The founders of Washington’s K-B Theatres chain thought they’d name all their movie houses starting with the letter A so they’d be first in the phone book. They abandoned that scheme after two — the Atlas and Apex — but the theaters remained lodged in District moviegoers’ hearts.
Especially the Apex, the art deco Spring Valley theater Answer Man wrote about last week. Many readers wrote in with fond memories.
[Spring Valley’s art deco Apex Theater was once a favorite of D.C. moviegoers]
“One of my most cherished memories of Washington was walking down to the Apex with my girlfriend, shortly after the November 1964 election, to see ‘Topkapi,’ a wonderful film set in Istanbul,” wrote Phil Padgett of Kensington, Md. While they waited in a line that stretched around the block, Phil and his date saw a black Cadillac pull up and let out two kids and a man in a gray sweatshirt and khakis.
“Almost immediately, everyone recognized Robert Kennedy who, days earlier, had been elected United States Senator from New York,” Phil wrote. “In a cold drizzle, Kennedy bought tickets and then walked past us around the corner to take a place at the end of the line like everyone else.”
Claire O’Dwyer Randall of Springfield, Va., grew up about two blocks from the Apex and was a fixture there in the 1940s and ’50s. “Mr. Demma was the manager, and of particular interest to my family was that when Annunciation Catholic Church was being built, Sunday Mass was said there. Imagine the delight of getting to go to an ‘air-cooled’ place for Sunday Mass. It sure beat going to St. Ann’s, where you’d hope to get near a fan.”
Kevin M. Sweeney of Arlington was an usher at the Apex during summer breaks from college in 1975 and 1976. He saw how contractual obligations to keep showing a film for weeks on end could make or break the bottom line.
“ ‘Logan’s Run’ brought in the Michael York and Peter Ustinov fans for a while, but attendance really dropped after a few weeks,” he wrote. “The previous summer the film was ‘The Wind and the Lion’ with Sean Connery and Candice Bergen. That film developed a following with Marines stationed at Quantico, due in part to a scene in which the Marines mowed down some palace guards.”
Kevin said the last manager of the Apex was a man named Halsey “Hal” Melone. “I don’t recall the details, but he had a harrowing experience when the theater closed. He was alone in the theater, removing a fixture, when the ladder he was standing on slipped and he fell. I believe he broke both ankles, and yet somehow managed to get to his office and phone for help. That would be an interesting story if he’s still around.”
Alas, he’s not. Melone died in 1996 at age 73. But what an interesting life he led. According to his Post obituary, Melone was in the Army in World War II, was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and later received a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
After the war, he wrote scripts for such TV shows as “Wagon Train,” “Riverboat” and “The Millionaire.”
From time to time in the 1970s, Rick Raskin of Manassas, Va., worked as a projectionist at the Apex. He snapped the accompanying photo of the two big Norelco projectors he had to manhandle.
“It took some skill,” he said. “You had to know what you were doing.”
The job involved muscling reels of film on and off the two projectors and memorizing the reel changes, the points in a movie when one 20-minute reel ended and the next began.
Rick was witness to an infamous incident in District projectionist circles: the nitrate film fire of 1975. He and another film slinger were in the booth at the American Film Institute when it was located in the Kennedy Center. They were preparing to show a poor-quality print of “The Lady From Shanghai.”
“It was really, really messed up,” Rick said of the brittle film. “I remember the other guy saying, ‘If we get through this show we’re going to be lucky.’ We didn’t.”
Halfway through a reel, the film broke and froze in the projector gate. The intense heat from the lamp ignited it. Fire rushed vertically, engulfing the film still spooled on the reel.
“When I saw the flames, everything turned to slow motion,” Rick said.
Nitrocellulose film burns with an intense yellow flame and noxious fumes. The projectionists fled the booth and the theater was evacuated. No one was injured, but 10 minutes of the Orson Welles classic were reduced to ash.
When Rick joined the projectionists’ union in 1969 he met men who had started out hand-cranking silent pictures in D.C. movie houses.
“I went down to the Warner Theater once,” he said. “The guy who was working it was 90 years old and he was still running film. He’d been there since the day that theater opened. Imagine having one job for your entire career.”
Rick realized automation would replace most projectionists. He left to work for the phone company.
Twitter: @johnkelly
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