The picture above is from a 1984 calender I saved part of from the privately-owned U.C. Theater in Berkeley California. The calender for this and other retro-movie houses in the Bay Area (such as the Red Vic, the Surf, The Avenue, and the Castro Theaters in San Francisco; The El Rey Theater in Walnut Creek; The Telegraph Avenue Cinema and the University-affiliated Pacific Film Achieve in Berkeley.)
These cinemas usually had popular animation and foreign film festivals and retrospectives of famous film stars, foreign and domestic, from Jack Nicholson to Ingmar Bergman, and from Woody Allen's (who at one time wanted to be Ingmar Bergman come to think of it) many opuses to collections of film noir classics, to documentaries about everything from Gospel music to a late-1950's BBC program that featured two extended interviews with pioneer psychiatrist Carl Jung. Such films otherwise wouldn't be seen in regular theaters in the Bay Area and certainly not if they were more than a year in release.
My friend, future scribe Richard "Get-Me-A-Rewrite!" Nelson used to joke that "Jimmy Plays Berkeley", a 1968 film featuring a performance at the local Greek Theater by the great left-handed guitar genius Mr. Hendrix, played the UC every month in the early Eighties without fail. Admittedly, he exaggerated, but not by much.
As you can see the movie selections changed practically every day, which gave just about any film-goer the chance to see our of his or her favorite films (or see a film they hadn't seen yet in a favorite genre, or see three 1950's cheesy sci-fi flicks back to back and enjoy the experience with hundreds of the like-minded .) To me, that was part of the fun of the whole format: you could pick up a copy of the theater calender for, say, three of these places and start deciding which films you wanted to see, and then rounde-vous with others who shared your interest or go it alone.
As long as your work or school schedule permitted, and you got there early enough in some cases, that double bill and the anticipation of seeing it was a great treat. Of course you could rent a movie or two today, but part of the fun for me was always in the planning to see the films and what part of the day to go and getting there in time and whether I was going to eat before or after the shows, etc, etc. It was an outing, an event. One would go in to Berkeley, for instance, and peruse the used record stores like Rasputin's or the big book shops like Moe's on Telegraph Avenue for an hour or so before or after the movie. I once saw four movies of Katherine Hepburn's as birthday celebration for her. My date who had planned to go with me --also named Kate, believe it or not-- stood me up that Saturday afternoon/Evening. But I still consider it a positive experience, in part because I managed to get my hand stamped by a ticket-taker between the end of "Adam's Rib" (1949) , got dinner at Mickey D's and got back in a few minutes for the credits of her next movie on the bill, Summertime (1955) thus saving me the cost of an expensive repast at the snack bar.
Seeing films this way also gave you a chance to talk about the movies you'd just seen with friends or friends of friends who came along. (I've been told of a couple times when total strangers would talk in the lobby after a movie.) That never happened to me, but I have it on reliable authority from others . Imagine that happening at a blockhouse 25-screen multiplex at the mall!
Every cinema has its ambiance, or in the case of the blockhouse-multiplex, a uniform lack of ambiance no matter what town or city you are when you go to watch a movie. The UC was rundown, the seats were coming apart, the place didn't have air-conditioning (or at least it didn't work) so the Summer shows now and then had to keep the exit doors wide open on rare hot nights. I remember back in 1980 some friends of mine had to walk out of a showing of Jean-Luc Godard's "Beathless" because, well, we could hardly breathe. Hard as it might be to believe today, the evening showings for a Orson Welles rarity like "Touch of Evil" or a Hitchcock or Antonioni double bill could pack the place. Some of these films were available on television from time to time but to see it as it was first seen by the public was a great lure. I personally put off seeing David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" or Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts (1963) so I could take it in on the big screen.
