Ashtrays in theatre seats.
People tended to be quieter while the movie was showing.
Floor slope was less
People were better dressed overall, there was more a of a “night out” vibe to it
I could be incorrect but I don’t think popcorn and candy was quite as expensive even in in date adjusted terms as it is today.
So, which was it?
There was one smoking section, and it was the whole theater.
There was such a thing as “First run theaters”. They had the best, most recent movies and unless they were a massive flop they ran them for a few weeks before they moved to the second run theaters, where theater quality was lower but the admission cost much less. The 2nd run theaters would often show a wider variety of movies during the day and would get the non blockbuster movies as “first run”
Some theaters had a reputation, the infamous Budco-Goldman theater in Philadelphia showed 2nd run blockbusters, horror, and exploitation movies. The jokes about the place is that it was the kind of theater you ran into to escape the police. Also that when there was Kung Fu on the screen there would be Kung Fu in front of the screen.
The Trocadaro theater (now a small concert venue) was in Chinatown and showed Chop-Sokey and Kung fu films. It was quite a ratty theater. The TLA would print a schedule as they changed movies throughout they day, showing different 6-8 movies a day. VCRs killed that and the TLA became a local video chain with a stronger cult movie selection. But that didn’t finally happen until the late 80s. So VCRs didn’t win overnight.
There were still porn theaters. Oddly the last one with an actual marquee didn’t close until a couple of years ago.
I never saw a line for a theater stretch around the block until I went to see Star Wars. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Most of the theaters were pretty grand places, and some of them might have survived when the city rebounded had the owners actually given a shit. They didn’t, and the result was that there was no reason to watch a movie in those theaters when you could go to a more corporate theater in the suburbs that was cleaner and showing the movie properly.
I lived downtown and I miss being able to walk to a theater. Discounting the art house theaters I think the last movie I was able to walk to was the enhanced re-release of Empire Strikes Back.
In small towns, theaters at the time had one screen and one movie that ran two shows a night plus matinees on weekends. In larger cities, there were continuous shows all day.
In a city, there would be many theaters. Each would run a movie one week (unless it was a smash and held over).
Movies had a slow release. It would premiere in one theatre in the big cities, and expand out to more theaters as time went by. I lived in a rural area and it would take a month or more for our theatre to show them. Cities also had second-run houses that showed movies a couple of months after release. Few movies opened on thousands of screens.
The first multiplexes started showing up around 1970. Star Wars was the point of change. Before it, people saw a movie once and wouldn’t pay full price to see it again. People went to see it multiple times, and studios started to make movies for that audience?
Yes there were trailers. There were no commercials.
Yes, each theater would play no more than two films, because there was usually only one screen, but small college towns often had two theaters and an actual city would have theaters all over the place, so you had a big variety.
A movie would stay in a theater as long as enough people were coming, so movies would often stick around longer. The lack of the “blockbuster” mentality meant that the first weekend performance didn’t mean as much because of a movie was good it could build sales through word of mouth.
There were a lot of “revival houses,” which showed only old movies.
The absence of the blockbuster mentality meant that a lot more movies were made in a year by Hollywood, because there were no blockbusters eating up all the studio budgets.
Even if a drive-in ran an “A-list” movie, it was after the first-run houses were done with them. This was for two reasons. First, they didn’t want to pay the higher rental price so they could keep their admission prices down. Second, the higher wattage, higher heat of a d-i projector lamp could “pillow” each frame on the print, making distributors reluctant to send a print that might have more life in it.
Absent a big film, they would show Poverty Row fodder or, especially in the late fifties/early sixties, American International releases. There is a reason so many of the latter have become targets of MST3K or RiffTrax. Even as a tyke, I could tell from the previews that an AI movie’s quality was not on par from something by, say, Columbia, to say nothing of MGM or WB. Us kids not being teens at the time, we didn’t see many AI releases, except for the Corman-Poe ones. I distinctly remember having the bejesuz scared out of me by The Pit and the Pendulum, especially the POV of that pendulum swinging back and forth.
Oh and once you bought a ticket you could stay in a theater as long as you wanted. There were no more ushers shooing you out like in the 1960s. So in a first run movie theater you could watch it over and over.
A lot of people would come in the middle of a movie and then stay to watch what they had missed.
If it was a theater that showed different things all day, you might possibly be able to go in around 10 in the morning on a Saturday and stay until after midnight.
In 1950, the town I lived in had one movie theater. They would show two programs a week. One on Sun-Wed, the other Thur-Sat. S-W there would be two showings, at 7 and 9 pm, with a 2 pm matinee on Sunday. Thnn Th-Sa, a double feature, starting at 7, showing A-B-A. So that would be 156 titles a year, and I suspect I saw every one one of them, although we skipped the ones with a lot of kissing in them. Variably, there might be a Saturday matinee with kid-type shows. Kids paid 14c, over twelve paid 20c, adults 35c.
