Hooray! Hooray! The first of May!

I'm really enjoying these slice of life entries you have been doing. They just don't sell the matinee like they used to. Today you pay a couple of bucks less and get a movie, back then you got a show. Great article!

Nine cents? That's a strange price.
What's a Horehound? Sounds a little nasty for kid's candy. Well, i'll google it later.
But what about "sweet little bumps", that's too much, it triggers a famous movie line memory, "oh he's out there, he's really out there".
Down here we're surrounded by flowers, shit i've never seen bloom before is now blooming, we had hard rain followed by dry periods followed by hard rain, maybe that's it.
Better stay away from those prickly pears unless you have your chaps on!

Ebert: I began to try describing them, and surrendered. You can buy six ounces for $1.99 here:

http://www.jeffersongeneralstore.com/Shop/product_info.php?products_id=242

Also cinnamon, wild cherry, root beer and my favorite, licorice drops. Also, dimes that measure three inches across.

It was renamed the "Cinema"? What an insult.

I'm nostalgic for the older theater names. One of the multiplexes in Tulsa is called the Palace 12; I never hear anybody but myself refer to it simply as the "Palace". While traveling, I've intentionally watched below-average movies so that I could say I saw it at a Rialto, or an Orpheum, or a Majestic.

I have fond memories of the Circle Theater in Tulsa, which I and another fellow Tulsan have written about in one of your earlier blogs. I don't remember any contests going on, but I do remember the afternoon matinees having an average age of around 8. And the best popcorn I've ever had.

When I was eleven, we moved north to a small town called Collinsville. The theater there, the Crown, served cups of pickle juice for a quarter. I remember seeing, of all things, "Smokey and the Bandit", and all the teenagers and maybe a parent or two rushing out to their cars and racing off in their AMC Gremlins like they were being chased by a demented southern sheriff. The Crown is now closed, and even the marquee has been removed so that when you look at the building now, it appears as if its nose has been ripped off. What a shame.

Ebert: Pickle juice? Now I have finally, definitively, heard everything. You can't make up something like that.

It's funny how reading something like this can make me nostalgic for a period of time I didn't live through.

For me growing up it was the Varsity and Valencia in downtown Evanston. we would take the Number 9 bus from Skokie and it would drop us off 1 block away. One Saturday my mother gave me $3.00 (the bus was 10 cents, I went to Evanston, had a substantial hamburger lunch, went to the Varsity to see 13 Ghosts I think, and had a substantial fill of popcorn and Snow Caps (my favorite movie candy). And still had money left over! At that time they even let you sit in the balcony which was such a treat if you could get a seat. There was a glow (purple) in the dark clock in the Upper right hand corner above the screen so if the double features were running late you could still catch your bus! My god those were the days! My daughter still can't believe we were lucky enough to have cartoons before the feature. No wonder we all love to watch those old movies. It was a time when the only thing you coverred your eyes for in the movies was when the hero didn't see danger coming his way, not when there were things on the screen we shouldn't be seeing. Thanks for the memories.

Pitter patter raindrops falling from the sky...

And I'm six again.

We got $0.35 each on Saturday for the movies. $.25 to get in and a dime for candy. Didn't have to know what was playing, it was Saturday. One Saturday the line was around the block, Cinderella. When we got to the wndow the admission was $.35, we didn't have the money to get in. Can't see a movie without candy! On the way home I remembered that I had a few pennies stashed away so I could buy penny candy at the Corner Sweet Shop and we returned to the line (still around the corner) and saw the movie.

After reading this I can say definitely that Florida is the worst place to be a kid

If you think pickle juice is strange, there's a generic soda brand located round these parts that makes celery flavored soda.

As a kid, we had a drive in theater right on the edge of town, in walking distance, even. Now even those are disappearing. I've been to an IMAX movie, but I still think the drive in is the best way to see "Spectacle" movies. Giant monsters and guys jumping off of skyscrapers just isn't the same without it being framed against the night sky.

