Step Inside the Brooklyn Paramount's Roaring 1928 Debut

The following is adapted from The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre by Michael Hittman.

It's November 24, 1928. The marquee blazes across Flatbush Avenue, the crowd shoulders through the lobby in furs and fedoras, and I'm pulling you straight into the velvet-rope opening night of the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, the first movie palace on Earth built to exhibit "all dialogue films."

The picture chosen to christen this temple of cinema? Manhattan Cocktail. Ironic, considering it's a Silent Film with only two fewer songs than The Jazz Singer. Paramount billed it as a Talkie anyway, daring you not to notice the difference.

The film opens with a phantom ballet, dancers gliding across the screen in ancient Greek costume, because the story is loosely lifted from the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur. The director is Dorothy Arzner, the first woman in Hollywood to crack that ceiling, and her partner Marion Morgan choreographed the Prologue you're watching live on our stage before the picture even rolls.

The plot pulls you into "monstrous Manhattan." Three upstate college kids chase fame on the Great White Way. Babs, played by Nancy Carroll, an Irish ingenue born in Hell's Kitchen, wants one last fling before bourgeois suburban life closes in. She belts "Gotta Be Good," a song so risqué it would never have survived the Production Code waiting two years up the road. Her fiancé Fred, played by rising star Richard Arlen, follows her into the city. Their best friend Bob takes up with the predatory wife of a Russian-born Broadway producer named Renov, a leering Minotaur in evening dress who devours aspiring actresses for sport.

The story turns dark before the final reel. Bob, rejected and ridiculed by Renov, climbs a ladder in the flies and leaps to his death. Babs, cornered in Renov's office during an attempted assault, smashes a fire alarm with a paperweight and brings the brigade hosing through the door.

I sampled the reviews from coast to coast. The Brooklyn Eagle warned young theatergoers to stay clear of Manhattan altogether. The Los Angeles Times called it "one of the most delightful of recent Paramount pictures" and marveled that you could actually hear the taps on Nancy Carroll's chorus shoes. The New York Times sniffed that Arzner "should be ashamed" and dubbed the film "a synthetic cocktail without the cherry." Variety's Bige tore into it, then admitted the Prologue cost more than the picture itself.

What none of them mention is the room you're sitting in: a 4,000-seat shrine of gold leaf, velvet, and atmospheric stars overhead, designed to make Brooklyn feel like the center of the universe. The Vaudeville acts are still warming up the bill. The Wurlitzer is rumbling under your seat. Prohibition rules the streets outside, and somewhere in midtown, a bartender is shaking a real Manhattan in a brand-new Art Deco martini glass.

This is the night the palace opened. And I've barely cracked the door.

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For more stories on the Brooklyn Paramount's golden age, you can find The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre on Amazon.

Michael Hittman is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Long Island University, home of the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre. He has authored numerous academic articles in leading journals and books about Native Americans, including Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. He has also conducted research and taught on popular culture and mass media. His anthropological-like study of the Brooklyn Paramount, the world's first motion picture theatre built expressly for the “Talkies,” channels his background in Jazz as an NPR radio host in recounting the Theatre’s fabled history. He lives with his wife in Manhattan and Southold, New York.

(Royalty free image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vintage-camera-and-typewriter-18413963/, Credit: HYRLF meng)