It's worth noting that in many ways this time period seemed ready to deliver whatever the baby boomer generation wanted. And, it wanted.
With that thought in mind, during the first year the theater became sort of an after-hours clubhouse/hangout for the staff and friends. Of course that set of wiseass movie-lovers wanted/needed a place in which to gather and socialize over cheap beer, etc. Speaking of cheap, the popcorn was free.
Chapter Two of Part One of the Biograph's story spotlights one hell of a prank. It also provides selected glimpses at highlights of 1973 and '74. Happenings in the time leading up to the quick and dirty makeover that transformed the Fan District's Biograph into a twin cinema.
*
Fan Free Funnies
During the spring semester of the 1972-1973 school year the student newspaper at Virginia Commonwealth University published three tabloid supplements that were inspired by the irreverent, frequently-salty underground "comix" of that age. The first issue of Fan Free Funnies came out near 1973's St. Valentine's Day.
The timing was perfect for Fan Free Funnies. It was created at the zenith of the hippie era in the Fan District. FFF published my first Rebus strip. Before Rebus even had a name he had been appearing as a spokesdog on my flyers touting midnight shows at the Biograph Theatre, which I managed at the time. Rebus was somewhat influenced by R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, in that I went to school on how Crumb used Mr. Natural as a spokesman, sometimes like a carnival barker. However, Rebus was hardly a holy man. Instead, he was an everyman schlemiel with a dog's head.
In that time some local, mostly VCU-trained artists, were making paintings and prints in a style reminiscent of some old animated cartoons of the 1930s and then-current underground funny books. Some of the same young artists also were making short films in Super 8 and 16mm. So the Biograph became a hub of a sort for them.
Not long after FFF came out, my 3-year-old daughter, Katey, asked me a question. “Is Rebus real?”
I shrugged. “What do you mean?”
Rebus hawking an event. She said, “Like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck.”
“Sure,” I said, “Rebus is real. But only the cool people know about him.”
The inspirational Crumb was the most celebrated of the underground artists in the days when cartoonists bitterly lampooning the tastes and values of middle class America were making an impact on popular culture. Spontaneously, Crumb launched the movement in 1968, selling his “Zap Comix No. 1” out of a baby carriage on San Francisco sidewalks.
In 1973, in spite of cultural changes that had been in the air for years, mainstream pop culture was still serving up plenty of safe schmaltz and accessible old hat: Billboard's top single of the year was “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree.” A month after the first issue of FFF was published the Oscar for the Best Picture of 1972 was presented to “The Godfather.” Thus, the term “underground,” as associated with art, film and music, still had a yet-to-be-fully exploited edge to it.
Perhaps the best known of the FFF cartoonists was Phil Trumbo (VCU 1972). “Ed Slipek, the editor of VCU's student newspaper, Commonwealth Times, approached me to help create an underground, comix-style supplement,” Trumbo remembers. “I suppose he contacted me because I had done some independent comics and was exhibiting paintings influenced by comics imagery.”
Each invited artist was instructed by Slipek to create a full page, drawn to proportion, in black and white. Some submitted a page of images set within traditional comic strip frames; others wandered into loose, more avant-garde styles. Scans of the three issues of Richmond's 1973 underground comics can now be seen online at the VCU Libraries Digital Collection.
“The journalism department at VCU didn't see that this was journalism,” recalls Slipek (who is, today, Style's senior contributing writer). “The media [advisory] board questioned the fact that we were doing this, but it was very well-received with the students. I'm proud of it because the Commonwealth Times continued to have comics of some sort — it's a lasting tradition that started with us.”
Trumbo left Richmond in 1984 to pursue a career in animation, which eventually led him to the West Coast and his current position as an art director at Hidden City Games. Along the way he picked up an Emmy Award for his work on “Pee Wee's Playhouse” and has been the art director of more than 100 video games, including “Lord of the Rings” and “Spider-Man.” Also a noteworthy musician, Trumbo recently returned home to play a reunion show with the Orthotonics, the influential Richmond band that he played with during his time here.