When I was a kid here in Mexico in the late 60s/70s our movie houses not ony had double features but some of them triple features as well. We also had the newsreels, coming attractions and cinemas the size of 5-6 present day ones put together, with ticket prices not too different from yours.
Does this make me nostalgic ? Maybe a little. Were this better times ? I doubt it. I remmember passing by a room besides the stairs on my way to a theater's balcony (back then) and seeing the "pop-corn room" which was one where great big bags of pop-corn where stashed directly over concrete floors (I'm sure the rats loved this). Cinema floors where always sticky and the weirdest people populated this places (think of the crowd in CINEMA PARADISO).
Call me unsentimental but there is nothing like going to today's cinemas with air-conditioning, having 10 different choices of movies to pick from, getting warm and fresh pop-corn and seeing the usual group of teens that enter the theater between shows to make sure you sit in a clean place. Price be damned.
It's worth having to go through the "assembly line" Hollywood movies, CGI and what have you.

I wish we still have some of those old cinemas around in my area, but alas we don't. as a 26 years old woman, I often wish I was born in an earlier decade so I could have experienced all this glory you described in your journal. Sigh.

My little town in North Central Indiana is home to the Rees Cinema, a movie theater that is a century old. I haven't been there in years because it is so run down its lost what little essence it did have. The screen has tears in it that were repaired with some type of clear tape, the sound system is awful and the place literally has bats. The last film I saw there was 'The Prestige'. I sat in the 3rd row of the theater because I knew the sound was bad, and I still had trouble hearing the damn thing. My feet stuck to the floor, the seat hurt my ass....it was honestly all I could do to not cry as I left the theater, because I knew I would never be back. I grew up watching movies there and the place was now a shell of what it used to be. I remember my first movie there, 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' and just being in awe at how big the place was, how loud it was, and how amazing the movie was. I remember seeing 2 movies that were sold out beyond capacity, people were literally sitting in the aisles on the floor. Nowadays that would be a huge fire hazard. Those movies were 'The Lion King' and 'Titanic'.

Now, the place is pretty much a second ran theater. Occasionally they'll get a new movie, but theres a new sheriff in town who owns a multiplex, and any time the Rees actually does get a new movie, he puts it on himself, and then no one goes to the Rees to see it because of the poor quality of the Rees compared to his place. The Rees has been for sale for years, but because it was deemed a historic landmark back in the 90's, its asking price is way over what it is actually worth. It's ran by a couple of senior citizens and I and everyone else in town knows it wont be much longer before the place gets shut down for good.

I would love to buy it, but in order to do so it would require me to take out a bank loan that I would never be able to pay off in my life. And a second loan just to be able to afford all of the work and repairs that need to be done to the place, inside and out. I have so many ideas and repairs I want to do to the place but I just cant. I want to be like Jim Carrey in 'The Majestic', but its just not possible. I said goodbye to the place years ago, and some day I'll say goodbye to it forever. And that will be a sad, sad, day.

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote..."

very nice....

This entry reminded me of the Continental Theatre in Denver, Colorado. Until about a decade ago it was the only game in town to see 70mm prints in all their glory. They specialized in summer blockbusters, but occasionally featured beautiful restored prints of classics, some of which appear on your Great Movies list.
My earliest clear memory of seeing a movie was going to see Tim Burton's Batman on the giant screen. The marquee was visible from the highway, and my twin sister and I would squeal the second it came into view. The lobby seemed like the entrance to heaven for an eight-year-old. The vintage glass lighting was just dim enough not to expose the decades of wear on the red carpet. Bulk candy bins lined the walls at child's eye level. Red Hot Dollars and Lemonheads were, and remain, my favorite. Stadium seating was years away, but the numbered rows of plush red seats were comfortable enough for two hours. I had words like "Cinemascope" and "Dolby" explained by employees who had been there for ages. Even the bathrooms were spectacular.
Denver was fortunate to have many classic movie houses, but many are gone now, even our beloved drive-in. The Continental underwent a massive remodel in 1995. While nice by modern standards, it just isn't the same. My sister grew up to be an IMAX projectionist, and we still remember that giant screen with awe.
There's a brief but fun history of the Continental here, including worthwhile user comments: http://cinematreasures.org/theater/13718/
All that's missing is a picture of the wonderful old lobby.

I grew up near the Glymont Theater in Indian Head Maryland. Although it was only 26 miles from the nation's capital, it was completely segregated. This was in the 50s, a few years away from the civil rights act. There were two entrances, one inside the lobby for whites and one outside in the alley for blacks. Blacks were only allowed to sit in the balcony (still my favorite place to watch a movie even though very few theaters still have them). I remember as a child standing at the ticket window on a rainy Saturday and being able to look through the ticket booth to the window facing outside and seeing the black faces looking back at me in the rain as I bought my ticket in the warm, dry lobby.

