They're as weird as antique spaceships. This particular motion-picture cathedral of excess once known as Loew's 175th Street Theatre was saved from certain destruction, not only preserved but lovingly and careful polished, cherished, under the direction of one man, the man whose green Rolls Royce was parked around outside, Dr. Frederick Eikerenkoetter, Th.B., D. Sc.L., Ph.D., Founder and Pastor of the United Church, more popularly known and beloved as Reverend Ike.

Yes, this is Reverend Ike's church. Reverend IKE is ALIVE!

Reverend Ike peaked decades ago. He had a high profile in the late 1970s, early 1980s, as a flashy, hypnotic, and openly money-hungry preacher who had a Rolls Royce in a different color for every day of the week. Founder of Thinkonomics! Everybody knew his name, and his over-the-top routine about Dollars and God all mixed up together. "The lack of money," he once shouted out, "is the root of all evil." He inspired adoring wonder from his flock and a slightly different kind of incredulity from outside his community, but not even Mike Wallace could dent his solar self-confidence or pin him down.

The Reverend Ike was a lot more famous 25 years ago than today. He's gotten a lot quieter. His profile is low. His profession was overrun with cartoonish creatures, Swaggart and Tammy Faye and all them, but Reverend Ike has been at home in Washington Heights up north of Harlem in this church since 1969. Yes he has.

This church has a historic Robert-Morton Wonder organ restored to its original splendor. Yes it does.

The green Rolls Royce parked around back on the north side has a full-time guard, who welcomes friendly attention to the vehicle. He seems delighted by it too. Yes he does. A brilliant and beautiful thing has happened here today. This cathedral of the movies once known as Loew's 175th Street Theatre still occupies its own block of Broadway, an irregular little block, not a whole square city block like you might imagine, but still a block.

And Reverend Ike is in it. He has it, he's in it, he IS it.

Its Assyrian exterior walls still stand up like thick medieval battlements, mostly whole and mostly free of graffiti. They look blocky and invulnerable from outside, a solid fortification. And it's a good thing too. This is a corrosive neighborhood, a lively and desperate street scene, opportunists and vandals and transients and metal-dealers looking for any opening.

This church is a rock in a whirling storm of vandals and thieves.

Reverend Ike is also protected by those letters after his name; they curl around protectively like a muscular tail. He's got a lengthy name, the right Reverend Dr. Frederick Eikerenkoetter, Th.B., D. Sc.L., Ph.D., Founder and Pastor of the United Church does.

(The "Th.B." is a standard degree, a Bachelor of Theology, and his was awarded by the American Bible College. "Ph. D." is the usual Doctor of Philosophy except it was bestowed by the United Church, Science of Living Institute, New York, Ike's own organization. So he gave himself a Ph. D. That's very good. The "D. Sc. L." was more puzzling. It's similar to some archaic English degrees, but the clue was that the only three people in Google's world credited with this mysterious "D. Sc. L." are Reverend Ike and his wife Reverend Eula and his son Reverend Xavier, and of course it turns out to be the "Doctor of the Science of Living" conferred by the United Church, Science of Living Institute, New York. Not only did Ike give himself and his loved ones another apparently-doctoral level degree as another charm on his necklace, but he invented a new one appropriate to his own achievements.)

He's a rascal, that Reverend Ike. You can't stay mad at him. And so this is his personal cathedral.

I wandered in at 2:45 on a Sunday, when the regular service is held and Reverend Ike is supposed to be there in person to share his magnetism and message of hope and riches. They did not welcome me in, exactly, but they let me in. "No photos", the woman at the front said, handing me a program and getting a load of my pallor and inappropriate scarf. I just wanted to rush past these human affairs, these social distractions. They do an awesome job, there at the door, of keeping out the forces of decay.

But if they didn't welcome me, the building did. These photos may suggest the shock between outside and inside, an effect heightened by the bleak broad grey character of the Washington Heights street, and then bam, the space welcoming you inside, scaled to be inhabited and made to be looked at, red, like a childhood retreat, and working on you - drawing you in, welcomed, trusted, embraced, pleasantly lost in the splendor of a Babylonian love factory.

And the entry sequence works its magic. I wandered into the theatre and straight down the leftmost row, while the service was just beginning, and people were settling in. The music was great. The proud deacons were full of upright faith, and nothing I say here is meant to detract from their sincerity. This happened to be Palm Sunday, so I got the whole black-church-hat show: gilded turbans, polished black derbies, hats with fruit, hats with white netting, too many to take in. Those proud upright deacons in the aisles chose to ignore me, and allowed me to lurk by one of the pillars and listen to the music, a little dizzy from the effect of the super-ornate proscenium. It was totally distracting. I get a little dazed and glazed and dopey when confronted with so much organized ornament to absorb. So much color and detail in ranks of organized decoration has a hypnotic effect on me, it's too much, it has a weird effect, it's aesthetic overload. I tend to glaze over. This indescribable spatial treasurehouse concocted when luxury sped out ahead of common sense only survives in this rough world on this rough street because of the work of Reverend Ike.

By some miracle the steps to the balcony were open, and by another miracle the loge and balcony were totally abandoned, waiting for me. Sliding into the front row balcony, I'm the only one up there, and looking down on the scene gives me a funny, removed, supervisory vibe.

I have time to take in some of the details. There was an oceanic tide of identical red chairs rising up behind me in the balcony, all in really excellent red-velvet shape. (It made me light-headed to look backwards like that.) Down below the serious deacons were concentrating all the worshippers into a square of seats up front, behind ropes, a small group, all huddled together. Attendance looked sparse and it was an elderly demographic. The full-on gospel choir and organist were working hard trying to fill up this barn-like void with some kind of religious energy, supervised by sinister Hindu figures, washed in blue and green lights, hiding themselves in the wall of ornament behind the stage.

