Thomas Beller recently wrote in the New Yorker about the closing of the Lincoln Theater Cinemas.
“There is something disturbing about a blank movie marquee. It’s like a face without a mouth. I don’t mean the brief transitory blankness when the lettering for one movie is taken down at the end of its run to be replaced with lettering for the next movie but, rather, a marquee that remains blank, day after day, week after week. This has been the condition of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas marquee, on Sixty-third Street and Broadway, for the past six months. The theatre closed at the end of January, the lease not renewed. Every time I pass it by, the blankness provokes a feeling that some crime has been committed here. For a while, as though to make the metaphor explicit, some construction equipment beneath the marquee was surrounded by yellow tape. The theatre had been at that location for thirty years, but its legacy dates much further back, to a pair of cinema visionaries and entrepreneurs named Dan and Toby Talbot.”
The couple were quintessential New York people, who had run the theater since the 1960s.
It is sad to see another theater close.
For me the closure of the Ziegfield was a mortal blow.
During the 70s my friends and I would hit the theater for 1st day showing of so many movies.
I worked at Hurrah, a punk nightclub, across from the Lincoln Center and once made a date with Julie, a waifish cross-eyed model, to view AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD ( maybe ). It was an early show so I could go to work after THE END. Our appointment was scheduled for 3:45. The movie was at 4.
4:15.
No Julie.
I crossed Broadway and kill time at O’Neal’s Saloon with a meal and spoke to the bartender who wisely opined that the reason men die before women was that they are always late and the time they steal from men is put into their eternal time clock. It sounded good to me and I left the bar to catch the new showing.
As I approached the theater, I spotted Julie hurrying up Broadway.
She arrived out of breath and said, “Sorry, I’m late.”
In her mind she imagined that I had waited two hours for her and maybe she wasn’t wrong.
I think we sat downstairs and we didn’t make out.
She was that kind of girl.
