As early as my elementary school years, I was a movie fan. Dad and Mom took the family often, and also dropped us off at the local movie houses for “kiddie matinees” which featured westerns, comedies, and cartoons. Sometimes, the “adult” movies weren’t quite appropriate for us little kids. I still remember the scene from “The Naked Jungle” where “army ants” covered the bad guy’s body and chewed him up. But there were also the “Francis the Talking Mule” series, “Ma and Pa Kettle,” and good old Abbott and Costello. [I keep wanting to call them “films,” just to vary the nouns; but “films” really sounds too sophisticated for those B- (or C-?) screen gems.]
There I was in maybe 3rd grade reading the movie ads in the daily newspaper. It was a big deal to me when the Vestal Theatre added stereophonic sound. And when the square screens became “our giant panoramic screen!” “Shane” was an early entry in that category. In 1955 CinemaScope had arrived at the theater right around the corner from our Liberty Ave. house! Dad and I took the three minute walk to the State to see “The Robe.” When we got home later, Mom asked how it was, and Dad replied, “The curtain kept opening and opening,” so wide was that screen. Forty feet wide, and curved! And surround 6-track magnetic stereophonic sound. The theaters at that time were threatened by television, so came up with wide screens, 3-D, and stereo to combat the emerging presence of free movies on small TV screens.
So, the room I write about today is the movie auditorium, where stories played out on the big screen as we sat in the dark eating Good and Plenty licorice. And I have to specify that I mean our local, neighborhood theaters, not the massive, gaudy movie palaces of the big cities. No, I mean places like the Elvin, just down West Main Street from the State. The Elvin wasn’t much to look at, inside or out. The auditorium exterior looked like a huge add-on shed. The interior had little design beyond two-tone brown walls and maybe 800 seats. But in the dark, it served its purpose. The Elvin had lots of Saturday matinee fare, including those “cartoon carnivals” with fifteen (or more!) Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons, plus a Gene Autry western, and maybe a Three Stooges comedy thrown in. (I still wonder why “sepia” was the chosen “color” for the old westerns.)
The owner Mrs. Ammerman took our tickets after we’d bought our popcorn and Jujyfruits. “Can I work here someday?” I’d ask. She promised that when I was older, she’d think about it.
So if the Elvin was our Saturday escape, the State gave us a little more to think about on Sundays. Sure, it too had the occasional kids’ matinee, but I remember it more for the Sunday afternoons there, and more adult fare, like “Marty,” “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (the sequel to “The Robe”), “Friendly Persuasion,” even “War and Peace.” The State had a 600 seat auditorium, lovely art deco design, and oddly, the candy/popcorn counter was inside the auditorium. (That meant you could get a refill on popcorn without missing the movie.) Over the front entrance was a glittery sign that boasted “One of the Nation’s Outstanding Theaters for CinemaScope.” Another sign on the side of the building claimed it was a “Theater of Distinction.”
Those neighborhood movie houses were my weekend retreats. I often had siblings in tow, giving my parents some respite. But I also went alone, to the Elvin one afternoon and to the State the next. I wasn’t much into the movie stars, more the stories. The dramas (“From Here to Eternity”), musicals (Silk Stockings” even had a song about stereophonic sound!), comedies (Martin and Lewis), and sci-fi (“Forbidden Planet”) — all took me away from the neighborhood bullying I got from classmates Bucky and Mervin for being an Icabod Crane look-alike (thanks to the Disney portrayal), from minor family drama and school struggles…none of it traumatic, just the typical yearning for something outside one’s imagined or real travails of adolescence. During the Depression, those huge movie palaces were designed to help people escape to Moorish gardens, Italian villages, and other dreamscapes that freed 3000 fellow prisoners of near or utter poverty.
But in small towns, we had the State, the Elvin, the Vestal.
The Elvin was eventually torn down to make way for a bank. The State was rebranded simply “The Cinema” before meeting the wrecking ball and being replaced by a chain drug store.
I’m sorry for the decline of those neighborhood cinemas. Walking to the movies, affordable tickets and cheap popcorn, finding the place full of friends and neighbors, knowing the manager, seeing films change every weekend. Where I live now, there is still one neighborhood independent movie house, founded as a vaudeville venue maybe a century ago, now still showing first-run movies. The main auditorium is largely unchanged, but the projection is digital and the sound surrounds. Years ago, the guy who owns/operates it added two smaller rooms so he could expand the offerings. You don’t know if you’ll see your chosen film on the big screen with stereo sound until the evening’s tickerts are sold. The movie with the most tickets goes into the original auditorium, and the other films go into the smaller screening rooms. I have to admit, sometimes I just stay home and watch movies with better sound in my living room. I feel a little guilty.
Has this been an exercise in nostalgia? Probably. But do we not still need room to escape now and then? Maybe Lent itself is a kind of escape. Maybe Jesus’ forty day wilderness journey was an escape, and one that paid off brilliantly. Maybe the Spirit will give us that push, if now, maybe then.
Peace, Grace, and Jazz! 