Charles Vess (VCU 1974) is another award-winning illustrator who contributed to FFF. Vess' art has since appeared in “Heavy Metal” and “National Lampoon”; he's a World Fantasy Award-winner who has worked for comic book publishers such as Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Epic. Other contributors to the 1973 series included Bruce Barnes, Eric Bowman, Michael Cody, Greg Kemp, Nancy Meade, Bill Nelson, Trent Nicholas and Ragan Reaves.
“Fan Free Funnies was a really diverse collection, representing vastly different graphic styles and inventive, experimental approaches to sequential storytelling,” Trumbo remembers. “We were all influenced by the amazing work of '60s underground cartoonists, like Robert Crumb, Rick Griffith, S. Clay Wilson and Trina Robbins and the rest.”
Note: Scans of the art presented in the three issues of Fan Free Funnies can be found here.
*
The Biograph's management team was hoping that by playing some first-run foreign films we might benefit from getting more publicity and beneficial chatter than usual. The hope was such films would be noticed by a wider audience. Serious film buffs in Richmond were accustomed to driving to D.C. to catch trendy first-run imports.
We led off the spring festival with a charming first-run French picture, "César and Rosalie" (1972). Sure enough, it got good local reviews. It featured two attractive stars -- Romy Schneider and Yves Montand. Nonetheless, it flopped at the box office.
Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) followed. That feature-length cartoon had been out of theatrical release for several years and it drew good sized crowds. We had never had so many children show up before, so we ran out of popcorn. Which meant we held the picture over for an additional week and we bought a lot more popcorn.
Until then, rather than depart from the published schedule on one of our calendar programs, as soon as it was practical we would bring back a popular movie for a return engagement. By holding "Fantasia" over, we were acting more like a standard movie house that books product on a week-to-week basis, each Monday morning, according to the weekend's box office numbers.
Note: Which is how most cinemas operated then and probably still do. That style of programming depends heavily on having a healthy sized newspaper advertising budget, with much of the money supplied by the film's distributor. However, back in this time, with the running of old classics and current second-runs, cooperative advertising budgets were extremely rare. So, the promotion burden was left to the theater.
Next came the centerpiece of the festival, Luis Buñuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972). Incidentally, when I first saw it at the old Cerberus in Georgetown, in the fall of '72, I stayed on and watched it all the way through a second time.
Critics were praising it as Buñuel's masterpiece. Consequently, there was a demand for it in other cities in the region and only a limited number of 35mm prints were available. Thus, in order to secure a print, when we wanted it, we had to guarantee the distributor its picture would play a minimum of two weeks. Plus, we had to cough up some film rental in advance -- probably $2,000 to $2,500. The reason for those terms was mostly because at that point we simply had no track record with first-run foreign films.
With this move we were hoping/gambling that it would win the Best Foreign Movie Oscar just a few days before its scheduled premiere in Richmond. Which it did. For the first week "Discreet Charm" drew a decent crowd that loved it.
Then, rather than good word-of-mouth goosing attendance up during the second week, it dropped off dramatically. Ouch! Levy and I had imagined that attendance for an Oscar-winning Buñuel comedy would justify holding it over for several weeks. After the required two weeks, we packed Buñuel's masterpiece up and Clark Transfer hauled it off.
All these years later, when I think about this episode, I can still feel the bitter sense of disappointment. We, the owners and the local staff, had wanted to prove to everybody that the Richmond market was changing and the best of foreign films could draw a decent crowd at the Biograph.
Of course, now it's easy to see that our confidence was based way too much on how much some of us loved the damn film. C'est la vie.
*
Note: The reader should understand that in those days the large movie theater chains had all the booking power (and I doubt that has changed much). Which meant that when it came to having access to popular first-run pictures an independent cinema in a medium sized market had no clout. For the most part, in 1973 we could book what the regional chains didn't want.
In retrospect, I have to say now that our series of post-"Greaser's Palace" telephone conversations probably marked our first real hard look at what we were doing right and doing wrong. David, Alan, Lenny and I had to face it -- there was just more difference between the D.C. market and the Richmond market than we had originally imagined.For sure, the Biograph up in D.C. had been competing with other art houses for a share of a substantial, already established sophisticated audience in the metro area. Whereas, in Richmond, the group of the same sort of viewers was much smaller.
Consequently, the four of us could see that in Richmond we had to make more of an effort to cultivate an audience for our repertory concept. We also needed to do more to promote the theater, itself, to the whole city, not just the Fan.
