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calendar   Saturday - April 02, 2011

Loss of Local Color

I saw in the newspaper today that the last movie theater in our county closed for good last night. Movie theaters - a good idea who’s time has gone?

Once upon a time in the land of far away and long ago, the little town I grew up in (pop about 10K then, 32K now) had two movie theaters downtown. We also had 5 grocery stores; all but one of those is long gone. I remember being in the balcony of one of the movie theaters, to see Dean Jones in That Darn Cat, which tells you how young I was then and how old I am now. They closed the balcony area shortly thereafter for “safety” reasons. Two decades later one of the places converted to a duo-plex, and the other one soon went out of business. A few years later and the other theater followed suit. The duo-plex was reopened a few years later and I think it’s still in business. I haven’t been in either one of those places since the very early 80s, so I can’t speak to their interiors, but my childhood memory of them has big cushy seats in it, and a Panavision screen that must have been 80 feet wide. With a power operated curtain 2 stories tall that opened and closed for each showing.

When I was in college up in Binghamton NY there were two in the area that were kept open via federal arts grants. The one in Johnson City was huge, one of those massive plush and gilt relics from days gone by. I bet it had 500 seats. We’d go there to watch second run films on the cheap, and usually have almost the whole place to ourselves. The other smaller theater went the art house route, and did a decent weekend business that way, but I don’t think they were open more than 3 days a week.

Up in the town of Washington here there is another old time movie house, another of those gold paint and red velvet plush places from the past. They were closed for many years, but reopened a few years back. I haven’t been in there either, but I see the marquee every week and know that they run 3 or 4 films at a time. Whether that means multiple showings, or that they’ve cut the place into a bunch of mini-theaters, I don’t know.

The rise of the multi-plex was both good and bad for movie theaters. Good in that they could offer the customer so much more choice. Bad in that almost all of them did it on the cheap, and the partitioning of the grand old giant arenas into many smaller rooms resulted in bare concrete floors, raw walls painted black, and terribly small and uncomfortable rows of seats that had built in cup holders in the arm rests that made them unusable. And then they set the sound level to Deafen Everyone. Worse, they lost the giant projection screens, and with that they lost the magic. Panavision and CinemaScope are long dead*. Films are shot these days with an eye on showing them on standard television with it’s nearly square format. There is some hope with the ascent of HDTV; films can once again be shot in a bit of wide angle.

But that same HDTV is hammering the last couple nails into the coffin of movie theaters. The outrageous ticket price is another handful of nails, along with the knowledge that whatever film you’re going out to see now will be available either on disc or on download for just a dollar or two in less than 90 days.

Let’s ignore for today that the vast majority of modern movies have been total crap that aren’t even worth the one dollar disc rental.  Our local small business video store closed 5 years ago. The Blockbuster in the strip mall at the other end of town closed last year. With delivery venues like Netflix and Red Box, who needs them? It’s easier to just click a mouse and visit your mailbox a few days later. Now even that is going away; just click your mouse and start watching the film right now. What you can’t get On Demand from your cable TV company you can download from the internet; some of the TV’s being built today hook up directly and you don’t even have to figure out how to wire in the computer.

So we sit in our homes and watch films on our really large wide screen TV sets, with our own surround sound multi-channel stereos. And the movie theaters die. And we lose the community event, the polite public gathering, the shared iteration of being part of a culture, that was going out to the movies. Sad.


Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 04/02/2011 at 09:22 AM   
Filed Under: • Art-PhotographyDaily LifeHollywood •  
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