OK, here's the early-'60s version:

"Movie parties": Take your friends to the matinee at the Whitman Theater in Camden, NJ, then home for cake. Between features the birthday boys/girls and their friends would troop to the front so that the audience could sing "Happy Birthday"--a miserable experience, since you became an immediate target for stray Jujubees and old maids (unpopped corn kernels), and of course most of the audience sang the alternate version of the song, in which the birthday boy/girl is compared to other, more odorous branches of the primate tree.

The brand-new Cherry Hill Mall (according to Wikipedia, "the first indoor, climate-controlled shopping center east of the Mississippi River"; reverse pioneering, West to East, with aviaries and tropical foliage, ponds and fountains) and its blandly named Cinema, which thankfully had a Saturday matinee double feature of '50s horror/SF movies, all of them unbearably terrifying and absolutely irresistible, Crab Monsters, Deadly Mantises, Saucer Men, Flies, and all.

And the Starlite Drive-In, my father's idea of family heaven, bless him. Dusk 'til dawn showings, everything jammed in, from Spartacus to Seconds (I kid you not); buying at the ticket booth little incense-like coils of some deadly poison for killing NJ's state bird, the mosquito; falling asleep somewhere in the middle of a busted-up print of Son of Flubber and waking at dawn, my father Last Man Watching, a pile of Kools in the ashtray and a half-bottle of Yoo-Hoo slopping at your feet.

What other choice did a kid have but to grow up loving movies as much as life itself, since, from where we sat, they were.

I've got a memory of the theater that used to be in the shopping mall. Sure. it was run by the Famous Players chain, not great. But they had two dollar Tuesdays movies and once it was gone you needed to take two buses to get to the next nearest multiplex.
I know it's wrong to be a movie downloader but let me say that it has it's own sort of excitement. I remember the first time I found a file for Aguirre Wrath of God. I was so exited to have it that I just sat and watched the status reports on my browser until the file was ready. Citizen Kane took a month to get on my hard drive and it was worth it. Manhattan came for free on TV, but I stole Hanna and Her Sisters.
I know television and computer monitors aren't the best ways to see movies but I do what I have to because I really want to see all the greatest shows. If they fix the internet all up so that I can't steal anymore old gems I'll miss it badly.

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, we had to move away from Chicago in 1999....is the Patio on Irving Park just west of Austin still in business, still showing second-run films? or is it another casualty of the business changes.

Ebert: I have some bad news for you:

http://cinematreasures.org/theater/272/

SPRING.
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

Ebert: A contribution pleasing.

Boy do I miss 1 and 2 screen theaters. I grew up in Oak Lawn, IL and the only place you could go see a show in our area was the Coral Theater on Cicero. One of my most memorable movie experiences was my Dad taking me to see King Kong at the Coral in 1976. The screen was so big! My Dad paid the "outrageous' price of $1.25 for my ticket and $2.00 for his. He smoked his El Producto cigar next to me while we watched it in a nearly empty theater.

Theater floors have been sticky since time out of mind, but no theater floor was as sticky as the Coral in 1976. I thought Jeff Bridges was so cool, and it was the first time I can remember feeling an unusual sensation at the sight of a young Jessica Lange in various states of half-dress.

My Dad is passed away now, and I would give nearly anything to relive that day. Thanks for the article Roger. It was nice to spend some time with that memory today.

Aaaaaaaaahhh...laughing my little ass off at a revival run of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at a theater in Forest Park (I think)...The Towering Inferno, in all its melodramatic splendor, at the Will Rogers on Belmont...The Godfather, Part II, largely incomprehensible (but no less fascinating for that) to my 10/11-year-old self, at the Luna with my movie-loving dad (He was, thus I am indirectly, named for Ronald Colman, my grandmother's avatar of masculinity.)...The Exorcist, again with dad, in the car after picking up strawberry malts at So-White on Irving Park across from Dunning, outside the fence sneaking a peek at the Harlem-Irving Drive-In...first date, Stir Crazy, January 17, 1981, with high school/college first love, Mary Jo...Witness, again with Mary Jo, in a grand old Philadelphia movie palace on Chestnut St. (which I think Terry Gilliam later used for the scene in 12 Monkeys where Bruce Willis beats a couple guys to death)...making love under a blanket with Mary Jo in my Celica GT hatchback at the Twin Drive-In in Wheeling during the otherwise unmemorable Fright Night...Prizzi's Honor from the back row of the Mercury in Elmwood Park with Mary Jo, with Alice Cooper and his pregnant date (wife?) next to us, then cutting my hand after slipping on the ice while trying to get my car out of the snow which had accumulated during the movie...Se7en with my cousin at the Patio: rundown, but still showing signs of its former grandeur...the devastating Leaving Las Vegas and American History X at Piper's Alley with the equally devastating (and devastated) Paula...