Having been exposed to lots of marketing and ratings studies in my previous job, in the radio business, I decided to run some in-house studies to gather information about what our patrons liked. What movies? What radio stations? What print media?
That sort of thinking launched what soon became a familiar research and marketing tool. Located in the lobby, the Suggestion Box became popular right away. And, frequently, it yielded useful information.
Then, in June, I was told the Faustian deal had been struck with the same company that distributed "Deep Throat." We agreed to play “The Devil in Miss Jones” (1973), a new film directed by Gerard Damiano, the headline-making director of “Throat.”
In becoming the USA's first hardcore X-rated flick to attract a significant mainstream audience, "Throat" had received massive national publicity over the previous year. For several months, according to trade journals, it had been one of the top grossing movies in the country. Damiano and Linda Lovelace, the star of "Throat," had been interviewed by national magazines. They had both appeared on television network talk shows. Culturally, because there was a blur in the line between edgy American underground films with nudity and outright porn, the oxymoronic term "porno chic" was briefly in currency.
Emboldened by the crazy national success of "Throat" the new X-rated picture's distributor imposed terms on the deal that called for it to play as a normal first-run picture. Rather than as a midnight-only attraction on weekends, it had to play at regular show times, seven days a week. That was the deal -- take it or leave it.
When Levy agreed to those terms for "The Devil in Miss Jones" he had to have known we were crossing a line. Still, no one could have anticipated what we were setting in motion by expanding the availability of notorious “adult movies” beyond the midnight hour.
*
Until this point, we had not been promoting any of our midnight shows in the same way we did our regular fare. That had helped cast our midnight shows, such as "Reefer Madness" and "Throat" as sort of playfully forbidden. According to our deal with "The Devil," for the first time the promotional art and copy for a hardcore skin flick was included in a Biograph calendar program. That change didn't go unnoticed.
Following a friendly, "No comment," from me, an aggressive young TV newsman laughed. Then he took Biograph Program No. 12 downtown to Richmond's new Commonwealth’s Attorney, Aubrey Davis.
The reporter asked Davis what he was going to do about the Biograph’s brazen plan to run such a scandalous movie, especially in light of the then-freshly-minted Miller Decision on obscenity by the Supreme Court.
*
The following afternoon a press conference was staged in the Biograph’s lobby to make an announcement. Most of the news-gathering outfits in town bought the premise enough to send a reporter/representative. They all acted as if what were doing was big news. It seemed to serve their purposes to to play along by gathering a story about what we all knew was a publicity stunt.
That was my first press conference. No doubt, I learned something that day about how to go about planting a story.
After Dave DeWitt -- who had been representing the theater as its ad agent -- laid out the ground rules and introduced me to the working press, I read a prepared statement for the cameras and microphones. In my spiel, I said that based on public demand the Biograph planned to fight the TRO in court. Furthermore, the first-run engagement of “The Devil in Miss Jones” would be extended -- it was being held over for a second week. Boom!
During the lively Q & A session that followed, when Dave scolded an eager scribe for going too far with a follow-up question, it was tough duty holding back the laughing fit that would surely have broken the spell we were casting, as best we could, over the room.
The trial lasted two days. The prosecutor called a handful of witnesses, all from the same neighborhood in the West End. Maybe they all went to the same church, too.
I testified and we also put a few witnesses on the stand, mostly film and freedom of speech experts. The local media continued to lap it all up.
Lumpkin's decision came on November 13, 1973. His terse decree put all on notice. Essentially, it said: From now on, if anyone dares to exhibit this “filth” to the public, they should expect criminal prosecution will come their way.
So it was that “The Devil” was banned by a judge in Richmond, Virginia. The plot to have some fun responding to the judge's decree was hatched a few weeks later.
*
Also in the autumn of 1973, other things happened. One day Levy asked me to look at a new movie to evaluate its potential. From time to time he did that for various reasons. In this case he had a new 35mm print of “The Harder They Come” (1972) shipped to me, via Clark Transfer.
Note: “The Harder They Come": Color. 120
minutes. Directed by Perry Henzell; Cast: Jimmy Cliff, Janet Bartley,
Carl Bradshaw. In this Jamaican production, Cliff plays Ivan, a pop
star/criminal on the lam. The music of Cliff, The Maytals, The Melodians
and Desmond Dekker is featured.
