Inside the Majestic: Ghosts, Zombie Doors & a Century of Dallas Secrets | Mike Schwedler

Greetings to all out there in YDC land. This is the, what, seventeenth? Twenty seventh. Yeah. May 27. Look, I'm an old guy. Okay? I can't keep up with this stuff. I do know where I am, though, and where I am today is kind of on the inside of a place that I've always wanted to see, and that is the beautiful, legendary, Majestic Theater in Downtown Dallas. Now, I'm sure many of you have been to shows here at the Majestic over the years. I've been to a number myself, and every time I come in here, I look around and I go, Wow. This has held up so well. They've done so much to keep the vibe of this place, and it's amazing. And fortunately, we've been allowed to come in here today. This is Mike Schwedler. He is a longtime friend of mine, and you pretty much run this place, don't you? Yeah, pretty much for a while until they take the keys from me. And this, as you know, is my good friend, Mr. Chad. Hello. Hello. The great Chad Stockslinger. We brought him in today because I figured this is something he needs to be in on. Well, much a blessing. And what we're going to do here is Michael has been kind enough to grant us access. He's going to take us around and show us some of the places at the Majestic that the average spare guy who comes in here to see a show might not get to see, but places that are interesting nonetheless. We'll do that, and then we will have a seat over there and engage in a little bit of conversation about the place, talk about what we've seen here, who's been here, and whatever else might come up. So we'll be right back at a place of interest inside the Majestic. So this kind of corner is our production corner, Michael. This is where stage manager's seat is, and they kind of run the show from back here. One of the most interesting things about this place is this door that leads into our production closet. This door has been here. I'm not sure when the if it's original to the place from 1921 or not. But everybody that plays here sticks something up here, signs something, puts the sticker up, does whatever they want to. But the particular thing of interest that I wanted to show you is right here in the middle. This is Johnny Cash, apparently played here, and I don't have a date. We may have to find that. But he played here sometime, I believe, in the eighties, and he autographed this little picture. Thanks, guys. Jay Cash. And taped it up there, and it's been there ever since. And I've been offered I've been offered money for the door. I've been offered money for the picture. I've been people have tried to steal it. We came in one day, the door was taken off the hinges. We we've kept it all this but I think it's just a fascinating piece of majestic memorabilia. That's the kind of memorabilia you hold on to at all costs. Absolutely. We have installed a little bit of a historical exhibition down in the basement with some other memorabilia. I think what we're going to do take this door off and move it down there and put it behind some stanchions and make it a piece of A door like that needs a place of its own. Needs a piece of history. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Alright. Now I'm standing here, not terribly far away from where we were before, but I'm standing next to a couple of very, very serious ropes and some sort of wheeling device where you pull on the rope and something comes down, something goes up, something like that happens. But, look, I'm a pagan. I know nothing of this. So let's bring in Mike Swedler once again to tell us just what we're looking at and how this works. Well, it's fascinating that when we have often we have fire inspections here and things and the firemen are always fascinated with this. We've got this in case of fire cut rope sign. So the way it worked in the old days was that when you didn't have fire suppression systems, if a fire started, it was probably going to start on the stage as a result of a footlight going bad or something, and you had to protect your audience. So they would come over, they would grab this box cutter that's stored here, and they would cut the rope and the fire curtain would fall, hopefully not kill anybody when it hit the stage and the audience would be protected. So, that was the old fashioned. This was kind of the fire escape before there was such a thing as a fire escape and look at that. They hook you up with the device and everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's all right there. Yeah. This is your one stop shop. I don't think there was even Home Depot when this was put together. So I don't know where they got this stuff. Alright. It looks like it's designed to cut a flavor ful brie. That's what it looks like. The cheese board. Why did I not think of that? If an actor would need to exit stage right and then their entrance was stage left, they had to have a crossover. They didn't always have a scrim on the back of the stage for them to crossover behind, so the actors would run through this door, down some stairs I'm about to show you, through a hallway to the other side, up some stairs over there, come back in and then make their entrance. Wow. That's crazy. So when they made the film Phantom of the Paradise, they shot this area. Oh. Now we're getting into the hoary stuff here. So this is let's let's just let's just walk across. Yeah. The belly of the beast. Oh my god. I'm getting dizzy as shit. Oh, no. Don't let your vertigo start acting up. So imagine the imagine the actor leaving the stage, running down that circular staircase that we almost killed ourselves just walking down, running through here, coming back up, and making his entrance to on the other side. And of course, when they do it, it's just like nothing ever even happened. Yeah. Like, not even winded. Very Mick Jagger. Alright. Some other fascinating things about this part of the building are one of the most fascinating things is we're one of the only places that still has a counterweight fly system. So, when these line sets need