An aging movie snob pulls rank on the DVD and multiplex generation.
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Let’s get one thing straight- I’d rather not be writing movie reviews for a website. I’d rather be living off the royalties of my books and poetry and basking in the glow of a Pulitzer Prize. A couple of years ago The Kansas City Star ran a series of articles where their arts critics pontificated on why they love doing their jobs, and each one of them, especially the pop music critic, tried to make us believe that they had always wanted to be a critic. Bullshit. No one who’s ever strapped on a guitar as a teenager or caught the winning pass for their high school football team ever wanted to be in the crowd at a concert or on the sidelines. Like most people, they realized that life is not about getting exactly what you want. Life is about settling- and not being miserable.
So I’ll settle for writing for this electronic rag as long as they’ll let me. Why? Because I love movies. I grew up in Los Angeles, an industry town. I spent my childhood, adolescence and early 20’s leafing through page after page of full page movie ads in The Los Angeles Times. I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Planet of The Apes” when they first came out- on the big screen. I saw “Blade Runner” when it premiered at The Mann’s Theatre in Westwood. I saw Mel Brooks scurry out of the theatre as I was waiting to see the ten o’clock showing of “The King Of Comedy”, his friend complaining that the movie “could’ve been funnier.” When I was sixteen, my brother-in-law, Phillip, was in the crowd at The Olympic Auditorium, part of a casting call for a new fight film. When he got home that night my sisters and I asked him if he’d seen any movie stars. He said the only one he recognized was the guy who played The Penguin in the ‘Batman’ TV series.
The actor was Burgess Meredith and the film was “Rocky”.
Most of the movies I saw affected me because I was young, the theatre was dark and the images were vivid and larger than life. Also, I was at “the show” and not at home, bored. Let’s face it, that’s why most people go to the movies. Movies, like television, are, in the words of Paddy Chayefsky in “Netowrk”, “boredom killers”. Since we humans don’t have to worry about food, clothing and shelter on a daily basis, then it’s all about killing the boredom. Also, movies give us a reason to sit close to someone else in the dark, and they give us a reason to talk to them later.
When I was a kid and a teenager I was serious about movies. And like a serious drinker, I did it alone. There were second run theatres in the towns I grew up in: Compton, South Gate and Huntington Park. The Arden Theatre in Compton had a ‘crying room’ at the back- a sound proof room where mothers could take their unruly children and still watch the movie through the glass and listen to the sound piped in through a speaker on the wall. On Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park there were three theatres: The New Park, The California and The Warners. Like The Arden, they showed double bills for .50 to .75 cents and the ticket sellers were ok with kids like me watching rated ‘R’ movies. I ate a lot of Flicks and saw some great doubles at those theatres: “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” and “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, “Bullitt” and “Bonnie and Clyde”, “The Godfather” and “Skin Game”…
As a young man I frequented the grand palaces in Hollywood and Westwood. My favorite was The Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, especially when I could get the center balcony seat on the rail. There were also ‘revival’ theatres around town: The Beverly Cinema in The Fairfax district, The Nuart on Santa Monica Blvd., and The Four Star on Wilshire Boulevard, where you could see films like “The Wild Bunch” and “Sunset Boulevard” in all their larger than life glory. And unlike a multiplex, at these theatres when the movie was over you walked out to the lobby and into the street with the crowd, still carrying the mood of the film and a shared experience.
I took a screenwriting class in the early 80’s. The only thing I learned that was useful was how to copyright your work- cheap. (You just mail it to yourself in a manila envelope and if someone steals your idea, then you open it up in court and prove, with the postmark, that you’d had the idea earlier.) Of course, when one of the students asked the instructor about having an idea for a movie stolen, he replied, dryly, “You should be so lucky.”
I went through my ‘scholarly’ phase soon after that, the period when I was into the French ‘New Wave’ and the silents and American film noir. Most of it bored me. Now, when I watch a movie, I think, if one of my co-workers saw this, will they come up to me in the breakroom, wide-eyed and grinning, and ask, “Have you seen——–?” Or I think, if they showed this to the boys in the joint, will they sit through it, with their tattooed guns folded across their chests, and nod in approval when it’s over, or will they be tossing chairs at the guards and slicing throats before the second act? Will frat boys be quoting from it ten years from now?
Is it killing the boredom?
Then there are the films with a ‘payoff’- that moment at the end where character and plot come together in an immensely satisfying rush: Clint Eastwood standing at the saloon door and pointing that Scofield at Gene Hackman, with a whiskey fire burning in his eyes and a taste for revenge on his tongue; Max, barely standing and broken up, next to the wreckage of the overturned tanker, holding out his hand only to catch sand rushing out of the pipes and realizing that “the juice… the precious juice” had been in the school bus all along.
Moments like that can only be fully appreciated on the big screen with an audience.
Now we live in an age where the turnaround time for a movie going from the big screen to DVD is faster and tighter than an ice skater’s single axle. And I think it’s a shame. It’s a shame because movies have become as small as we are. Watching a film like “2001” or “Planet of The Apes” on a television- even a 42″ hi-def plasma screen- is like listening to a Beethoven symphony on AM radio.
Yes, I’m a snob.
The pioneers of organized religion- those old dudes in two story hats- had it right. They knew gods were meant to be worshipped in grand cathedrals. They knew they were putting on a show for the commoners, and they expected the faithful to make pilgrimages to “the show”.
The way I see it, movies, like gods, should be worshipped in grand palaces, not dispensed over the counter in plastic bags and taken home.