Apologies to Norman Maclean, but I am haunted by movies. My life? A movie runs through it.

Ebert: There's the title for a book, right there.

My parents raised me in their hometown of Muenster, Texas. The town's Main Street had a little movie theater up until around 1972. My father told me he sat in that theater alone, air-conditioned on a summer Saturday, and watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" all by himself at around 14 years old. The movie was in theaters long enough to reach even Muenster. Dad took a friend to it later but the friend didn't get it.

My grandfather was the town plumber and took Dad with him on jobs. At some point most mornings, they would take a break at a cafe on Main Street. Grandpa had black coffee and his cigarette; Dad drank a Coke longneck and had pie cold out of the fridge. Not long before starting his own business in 1985, Dad saw "2010" on the big screen in Phoenix, Arizona.

Later in life, my grandfather worked for Dad and suffered a heart attack on the floor of his shop, dying about a week later in November 1994. I started working for Dad more full-time. Some years later, after I'd left home, I visited for Sunday dinner and Dad and I sat in the living room and began to watch "2001," letterboxed on TCM. Curiously, Dad lost interest.

You're doing it again. Pulling up old memories about my Chicago childhood. The local theatres (or single screen palaces) were The Roseland (113th and Michigan), The Normal ((119th and Normal), and The Beverly (95th and Beverly). I don't remember where I saw the kiddie films (Lady and the Tramp, Bedknobs and Broomsticks) but I remember seeing movies I had no business viewing at The Roseland (Dolemite, Coffy, Ebony Ivory & Jade, Terminal Island, The Mack). I was way too young to see those films but anyone with a dollar could get into that theater. We usually got a ride but one afternoon half the kids on the block walked to The Roseland. We walked east on 115th Street (a bus route) turned left on Michigan Avenue (another bus route) and up to 113th.

The Roseland became a shopping mall. The Normal was a bank, then demolished. I believe a church was constructed on the site. The Beverly was converted to a church.

What I remember most about going to movies when I was a child was staying until we were ready to leave. The movie played over and over all day. If we arrived after the film started we stayed through the second feature and the missed part of the first film.

Ebert: Do younger generations even know what it means to say, "This is where we came in?"

"­When spring arrives, heaven and earth, towns and cities--everything--takes on a new brightness. The fresh faces of the students just starting school as the cherry blossoms burst into bloom are also bright and shining.

Although many people delight in the beautiful blossoms, few bother to consider the roots that make that blossoming possible. In life, our roots are largely formed by our first experience of education, the years we spend in elementary school.

"Blooming, blooming, the cherry trees are blooming..." I remember my very first school textbook when I entered elementary school in the spring of 1934. Opening it with excitement, I saw a beautiful spring scene of cherry trees in bloom. In the distance there were mountains, and in the foreground the lovely pink cherry blossoms. This Elementary School Reader was the first textbook in Japan to be printed in color; it had just come into use the year before I started school......

In Japan, people who tend and care for cherry trees are called sakuramori, a word that implies a sense of careful stewardship. The sakuramori look after the cherry trees, encouraging them to grow, tending to their welfare and generally caring for them throughout the four seasons. The care they extend expresses faith in the power of life as it grows and develops into the future. They don't fuss too much about the trees but at the same time they never ignore them. They observe the trees' growth in great detail but allow them to develop freely. For example, if we stake a tree from the very beginning, the tree will rely on the stakes for support and not grow strong on its own.

The roots are especially important. One expert on trees says that the spread of the crown of a cherry tree is mirrored almost exactly by the spread of its roots below ground. If we water the tree only around the base of the trunk, the tree will become "lazy" and not bother to spread its roots far in search of water.

For people, "roots" correspond to the tenacity of our spirit, our refusal to give up. Once a tree has taken firm root, it can survive even on a rocky mountain face buffeted by powerful winds.