to come in, when lights or scenes or things need to be dropped into place, There's a guy standing up on that fly rail putting weights on and off of those ropes. He'll lift the weight off but that releases the tension, lets the scene come in and when it's time for it to go out, he puts the weight back on and that pulls it back up. I think there's only maybe two or three of these systems left in the city. Maybe one over at SMU, McFarland may have one or Moody. I'm not sure. We've got one and there's one or two others but it's fascinating. We just replaced all those ropes a few years ago and that was quite a process. Yeah. It's really cool. Couple of other things are so, all the dressing rooms are up in there. You know, big doors there that look like bank vaults. Those those slide open and there's a motor, those chains hanging down and they would take big wardrobe trunks. Roll em in this door, hook em up to that chain, and the motor would pull em up and they would put take the wardrobe into the dressing room areas that way because there's no way carry that stuff up the stairs. And then there's also a trapdoor there. So if something needed to go down to the where we were when we could do the crossover, that motor would drop it down through the trapdoor and you could get big things downstairs. And by way of reference, we are standing on the stage here. The audience is out there and backstage, as Michael said, is over here and over here. But that's just a point of reference. We call this the zombie door to protect us from the zombies. I thought maybe that was how you let them in when they played here. Yeah, maybe it would be Gary Myrick and the fake zombies. Yeah, maybe it would be. Maybe. So if we've got stage sets or any kind of piece of stuff, anything that needs to come in that's bigger, too big to come in through the walk in doors. Yeah. We lower this. That just goes right out on Pacific right where you're parked. This drops down, big ramp, we roll the big things in, then we close it up keep the zombies out or keep the zombies in, whichever. Has anybody ever wanted to bring in something that just could not be fit in here in any way? They wanted to bring a camel. Really? Yeah. I said no. Yeah. The main concern being fecal. Yeah, yeah. What are you going to do? In the middle of the show, you're going sweep them? Yeah. So we'll say though that Polyphonic Spree, they're our buddies, you know, they're here, they're local. So, we do get a little extra latitude and they when they play here, they want live animals and they have the Dallas Zoo bring over animals and they have they bring in there's cages all out on Pacific and they bring in the animals and walk them out for the children. They have hawks, other birds of prey that they put up in the balcony and they fly down onto the stage all during their holiday extravaganza. It's crazy. So you might want to cut this out because of risk management. You know, I was doing that. I'd probably Oh, yeah. Okay. You didn't see that. Yeah. We didn't see it. Under this carpet, there was old carpet laying here when I got here. Was carpet. It was always carpeted. But way way back, under this carpet is beautiful black and white Italian marble. That's real. I read that. Yeah. Absolutely gorgeous. But you can imagine how loud, you know, 400 people standing around in here chatting on marble floors. It was just plus, we sell we sell booths. I can't have anybody falling down. Oh, yeah. So the carpet is a good idea. But these all the stairs, everything is Italian marble. Yeah. And interesting that this this theater was the first with a lot of things. One is it was the first air conditioned building in the South. It's not really air conditioned, but there's a plenum system that pulls air through, kinda circulates just air, not refrigerated air. But people would come out as close as we had to air conditioning in, and people would ride the train in, and sit here all day and watch movies because it was cool. Nice. Interesting, but there also was the first concession stand in any movie theater was here, first candy counter. It was in the middle of the room here. And there's an old Life Magazine photo shoot that shows it here. And right about there, I guess, all this Italian marble, and there's a drain still there from when this was a candy counter, and they sold soft drinks, they had to have some plumbing. Sure. So this was the first concession stand in America, I guess. Wow. Yeah. That's what I hear. That's far out. At one point, Mr. Hoblitzel, who built this place, his wife got very sick and they moved to Europe. And while he was gone, his right hand man, name escapes me, but his right hand man had this all painted, had it painted pink and red. And Karl came back from Europe and walked in and went, what's going on here? And he had it painted back to this color the next day. One day, he was back and he's, you know, so it's been, these are the original colors. It keeps You can go for the pink or red, Yeah. And you know, the city of Dallas isn't great about restoration and saying to me, something gets the ashtrays dirty, we tear it down, whatever. But somehow, this building, which was one of nine theaters on Theater Row at one time in the 40s and 50s, this is the only one left. And when the Hoblet Cell Foundation gifted it to the city in nineteen seventy eight, nine, it was all that was left and the city came renovated. And I've got to say they did a fantastic job. All the gold leaf, all the gypsum board that I guess would be drywall now, but it's called gypsum board then, that's got the etchings on it, all that they redid very carefully. It was really fascinating that they did such a good job because we're not known for that. No, we're not known for that. I wonder who from the city was in charge of that and oversaw that. That's interesting. So in the film we were talking about, the one hundred Years of Majestic thing, they go into it a little bit and there was a bond program and there was a whole promotional campaign so that citizens would vote to spend some money on this. And