Weird Island

56. PPAC: Providence’s Movie Palaces

Episode Summary

Have you ever been to see a show at the Providence Performing Arts Center and marveled at the gorgeous building? Well, you might be surprised to know that when PPAC opened in the late 1920s, the theater showed a different kind of show–movies! I’m joined by special guests Lynn Singleton and Alan Chille this week to dive into the history of Providence’s Movie Palace, these elaborately decorated movie theaters designed to make the average person feel like royalty. And Lynn and Alan will share some amazing behind-the-scenes stories that shed light on everything that goes into keeping a historic building like this one open for all to enjoy.

Episode Notes

Episode Source Material

Episode Transcription

Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci once said, “I was accused many times of abusing my power, but I admit that at least one time I really did–and maybe I should have gone to jail for this one.” But this story probably isn’t one that you know.
Cianci had only been in office for a year when he got a call from a wealthy Providence citizen asking if he knew a man by the name of B. A. Dario. Dario owned Lincoln Downs racetrack and a number of other properties in Rhode Island. Including this historic theater, an ornate movie palace built in the late 1920s that represented the glitz and the glamor of the Golden Age of Hollywood, when a night out to see a movie was an event on par with going to a play or the opera. The person on the phone told the mayor that Dario had plans to tear the building down. And no one doubted that he’d follow through with it. Years before, he’d demolished another historic movie palace, the Albee, and replaced it with a vacant lot. So, a group of prominent locals wanted to save the building, and they wanted to put up some money to turn it into a first-class theater. But Dario refused to sell. He wanted more money than they were offering.
Cianci listened as the person on the phone explained the situation. Then he asked, “Why are you calling me?”
“Well, we figured, you know, he’s Italian, you’re Italian…” the speaker trailed off. There were rumors Dario knew people in the mob. And the caller assumed maybe the mayor could help facilitate some sort of deal. And they’d called the right guy.
Cianci had already stopped plans to tear down other historic buildings in Providence. He’d halted the demolition of the Shepherd’s department store building and the Casino at Roger Williams Park, and he was working on saving the Biltmore. In his memoir, Cianci remembered, “I didn’t want to tear down anything. Old was new again.” And this theater was exactly the type of project Cianci had been looking for.
So he set up negotiations between Dario and the group trying to buy the theater. The negotiations were long and difficult, and at one point he committed a million dollars from the city towards the project. But eventually the deal went through.
He felt it was a big win. But when he went to shake hands with Dario, the man said something unexpected. “So Mayor, what about my other forty thousand dollars they owe me?”
Cianci had no idea what Dario was referring to.
“They promised me they’d pay me a thousand bucks a day to negotiate. That’s forty days. I want my money.” And this $40K dollars almost halted the whole deal. The group refused to pay it. And Dario refused to close the deal without it.
So the major thought on his feet. “How about I make you the artistic consultant to the city of Providence for a year at twenty thousand a year.”
“Alright… But make it twenty-five.” Dario responded.
Later, Cianci remembered, “Now that is the kind of deal I should have gone to jail for.”
That building that was saved was originally called the Loews State Theater. But today, you probably know it as the Providence Performing Art Center. And even more interesting than Cianci’s involvement with the theater is its early history as a movie theater–or more accurately, a movie palace.
I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’ll be telling you about the rise and fall of Providence’s Movie Palaces, these elaborately decorated movie theaters designed to make the average person feel like royalty. And I’ll be joined by two special guests, PPAC’s own Lynn Singleton and Alan Chille, to share the unbelievable story of how PPAC survived the ups and downs to continue playing an important role in downtown Providence today.
The first time I went to PPAC, I was blown away. If you’ve never been, you should go just to see the building. “Imagine a theatre so magnificent, so costly, so different, so far exceeding anything that has ever been done anywhere in Providence that there is nothing for you to compare it with. Imagine the years of planning for this magnificent new showplace! Imagine all the luxury, comfort, and dazzling beauty of color and ornamentation that you ever dreamed of in a theatre–and you’re still miles shy of what you’re going to see.” At least, that’s how the papers described it before opening day in 1928, and while the building has gone through a lot since then, it’s still that same historically accurate experience. Every inch of space feels richly and ornately decorated. It’s dramatic to walk into the auditorium space for the first time.
I think most people would expect a traditional theater would be converted into a movie theater, not the other way around. So, I was blown away to find out that when PPAC opened, the building was built and designed to showcase movies. Of course, back then it wasn’t called the Providence Performing Arts Center–that name would come later. It was called the Loew’s State Theater. And it wasn’t just a movie theater–it was a movie palace.
