The Place To Be 55 Years Ago


Theatre television hit a jackpot in July 1951. The crowd above is waiting to buy tickets for a close-circuit broadcast of the Jake La Motta/Ben Murphy prizefight at Philadelphia’s Warner-Stanley Theatre. The match wouldn’t start until 10:00, but these fight fans are already out in force at 5:00 (the time this picture was taken). The bout would be staged at Yankee Stadium and picked up by a theatre network involving 11 houses in nine cities. To safeguard the gate at the Stadium, where 20,000 attended, no New York theatres carried the match. Participating showmen in Cleveland, Albany, Baltimore, and Richmond were sold out, and most of these advanced their admission price for the event. Early projection TV could be unpredictable. In Chicago, the apparatus went on the fritz and the audience missed the knockout punch in the last round. I’d hate to have been the manager of the Tivoli that night. Boxing action on theatre screens often led to unwelcome action in auditoriums, as bad behavior among patrons was particularly rife on these occasions. Fights and even shootings were all too commonplace, especially when closed-circuit equipment went on the fritz. New Yorkers had to attend the match live at the Stadium or miss it all together. Bitter complaints were lodged by bar and grill operators accustomed to having such events broadcast gratis on TV for their customers. CBS waited a week, then carried La Motta/Murphy on film. The socko boxoffice numbers led to increased sales for RCA theatre television units, which were adjudged "excellent" by circuit managers. It's hard to imagine these stone-age video projectors looking anything other than dreadful flashed upon those enormous downtown palace screens, but chances are sheer novelty of the thing made up the difference. I can just visualize ushers at the Warner/Stanley scouring the auditorium with flashlights after the last evening show of Strangers On A Train, flushing out any number of would-be freeloader patrons anxious to see Hitchcock and La Motta on the same ticket. I might have attempted such a gambit myself had I been there. What glorious adventure moviegoing was in those days …