I had the weirdest dream the other night. I was in a movie theater watching a film and suddenly the film broke. The frame jerked to a halt and the image caught fire, melting like a bubbling celluloid rose. Of course, the audience jumped to their feet, irate and screaming (as if the projectionist could hear them through the sound-proof walls), but the aggravated cries of the crowd woke me up. I lay there in bed and I was transported back in time, momentarily, to when I managed a movie theater on Cape Cod, where that angry din, shouted out nightly, was music to my ears.
It was a small repertoire cinema in Provincetown, Massachusetts, simply called “The Movies.” Located on the very tip of the scorpion tail of Cape Cod, Provincetown is the first place the Pilgrims landed before Plymouth Rock, but they actually only stopped long enough to do their laundry and steal corn from the Native Americans, so it really doesn’t count. A small fishing village that is annually transformed into a swinging summer resort, Provincetown has always drawn a bohemian crowd- Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and countless others were lured by its rustic charm- and there has always been an uneasy alliance between the Portuguese community and the large gay crowd that summer there. “Fishermen, fags and fudge,” a friend once joked, was the essence of Provincetown. I vividly remember my first drive down Commercial Street (the main drag): when I got an eyeful of the crackpots careening back and forth on the sidewalk, I knew it was the place for me.
At the time there were three movie theaters in town. “The Movies” was the smallest and the funkiest. It was actually the balcony of what once was a huge movie palace, but the downstairs now housed a warehouse of shops. All that was left of the grand old theater was a 100-seat cramped death trap up two flights of stairs. Advertised as “Air-Cooled!” there was just one dangerous, noisy fan on the roof that I always feared would fall down. It was hot as blazes, and on particularly steamy nights, people would stumble down the stairs hyperventilating, drenched in sweat. “I lost 10 pounds during that Bergman movie,” one woman announced to me as she left, stripped down to her bra and panties. The projectors, two antiquated dinosaurs, were forever breaking down. “The Movies” specialized in foreign and cult films, which meant that while the other theaters were packing them in with Jaws 2, we were herding those poor souls into the sweltering attic to see, appropriately, The Damned.
And then there were the seats. We had appropriated them from a theater down Cape that had gone out of business, and had riveted them down in a rather haphazard fashion- they were forever collapsing. I would shudder every time I tore the ticket of an overweight person. The ticket seller and I would take bets on how long before we heard the inevitable crash and howl of pain coming from the theater. One extremely corpulent gentleman was wedged in so tight it took three of us and a crowbar to get him out.
I worked my way up from janitor to manager in no time- no one else was stupid enough to take that thankless, low-paying job. So I set out to hire the perfect staff. I not only hired the handicapped, I made a point of only hiring alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally unstable and children who smoked. I then proceeded to create a manifesto of how we would work there. Our creed: “One: The customer is never right. And two: If anything goes wrong just leave the theater.” Many a time I sat at a nearby outdoor café, listening to the disgruntled cries of angry movie patrons echoing in the distance. Now, anyone who has ever worked with the public knows how fast the milk of human kindness can sour. Most people spend their whole lives empowered by others- their bosses, their spouses, the government, etc. They are filled with frustration and rage that seems only satisfied when they can yell at people who are hired to serve them- waiters, salespersons, hotel staff, or people who work in movie theaters. They bully and argue and demand to see the manager when things go wrong (and at our theater, that was nightly). Well, we made it our policy never to give them any satisfaction. When they screamed for the manager, I would appear at the top of the stairs, drink in hand, and announce: “I’m the manager- and fuck you!”
Why were we were allowed to get away with this, you ask? Simple. The man who owned the theater was so high on cocaine, he was just grateful we turned in the money every night. And the surprising thing was that the theater was very popular. Every evening the air was giddy with suspense and morbid anticipation. And the staff was so scary it made for an interesting night out.
Our projectionist had a bit of a drug problem so you never knew what was going to happen. One night I stepped from my manager’s office/cocktail lounge to find, for some reason, Children Of Paradise being projected on the ceiling. (What astonished me was that the audience was patiently leaning way back in their seats, just taking it for granted they should be reading subtitles over the exit sign). Once, during Gone With The Wind, I poked my head in to see the burning of Atlanta on the screen and, relieved that everything was running smoothly, I started to descend the stairs when I suddenly heard peals of laughter coming from the audience. I rushed back upstairs to see all these Jews up on the screen dancing merrily around- the projectionist had somehow confused a reel of Fiddler On the Roof which was playing later in the week.
