The Shrine Hidden in Plain Sight: Dr. Michael Hittman’s The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre
“Wisdom sits in places. If you don’t know the stories attached to a place, the Apache Indians say you [are] lost.”
Dr. Michael Hittman, author of The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre
Dr. Michael Hittman spent 46 years as a professor at Long Island University, which owns the Brooklyn Paramount, and even played basketball for decades in the auditorium after it was turned into a gym, without ever really seeing the place. An anthropologist known for the definitive scholarship on the Ghost Dance religion, he eventually turned that same lens on the theatre next door. The result, The Brooklyn Paramount Theatre: An Intimate Portrait, rescued a landmark’s forgotten history, and his research is now being used to brand the restored venue.
The shrine hidden in plain sight
Clip · Dr. Michael Hittman on a shrine hidden in plain sight · 30s
The Brooklyn Paramount was the first movie theatre in the world built for talkies. For most of Michael’s life it sat in front of him, unremarked.
“To me, the Brooklyn Paramount is a shrine [...] Long Island University, which bought it in 1950 and still owns it, they never did anything with it [...] And I myself was a professor there for 46 years. I never paid attention to it.”
Dr. Michael Hittman
Why he wrote it his way
Michael had written books before, including one for money he still regrets. This one he wrote purely because the place deserved it, and he built it around what he calls the four faces of the theatre: film, vaudeville, jazz, and rock and roll.
“Nobody put a gun to my head. I did [...] what I want to do. And I still do what I want to do. I just decided I wanted to do a book on the Brooklyn Paramount since it was so neglected.”
Dr. Michael Hittman
He dedicated the book to his friend and collaborator Stuart Fischelson, the photographer who was to shoot it with him and who died before it was finished.
The discoveries
Clip · Dr. Michael Hittman on who really played the Paramount · 14s
Once he started digging in the library, the scale of what had happened on that stage, and gone unrecorded, stopped him.
“Everybody except Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, three major figures, everybody except those three played there.”
Dr. Michael Hittman
The research also led him to a claim that runs against the standard history of popular music, and that he is willing to defend in print.
“My [...] hypothesis is, he [Tommy Jive Smalls] is the father of rock and roll, not Alan Freed [...] chronologically, he had the first rock and roll people at the Brooklyn Paramount before Alan Freed.”
Dr. Michael Hittman
A record that will outlive him
The theatre has since reopened after a restoration, and the team bringing it back used Michael’s research to brand it, down to naming its rooms after the artists who actually played there. Members of the Theatre Society of America have been asking him when they can get copies. It is exactly the work Scribe exists to help with: an expert who went deep down a rabbit hole, getting the definitive book out into the world so the stories attached to the place are no longer lost.
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