In
those early days we occasionally had after-hours screenings of films we
came by, one way or another. For instance, being in the same city as three universities meant access to films that could be borrowed briefly.
Usually on short notice, the word would go out to friends that we would be watching a particular movie at a certain time. These gatherings were essentially impromptu movie parties. Once it was 1940s and '50s 16mm boxing films from a private collection. The Beatles' then out-of-release "Magical Mystery Tour" (1967) in 16mm was the centerpiece to another one of those parties.
Although I don’t remember any moments, in particular, from that after-hours “The Harder They Come" watch party, I do recall the gist of my telephone conversation with Levy the next day. After telling him how much I liked the Jamaican movie, he asked me how I would promote it.
Well, I was ready for that question, as I had smoked it over thoroughly with DeWitt and a few friends after the screening. Consequently, I told Levy we ought to have a free, open-to-the-public-on-short-notice, sneak preview of the movie. Most importantly, we should use WGOE exclusively to promote the screening. Because Levy liked the radio campaigns for the Biograph's midnight shows that DeWitt and I had produced over the last year, he went for the idea right away.
Note:
In the early-'70s, long before the era of giant corporations owning
hundreds of stations, a locally-programmed daytime radio station with a
weak signal played a significant role in what success was enjoyed at the
Biograph. For a few years we had an especially good business arrangement with
WGOE-AM, the station that then owned the hippie market in Richmond.
Subsequently,
on a Friday morning in November the DJs at WGOE began reading
announcements of a free showing of “The Harder They Come” that would
take place at the Biograph that afternoon at 3 p.m. Then they would play
a soundtrack cut by Jimmy Cliff, the film’s star. This pattern was
continued maybe three times per hour, leading up to the time of the
event. Since we presented it as a "WGOE-presents sneak preview," the announcements cost the Biograph nothing.
Of
course, reggae music was being heard in Richmond before our free
screening, but it was still mostly on the periphery of popular culture
on the East Coast. As I recall, some 300 people showed up that day and
the movie was extremely well received.
In
a couple of previous runs in other markets, “The Harder They Come” had
been handled as an underground movie. As it was shot in 16mm and blown
up to 35mm for its American distribution, it had a grainy, documentary
look. Upon hearing about the test-audience's approval, Levy got excited
and decided to book it to run as a first-run feature, rather than as a midnight only show.
Levy became a sub-distributor for “The Harder They Come.” He told me that when he rented it to theaters in other cities within his region, he advised them to use the same radio-promoted, free-preview tactic.
While
it didn’t set any records for attendance at the Biograph, “The Harder They Come” did
fairly well and returned to play several more dates,
both at regular hours and as a midnight show.
As
it happened, in late-1973, watching a then-virtually unknown,
low-budget Jamaican film after operating hours with a small group of
co-workers and friends had seemed somewhat exotic that night. Of course,
on that occasion, we had no idea how popular reggae music was
about to become, in some part because of that movie's influence.
*
*
1974: Early in January of 1974, I was in the Biograph's office on the second story, one door west of the projection booth. Having finished with the box-office paperwork for the evening's shows and I was killing time reading about old movies in a 16mm film catalog. The building was probably empty.
Since it was after-hours, the telltale scent of recently-burned cannabis may well have been wafting about when a particular title jumped off the page. “The Devil and Miss Jones.”
On February 10, the day before the event, the busy staff fielded all inquires, in person or over the telephone, by politely reciting the official spiel, which amounted to: “We can tell you the titles and the show times. The admission will be free. No, we have no idea when the line to get in will start forming. No further details are available.”
On Devil Prank's Eve, a few reporters were snooping about. One, in particular, stuck around late, hoping to claw his way toward the mystery's key. As I stood at my familiar post in the lobby, next to the turnstile, in a hushed voice he said: “I think maybe it has something to do with the title, but what?”
Uh-oh! He was getting too close.
Thus, the reporter's identity was held as a secret until his death in 2015. Now I can write that it was Don Dale, who, after his news reporter stint at Channel 6, went on to be a longtime publicist for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Thanks to Don Dale, right up to when the box office opened, no one else outside of a tight circle appeared to have had an inkling of what was going to happen. Amazing as it may sound, effectively, the caper’s security was airtight.
