By Chris Hyde

July 29, 2003

Wherein an aging writer takes stock of a life spent watching cinema unspool frame by frame like the myriad grains of sand in some cosmic frikking hourglass.

Well folks, we've passed the rubicon here. As I write these words the date marks this writer's 40th birthday, an anniversary that could easily be considered a sort of unofficial halfway point in that big movie that we call life. In general, milestones such as this one are not something that I'd really dwell upon overmuch, but in my capacity as BOP hack this particular date does give a golden opportunity to cast a glance back over all the things seen thus far in my life on the planet. To be sure, many thousands of my waking hours have been whiled away in darkened rooms watching the ephemeral images of motion pictures flicker onscreen, and it seems fitting to nostalgically peruse some of the highlights that stand out from that voyeuristic pastime. At the same time, though, the cinema is in no way a static enterprise and as such, the landscape of film today is very different than it was when I began to go out to the movies. So let's stumble down the twisted path of a wayward existence spent at the movies, noting along the way some prominent personal signposts and pointing out some places where things look much different than they used to.

The first time that I ever went to the movies was at some point in the late 1960's, when I cajoled my mother into taking me to see Zebra in the Kitchen at the old Wellesley Playhouse in Massachusetts. (In one sad indication of how the territory of film has changed, this nice single screen theater is today the site of a chain restaurant). Being an inveterate animal lover as a youngster, the appeal of a story where TV's Dennis the Menace (Jay North) takes a job at the zoo only to decide to emancipate the poor beasts from their cages held almost unlimited appeal. While I have only the sketchiest memories of the main film, surprisingly enough I have a very vivid recall of the materials that preceded the film itself. There was a cartoon starring the Pink Panther, a colorful travelogue on the Rio Grande River valley and a lengthy Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp short. As an impressionable youth, this whole program seemed a fascinating wonder, and inside the dim confines of that suburban movie house a passion for film that lasts to this day was born. I'm not sure if it's possible that a child currently could have that same sort of seminal experience, as at the megaplex today the cartoons and shorts of yesteryear have been replaced by more blatant commercial whoring, but at that time this extravaganza of delight awoke me to the possibilities inherent in the celluloid medium. For that reason alone there'll always be a soft spot in my heart for the TV-driven bit of Disney ripoff that is Ivan Tors' Zebra in the Kitchen.

Over the years that followed, the movie-going trips would pile up to create a base of narrative experiences that I continue to draw upon to the present moment. The cinema turf of the early 1970s was as yet unaffected by the vagaries of home video player so that repertory theaters flourished, allowing my parents to indulge in the pleasure of taking me to the Exeter theater in Boston to see my first Marx brothers movies. The decade also gave rise to the disaster film, and I recall taking in gems such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno in the comfort of the theaters at the Natick Mall. Another film like that which left an indelible impression was Earthquake, whose rumbling Sensurround experience drove me to see it twice so as to feel the gutchurning thrum to its fullest extent. Yet one more movie that really hit the mark in my preteen years is an outing that in many ways signaled both the end of old Hollywood and its reincarnation as a megablockbuster enterprise: Steven Spielberg's Jaws, a thrilling adventure that managed to be hugely entertaining even as it was razing the cinematic landscape.

There are plenty of other adolescent outings to the pictures that remain buried in the synapses of my faltering brain, but few seem as representative of a lost age than the trips to the drive in. While some 450 of these operations are still functioning in the United States as we speak, in the years of my youth they were common enough to dot the landscape practically wherever you went. Two of my drive-in movie experiences really stand out above all the rest; seeing Godzilla vs the Smog Monster in 1975 and taking in a trio of softcore skin flicks at a sleazy spot a couple of years deeper into my adolescence. Having always been a fan of trashy monster movies from their televised appearances on Channel 56's Creature Double Feature and The Ghoul Movie, seeing the eco-driven splendor of the latest rubber suited spectacular from Japan projected in all its glory on the huge outdoor screen of the Framingham Drive-in is something I will never forget. ("Save the Earth,” indeed). The other memory is somewhat more prurient - shortly after getting a shiny new driver's license, some of my friends and I hightailed it out to a drive-in known for showing nudie flicks so as to get a good look at the promised land of female flesh in its celluloid form. The triple feature was school themed: Fantastic Freshmen, Sizzling Sophomores and one other bit of topless inanity whose alliterative title has since vanished into the fogs of time. It may be hard for those who have grown up in an era dominated by the videocassette recorder to imagine that once you actually had to leave your home in order to see films that mostly just showed off the bare essentials, but in those halcyon days that's really what you had to do to glimpse the mysterious world of sex onscreen.

