A Night at the Stone Burlesk
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The Stone was in business for close to 50 years, and during that time Milton assembled a remarkable archive of film and burlesque ephemera. “He was a complete pack rat,” Matthew says. Included in his trove were boxes and boxes of vintage lobby posters, scores of nudie mags, and, by Matthew’s count, more than 10,000 adult film shorts. But if it hadn’t been for Matthew’s intervention, the films might not have survived. “My grandfather was about to have them melted down for the silver, until he found out it wasn’t worth it,” he says. “That’s when I asked if I could have them. I sort of lucked into this stuff that I otherwise honestly would never have had any interest in.”
Milton Jacobson started managing theaters in 1936, at the age of 23. He’d dropped out of school nine years before, briefly working for Ford–“spitting tacks,” as he put it–before taking a job as an usher at the Majestic Theater, owned by his uncle, Jacob “Silver Dollar Jake” Schrieber. He eventually took over the Majestic and four other theaters: the Fine Arts, the Colonial, and the Blackstones 1 and 2. He bought the Blackstone 2 in 1937, renaming it the Stone Theater to avoid confusion.
Matthew and his wife are in the process of cataloging and preserving Milton’s collection, but it’s a daunting task, and they’ve only gone through a few hundred films so far. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. The posters, some of them certainly worth thousands of dollars, spent most of the last 50 years in a damp midwestern garage and haven’t fared too well. But the films, which lived in a closet under Milton’s stairs, are in remarkably good shape.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