The Avenue was the place where I caught a special reverence for the silent movie. It's ambiance was like a step back into time . One Friday Night, a couple years before Betamax and VHS became commonplace, I saw a couple Chaplin shorts, a W C Fields short called "The Pharmacist" film and the feature, a Harold Lloyd film there called "Girl Shy" from 1924. One guy there was even dressed like Harold Lloyd. (OK, maybe that's too muc hyou say, but it was jus tone person.) I had seen some of Lloyd's work courtesy of a Time-Life series that played on local PBS stations in Florida and California. The television presentation featured a corny narrator and really bad over-the-top music I looked at such films asa curiosity, funny to a point but hard to evaluate becasue they were packaged to be old-fashioned and creaky
But seeing Lloyd's work with a clean 35mm print on a big screen from a loge seat with hundreds of other people there laughing along with the best of the gags and and a guy at the Wurlitzer in front of the stage doing great accompiment was a true event, as enjoyable an evening out as I've ever spent. Other times I saw older films on a billing with newer ones. (Like "Citizen Kane" with Allen's "Zelig", a good combination or you could see the great Robert Mitchum-Jane Greer film noir classic, "Out of the Past" with the inferior remake with Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward. Compare and contrast can be fun.
These older movies, sound or silent, weren't just curiousities for me; they broke through as popular entertainments that transcended their times. Later I saw Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes" at the El Rey one evening, wedged in a middle seat with a sell-out crowd and more than a hint of the smell of cannibis wafting through the air . Taking these movies in with a crowd, I could see how Hitchcock really was a master of suspense, not only for the small screen but I could tell from the audience reactions how well his 45-year old films still could hold an adult audience enthalled with suspense, comic relief, a bit of S &M handcuff titillation with Robert Donat and Madelaine in "39" linked together in a very literal way and some derring-do by the relectant hero and heroine at the end of both films. It was marvelous and the crowd appreciated it.
After that, I was hooked on seeing movies as they were meant to be seen and seeing them wheneverpossible with lots of like-minded dolks who wanted to see if the old magic still was there. For Hitchcock and Keaton and the Marx Brothers and Bogart and Fellini's characters and others, they still held their audiences. Others, like Jacques Tati, I couldn't get even if people around me were laughing. And Chaplin in his later features could be way too sentimental no matter how big a crowd he had or how many disaffected left-wingers cheered his image from the stalls during, say, his long and idealistic pacifist speech at the end of "The Great Dictator"
Luckily at about the same time a silent movie series featuring the above artists plus Buster Keaton started making the rounds. I spent several days over the course of a month, out with The T-Man and Our Usual Suspects of male and sometimes female co-horts seeing these films. Keato nbecame my favorite comedian because of the experience and seeing all his features at one theater with an audience was a fine a treat as you could get in two dimensional entertainment.
I realize younger people today have their own favorites behind and in fornt of the camera these days. MocviesI saw from the 1940--1960's aren't available for many to fall in love or get interested in on television, unless you have Turner Classic Movies or if you happen to catch a movie on American Movie Classics in between the commercials and the "original programming". Consider that in this New Age cinema patrons will be lucky if they ever see their favorite films--be it L.A. Confidential (1997) or "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Pan's Labyrinth" or "Amelie" once or at the most twice on a big screen before they will be confined to only seeing these films on their living roon DVDs. The collective experience is lost--almost for good.
Yes, there are a few art houses left. The Castro down in San Francisco recently ran their 12 Annual Silent Film Festival and I imagine the Pacific Film Achieve is still open for business but their stock and trade I'm told is more and more entirely foreign films of an obscure variety. Some movie houses, like Oakland's Paramount Theater, are still around, but they have a variety of live shows on their calenders to push out the films.
Alas, most surviving retro-cinemas mostly play brand new Sundance Festival -approved indie documentaries and second-run popular recent films and certainly don't change their selections more than once or at most twice a week. And the suburban single-screen cinema is totally a thing of the past in the Bay Area. Perhaps in a couple years, I'm afraid, if you're not in LA or New York, you'll be out of luck.
Like the drive-ins that once brought families out in the Sticks and the 'Burbs, are not shuttered or turned into restaurants and tanning salons. Thanks to Blockbuster and Netflicks, we still have some of the classic films out there and the new classics are around, depending on what your taste considers classic. But gone (or far reduced) is the fun of planning to see a couple fine old movies with strangers--and a date or a chum or two. I miss that, just as I miss that anticipation when the lights go dim in a theater and you know you are going to see a fine movie you've perhaps seen before--not now it comes to you as the filmmakers wanted you to see it, as if the long-past creators and players were someow arranging this special expereince for you (and the hundreds around you). I still cherish those delicious moments, when a giant beam of light hits a giant rectangular screen, with a crispness of sight and sound, giving life to a place and time that otherwise would only live in old memories.
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