Trees are living things. They are not machines. Every cherry tree is unique. They each grow and thrive in different environments. That is why there is no manual that can tell us how to grow a cherry tree. The only way to succeed is to learn the particular tree's character and idiosyncrasies and, taking them into account, warmly care for it.

Each child is also unique. Each has a distinct way of flowering that is his or hers alone. To raise a tree or to foster people, we need a patient faith in their potential to flourish. A child who has poor grades or who is out of control and behaving badly now may in the future grow into a person who does truly remarkable things. It is not at all rare for a child we think we know very well to suddenly change and show us a side we never would have imagined. To the precise degree that we care for and have faith in children, they will extend and spread their roots. And it is this that will give them the strength to survive and make their way successfully through life."

http://www.daisakuikeda.org/index.php?id=119

Nothing in this description of your happy memory seems "dated" to me. I don't see why this sort of thing isn't happening every weekend, still. What changed? I don't buy that we lost our innocence or had our attention spans surgically altered: I think perhaps a day like that is created now via memory, just perfect, and sent back to your child self to enjoy.

I can't imagine why any child wouldn't enjoy a day like that, no matter how hard-wired he was to his PS3.

Gosh, I'm a little misty now, recalling that one essential fact of childhood: That a day was yours, all of it, and it could be a lovely waste, toes dangling in the water, movie after movie... with no feeling of anxiety about what could be getting accomplished, what other people might be doing to get ahead while we sucked candy in the double-feature, no worries about whether 27 or 36 is too old to do this or that.

Jeez, when you take away sex and being able to appreciate Bergman movies, I'm not sure adulthood has too much over childhood.

I had a cinema near me called The Marina down in Redondo Beach, and on Sundays when my dad would be too immersed in his football to notice me, I'd head to that rotting movie house with my friend Andrew (the shortest kid in class, and everyone loved him for that) to watch a double-feature, inevitably two bad 80s comedies, and we'd go into the bathroom and try to decode the graffiti (my favorite was a crudely scrawled "Hitler Was Crazy!"), and after the movies were over we'd emerge into Sunday's dusk, and play war in the park for a minute, and then head home, burdened with thoughts of school the next day, but only with those thoughts... and maybe the earliest tinklings of that tip-of-the-iceberg feeling a boy has about his life stretching ahead of him, eight lanes wide, or sixteen if he wanted.

Now the Marina, Andrew, my dad, Sunday's dusk - all gone. I wish I was where they are sometimes, because here I am all alone and wondering how every handles such dull adult lives, wishing only someone would call me out to play and waste a day.

Ebert: Did we know how happy we would someday think ourselves? Summer seemed as long as the rest of the year, because every moment belonged to us.

Your wonderful commentary reminded me of the Saturday matinees of the 50's and 60's at The Glen Theater in Glen Ellyn, IL. Small boxes of popcorn (a dime), Milk Duds, JuJuBees, Chuckles jelly candies and more! There was a "modern" push-button vending machine in the lobby where you could get soft drinks (along with orange, it also offered two types of grape drink: fizzy or non-fizzy). You put in your nickel, a paper cup dropped down the shute and then the drink would be dispensed. We always kept our fingers crossed that the paper cup would be positioned correctly; sometimes it came down the shute upside-down and then the grape drink would squirt all over the floor.

In the theater itself, the big kids from junior high would sit at the back of the theater. They'd pelt popcorn at the rows ahead of them and would promptly be "arrested" by the flashlight-wielding uniformed ushers who maintained order over the Saturday Matinee kid crowd. Before each movie, we hoped for a Road Runner cartoon and were always disappointed when they showed a Woody Woodpecker instead (no offense, Woody, but you just didn't do it for us.)

The theater had a cartoon sticker on the door of icicles and advertised itself as "Air-conditioned inside!" On a hot summer day, for those of us who loved movies, even really bad movies like "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians," The Glen was the place to be.

Ebert: Hey! We used an upside-down pop cup in our titles for "Sneak Previews." That was truly a downer. Your whole investment pouring down the drain.

I got a giggle from your headline on this entry. When I was growing up, my father was a ribald type, and around this time of year he would chant, "Hurray! Hurray! The First of May! Summer wooing starts today!" Actually, "wooing" was not the word he used: the actual word that rhymes with it seems a little too blatant for this polite conversation. But I'm curious, might this mantra have been common in your neighborhood as well?

