Where’s Sid When We Need Him?

The 7 o’clock showing of “The Dukes of Hazzard” at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was lightly attended. As I handed over my 14 bucks for large buckets of empty carbohydrates, I asked the kid in the red tunic behind the concession stand why more people weren’t there. “Could be the movie,” he said. Wow. Here at the funnel’s end of the movie industry, the river of hype and happy boosterism was squeezed down to a single drop of honesty. I almost choked up.

You couldn’t blame the attendance on the theater. I’ve been to Grauman’s three times now, and every time it feels like eating a ripe, succulent peach after a steady diet of sawdust.

I know it’s set dressing, all this forbidden-palace chinoiserie whipped into a lather, and I reckon that the more sensitive multiculturalists among us might find the 78-year-old Grauman’s vaguely insulting. Should Grauman’s Irish Theatre be a sod house? But I appreciate the effort. There’s even a faux-for-faux’s sake obviousness to it that makes it comfortable, that keeps it light. Movie theaters are, or should be, places of illusion. The great and unappreciated insight of America’s old movie palaces is that, with their suffused Orientalism and vaulting spaces, they invited patrons to dream.

Grauman’s auditorium always stops me in my tracks. What seems like endless rows of red-mohair seats, 1,162 in all, fan out like the ridges of a scallop shell. Light pours through the enormous carved-wood starburst on the ceiling, with a spoke-and-wheel chandelier in the center. The proscenium arch, like the recovered timbers from a sunken Chinese junk, frame a shimmering curtain. Much as an old cathedral does, Grauman’s invites you to lose yourself in its sheer scale.

Old Sid Grauman knew a thing or two about showmanship.

Or at least about the psychology of theaters. As Hollywood tries to understand the dramatic drop in box-office revenue--it’s the films, it’s the ticket prices, it’s the motherless mongrels on their cellphones--someone might stop to consider that it might be the theaters.

I call them theaters but they are really more like self-storage units with stadium seating--raw, rough, charmless voids cut out of the dark. Amusement bunkers.

You may choose to attribute teenagers’ appalling behavior at the movies to a decline in civility. I think the reason they behave like they’re at a school assembly is because the theaters themselves are carpeted gymnasiums. What signal do they have that theaters are someplace special?

It’s been 10 years since AMC Entertainment Inc. opened the Grand 24 in Dallas, the nation’s first megaplex--a theater with 14 screens or more--and the movie business hasn’t caught its breath yet. There are 5,629 theaters in America, and each has an average 6.4 screens, almost double the average of 10 years ago.

Megaplexes promised an economy of scale, but it didn’t work out that way. The fact is these theaters operate on razor-thin margins. When the $100-million blockbusters don’t show up, as they haven’t this summer, megaplexes lose money, entertaining only empty seats. In an effort to stay in the black, theater owners run on skeleton staffs--just try to find an usher to silence rowdy teenagers--price soda and popcorn at markups that would shame a Worldcom exec, and sell endless, galling minutes of advertising before the previews even begin.

All this ran through my head as the lights dimmed and the curtain opened on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” a piece of large-caliber summer ordnance specifically designed to fit in the barrels of megaplexes. The economics of these theaters requires larger and emptier spectacles to draw in teenagers. I actually felt a little embarrassed for Grauman’s. Poor old girl.

It’s hard not to envy our parents and grandparents their moviegoing experience. It’s true, they didn’t have digital light processing projection and THX sound, cinema’s blue pill of sensory overload. But what their theaters had was a sense of occasion.

Megaplexes might turn out to be a kind of architectural suicide for the theater business. The binge-and-purge cycle of summer blockbusters is closing the window between movie releases and DVD on-sale dates, now averaging about 4 1/2 months--a month less than it was two years ago. Some studios, including mighty Disney, have considered shutting the window altogether.

If that happens, well, will the last person to leave the theater please turn off the marquee.