The first older, classic theatre I ever went to is The Senator Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland, a seventy-year-old single screen Art Deco beauty, opening night was October 5th, 1939. A recent article in
Moving Pictures magazine named The Senator one of the "10 Best Movie Theaters in America" (article
HERE) and in 2005
Entertainment Weekly crowned it one of America's "10 Theaters doing it right" (article
HERE). It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a bonafide landmark. My first experience there was a keeper: the Spring of 1989 when the restored
Lawrence of Arabia played in glorious 70mm. Saw it twice in as many days.
The Senator's exterior is distinctive, but mostly at night when its front lights up like a gigantic jukebox. It has a lush lobby: chandeliers, terrazzo floors and murals abound. Class all the way, with the kind of detail and ornamentation theatres just don't invest in anymore. The house itself has about nine hundred seats plus a special mezzanine, with gilded molding of a setting sun atop the screen that radiates across the ceiling. The screen is an old-style forty-foot curved bit of perfection.
The Senator has been featured in films and television projects over the years. The big non-Barry Levinson or John Waters one is in Terry Gilliam's
12 Monkeys (1995). They are supposed to be in Philadelphia at the time (the film was shot in and around both Baltimore and Philly), but it's definitely The Senator. It's the scene where Bruce Willis' Cole and Madeline Stowe's Kathryn Railly are hiding at a double feature of Hitchcock,
Vertigo and
The Birds (the marquee also advertises
Psycho and
Strangers On a Train). The interior with seats and screen isn't The Senator, but the exterior and the lobby when the Bernard Herrmann score kicks in and Stowe shows up in her blond wig and disguise, that's it.
In Levinson's
Avalon (1990) it is the threatre where young Michael (Elijah Wood) is watching his Rocket Man serial and where he and Elizabeth Perkins are standing outside of when the streetcar comes down the hill, jumps its tracks, crosses York Avenue, and smashes into their car at the gas station across the street.
But perhaps the best place to see The Senator is in a seventh season episode of the Levinson-produced
"Homicide: Life On the Street" called "A Case of Do or Die", original airdate February 12th, 1999. The B-plot is a murder detectives Mike Giardello (Giancarlo Esposito) and Rene Sheppard (Michael Michele) have to solve that took place in the theatre during a midnight double feature of Bogart movies,
Casablanca and
The Big Sleep. The dead patron was a rude, noisy know-it-all who wouldn't shut up and kept ruining the theatre experience for others by talking back to the screen and yelling out lines or plot points ("She gets on the plane, she leaves him behind!"), and as one of the other patrons they interview tells them "There wasn't a soul in that theatre who didn't want that man dead." I'll just tell you whodoneit: it is the theatre manager, played by Wallace Shawn, who has finally had enough of the man's base lack of consideration for cinema lovers. There's a great bit from Richard Belzer's Detective Munch in the middle of the episode...
DET. MUNCH
Love, money, revenge: of all the various and sundry motives
for murder, talking in the movies is the most reasonable excuse.
DET. GIARDELLO
Yeah, this Blowen probably died of natural causes.
DET. MUNCH
That's what you think. Really, the Gods of the Old Hollywood
are sitting up there in their Busby Berkeley version of Heaven,
smoking cigars, drinking rye on the rocks, looking down in
disgust at this loony B-Picture we call our lives. They're all up
there together, The Columbia Goddess, The MGM Lion, The Four
Warner Brothers, and they spot this schmuck, Blowen, making
a mockery of their life's work so what's left to do but write the
offending actor's final scene? Voluminous sweets get the letters
of transit, our loudmouth has a massive cardiac arrest, fade out,
the end.
http://www.senator.com
Reply to Topic