Ebert: Could be. Could be.

I had been looking forward to the first of May to enjoy the origin story of Wolverine, but I may skip this one now that I've read both your and A.O.Scott's reviews. Interesting sychronicity of review ending choice between the two of you though:

-Ebert:
"But wait! -- you say. Doesn't "X-Men Origins" at least provide a learning experience for Logan about the origins of Wolverine? Hollow laugh. Because we know that the modern Wolverine has a form of amnesia, it cannot be a spoiler for me to reveal that at the end of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," he forgets everything that has happened in the film. Lucky man. "

-Scott:
"A twist at the end that gives poor Wolverine a bad case of amnesia — turning him into a kind of Jason Bourne with sideburns — is a virtual admission that nothing terribly interesting has been learned about the character. He forgets his origins before the movie devoted to their exposition is even over. It won’t take you much longer."

Its great when people think alike, don't you think, although I think your quip went a little smoother. Sorry to seqway the topic thread, I loved your rememories considerably, my father talks about that bygone era as well where coinage was actually useful. I remember when a Coke was 75 cents, now I have to get a bill or two out to get one!

Cheers,

Miles Blanton

Ebert: The ending does rather suggest the movie is pointless, doesn't it? It exists entirely to jerk our strings, and is irrelevant to its hero.

Ebert: To S. M.: Welcome back!

Thank you! This is one of the places where I feel belonging--an elite circle of which I am a privileged member.

Ebert: I wouldn't belong to any club that didn't have you as a member, as Groucho said, sort of.

Yay! Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein ... I knew you'd get to it eventually.

Lawrence Talbot: "In an hour the moon will come out and I'll turn into a wolf."

Costello: "Yeah, you and 20 million other guys."

They showed it at the long-lost Regency Theater (now a damn noodle shop) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1980s as part of a film festival whose theme I have forgotten.

Saw maybe a hundred movies there--a wonderful Welles restrospective with Filming Othello and The Immortal Story, another on Olivier with his Othello in widescreen.

The odd thing about Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is that until you see it in a theater full of people, you don't realize how genuinely funny it is. Great waves of laughter.

Abbott: "What do you see in that little guy? Frankly, I don't get it."

Femme fatale: "... and frankly you never will."

Ebert: Costello was sort of a preincarnation of Buddy Hackett.

By Harry on April 30, 2009 1:26 PM

One of my most memorable movie experiences was my Dad taking me to see King Kong at the Coral in 1976.

OMG! How could I have forgotten my first touch of "sweet little bumps": King Kong at the Patio with the lovely black-haired and blue-eyed Mary Ann (who later, as Boston put it at the time, I saw walking away)?

...and the Robbie Benson "star" vehicle One on One with Mom at the Lawrencewood in Niles (no palace, certainly, but the memory of the movies seen with those now gone is washing over me)...

Hey, Yancy, nice post!

...Chinatown at the Patio, Murder on the Orient Express, also, I think, at the Patio...1974 was a helluva year for movies, wasn't it, Roger?...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and many more, all with Dad...

PS Thanks for the Abbott and Costello clip, Roger; as a huge fan of Friday night WGN "Creature Features" (remember those?), A & C Meet Frankenstein was probably my favorite A & C movie.

Another movie memory: my grandmother, second generation Italian-American, who named her son after Ronald Colman, but with whom I never saw a movie, expounding (repeatedly over the years) with such sadness about Bud Abbott's tragic loss of his son, in a drowning accident, if I remember (and she related) correctly. Something with which I think she particularly empathized, having lost my uncle at the age of 11 in the 30's.

Andy Clyde. His voice and mustache are imprinted from all the character parts he played in westerns. Makes me want to see all those again. I went to the local Y on Saturdays in the 50's and saw the serials and our local Yo-Yo man. I still have a Yo-Yo and come across it in a box from time to time. Can't resist "Shooting the Falls"

Roger, I am not that old (I was born in 1984), but I was able to grow-up when they actually still showed Mickey Mouse on the Disney Channel, Looney Toons on Nickolodeon, and the MGM cartoons on TNT. Do you think kids even know who Mickey Mouse, the Looney Toons, or Droopy Dog even are? Do you think kids are missing out on watching these old cartoons? Its not like cartoons are more wholesome now; there are far worse things that pass for childrens entertainment than Elmer Fudd shooting Daffy.

