Biograph Times: 1974: A Year of Change

 

The last American last 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 made for a different vibe. During 1974 a lot changed in the U.S.A.; probably more changes than most years. 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.

 

With the turning of those two significant pages of history the zenith of the hippie era itself was behind us and styles in music, politics, movies, drugs, clothes, hairdos and you-name-it began moving in different directions. 

 

For my demographic group, the 20-somethings, the temptation to celebrate having been right about Vietnam and Nixon was irresistible. So it was an excellent time for a party. Maybe in an empty warehouse or an art studio ... at least, that's how I remember it ... looking back through the compression of a long lens.

 

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While some of 1974's changes were fairly predictable, others seemed to come from out of the blue. For instance, not many of us foresaw the most popular gesture of civil disobedience and group defiance on campus during the '60s and early-'70s -- the protest march -- would mutate into impromptu gatherings to cheer for naked people running by. Well, in the spring of '74, streaking on college campuses suddenly became a national phenomenon. 

 

It seemed most folks laughed off the streaking fad, or they just didn't care much. Yet, some people were outraged into quivering fits by it. Naturally, such reactions inspired some adventurous young people in the Fan District to get in the act.

 

However, after hearing about incidents of streaking on Virginia Commonwealth University's campus, Richmond’s police chief, Frank S. Duling, told the media that his department would not tolerate streaking on the city’s streets, in the alleys, etc. He promised to do his duty to rid the city of the threat streaking posed.  

 

Then a VCU spokesperson insisted that if the streaking occurs on campus, that would be a university matter. So it would be properly dealt with by its own police personnel. 

 

Truth be told, the relationship between the City of Richmond and VCU was still working itself out in 1974. VCU had been growing by leaps and bounds in the time since its 1968 creation, by way of the merger of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medial College of Virginia. All that sudden growth was rubbing some Richmonders the wrong way.

 

It should be remembered that VCU's academic campus had some busy (and still has) city streets running though it. Thus, it wasn't altogether clear to everyone just who ought to have the say-so over the university's exhibitionist students playing on those city streets and sidewalks.

Moreover, leading up to this point, there had been a series of the-cops-vs-the-kids skirmishes in the lower Fan District, on or near the VCU campus. The most bitterly remembered of them occurred after Allen Ginsberg spoke at the VCU gym on Oct. 12, 1970. Reports I've read and the many firsthand accounts I've heard have agreed that the city police used overkill force to break up what was essentially a spontaneous outdoor after-party in the vicinity of N. Harrison St, where Grove Ave. and Park Ave. converge. 

 

Hell broke loose. Debris was thrown. It was said a cop was hit by a flying piece of brick. K-9 dogs were unleashed upon the crowd. It was a turf war mess. Then there were lots of resentments to do with the increased pot busts in the neighborhood, frequently facilitated by the squealing of undercover narcs. 

 

There were other lesser clashes in the neighborhood. Anyway, grudges were held. So, leading up to the incident described below, which played out three-and-a-half years later,  there was a troubled history . 

 

By about 10 p.m. of March 19, 1974, several small groups of streakers had already made some quick runs on the streets, sidewalks and between buildings near the intersection of Shafer and Franklin Streets. Cops on patrol rode by a few times, but took no action. 

 

At first... 

Then four young adults slowly rode along of the 800 block of W. Franklin in a convertible and stole the show. As they stood up in the middle of the block -- as naked as jaybirds -- and waved, the crowd of some 150 spectators cheered. 

 

At this point the prevailing mood was quite festive. Peaceful, too. Because I was in that crowd when the convertible passed by, I know this firsthand. It all happened just a block from the Biograph Theatre, on Grace St., where I worked. Trent Nicholas, also on the theater's staff, and I had noticed the commotion and walked over to see what would happen.

Then a group of maybe 60-to-70 city policemen zoomed into the scene on small motorbikes and in squad cars. They were executing what appeared to be a planned raid. They wasted no time in arresting the four streakers in the convertible. The crowd booed.  

 

After a lull in the action, several uniformed policemen suddenly charged into the assembled spectators on the sidewalks and lawns on either side of Franklin St. Other than the crowd booing the cops for arresting the streakers, I don't remember any particular provocation for that abrupt change. A few of the bystanders were randomly seized, dragged into the middle of the street, roughed up and thrown into paddy wagons. 

 

One kid, close to where I was standing, was shoved from his bicycle to the curb. Two cops grabbed him and slammed him several times against the front fender of a police car in the middle of the street. By then the crowd was scattering. A few unlucky bystanders were beaten with clubs or flashlights.  

