When girls ran the Moviehouse

MILLERTON — The Moviehouse on Millerton’s Main Street is iconic.

Built in 1903 and used briefly as a grange hall, it was soon converted into a movie theater with a second-floor ballroom. Some know that it fell into disrepair in the 1970s before being bought and restored by Carol and Robert Sadlon in 1977. Some fewer know that it was briefly a porn theatre. But it is a seldom told story that, for two years (the summers of 1974-1975), four teen-aged sisters ran the movie theater. 

The girls’ father, M. Carr Ferguson, senior counsel in Davis Polk & Wardwell’s tax department, was teaching at the University of Iowa in the early 1960s when he was offered a position at New York University Law School. His beloved late wife agreed to the move on one condition: that they’d also have a place in the country.

One of their four daughters, Sharon, recalled: “Mom told me that she put a map out and placed a pin right where we lived. She then cut a string as long as what would have been 100 miles, and she just ran the string around. Anywhere within that space was okay. Turned out Lakeville was it!”

The Fergusons sent their children to PS 41 in the city and raised them in Washington Square, but summers were always spent up at the lake. As the children got older, however, it got harder and harder to entice them away from their social lives and the allure of the city. Then Mrs. Ferguson had an idea.

Mr. Ferguson recalled her saying, “We have to do something to get the girls up here, and we can get rid of the adult movie house at the same time.”

At the time, the Millerton movie house (called the Millerton Theater prior to 1978) was a porn theater. 

In December 1973, The Lakeville Journal ran a story reading: 

“‘Are you aware of the type of motion picture you are coming to view?’ Richard Masters asks this of everyone who comes to purchase a ticket for the XX-rated movies in Millerton, N.Y. Apparently some people have different expectations and do not realize the type films that are being shown. 

“Richard and Barbara Masters, formerly employed at the Canaan Drive-in in Connecticut, took over as managers of the Millerton theatre on Monday Nov. 26. The Victory Theater Corporation, which bought the Millerton Theater back in June, can explain the run of sex-based movies.

“Jim Severin, spokesman for Victory, said. ‘No theater goes to X policy through preference, only through darn necessity.’ According to Mr. Severin, the Millerton Theater has lost over $5,000 since August: ‘at this point we’re just looking to meet house expenses. With X-rated films our take is a little bit better.’”

In the early ‘70s, Mr. Ferguson had a client in the United Artists theater corporation. That client was Egyptian-born Salah M. Hassanein, who began his career as an usher at a movie theater in New York and rose through the ranks to become president of United Artists Eastern Theaters and subsequently president of Warner Brothers International Theaters.

In the summer of 1975, The Fergusons decided they would rent the movie house from the Victory Theater Corporation with motivation that was two-fold: to stop the showing of the X-rated movies and to entice their four daughters to spend their summers with the family in Lakeville. 

For the next two summers (1974-1975), the four Ferguson daughters, aged about 11-19 at the time, ran the theater.

“At the beginning, they didn’t like us,” said Marcia, referring to the men in town who had frequented the porn showings. 

“At the beginning, bras and tampons got thrown into the lobby because it was four girls running the theater!” The sisters laughed, and Marcia continued, “Laura, my oldest sister, had the idea to take advantage of all the male attention and would get them to help sweep the lobby. The next thing you know, they were our ‘protectors.’” 

The girls came up with all sorts of ways to entice the men to their advantage because, as it turned out, running the theater was a huge job.

“Laura, the oldest, was the manager,” explained Marcia. “Sharon sold tickets and made popcorn, and I was the projectionist.”

A young man in town, Jason Schickele, who had worked as the projectionist at the Mahaiwe and Colonial theaters, showed Marcia, 14 years old at the time, how to run the projectors.

“He was patient,” Marcia said, showing her again and again everything about the machine. “You were running celluloid,” she explained, “So you’d watch for the little dot in the right-hand corner called ‘the changeover,’ and when you saw that, there was a second dot. That’s when you had to change the film.” 

She continued, “If there was a crack in it, you could fix it with just, you know, regular old scotch tape, but you’d have to run it with a little viewfinder so you could see where the problem was.” 

She continued: “It was really fun to work those machines. I mean, they were elaborate. You would bang together the carbon. It might take a few times for it to light, but when it did, you couldn’t really look at it. It’s like looking at the sun. It was so powerful.”

“We had so many mishaps,” Sandy laughed.

Marcia continued: “Jason saved our bacon so many times. We would have a full house, having sold all these tickets, and the thing would break, and I’d be completely panicked. Then he’d come over and help us.”

When asked which years they ran the theater, there’s a lot of back and forth about whether it was ‘74-’75 or ‘75-’76.

“I try to set the memory of that time by the movies that we showed because Salah gave us second-run movies. We were a couple of weeks behind,” said Sandy.

“It was movies like ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ ‘Young Frankenstein,’ ‘Jaws,’” said Sandy, with Marcia jumping in: “One of the really popular ones was when they gave us ‘Gone with The Wind.’”

“That was the very first movie we showed,” Mr. Ferguson interrupted, returning to the busy kitchen from another room in the house. He went on to proudly say, “These girls had it running at a profit for those two summers.” 

The girls had constantly evolving, entrepreneurial ideas of how to make it a sustainable business, and the theater was a success. 

“We placed ads in the paper all the time,” said Marcia, “like ‘Thursday dollar night.’ When it rained, if we woke up and it was raining, we’d call the summer camps and say, ‘bring the campers,’ and we’d go run whatever we were running.” 

“We made a profit,” Marcia continued. “And at the end of the two years, I got a stereo system.”

In returning to the origin of the idea, Marcia said: “Mom was in it to get us home for the summer. I mean I was 14 so I was gonna be home anyway, because we didn’t have money for camp. We were not camp kids. This was our camp.”

When asked why they didn’t continue, Mr. Ferguson said that after the two initial summers, they floated the idea around of buying the theater. He explained that he “wanted to buy it, but Marianne [his wife] said, ‘Carr, the kids are graduating. They’re not gonna run it. I’m not gonna run it. You’re not gonna run it.’”

The space lay empty again until Bob and Carol Sadlon purchased it in October 1977, renovating and opening it once again in 1978.

“There’s such a wealth of documentation now with our phones,” said Carol Sadlon when asked about the state of the theater when she and her husband purchased it. “But it’s too bad there isn’t more of the way it was then.” 

She went on to say: “It was a single theater with 300 seats. There was no heat, no air conditioning. It was in just terrible condition.” 

She said: “Laura [Ferguson] and I had a wonderful conversation years ago, as I recall, because we were both very interested in the preservation of theaters like the Moviehouse, of course. [The Fergusons] have so much enthusiasm, and it really is just extraordinary what they were able to do.”

Several of the Ferguson women have gone on to have lives in performance. Marcia recently retired from the theater department at the University of Pennsylvania and has performed in numerous films and in theater; Sandy (now Huckleberry) is an artist with the Boston-based artists’ collective Mobius. 

The Moviehouse again closed its doors in March 2020, until its highly anticipated reopening by David Maltby and Chelsea Altman, who have managed to honor the Moviehouse’s history while bringing a new energy and vision to the space.