Two architects built most of the good movie houses: the Scottish Thomas Lamb who specialized in super-ornate jewel boxes of standard theatre design, and the Austrian John Eberson. Eberson specialized in the subgenre of "atmospheric" theatres. His first, of the five hundred in his career, was the 1923 Majestic in Houston, Texas. The atmospherics usually conveyed the impression of sitting in an outdoor courtyard, surrounded by highly ornamented asymmetrical facades, the inside walls carefully lit and made like the exterior walls of some Hindu-Persian-balcony-loggia-Himalayan-agora, something from… out of town, with crazy illuminated joss-houses and bridal fountains and niches and arches, to complete the illusion of being outside. And with exotic flora and fauna to complete the illusion, all underneath a dark blue canopy. When the lights went out, the Brenograph magic lantern machine would begin to project drifting clouds, constellations, and special celestial effects and illusions on the ceiling. (The atmospherics were about 25% cheaper to build because you didn't have to decorate the ceiling or hang a chandelier.)

Lamb's theatre style was based on the more straightforward, 'hardtop' form patterned on opera houses, but no less ornate. Some of these theatres were ornamented to a ridiculous extent, in a kitchen-sink exoticism where referenced visual styles wildly collided with each other: church Gothic, Moroccan, Mediterranean, Spanish Gothic, Romanesque, Chinese, Hindu, Babylonian, Aztec, Mayan, Orientalist, Italian Renaissance, and (after the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922) Egyptian Revival, all mixed, matched and bastardized in a glittering disorienting train wreck. This wealth of ornament was not merely for aesthetic effect. This was not an aesthetic choice. This wealth of ornament had a calculated effect, meant to work on human bodies and minds in a specific way. Lamb and Eberson had a manipulative agenda. Nutty and extravagant, yes, but nutty and extravagant like a fox.

This particular theatre up on Broadway was one of Thomas Lamb's New York triplets, sharing some of the same castings for the plaster work to cut costs. The triplets were Syracuse in 1929, this one in 1930, and Loew's 72nd Street in 1932, the last one a masterpiece of thievery where Lamb stole Eberson's style and tried his hand at an atmospheric. It worked perfectly.

Lamb is quoted somewhere saying, "These exotic ornaments, colors, and scenes are particularly effective in creating an atmosphere in which the mind is free to frolic and becomes receptive to entertainment." To which I say, Hell yeah! I'm receptive to entertainment!

In many ways Reverend Ike's career is parallel to the equally astonishing and bizarre Southern California television minister Dr. euGene Scott.

Scott's full story is unfortunately beside the point here, and worth looking into, but they're very similar. Instead of Rolls-Royces, Scott has race horses. Both men began with little but their half-clownish charisma and turned it into a steady flow of cash from a devoted congregation, a recklessly extravagant lifestyle, opaque finances, and tax-free status. Scott is known for demanding a Rolex on the air, pissed off (his words) because one of the other televangelists had one and he didn't. Yes, he got one. According-to-their-critics both men have found and systematically exploited a trick of the mind, a certain human weakness, a certain weakness in reasoning, an impulse of trust that works while they're taking your wallet for a walk. They're magicians who show you how the trick works.

According-to-their-critics both men are well regarded in the community and politically bulletproof, which comes from influence bought and paid for in nickels and dimes, both of them like Robin Hoods in reverse, all in the name of Jesus. There's something basically illogical about the poor giving money to the rich, particularly with the demographic that Ike appeals to, but then again logic really has nothing to do with it. Don't bring your logic around here. It doesn't work and it only leads to tears.

And both men have their own private movie-palace cathedrals.

Scott's cathedral is on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. His cathedral is the 1927 United Artists flagship theatre at Broadway and Olympic, built by the micromanaging businesswoman Mary Pickford for the movie goddess Mary Pickford. Scott's church spent some two million dollars to restore the UA to its original appearance, moved his church from Glendale to downtown in 1986, and anchored a subsequent rejuvenation of Broadway and the whole theatre district, for which urban-minded Angeleans owe him thanks.

Pickford was involved in the original United Artists Theatre design, to say the least. Pickford's Spanish Gothic love factory was inspired by her obsession with medieval European castles and, in particular, the cathedral at Segovia. The gargoyles, some of them cranking old-style Bell & Howell movie cameras, were her idea. High up on the side walls of the auditorium are two huge, dramatic, psychosexual murals by Anthony Heinsbergen, featuring Mary Pickford as a naked angel in chains, threatened by devils with the recognizable faces of evil studio executives on the left, rescued by Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin on flying-horseback to the right. To say these murals are self-aggrandizing is a wild understatement. She had a private screening room in the basement.

And the lobby, which appears impossibly lavish at first glance, is full of architectural trickery. Of course it's full of social engineering tricks to get people in the door and up the stairs, but most of the materials and perspectives here are also clever fakes. The marble is carefully painted plaster. The woodwork is shaped and painted plaster. This lobby is a regular encyclopedia of cheap architectural illusions. According to the LA Conservancy docent, the original lobby carpet was woven to include shadow patterns of gothic tracery and stained-glass patterns - fake shadows. It's not just fake, or faux, or tricky, it's joyously phony.

Pickford loved to point these things out. She had a manipulative agenda, sure, but she liked to have people in on the joke. Mary Pickford knew you could let people in on the joke, and the joke not only still works, but gets funnier and funnier.