during the postwar movie slump. Returning veterans were attending college on the GI Bill, marrying, and starting families. Newlyweds and young families with babies were usually on a budget and put the purchase of a home, a car, and new appliances ahead of going to the movies. The company's declining newsreel movie business quickly recovered when it switched to showing first-run feature films in 1949, but weekly theater attendance still experienced a dramatic drop: from 78.2 million in 1946 to 58 million by 1950, when the American public chose to sit at home in front of their new television sets rather than go out to the movies. As this postwar middle-class began moving from the cities to the suburbs, shopping complexes to support them proliferated, and theaters followed. In 1964 Trans-Lux built its first shopping center theater, an 850-seat facility in Reisterstown Road Plaza Mall in Baltimore. By 1969, the company had brought large, modern theaters to five more suburban shopping centers, nearly doubling the size of its theater holdings, and by 1965 had 37 theaters in ten states. By the end of the 1960s, the theater building boom was over as well. In 1973 Trans-Lux lost money on its theaters for the first time in years. The boom had aggravated the newly independent industry's problem of a shortage of quality movies. Bidding on films became fierce, and many companies split their single theaters into twins. Three screen and four screen theaters began appearing, and when Richard Brandt replaced Percy Furber as chairman of the board in 1974, the multiplex trend (with as many as 12 screens) was in full swing. Some of the company's theaters were split into two and three screen houses, and others were sold off entirely. In the midst of this, Trans-Lux went into the business of multimedia shows. The 1970 premiere of the San Francisco Experience, a 29-projector, seven-screen spectacular with 30 special effects inspired the company to hire its creators to develop a nearly $1 million budget multimedia entertainment film about New York City. The September 28, 1973, opening of the 45-projector, 16-screen film was called "bedazzling and breathtaking" by The New York Times. The New York Experience, which was housed in a sub-basement of the McGraw-Hill Building in Rockefeller Center, became the longest-running commercial multimedia show in history. The show featured panoramic movie screens, slide projections, extensive light and sound systems, and a