A colossal monument to cinematic lavishness, is the Roxy Theatre in Manhattan. Showmen, long impotent in creating new superlatives, can murmur nothing except "titanic" when they think of the $10,000,000 that went into its erection. But few stockholders in Roxy Theatres Corp. are proud of their palatially gaudy enterprise. For, despite the fact that Fox soon bought control, Roxy A stock has declined from its offering price of $40 in 1925 to $22, has never been listed on any exchange. And Roxy performances, while resplendent with tinseled stage-shows, redundant with the harmony of a vast 80-piece orchestra, nevertheless seldom seem to include good pictures.
Last week Roxy stockholders held a most unusual meeting. It was unusual because instead of the customary five or ten, 500 came; unusual because instead of being complacent stockholders, they were armed with the spirit of "We want to know why!"; unusual because they practically declared a dividend without their directors' approval; unusual because President Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel, an exMarine, confessed in a long theme-song of woe that his stockholders have made him cry like a baby.
First in the stockholders' minds was the question as to what relationship there might be between the present Fox difficulties and Roxy Theatre. All through the meeting stockholders kept shouting remarks relative to this. To the question "How much money does Fox owe the theatre?" "Roxy" replied "Not a red cent," and then added that he intends to coöperate with Cineman William Fox to the best of his ability. To the pointed query of how much Fox makes "Roxy" pay for pictures, Chairman Saul Rogers explained that the theatre pays a percentage of box office receipts: "Right here, let me tell you, Fox hasn't done so badly by you. The few outside pictures run this last year were the worst money-getters we had."
A point especially interesting to stockholders was the reading of the annual report. Although this was delayed by confusion and heckling, the year's profits were finally revealed as $643,047 against $607,677 in 1928, and the gross admissions as $5,131,675 against approximately $5,000,000 for 1928. However, the balance sheet showed that a surplus achieved only by a generous estimate of "good-will."
When the report was digested, "Roxy" began his message. Gaily colorful is "Roxy" who, in 1907, after seven years in the Marine Corps, borrowed chairs from an undertaker and started a motion picture house in Forest City, Pa. Immensely genial, he proclaims that his chief ambition is "to live to see the day when I could throw all cares aside and go some place in a little flat-bottomed boat. And there in that boat I could sit under a big sunbonnet, with a little, old fishing pole, and I could sit all day and fish for sunfish and perch."