They also made sure things didn’t get too amorous on the balcony. Mostly, they would patrol row by row, looking for food items smuggled in. I’m guessing their original purpose was to find seats for late arrivers when the place was crowded, though I never saw any of them actually do that. Remember ushers? They would roam up and down the aisle with their flashlights. At the Alabama in downtown Birmingham, patrons got a singalong, accompanied by that massive pipe organ. Something like “The Wild Flowers of Bora Bora.” Occasionally, you’d be rewarded with a Three Stooges episode or an extra Tom & Jerry cartoon. Fifty cents! You would see a full-length cartoon, followed by some sort of short. I remember, as a child, going to the movies for fifty cents. Undaunted, the doors eventually reopened, the projectors (now computers) fired up, and the popcorn resumed crackling. Finally, Covid forced many to shut down for over a year. Along came on-demand streaming from companies like Netflix, Disney, and Paramount. Then the, premium TV movie channels like HBO and Showtime were thought to be the beginning of the end. The advent of television in the late 1940s and early ’50s was supposed to kill them off. Movie houses have been nothing if not resilient.
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