Movie Palaces: Survivors of an Elegant Era

Movie Palaces: Survivors of an Elegant Era by Lucinda Smith. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780517538579.

The book includes 181 full color and 15 black & white photographs. Dust jacket notes: "For the small fee of fifty cents, a moviegoer in the early 1900s could gain admittance to any Cathedral of Motion Picture and enter the enchanted wonder of an Egyptian temple, Persian court, Italian Garden or Chinese palace. Going to the movies was a total experience. Once seated in the magnificent environment of the Roxy, Rialto, Egyptian or Metropolitan and surrounded by marble statuary and orate murals, the theatre would suddenly explode with music as a one hundred piece symphony orchestra arose from the floor and miraculously disappeared as matinee idols appeared on the screen. In 1928, the Roxys enormous columns, arches, trellises and fountains humbled even the notables of government, industry, military and theatre who attended its opening. By 1940, the talkies had become spectacles themselves, and the screen became the focus of attention rather than the surrounding theatre. Today these great buildings are a rare and vanishing species. Movie Palaces immortalizes these disappearing structures and recounts through photographs and text their fascinating origins, the great men who saw their dreams come true in the fabulous structures they built and the entrepreneurs and studios who found in the palaces an outlet for the gaudy and glamorous. Here are anecdotes about the stars, Gloria Swanson, Greata Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, whose fascinating lives contributed to the myths and gossip surrounding the palaces. This era, which marked the beginning of the motion picture industry, has almost completely vanished. The movie palaces are the last remaining relics of a moment in history that can never happen again."