotlighting 11 of the country's most endangered historic sites. The 62-year-old showplace, which is being cited by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a prime example of the endangered "historic theaters of America," is the first location visited during "Save Our History: America's Most Endangered 2001," premiering at 10 p.m. It also serves as home base for narrator Josh Binswanger, and pops up repeatedly during the hour.

North Baltimore's landmark Senator Theatre was showcased yesterday in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's annual list of America's 11 most endangered historic places, described as a classic example of grand -- but vanishing -- American movie houses. Historic movie theaters were listed -- along with Midwestern prairie churches and barns, a California temple built by Chinese immigrants in 1880 and Jackson Ward, a historically black neighborhood in Richmond, Va. -- to warn that such places are slowly dying.