The staff did its part to set up the
event flawlessly. Then they performed like pros during the event. It was
absolutely beautiful
teamwork, under pressure.
The box-office for the 6:30 p.m. show opened at 6 p.m. By then, the line of gullible people stretched three-fourths around the block. It took every bit of a half-hour to fill our 500-seat auditorium. Then we turned away several times that number.
As the house lights in the auditorium began to fade, the sense of anticipation in the air was thick enough to cut with a knife. Outside, on the sidewalk, plenty of those who couldn't get in to the first show chose to stay in line for what would be the second show at 9 p.m.
For the most part, the reaction to the prank played out in three layers. Some attendees caught on right away and left while “Beaver Valley” was running. Most stayed at least through the first few minutes of “The Devil in Miss Jones.” Only about a third of the 6:30 show attendees remained in their seats through both movies.
Even though those in line for the second show were told all about the joke by people leaving the first show, nonetheless, the second show packed the house. By then, it seemed a lot of people just wanted to be in on a unique event, curious to see what would happen.
Later, as the second show's audience spilled out of the auditorium, the staff and a giddy gaggle of friends, directed our efforts toward polishing off the keg of beer. Come to think of it, I believe it was two kegs.
 |
| Stills from "Matinee Madcap" (1974) |
The plot, calling for a good deal of slapstick chase-scene footage, conveniently set all the action in the movie theater. I finished editing the nine-minute black and white romp in the Biograph's office during March of 1974. A sound track was added a month or so later in DeWitt's sound studio.
Although post-prank life seemed to fall back into what was a familiar routine, in the big picture momentous changes were on the horizon. The last American combat troops left Vietnam in 1973. Since the horrors of the Vietnam War had loomed over our political and cultural landscape for a decade, in 1974 the absence of war soon made for a different vibe.
However, of the many changes that were in the air during 1974, the one that stayed at the top of the news was the steady unraveling of Richard Nixon's presidency. For antiwar 20-something hippies the temptation to celebrate having been right about Vietnam and Nixon was irresistible.
So it became an excellent year to have parties. At that same time, Richmond's rock 'n' roll scene started bubbling.
*
To that particular community the Biograph's image had become that of the risk-taking good guys of the local film scene. Thus, after a couple of years of learning on the fly how to steer the direction of Richmond's repertory cinema, I could see that in order to succeed at the box office often enough to keep the place open, I had to get better at making it easy for those same influential people help us.
After the construction work was completed, with two projection booths and a connecting hallway between them, automating the change-overs from one 35mm projector to the other was essential to controlling costs. Until then, we had been doing changeovers manually. Among other things that necessitated switching from carbon arc lamps to Xenon lamps, which were high intensity bulbs that could be automatically ignited by switches.
Meanwhile, as the edgy punk style began replacing the hippie culture that had ruled the Grace Street strip for the better part of a decade, I doubt any of us working at the Biograph Theatre suspected that the apex of repertory cinema's popularity, nationally, was already in the rear view mirror.
Jan. 2: To conserve precious gasoline in an oil shortage crisis, President Richard Nixon signed a new federal law, mandating a 55 mph speed limit, coast-to-coast.
Jan. 12: After narrowly defeating Henry Howell in the general election, Mills Godwin was sworn in for his second term as governor of Virginia. He had been elected governor as a Democrat in 1965. As it turned out, he was the last of the string of Byrd Machine Democrats to serve as governor. In 1973, for his second term, Godwin won as a Republican.
In this time it was fashionable for conservative Southern Democrats to cross over, to sit on the other side of the aisle. Virginia's Republican Party, which had previously been the more liberal of the Commonwealth's two political parties on some issues, suddenly absorbed a flock of right-wing politicians who had once been a part of the deplorable Massive Resistance movement that had attempted to fight off the integration of Virginia's public schools.
Feb. 4: Patty Hearst was abducted. Eight days later a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army told the extremely well-to-do Hearst family it had to donate $230 million in food aid to the poor. Negotiations ensued.
Mar. 2: President Nixon was named as a "co-conspirator" in the Watergate cover-up by a federal grand jury. Later on, the public learned about how damn crazy Nixon got in his last months in office. Yet, it was still hard to see that he wasn't going to last out the year.