they did, and it was quite a bit of money, but I don't know who did the actual who oversaw that work, but whoever oversaw it really deserves a pat on the back because they I mean, it's just like it was in 1940. Yeah. They did nice work and it's held up marvelously. Yeah. Yeah. It's all this gold leaf. It's like the Oval Office. There was also a play space downstairs for your children. Right. So people would take their kids downstairs. It was a little miniature golf course. Right. There were all kinds of things down there for the kids to do and they would hang out and play while the parents watched the movie. Was it called Majestic Land? I think that's what I read somewhere. That may be right. And then there was a place called Land of Nod, that was for toddlers, like little bitty children. So you know, like a nap room. Yeah. Sure, sure, I could use a nap room myself. Sounds pretty cool. Sounds pretty good right now. Okay, let's go downstairs. During the filming of Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway would come here every afternoon to watch Rushes. They had a film screening room that's gone now. We it's part of our kitchen now. But they would come over here every day and hang out. So one day I'll start with this. One day, I'm walking down a hallway upstairs, just a forgotten hallway that goes to a door that nobody knows where it goes. And I opened a closet and this is sitting there. And we looked at it for a while and we did a little research. It turns out, this is a follow spot from the nineteen twenties. And it was just sitting there intact. Sitting there just like this. Sitting there. It hadn't been touched in I don't know how many decades. I don't know if I can even figure out how to open it. Yeah. So what would happen? In the old days, there was a carbon rod and they would light it like you were a welder. You would light it with a torchy thing. And it would be fitted into this apparatus somehow and it would be burning. And the operator, the spot operator, would stand here and using all these steampunk knobs that do whatever, they would stand here and operate things and when the carbon rod burned too short and started to go out, they would have to relight it and turn this to keep it close enough to keep the arc, to keep it burning, And they would, this is how they would do it. So, and then when they wanted to make the light red, for instance, they had gels that sat in here. And there were cables that ran across. And the gel would drop down in front of this. A red gel would drop down and now your light's red. Woah. And then when they wanted to take it up and a blue one would go in or whatever they're trying to do. Can you imagine how hot and stinky? And how complicated it Complicated. Difficult. I mean, now you've got a couple of knobs and you're just following the guy around. Sure. But this had to be insane. So we did some research. The base is from 1920 the top is from 1921. So somewhere along the way they got Frankenstein together. They must have had a breakdown and they needed to get one working spotlight. So they put an old base with a new topper way or the other way around. And this was just in a closet. We hauled it down here. So cool. Part of the thing. But most of the stuff that's in this room came from a lady that was a collector. Her husband had worked here and she we unfortunately, we lost her during COVID. We lost her to COVID. But the city, we arranged to purchase all this memorabilia from her and install it down here in this museum. That's mister Hoblet's all over there and the original blueprints and there's a lot of fun things. This is, as far as I know, nobody had ever done a comprehensive timeline of the existence of the theater ever. So this was during COVID and we have a lot of time on our hands. So we put this timeline together and had a gentleman kind produce this for us. But all of this copy that's on here, my assistant and I put all these pictures and these words together to tell the story from the days of the Vaudeville Theatre, through the movie era, through Theodoreau era, to the gifting up to the city, and now to our modern day where we are now. At one time, apparently, the Warner Brothers, the the two brothers, or I guess there's maybe more, they were friends with Mr. Hobletsell. Okay. And the building over On Park where Robert Johnson recorded. Right. That's the old Warner Brothers distribution place and they distributed movies to the whole Southwest. So they were friends with Carl and they did premieres here. We had more premieres in this building than they had in LA or New York for a few years during the 40s and 50s. So John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and all Cary Grant, all these people were here doing their premieres. One of the things that we were real proud of when we got here was getting Conan O'Brien. Yeah, that was 2014. They called me and asked if we wanted to do Conan and we cleared the calendar And, he came and broadcast for four nights, did his late night show from here for four nights. They spent a week, setting up for that to broadcast for four nights. It was quite a production. Were these the old style seats back in the old days? Yeah. Original seat. I don't know if that's an original stanchion or what. Original exit signs. John Eberson was the architect that Carl Hoblitzel hired. John Eberson invented the, called atmospheric theaters. This was the second one, he did one in Houston first. They were the ones had the blue skies with the stars and the clouds and the walls that looked like you were somewhere else. So they've torn down the one in Houston. This one was very formal in this kind of Renaissance style. Then they did one in San Antonio that's still there. If you ever go to the Majestic in San Antonio, on the walls, it's it's breathtaking. It looks like a like a Spanish village or something. There's these relief murals that are very it's very ornate, very cool. But this was the second atmospheric, and we still have the blue ceiling Okay. And a couple of other elements from the atmospheric days.