Movie Palaces were huge, elaborately decorated, ornate theaters that elevated the experience of seeing a movie to be on par with seeing a big opera performance. Most movie palaces were built between 1914 and 1940, and during that time, movies became the principal form of popular entertainment–with the movie palace playing a central role in a community’s social life.
The way they came about is kind of interesting. We’ve been making movies for a while now. Films started to become commercially viable in the late 1800s. First with this device called a Kinetoscope–invented by Thomas Edison’s lab–that allowed one person at a time to look inside a box and view a very short moving picture, like 15 seconds long. By 1894, these devices were starting to be installed in public parlors, hotels, department stores, and drugstores in large cities in America and overseas. But it was kind of expensive at 25 cents for a viewing, and only one person could watch at a time.
Then in 1895, two brothers in France were the first to project a movie to a paying audience, so multiple people could view it at the same time. It’s after that that a motion picture industry started to emerge.
At first, films were short. Only a few minutes long. They were in black and white, there was no recorded sound, and they were generally just one single shot from a steady camera. The whole experience was more about amazing audiences with the fact that they were seeing moving pictures vs. really communicating a strong story line.
These films were mostly screened in tents of traveling exhibitors at fairgrounds, in music halls, or at the end of vaudeville acts as chasers to get people to leave. And then, in the early 1900s, they were shown in empty storefronts that were set up with chairs, a projector, and a sheet to serve as little ad hoc theaters. The first ad hoc storefront theaters soon evolved into something you’ve maybe heard of–Nickelodeon theaters. They were still set up mostly in converted storefronts, but these were more permanent solutions with continuous showing times. And it only cost a nickel to see the films, hence the name.
Nickelodeon theaters flourished between 1905 and 1915, with thousands popping up across the United States. But these theaters catered to the busy lives and limited budgets of the lower class, and they got a reputation as being disreputable and dangerous. Some were poorly ventilated. There were cases of fires. And the seats were generally hard and uncomfortable. So wealthier people continued to attend stage performances like opera instead of frequenting nickelodeon theaters.
But during this time, film production flourished. Movies started to be longer, they had multiple different shots, they had more of a storyline and bigger actors. And suddenly middle and upper class folks started to feel like they were missing out. In comes the movie palace.
The first movie palace was established in NYC in 1914. And the rest followed very quickly afterwards. It’s estimated between 1914 and 1922, 4,000 movie palaces were opened around the country, mostly right in urban centers. They were big, beautiful, and advertised as places that would make the average person feel like royalty.
So, that brings us back to PPAC. Plans for this theater were announced in 1926, and it would be built by the Loew’s Theater Chain. Loew’s initially ran Nickelodeon theaters, and the company quickly grew as founder Marcus Loew purchased first small dedicated theaters and then large movie palaces. Loew also arranged the merger of three film studios–Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Productions - to form MGM Studios to provide his theater empire with product to distribute. This was standard practice. By the end of the 1920s, the Big Five movie studios–Fox, Warner Brothers, MGM, RKO and Paramount, owned most of the country’s large theater chains, so they now created the films, had writers, directors and big actors on staff, and they owned the theaters where those films were distributed.
Marcus Loew really saw the Movie Palace as a way for the average person to escape reality, and his philosophy was that tickets were sold for the theater itself rather than the movies. When the Loew’s State Theater in Providence opened on October 6, 1928 over 14,000 people showed up. Mostly to see the elaborately decorated building said to be on par with the large movie palaces of New York. They took in the chandeliers, the marble columns, and the detailed moldings as they were led to their seats by uniformed ushers, past perches in the lobby holding talking parrots. It was really this indulgent fantasy world that was created. People no longer went to the movies secretly. Now, they’d make an entrance - maybe even arriving in an evening dress.
The movie palace ushered in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Many point to 1939 as its apex, with films like Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz. But following WWII, the introduction of TV, and mass migration out of cities into the suburbs, Movie Palaces started to see a decline. And then in 1948, there was a Supreme Court ruling ordering all major film studios to sell their theaters. That was the nail in the coffin. Most movie palaces couldn’t continue to operate without the financial support of the major studios. Some hung on for dear life during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Others changed their business model–similar to drive-in theaters, if you listened to that episode, some movie palaces started showing dirty movies. But most closed. A Smithsonian Magazine article put it this way: “The demise of the studio system and the changes in how people lived left the country littered with beautiful, empty palaces.”
When it came to experiencing the hardships of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Loew’s State Theater was no exception to the rule. The venue struggled financially as attendance plummeted. Then the building suffered damage during Hurricane Carole in 1954. But it did have one thing going for it that a lot of other movie palaces didn’t.
0:00: “The one advantage PPAC has had since it opened in 1928, it never closed. It was always something. So the lights were on, heat was on.” “A lot of these old movie palaces, they closed down.”
That’s Lynn Singleton, President and CEO of PPAC. He’s been steering the ship for almost 40 years, since just after the theater was saved from demolition.
So, to come full circle to the beginning of the episode, in the 1970s, the theater changed owners. B.A. Dario bought Loews and reopened it as the Palace Concert Theater. Instead of showing movies, it showed rock concerts, hosting bands like the Bee Gees, the Kinks, Queen and Aerosmith. But, that wasn’t enough to turn the trend around. By the late ‘70s, Dario was looking to demolish the building, but with the efforts of the mayor and that group of prominent locals and businesses, the theater was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, and in 1978 it was purchased and reopened as a non-profit private corporation called the Ocean State Performing Arts Center. But Mayor Buddy Cianci had one more thing to say about this project. It had to do with the name.
39:00: “In 82, he came to the board meeting and said, Hey, I’ve given you all the money. I think you should name it Providence.”
I got the opportunity to sit and chat with both Lynn Singleton, CEO and President of PPAC, and Alan Chille, Vice President of PPAC. And, okay, I’ve leaned into the fun and flashiness of Buddy Cianci’s public character to tell this story. It’s an easy thing to do. But the truth is, it wasn’t Buddy who saved PPAC and turned it into one of the premier non-profit theaters in the country. It was Lynn and Alan. And the story of how they turned the trend around is a good one.
Now, you know today that the theater has a stage, and in fact it always has, despite the fact that it was originally designed for movies. Remember that films didn’t initially include recorded sound. Movies with sound were called “talkies” but prior to that, a pianist, a theater organist or a small orchestra might accompany a film with live sound. Film companies would even produce specially composed scores for their feature films. So the Loew’s State Theater was built to support live accompaniment, it had an orchestra pit and a stage and had even included a theatrical organ. Of course, in 1927, mid-construction, the “age of the talkies” was ushered in by Warner Brothers feature film The Jazz Singer, and within two years, almost all films included recorded sound. So the construction company quickly wired Loew’s State for sound. By the time it opened in 1928, the organ wasn’t necessary. Though it was still used fairly frequently.
Later, when movie palaces lost popularity, the stage was central to PPAC’s continued life as a performing arts center. But just as it seemed the theater was on the brink of salvation, a major change in the scale of Broadway shows threatened PPAC’s existence yet again. And if they couldn’t change with the times, they’d be left behind. This is the story of Lynn and Alan’s ambitious plan to take a wall and move it by 12 feet–and how, in doing so, they saved PPAC.
Interview Transcript
That project was a real turning point for the building. It’s the kind of thing that most of us wouldn’t think too much about, but that 12 feet of additional space on the stage was actually an enormous and ambitious undertaking. And it likely saved the theater. At the time it was only the 2nd movie palace in the country to take on the task of moving a wall. If it was an easy project, everyone who owned a historic movie palace would have done it. But today, Lynn guesses only about 12 have.
I liked this story a lot. It’s one I’d never heard before, and it struck me for a few reasons. First of all, it’s just about the most Rhode Island story ever. Lynn summarized it best:
34:09 - Not only did we do it. And I don’t credit this to us, I credit this to Rhode Island. We did it in such an abbreviated maner because of the connectedness of the state.
But beyond that, there were so many things that had to go right for this story to work. For Lynn and Alan to take the half-baked idea drawn on a napkin and make it a reality. And by some combo of creative thinking, sheer will and luck, they did it.
In a book about the golden age of theaters called Temples of Illusion, written back in 1976 when PPAC was called the Ocean State Theater, author Roger Brett wrote, “Half a century later, the Ocean State in Providence and a few dozen other movie palaces scattered across the country, like ruins of an ancient civilization, inspire wonder in we inhabitants of a more austere modern world.”
You look around Rhode Island and we have so much history here. So many beautiful old buildings, like this theater that really do inspire wonder and act as reminders of where we’ve been. And behind every one of them, you have to imagine there are people like Lynn and Alan and stories like this one. Because maintaining these places that connect us to our past–it’s not as simple as it might seem.
35:21: The moon, the stars, it all kind of lined up.
So many little things had to go right in order for you to sit in the audience, surrounded by all the dazzling beauty of color and ornamentation that you ever dreamed of in a theater, waiting for the lights to dim and the show to start.