Mar. 29: After flying by and photographing Venus in February, the Mariner 10 reached its closest point to Mercury. Photos of Mercury beamed back to NASA revealed a barren landscape not unlike the Earth's moon.
Apr. 8: Playing for the Atlanta Braves, outfielder Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s supposedly "unbreakable" career home run record with his 715th round-tripper. Eventually, the public was told about the many sick messages, including death threats, Aaron had received leading up to his feat. Once again, it was obvious that for some dyed-in-the-wool racists nothing would ever change.
Apr. 15: According to photographic evidence Patty Hurst seemed to be helping her captors rob a bank at gunpoint. It was hard to know what to make of it. And, apparently she had changed her name to "Tania."
April 27: At the Cherry Blossom Music Festival, staged at Richmond's City Stadium, club-wielding peace officers and pissed off hippies made national news. Headlined by the Steve Miller Band and Boz Scaggs that well-attended event (which I did not attend) turned out to be when the ongoing feud between the kids and the cops finally boiled over. Accounts agreed that things got totally out of hand when a team of police officers attempted to arrest some pot-smoking members of the festival's audience. Several police cars were destroyed during what turned into a four-hour battle. In all, 76 people were arrested.
May 10: A great offbeat thriller, "The Conversation," began a two-week run at the Biograph. The booking owed to a lucky quirk of business that allowed us to play some of Paramount's top first-run pictures that year. Paramount (the distributor) and Neighborhood Theatres (the dominant local chain) weren't speaking for a few months.
May 15: Richmond-based A.H. Robins Co. yielded to pressure from the feds to take its contraceptive device, the Dalkon Shield, off the market.
May 17: A tongue-in-cheek article published in New Times magazine, penned by Nina Totenberg, listed the 10 dumbest people in Congress. Virginia's Sen. William Scott was put atop the list. A week later Scott called a press conference to deny the charge. Scott: "I'm not a dunce."
June 28: "Chinatown," another Paramount first-run picture, premiered at the Biograph. It ran five weeks. The games the staff played using lines from the movie were fun. During that five-week run it became my all-time favorite movie. I was never happier with what was being presented at the Biograph than I was for those five weeks.
My favorite line in "Chinatown" is spoken by Noah Cross (John Huston), who says: "Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."
July 27: The House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to impeach Nixon. Three days later the Supreme Court said Nixon had to surrender tape recordings of White House meetings that had been sought by the Watergate investigation’s special prosecutor. By then, Nixon's presidency was surely in a death spiral, but he continued to vow that he would never resign.
Aug. 9: Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford was immediately sworn in as president.
Sept. 8: Ford pardoned Nixon, which didn't come as much of a surprise, but it still frustrated a lot of people who wanted to see him to face the music.
Oct. 29: Muhammad Ali regained the world heavyweight boxing crown he had lost by refusing to be drafted into the army in 1967. In Zaire, Ali defeated the heavily favored champion, George Foreman, by a knockout in the eighth round.
Nov. 13: Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addressed the UN with a pistol strapped to his waist. Supporters of Israel cringed. Israel's enemies puffed up their chests. Lovers of peace weren't necessarily encouraged, but hoped for the best.
Nov. 24: The 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of an early human ancestor was discovered in Ethiopia. The scientists who found it named the skeleton, “Lucy.”
Dec. 10: "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones," a first-run concert film, began a four-week engagement at the Biograph in No. 1 (the larger auditorium). A special sound system was brought in to beef up the surround sound to rock 'n' roll concert level.
Dec. 19: The former governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate Republican, was sworn in as Vice President.
Dec. 28: The last published Billboard Top 100 list of 1974 revealed that the No. 1 pop single of the year was Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were."
 |
| The masthead to Program 53 in 1980 |
Here's an offbeat story about Rea few people know about:
At the aforementioned "Devil in Miss Jones" press conference in the Biograph’s lobby, in the summer of '73, Rea looked into the camera and asked for the public to weigh in on the freedom of speech angle. "Send me your opinions," he openly requested of his news audience.
Perhaps the bitter need his precious Biograph had developed to show trashy movies, in order to be allowed to also show totally worthwhile movies, grossed him out a little extra on that particular winter’s day in early-1975.
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