 

What set the cops off that night on Franklin St. is still a mystery to me. Maybe they were following orders. I didn't stick around to ask. By the way, as I remember it, VCU cops were conspicuous by their absence.

 

Two weeks later, in Los Angeles, a man named Robert Opel streaked across the stage of the 46th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. On the live broadcast, as Opel ran by, flashing a peace sign with his hand, the upstaged host, David Niven, promptly jabbed: "The only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings."

Other Noteworthy Events in 1974

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. (Imagine how that would go over today!)

 

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. It turned out, he was the last of the string of Byrd Machine Democrats to serve as governor (1966-'70). In 1973, for his second term, Godwin ran as a Republican. 

 

In this time it was fashionable for conservative Southern Democrats to cross over, to sit other side of the aisle. Virginia's Republican Party, which had previously been the more liberal of the Commonwealth's two 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 fought 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 cough up $230 million in food aid to the poor.

Feb. 11: Richmond's Biograph Theatre celebrated its second anniversary with free movies, free beer and a wee prank, of a sort. Once all the seats were filled for the 6:30 p.m. show -- "The Devil and Miss Jones" and "Beaver Valley" -- thousands who had lined up were turned away. 

 

A couple of hundred simply stayed in line, to be sure of getting into the 9 p.m. show. When the essential details of the prank reached them, as they waited, some left once they heard no skin flicks were being screened. Others stayed for the second show, anyway.
 
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, at this point in the story, 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 from the public leading up to his feat. Once again, we could plainly see that for some dyed-in-the-wool racists nothing would ever change.

Apr. 15: According to photographic evidence Patty “Tania” Hurst seemed to be helping her captors rob a bank at gunpoint. It was hard to know what to make of it. 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 feud between the two groups finally boiled over. Accounts said things got totally out of hand when 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. A friend shot some color 16mm film of the scene that looked like news footage from a third world country. In all, 76 people were arrested. The fallout from this unprecedented melee put the kibosh on any outdoor rock 'n' roll shows in Richmond -- with alcohol available on the site -- for several years. 

 

May 10: A great offbeat thriller, "The Conversation," began a two-week run. The booking was owing to a lucky quirk of business that allowed the Biograph, an independent cinema, to play several 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, 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 plentiful and a lot of fun. During that five-week run it became my all-time favorite movie. It still is. 

 

My favorite line in "Chinatown" is spoken by Noah Cross (John Huston): "'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. While Nixon's presidency was surely in a death spiral he continued to vow that he would never resign.  

Aug. 9: Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford was immediately sworn in as president. 

Aug. 12: The Biograph Theatre closed for four weeks to be converted into a rather awkward twin cinema. The work was done by a chemically-fueled, round-the-clock construction crew. The Liar's Poker games in the middle of the night were the stuff of legends.

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." 

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1974 Note 1: During 1974, Richmond's Biograph made a lot of news, local and elsewhere. That process revealed to me just how much most of the local press seemed to want to help the Biograph succeed. In any city advertising and media pros tended to like art house cinemas. The same went for college art and communications professors. To that community we were the risk-taking good guys of the local film scene. 

 

Thus, after three years of learning on the fly how to manage Richmond's repertory cinema(s), I could see that to succeed at the box office often enough to keep the place open in the years ahead, I probably had to get better at helping that community to help us.   

 

1974 Note 2: Of the three partners who worked in the Biograph offices in Georgetown, the one I knew the best was David Levy. In early-1974 he split, to go his own way. Levy soon began operating his own cinema, also in Georgetown, The Key. 

 

1974 Note 3: In late-February of 1974 Trent Nicholas and I shot the 16mm footage that went into "Matinee Madcap." We used borrowed equipment (shout-out to Mike Moore). 

 

Trent played the protagonist, a harmless pauper trying to sneak into the cinema. Bernie Hall played the dutiful usher/schlemeil, determined to stop the freeloader. Others on the theater's staff and several friends played various supporting roles and served as extras. A nine-minute black-and-white comedy, it was styled after the classic silent two-reelers of the 1920s.  

 

It was basically a string of gags held together by the thinnest of plots. All of the film's action was shot at the theater. It ends on the sidewalk in front of the theater with a brief homage to Charlie Chaplin.

 

Over the next couple of weeks I edited it in the theater's office. Then, in a few more weeks, with me kibbitzing, Dave DeWitt added the sound track in his studio; for the sound we "sampled" a bunch of different pop music snippets. The style we used borrowed from what we had developed producing a bunch of goofy radio spots promoting the Biograph's midnight shows.

 

In the next several years that followed, "Matinee Madcap" was screened at the Biograph countless times. It was screened at a film festival in D.C. and received brief praise from critic Tom Shales in the Washington Post. Brief.

 

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