When I was a lad, there were dozens of movie theaters in my neighborhood, in the days just before the multiplex killed the screens. By the time my eldest was born, there were three left, and the local sports bars had bigger screens than most of the ones you could find at the movies.
The closest theater to my old house closed last summer. It was hard to take; I’d seen so many movies there, and in fact it was one of the first places I went to with just my friends, in about the fourth or fifth grade. (We saw Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety). For me the abandoning of a movie house is like the closing of a temple – a movie theater is a sacred space where people larger than life told wondrous stories, some humorous, some melodramatic, some adventurous. Even the most awful movie could still bring the pleasures of sitting in a collective space, watching the flickering images emerging from the dust that the light of the projector exposed. A movie projector’s shutter opens and closes constantly, sending out its film at 24 frames per second – we spend just under half our time in darkness as the shutter closes and opens. Where else could you spend so much time in the dark and yet have so much light shining in, the light of big stars saying witty things?
When the Big Movie Chain decided that it would not renew its lease on the building that was now the Last Theater in the neighborhood, there was much panic among the community. After much searching for a lessee who’d keep it a movie house, a hero was found, an independent theater owner who will also make use of some unused space in the building – the original theater itself! (all the current screens were fashioned in the multiplex conversion days). It was important to the community that there be at least one place where audiences could go and see first-run films.
There’s no question that movie theaters are not the palaces they once were (or very few of them, anyway). Most living rooms are cleaner than your average theater, and with new home theater systems you can have terrific sound and incredible images, too. But your living room is still your living room. It’s a place of reality. It’s not a place of fantasy (except for children, of course). When you go into a movie theater, magic can happen – and yes, not all of it on screen. Ever watch a bad movie and have the audience
I love taking my oldest to the movies. She sits there, wholly absorbed in the experience. Nothing distracts her, not even the popcorn. She spends the next week talking about it. It’s like it just enters your being, your soul. I’ve enjoyed a lot of great movies on video, and many of them have become classics for me, but for me, the space of a theater is sacred, awesome, and I hate not to be able to pass on that power to my children. We’re fortunate to live in a city where we still have quite a bit of movie houses, but walking to the “nabe” is something important to hold onto.
I’m glad whoever was really able to save the theater did it – there was an article in the local paper where many politicians tried to take the credit. I wish they were able to save the bowling alley…