At 7oclock, the house lights wouold be turned down, the velvet curtain drawnn open, and a catoon woujld start. Fllowed by previews of coming attraction, and a fw ads. A special featur would show, to pad out the two yours before the 9pm showing. Like a travelogue or a short comi-drama or newsreel. Then the main picture. When it was over, we’d all stay to see the cartoon again at 9, then go home. Kids behaved themselves in the movies, because of the morbid fear that misbehavior would result in our dads being told about it. Everybody knew everybody.
I usually went with other kids. There were three other towns within a half hour drive, which had a total of 6 movie theaters, and my family would often drive to one of those, and have a burger or pie or ice cream afterwards, always in a sitdown storefront cafe, there were no drive ins.
The movies were a very socially homogenizing experience. For me, there wasn’t much difference between going to a movie in Milwaukee, or Meadville Mississippi.
But then you and Old Weird Harold had to make it home after the monsters came out. And your Mom was not coming for you.
(Not insinuating you’re Cosby.)
Oh yeah! They had cartoons before the movie! That was the best part. They didn’t have incredibly loud sound systems either, another feature.
In the third world, moviegoing was totally different. In Africa or the Middle East, movies were usually shown in open-air theaters – a vacant lot between two buildings, with folding chairs for the patrons. Most pictures were either Bollywood or Black-power titles. There was the kind of audience reaction that one would expect at a sports event, with lots of cheereing and booing from the loud and vocal audience. But I never saw any kind of threatening behavior, nor anything what would require crowd control. It is sobering to get caught up in a black power film, and when the light come up, you look around and see that you are the only white face in the crowd.
What did she do instead? 
In the 60s to 70s, a lot of once-grand theaters were dumps.
Decaying, unpainted, & a lack of maintenance.
Often, bad locations.
TV had been making big inroads, & it showed.
The major difference was that multiplexes didn’t exist, so that theaters were single-screen and typically bigger, more ornate and often with bigger screens, and going to a movie was more like a night-out event, as already mentioned. I saw 2001 for the first time the year it came out, in a large theater with a gigantic curved screen, kind of an early version of an IMAX theater.
Some of the multiplex theaters today are sometimes surprisingly small and dinky, especially when they try to pack half a dozen screens into a relatively small mall space. The “premium” screening rooms are in many ways a return to old-style theaters, minus the art-deco, with extra-large screens and comfortable seating. Major difference is the stadium seating with much better sight lines, way better sound, and of course now it’s all digital. 3D is pretty cool these days, too. I saw Gravity in 3D one of those premium theaters, which was also my first experience with contemporary 3D technology, and it was impressive.
The theater we had in town growing up had one screen. It was huge. The theater looked like a real theater with very ornate architecture on the walls and ceiling. It also had a really cool clock that I can still remember. It was a normal clock face, not digital and would glow blue when the lights went down but was not distracting at all. There was a smoking section in the balcony but I never sat there. I have no memory of ever being in a theater that allowed smoking everywhere.
Movies would play for weeks or months. I remember ET was there for an entire summer. Red Dawn was another movie that played for a long time (but not an entire summer). If you wanted to see a different movie you had to check the paper for a different theater and see if they had it.
Damn, forgot the link.
In the 60s (or was it the 70s?) theaters ran ads explaining why the advent of cable TV was A BAD THING.
There were also porn theaters that showed hard core porn (and they were nasty places), because there were no DVDs and no Internet to get your porn fix (I was too young to know about these places, though.)
In our area the movies changed over on Wednesdays. So a new blockbuster would start on Wednesday, not Friday or Thursday night “previews”.
There was no fast tracking of box office receipts. You usually didn’t know what the #1 movie was from last week. (This was a good thing.)
Movies would have rolling releases around the country. The big cities first, then the middle sized places, etc. This allowed word-of-mouth to work and it saved on prints.
Once a movie went thru the cheapo and neighborhood places they’d be sent overseas. Theaters in some countries would get horribly scratched and spliced prints.
This roll out could last a while. Sound of Music, for example, played for over a year in our town.
If you wanted to see a movie, you had a fairly large window for better stuff.
And don’t get me started on college film society showings. I could go on and on. E.g., a Female Trouble and Heat double feature. A perfect date night.
This is one of my most distinctive memories of seeing movies with my family in the 1960s. My mom and dad simply didn’t care about showing up on time for the start of a movie. I absolutely HATED this, particularly the whole groping-around-dark-theaters-looking-for-seats thing. Also, about half the time, my parents would decide that the movie was crappy and it wasn’t worth staying to see the beginning. When I whined about this, my mom said that anyone who wanted to see a movie from the beginning was obviously some kind of weirdo. She even claimed that when she was a kid, newspaper ads didn’t even bother to list showtimes. Later I looked at some old newspapers at the library and discovered that she was partly correct—although some ads listed specific starting times, many did not.
This is why the ads for Psycho famously insisted that “no one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance.” It’s also how the expression “This is where I came in” originated. Huh … now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I heard that phrase.
I remember one older movie theater in Houston that had a “loge” section where you were supposed to sit if you wanted to smoke during the movie. IIRC, it was in the center section, near the back. I heard people call it “the smoking loge.” But generally, yeah, anybody could smoke anywhere, anytime in a movie theater back then (or anywhere else).