I'm glad you used some of the kid-language of the time, and it did tend to be on the violent side; "knuckle sandwiches" were still around in the early 60's. One reason American Graffiti was so popular is they got a lot of the language right ("If I had a boyfriend, he'd pound you"). Now we have LMAO and STFU. What next?

Ebert: Brown noser. Red dog. Horny.

Ebert: Do younger generations even know what it means to say, "This is where we came in?"

Sadly not, at least not myself. But you have piqued my interest as it is a phrase I am more than half fond of!

Ebert: You didn't always pay much attention to when a movie began. You went to it when you wanted to, and sat there until...this is where we came in.˜ Barbaric, I know.

Ebert: You didn't always pay much attention to when a movie began. You went to it when you wanted to, and sat there until...this is where we came in.˜ Barbaric, I know.

It's a wonder we ever muddied through such an archaic age of cheap, community matinees and simple but wonderful narrative devices!

By the time I was sneaking away to movies on the weekends whenever I could, the local theatres in my area had long since transitioned to store fronts and bowling alleys. The one that had serviced my very own neighbourhood, perhaps joined by a few others long gone was now a local grocery chain. The marquee was still up but long disused. Perhaps it occasionally listed the price of steak. It still stands opposite a glorious tyndal stone church whose tower I can see from the front windows of my house. I can only imagine what it was like to just be able to stroll down half a block and catch a news reel or movie.

'Here is where we came in' always seemed like good fodder for the great radio plays, which I am too young to enjoy as much as I do I'm told. Have you ever listened to the frantic narration for the visually impaired that optionally accompanies some movies? I sometimes find them oddly soothing and am often dissapointed they do not seem to include them on DVD's. It would be nice to just -listen- to a movie while doing other things now and then.

How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?

The first movies my parents took me to see were at The Southtown (we hadn't yet joined the white flight from the South Side). I remember seeing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Forbidden Planet, which probably explains why I've always been a science-fiction fan.

"This is where we came in." My father was one of those people. I was 7 years old in 1956 when we saw Forbidden Planet and to this day I remember exactly when we got to our seats. It was the scene where Morbius surprises Capt Adams and Dr Ostrow in his study and then takes them on the tour of the Krell labs. We sat down, saw the movie to the end, waited for the next show, and when we got to that scene Dad said "This is where we came in," and took us home. Huh? What?!? AAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!! I will not ever come in to a movie after start time. Ever.

The best thing about the Southtown, of course, is that it had a duck pond in the lobby. People don't believe me when I tell them about it. There was really no point to putting it in aside from total coolness.

Ebert: I understand Groucho made an appearance there, walked into the lobby, and said,

"Why a duck?"

I'm not old enough to remember continually-playing movies, but we did have a dollar theater not far from our house (Village Square in north St. Louis county.) It was cheap enough that we could see movies more than once, and after they'd been through all the big theaters. I can (barely) remember seeing Snow White, Cinderella, and the Jungle Book there, when they still replayed the classics in the theater. (This really confused me later when I found out how old the movies were.) And it was where my sister and I first went to a movie by ourselves - Beauty and the Beast, while Mom and Dad saw a different one.

It was within walking distance, and several Decembers my sister and I would spend all morning baking Christmas cookies, then walk to the theater and get nachos to cut through the lingering effects of too much sampling of our wares...

It flooded one too many times - it was built below ground level - and is now completely gone. The closest theater now is in a huge mall built smack in the middle of a flood plain. I can't help but anticipate the day that it gets completely buried.

"Ebert: You didn't always pay much attention to when a movie began. You went to it when you wanted to, and sat there until...this is where we came in.˜ Barbaric, I know."

Precisely. And, more often than not, you'd enter the theatre for your double feature, cartoons and coming attractions in mid-afternoon, and by the time you'd seen it all and walked back out into the street, the sun had gone down and it was suddenly night. It was like a time warp, or the "missing time" that alien abductees speak of, a shock to the senses.

You know, I used to think that my grandparents, who were born around 1890, were the ones who lived in prehistoric times. Your nostalgic blogs make me realise that I've become a caveman too.