In fact, there are many who posit that it was in fact mainly the sex film that first truly drove initial adoption of those now ubiquitous players, and there's no doubt that the advent of the home device was to spell the eventual end of the blue movie as a theatrical enterprise. Still, I can recall that as late as the early 80s films such as Inside Desiree Cousteau would play as midnight movies at the AMC in Hadley (and to ponder just how things have changed, try to imagine a chain like this devoting screens to the showing of XXX fare today) and decrepit pits like Boston's Pilgrim Theater somehow managed to eke out an existence until the 1990s. This latter location is one of the oddest movie houses that I've ever been inside, a gorgeous gilded former opera house transformed into a sepulchral den of gutter sex film. But it wasn't only the purveyors of porn who would see their existence threatened by the ability of patrons to take in movies at their leisure within the comforts of their homes; for both the family operators of single screen movie houses and those running repertory cinemas would also see their livelihoods destroyed by this technological tidal wave.

There's no reason to completely decry the device that would devastate many theater operators once it reached critical mass with the general population, however. While the VCR (and later, the DVD player) would demolish portions of the theater operator structure that had existed to that point, at the same time these machines would make films much more broadly available to the general public. While when I went to college in the early 1980s there was still enough interest in theatrically running repertory to keep the Amherst Cinema showing old double features, there were also neighborhood video stores beginning to crop up all across the land. These offered a means of getting my hands on many a cult classic that had previously gone unseen due to their lack of availability, and my friends and I held many a lengthy video marathon featuring time-honored chestnuts such as The Creeping Terror and the Hideous Sun Demon. But cult movies weren't the only place where the VCR brought a wider selection of material to the fingertips of film fans; movies from nearly all eras, genres and countries suddenly could be had for the watching with just a simple trip to your local video vendor. So far from being only a destroyer of worlds, this invention brought a cosmopolitanism and historical reach to individuals all across the world, a trade off that needs to be accepted when cast against the light of its obliteration of much of the standing repertory film circuit. Later on towards the end of the century the digital versatile disc would begin to replace the videocassette, and in combination with the Internet and a globalizing world trade economy, the trend towards a broader wealth of material being available to the average person would accelerate.

Still, the infant days of home technology to watch movies and its inherent advantages never totally replaced my desire to go out and see films in the theaters. The experience of seeing a film projected onscreen remains to this day a far superior way to see a movie than on any home system, and I think that perhaps at that time the VCR's appearance may have in some way stimulated my trips out to the theater rather than inhibiting them in any way. During the 1980s there are many lasting memories that this writer has of the projected cinema: crazy car rides to Holyoke to see Seven Doors of Death and Re-Animator; film classes that introduced me to Gun Crazy, Page of Madness and the films of surrealism; an annual daylong marathon of science fiction films at the old Orson Welles in Cambridge (and in the case of its tenth anniversary, a knock- down-drag-out 36 hour celluloid bout); Wednesday nights at the Calvin Theater in Northampton where movies were 99 cents so that it didn't even matter what was playing. There were also times during this period where my friends and I would go out to the local AMC and spend the whole day in the theaters, moving from one to the next whenever the urge struck - my memories of certain ‘80s films (Red Dawn, The Stuff, Purple Rain, The Philadelphia Experiment, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle for example) are completely confused in my head as