I took a hands-on approach in dealing with unruly customers. One little 10-year old brat who lived in town used to terrorize the theater. He’d run wild and make a lot of noise until one day I cornered him during a “Kiddie Matinee,” picked him up by the neck and throttled him, his little arms and legs thrashing wildly and his tongue bulging out of his head. I remember thinking to myself after I did it, that my actions were outrageously inappropriate and I was going to get in a peck of trouble. But to my surprise the kid was an angel for weeks afterwards. His mother even sent me a thank-you box of saltwater taffy. There were occasional wackos- a Vietnam vet went berserk during a screening of Apocalypse Now, and a rather inebriated young man actually urinated on the screen during A Clockwork Orange (take that Stanley Kubrick!)- but these incidents livened up a dull week. I only “lost it” when we showed Franco Zeffirelli’s ghastly Brother Sun, Sister Moon, his saccharine telling of the story of St. Francis, complete with music by Donovan. The hippie assholes and crystal-wearing fools who levitated up the stairs, smiling beatifically, every time we screened the movie made me so mental that I once angrily stuck a pencil into the projector just so I could hear the disappointed groans from the audience when the film broke. After that I put it in my contract I was not to work any night that Zeffirelli film played.
Every summer was filled with hundreds of incredibly stupid questions. Like, “What time does the midnight show start?” and “Will I like this movie?” It began to take its toll on the staff. Audience members joined in the anarchy- I would come in the next day to find the letters on the marquee rearranged to say “The Homo’s Ass” at 8, 10 and 12.
But there were wonderful times. There was the sweet thrill of coming to work on nights that we showed Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Altman’s Thieves Like Us, Malick’s Badlands, Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus or Cocteau’s Orpheus. Just sitting at the top of the stairs, basking in those images- while the audience used their movie schedules as makeshift fans- was so wonderful on those humid, airless nights. So what if the ticket taker had passed out and was slumped over the counter, or the concession stand boy was sneaking his friends up the back exit or the projectionist was speaking in tongues and had his clothes on backwards. There was magic in the air.
My good friend Frank Girolamo used to show up late, after the concession stand was closed, because there was a window that looked down at Commercial Street. We would sit there for hours laughing at who was going home with who, and then creeping up into the theater to watch snatches of McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Chinatown.
A huge fire burned down Whaler’s Wharf complex one winter. Supposedly the night watchman, who caused the fire with his space heater, was so distraught at what he’d done he chained weights to his legs and hopped down to the main pier and jumped off. My friend Frank found one of the half-burned movie schedules in the rubble and sent it to me, laminated. I had to choke back laughter, and tears, when I got that in the mail. Fortunately, the complex was rebuilt, and a new movie theater is now in business which flourishes during the Provincetown Film Festival every June.
But I get a pang in my heart when I go in there, because those ten years I spent as manager of The Movies are still so vivid. There was a time after I left for New York in the 80s that the theater closed up and was just used as storage space for the shops downstairs. I came for a visit one summer and a friend at Whaler’s Wharf let me sneak into The Movies. It was so sad and strange to see it all cobwebbed and stripped of seats and screen. My office was still there, and so were some of the movie posters I’d stapled up. It was so The Last Picture Show. Later that day, I was walking down Commercial Street and a woman came up to me and said in complete seriousness: “Are you still working at The Movies?” I was taken aback, considering the place had been boarded up for years. But then I remembered that some Provincetown locals exist in a perpetual time-loop haze. “What’s playing tonight?” she asked, and I shot back, “Harold & Maude is playing tonight at 8 & 10.” “Oh great,“ she said, nodding to herself. “I love that movie- I’ll see you there…” “See you there,” I said, and we moved off in different directions, dazed by the sun, both of us stuck permanently in the middle of some cracked dream.
Absolutely beautiful writing–the heartbreaking majesty of going back to a specific point in time