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Right: Interior, The Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, about 1928.
It was the summer of 1949. Fresh out of Yale with two degrees, I came to New York to make my fortune. Unfortunately, the first Post World War II recession was in full swing. Good jobs were non-existent. Someone told me that the Yale Club had an employment agency. Naïve me, I thought that there could only be "good jobs" at the Yale Club. The best they had to offer was what was called a "Junior Salesman" for the Royal Typewriter Company. I took it. My boss was the grizzled Howard Forshay from Queens, a veteran of the typewriter wars. His daily ritual was leading the morning pep talks. "Tell them how great the Royal typewriter is and say whatever makes the competition look bad." My job was to work under a salesman with an assigned territory and to place demonstration typewriters in offices. Later, that salesman would return to hopefully convince the office manager to buy one. Junior Salesmen were promised a percentage of the salesman's commission if the sale was consummated. Unscrupulous salesmen shuffled the paperwork so that junior salesmen never got their share of the commission.
Two weeks on the job, I knew that I made a disastrous error. So, I had to make the best of a bad deal. After the ritual pep talk, I was on the street supposedly selling typewriters. Having been familiar with the exhibitions and programs at MoMA, I knew that there were daily film showings from the museum's collection of historically significant films. The MoMA film showings were my salvation. The Royal Typewriter job lasted about nine months until I was fired.
During that nine months, I must have seen all of the films in the then MoMA collection. Films were shown in the basement auditorium. Although MoMA was multiplexed in one of its many building programs, the basement auditorium remains with a benefactor's name attached. This was 1949, only twenty years after the birth of sound movies. Historic films were silent. On the auditorium floor to the left of the screen stood an upright piano. There sat the indefatigable Arthur Kleiner, a Viennese refugee, who played prescribed scores as well as his own compositions accompanying these films. Later in my career, when I was working with the MoMA Film Library, I got to know Arhtur Kleiner and told him how he and the MoMA film collection provide solace during my desperate early days in New York.
For years, I assumed that a piano provided the appropriate accompaniment and that Arthur Kleiner's piano scores were as authentic as it could get. Little did I know that most movie theaters showing silent films in the 1910s and 1920s first had live orchestras, then either pianos or what were called "theater organs." Seven thousand of these generic theater organs populated an equal number of movie palaces in cities from coast to coast. They were 2,000 to 3,000 seat theaters with huge screens below proscenium arches surrounded on their flanks by opera style boxes complemented by huge balconies that often rose to six stories. Movie-going in the teens and twenties was a glorious experience transporting legions of city dwellers: new immigrants, former farmers and factory workers from their humdrum existence into a world of glorious fantasy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_organ
Last Wednesday night, I attended the Los Angeles Conservancy's "Last Remaining Seats" event at the Orpheum Theatre on Broadway in Downtown LA. The film being shown was Herbert Brenon's 1924 silent classic, "Peter Pan."
No anemic piano accompaniment here! We were subsumed with blasts of sound emanating from the Orpheum's recently refurbished 1928 Mighty Wurlitzer organ masterfully orchestrated by Robert Israel. He manipulated the keys, the pedals and the stops to create appropriate sounds from the organ's battery of metal and wood pipes capable of simulating over 14,000 orchestral sounds.
For me, it was a profound experience. I witnessed the recreation of an authentic historical sight and sound phenomenon, sharing it with with the approximately 3,000 others in the audience. I thought that I had been transported back to the 1920s. The film, its organ accompaniment and the theater itself might not have been original, but they were as close as it was possible to experience the original.
Last year, my wife and I went to Ostia Antica, the partially restored excavation of the ancient port of Rome. Having been to Pompeii several times (It was originally a Hellenistic city.), I consider Ostia Antica a more compelling recreation of a Roman urban experience. Here you see the extensive remains of a two thousands year old Roman urban complex with virtually complete fragments of "insula," the multiple story structures with shops at the street level and residences above. You see the original forum, Ostia's civic center, with fragments of religious and secular structures arrayed around this open space.
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS247&q=ostia+antica&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=UCowTMiBCtL9nAfOkIHXAw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CFIQsAQwAw
As you amble along remnants of paved streets, gazing from side to side, you begin to believe that you have been transported into a bygone era. That is how I felt at the Orpheum last Wednesday night when I saw "Peter Pan" accompanied by a Mighty Wurlitzer.
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