All About Eve | John Golden Theatre, New York — The Stage Door Eve Waited Beside

Karen Richards notices her first: a thin girl in a belted raincoat standing in the alley by the stage door, night after night, in weather that would send anyone else home. That alley belongs to the John Golden Theatre on West 45th Street. The unit came east before principal photography and shot night exteriors in front of the house, along with background plates the studio would later marry to interiors filmed three thousand miles away in San Francisco. The film cuts between two coasts inside a single scene and no one in 1950 caught it.

The Golden opened in 1927 as the Theatre Masque, one of three houses Herbert J. Krapp built in a row on this block for the Chanin brothers. It is the smallest theatre on Broadway, around 800 seats, and it took John Golden's name in 1937. Small houses get the difficult plays: Angels in America and Avenue Q both ran here.

Stand across 45th Street around seven in the evening, when the audience is going in and the alley is still empty. The stage door is unremarkable — a metal door, a bulb, a strip of sidewalk. That is exactly the point of the scene. Ambition in this film does not look like ambition. It looks like a girl standing in the rain, being patient.

Location: 252 West 45th Street, Manhattan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.