Around midcentury last, Chicago's neighborhoods were festooned with "B&K" (Balabin and Katz) theatres. Are there any left? Nobody called them "cinemas" back in Chicago then. They were "movie houses" or movie theatres to us hoi polloi. Gosh, let me recall some of the ones we went to as kids on the Northwest side: The Harding, The Logan, The Milford, The Luna, The Will Rogers, The Portage... I know there were others, but their names are lost in the mists of time. We would always walk to these theatres, even if they were a couple of miles or more away. Parents didn't chaufer kids around in cars back then and bus fare was too precious--it was the price of the ticket! On very special occasions we got to take a subway ride downtown to see a first run showing at The Chicago, The Woods, The Oriental, The Lake or (for Ben Hur and Around the World in Eighty Days) the Michael Todd Theatre (which was the IMAX of its day). You know, for important movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Godzilla, Rodan or Forbidden Planet. I also remember our dad taking the family to the outdoor theatre on Irving Park Ave, near the old mental hospital, on a couple of occasions. That landmark has been gone longer than Riverview Park. Actually, not much to recommend watching a movie from the hot, cramped confines of one's car. Those who were there for purposes other than watching the movie, blatantly advertised the fact by parking backwards.

Back in the day, I don't recall "the man" (i.e., a 15-year old usher) rousting you for bringing your own snacks to the movies like they do now. And, like you said, a box of Milk Duds, Jujubees or Black Crows were a nickel, not a couple of bucks like today. And, if you had a Coke later on, it was in one of those cone-shaped paper cups which you bought for a nickel at Walgreen's, Kresge's or Woolworth's and sipped while sitting on a rotating stool at the counter.

In all candor, it was a second feature "B" movie from 1955 that inspired my life's work as a scientist. As soon as I saw the not-so-classic scifi flick "This Island Earth" I suddenly and definitively knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to build an "interrassitor" to communicate with aliens and take that saucer ride to Metaluna. I could have saved their world.

Your wonderful commentary reminded me of the Saturday matinees of the 50's and 60's at The Glen Theater in Glen Ellyn

My second post I know but I had to add I saw 'Caddyshack" at the Glen Ellyn way back in 1979........

My daughter has her birthday at the Revue theater down the street. The Saturday matinees was packed to the gills with children and the resultant turned over popcorn. It was lovely. Save for the episodic outbursts of over-parenting. When I was a kid there was always that one parent who brought bran muffins at Halloween for their kids to eat instead of the candy. Now, there are no longer treats at all. Bran muffin Dad/Mom has won! Everywhere seems to be a realm of universal parental legislation. I hope that we can find ways to humanize childhood again! Allow for some slightly anarchic spaces, so that later they do not choose nihilism. I remember embracing school because the rules were interesting. I like the sudden potencies of structure--group sports, bingo, singing in a circle. School was interesting because I wasn't already in a realm of total legislation. I has already had five years of lawless freedom (and innumerable summers to follow) occurring in the barn and the corn fields ripe for games of hide and seek.

How I wish to have been a boy at that time! I only had VHS copies
of serials to watch on Saturday afternoons. I'd have to say that Captain Marvel was my favorite, perhaps the best, the Lydecker brothers pushing their special effects talent to the max. But there was AMC, back when the channel was more TCM than whatever indistinguishable thing it is now, thankfully they have Mad Men. They would, on Saturday mornings, run westerns, cartoons, and serials each and every week. Oh how wonderful it was to see Superman vs Atom Man in installments, each and every week.

Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man really got around, because either he or a darn good imitator made it all the way to Mansfield, Texas, a wide spot in the road on the Old Chisholm Trail with a one-block long business district, and right in the middle of the block was the Farr-Best Theater run by Mary Ann Farr's father, Mr. Farr, who also owned the Farr-Best Cafe right next door, serving the best fried peach pies outside of Georgia.

I lived on a farm outside of town, but on Saturdays my mother's friend Helen Poe would gather up her two kids and several assorted friends, including me, and deposit us all in town so that the grown-ups could have a few hours of peace and quiet. I saw Them and Destry Rides Again and Sneak Preview and Hoppy and Lash Larue and Flash Gordon and all the rest at the Farr-Best for 25 cents a week. Two doors down was where I got my hair cut at Gilstrap's barber shop for 75 cents, and when I went back home my dad would hold forth about Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson and Francis X. Bushman and Jean Harlow for hours. Years later when I saw The Last Picture Show it really took me back to small-town Texas in the 50's, and I knew without even having to read the screen credits that Places in the Heart was filmed within 20 miles of where I grew up; the screen doors and cheap wallpaper were just too real, too depressing, to be fake.

Thanks, