"Old Movies" in Theaters: The Lost Experience: Part One

Progress can be a great thing. But in the case of entertainment, when one form of media usurps another there is something lost. To me, one of the sad things about the revolution in movie rentals is that it drove out of business so many of the once-popular repertory cinemas in large cities and also university towns around America.

Sometimes people call them "art houses".

These theaters (like my personal favorite, the now defunct "UC Theater" on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, California, pictured above ) were once busy venues, gaving earnest movie-goers like myself and my friends the chance to experience an old Hitchcock film or a Marx Brothers movie or a great silent comedy or foreign film classic as these films were originally MEANT to be seen--with an audience of oft-times hundreds of strangers watching a big screen with the soundtrack reverberating in a old-style cavernous movie house. (Or even, in the case of the Castro Theater in San Francisco or the Paramount near Jack London Square in Oakland, an original film palace from the Golden Era when the studios owned their own theaters and set out to make "a night at the pictures" as much of an event as going out to a nightclub or to a play. )

There was a bit of magic to that experience--if you got caught up in a good film that was playing to a large patronage it was like going back in time for a few hours, feeling you were seeing a popular or acclaimed film for the first time (even if you had seen it before chopped up for commercials and broadcast time restrictions). You were surrounded by other appreciative people. If you had a date or a friend(s) with you, you shared the experience as a night (or afternoon) out. You weren't "cocooned" in your home, subject to the experience being hampered by a smaller screen or the phone going off.

Thanks to Netflix and Blockbuster and all that, people can order a movie via regular mail and have it delivered to their house. And of course you can drive over and pick it up at a rental store, or buy the film and see it all you want. Those are good things.

The DVD (and presumably new Blu-ray technology) even has those tempting special features and multiple tracks available where you can often hear the director go on about the film, or, if it's an older film, perhaps a film historian will give you insight into the making of the film or gossip about the male and female leads or some history as to how the film got made in the first place. All fine and well, and much of which , apart from the occasional rare clip, something that you could read about in a book. Nowadays I sometimes think comedy film-makers spend as much time putting together the "blooper track" for the DVD release as they might in making the jokes and situations in the actual finished film the best possible. And very often the "unedited" versions of a film and the omitted scenes only serve to make one realize the scenes were extraneous and were wisely cut from public viewing in the first place.

I have to admit there are exceptions to that last part of course. Sometimes a film might have a troubled history and scenes are cut for length of the film rather than quality. But is the price you pay for that rare clip worth the demise of the core of "art house" cinemas that made it possible to see a favorite older film on a big screen? Not to me at least.

But younger film viewers might say, "what about that experience of going to a movie that's been out before and seeing it again at a theater? Was it really so special that you should ask others to mourn the end of the repertory movie houses?"

Yes, I answer, it is, and I'll explain why when next we meet.

Oh, to give you an idea of what I'm missing, NedSparks, an old wisecracking Warner Bros. character actor from the 1930's who really shouldn't be up and around so much at his age, contributed this clip on You Tube of an "Evening Magazine" segment on Bay Area movie theaters in 1983 and the men with the Mighty Wurlitzers who made the evening's silent films extra authentic to the period the movies represented. The Avenue Theater featured in the show, like the UC Theater across the bay, is now out of business.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFZZ2Mny3Ic

Also, for those of you who don't like YouTube: An article by National Review's Richard Brookheiser on his art house movie experiences, with a nice contrast in the first part of the essay on modern film-going:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Art-house+memories-a0130931779