A Life at the Movies (Misspent Youth)

            Listen, I’ve always said I hope I die from “spontaneous combustion” while sitting in a movie theater. The reality is that an air conditioner will probably fall from a window and bash my head in while I’m coming home from the liquor store. But I have to admit recently when I was in a half-empty movie theater after a long, self-exiled period of Covid house arrest I was almost giddy at being back staring at a huge screen as the lights dimmed and the hideous previews unspooled.

            Recently I traveled to my old home town for a funeral and my dearest friend from high school days (Cynthia Hughes) and I drove around Norwich, Connecticut to check out where the old movie theaters were that we spent so many misspent hours when we were young. 

            My mother once revealed a memory that explained a lot to me. She was newly married, living on Staten Island with a baby (me) and a husband that was traveling a lot for work. So, she would go to the movies with me practically every day. “You never fussed or cried ever,” she recalled. I have to admit I always cringe when I see mothers dragging their squalling brats into movie theaters ruining it for every other patron. “You just seemed hypnotized by the screen,” she confessed. But what could I have possibly been watching during my first years on the planet? Quo Vadis? A Place in the Sun? Did she take me (an infant) to A Streetcar Named Desire? That would explain a lot. I recall none of this but when she told me it filled in a lot of blanks.

            We moved to a small town in Connecticut when I was 5 and she continued to drag me to movie theaters in nearby Norwich. She laughingly told me about taking me to a double bill of Underwater! with Jane Russell and Monster from the Ocean Floor. Halfway through Monster from the Ocean Floor (about a giant rubber octopus attacking swimmers at a seaside village in Mexico) she leaned down to ask what I thought of the movie and I wasn’t there. I had gotten so scared I ran up the aisle and out of the theater. She chased me halfway down Main Street and coaxed me back into the theater. When I watch that movie now it’s the dullest horror movie I’ve ever seen in my life and I cannot fathom what possibly could have freaked me out about it when I was a kid.

            That was at the elegant Palace theater- opened prior to 1929 with 1,400 plush seats where I saw so many films when I was young. All the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe films. All those gothic horror classics from Hammer Studios. Those great gimmicky William Castle movies like House on Haunted Hill. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and because the theater was at City Landing, near the river, when we came out of the show there were all these seagulls flying low that caused little kids to burst into panicky tears. When I was a teenager I would tell my family I was going to visit a friend and actually ride my bike 15 miles on the highway into Norwich to see movies. It was such a thrill chaining up my bike in front of the Palace theater and seeing Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World. My parents were so relieved that I had friends to hang with when actually I spent my Saturday with a box of popcorn and Christopher Lee.

            The Palace was torn down years ago and now is just a vacant lot.

            Fortunately growing up in the 50s horror and sci-fi ruled for kids at the movies. My mother would dump me off at a kiddie matinee on Saturday afternoon at the Yale theater (laughingly called the scratch house) where I would sit through triple bills of The Brain Eaters, How to Make a Monster and Ma & Pa Kettle in Waikiki. It was heaven. The kids would run wild during the show. Often the manager of the theater in exasperation would climb up on stage and threaten to stop the films if the kids didn’t calm down. He usually was pelted with candy and empty drink cups until he gave up and restarted the films in defeat while children ecstatically ran shrieking up the aisles. I think I heard the whole block was torn down where the Yale theater once stood.

            The Midtown theater showed more mainstream fare. It was just up the street from the Palace and it was a big, spacious cinema. But I remember seeing a lot of more adult fare there when I was young and there wasn’t a rating system to prevent me from seeing any films. I sat through The Night of the Iguana twice. I saw sultry, sexy Carroll Baker drive the men wild on a remote desert oil outpost in Station Six Sahara. I remember walking out of my first movie there. It was Under the Yum Yum Tree starring Jack Lemmon and it was so sleazy and stupid I just couldn’t sit in my seat anymore and fled into the warm sun with relief. Standing in front of the empty shell of a theater now made my heart sink.

            True, times have changed. People watch films differently now. But there really was nothing like the sensation of sitting in a packed theater and screaming together during a jump scare in a horror movie. Or laughing hysterically at the same moment during a comedy. Or clutching your companion fearfully during a suspense scene at a thriller. The faded velvet curtains in the lobby. The threadbare seats. Plaster falling from the cracked, aged frescos on the ceiling. Sticky floors littered with discarded candy wrappers. The tragically tired ticket takers. The stench of fresh popcorn. Movies were a collective experience that marked my life for good. And, as I stumble towards extinction I am convinced that watching a film on my phone will never infect my dreams like that holy experience.