I mostly saw them in intertwined 20 minute bits. There are plenty of other highlights of my film-going life beyond the drunken college years, however, and as I consider the littered refuse of 40 years spent in the dark it's amazing how many great moments there have been. I've gone to all-night marathons of the films of John Waters and Russ Meyer, though in the latter case the geniuses running the Boston Film Festival got 18 movies for a planned 24 hour program - so I ended up suffering through over 30 hours of massive mammary misogyny. I've seen Budd Boetticher, Classy Freddie Blassie, Doris Wishman, Sam Arkoff and Jules Dassin speak in person about their lives and their films. I've taken in movies in great venues like The Castro in San Francisco, gutbucket grindhouses on 42nd Street, and gilt edged cinematheques in Paris and Amsterdam. Once I spent an entire day seeing the entire run of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampyrs at a museum; another time I saw an Italian-French co-production Star Wars rip-off dubbed into Turkish in Istanbul; other nights I spent watching old educational movies, military training films and Scopitones shown by the legendary Jack Stevenson at the Primal Plunge Bookstore in Allston. Unfortunately, many of the great times I had at the movies were in locations that have sadly since vanished from the face of the earth: the aforementioned Pilgrim, Exeter and Calvin Theaters and the Amherst Cinema no longer operate as movie houses, 42nd Street is now a Disneyfied bit of canned Americana instead of a sleazy and dangerous slice of real world nastiness, and great Boston venues such as the Central Square Cinema and The Pagoda have been turned into Biogen labs and dim sum restaurants. The Harvard- Epworth Church where I saw Otto Preminger's hilariously awful Skidoo and Fred Astaire's Swing Time still stands, but the pastor who showed films has long since moved on. Certain other lesser area locations with some personal nostalgia value have additionally fallen prey to rising property values and exist now only in faltering memory: The Charles, whose large screen was the primary Boston home of any film shot in 70 mm; the Cinema 57, a decaying downtown house with a leaky roof where the central fare was Freddy Krueger style slasher movies; the West End Pussycat, a porno house that was right across the street from hallowed Boston Garden; and the Kung Fu One and Two, a martial arts emporium that showed only the cheesiest Hong Kong flicks and is now merely a garage where people park their cars.

But such are the wages of time. I'll admit openly that I miss these lost locations where I saw many a movie, and yet I can't deny that when I go to the megaplex today the seats are more comfortable, the sight lines are better, the theaters are much cleaner and the picture and sound quality are a vast improvement on what was around just 20 years ago. There's undoubtedly a price to be paid for these enhanced qualities, however, and in addition to the constantly rising costs of filmed entertainment I just can't help shaking the feeling that these professional and technical qualities serve mainly to mask an utter lack of localized charm in today's theaters. There's something about the franchised, corporate world of today's movie complexes that makes me long for a little more grit in my theater going experience; while they are inarguably more proficient in the presentation of product the sterile nature and cookie cutter conformity of these giant operations ultimately renders them somewhat suspect to my eyes. In part, this is simply a reflection of the zeitgeist of the times, as personally I find this same flaw of mercenary sophistication turning up in a number of areas: today's slick focus-group Hollywood films, silicon-filled passionless sex movies, the Wal-marting of the American landscape and the current corporately efficient theme parks. Now for the most part I'm no luddite and I'm willing to accept that as years go on things simply evolve into new forms and one just has to learn to take the little heartaches that come along with the changes; but for the life of me I still can't help but feel that something essential has been lost forever as today's society spends a little too much time backstage at the puppet show.

But as much as one might dwell on how things are different today when held in comparison to the individual highlights that make up more years of movie going that I really care to count, it's ultimately the things that are the same about the cinema experience that matter the most. While the Hollywood territory might be much less satisfying to me overall today than it was in the time of my youth, there's absolutely no denying that technically the films coming out of Tinseltown are better than they have ever been. There's also still plenty of room for great, historically significant pictures to be made both within the dominant American machine as well as in local industries all around the world, and one should additionally never overlook that the advent of the home player in tandem with the global reach of the Internet has vastly increased the wealth of film riches available to anyone with even a modicum of interest in the medium. So as I sit here and gaze at the detritus of a multitude of moments used up watching as flickering frames danced on screens across time, I am certainly filled with much more than the inevitable feelings of nostalgia and loss that often accompany reminiscences such as this one. For as much as I pine for many of the fleeting minutes mentioned above, these sentiments are easily trumped by an anxious excitement that belies just how ready I am to move on with a life at the movies. For who knows what future pleasures wait in the tenebrous rooms of the years still to come? Check this space 40 years hence and I'll update you on what happens during my time at the films over the next four decades. With any luck, I'll have even more to bend your ear about.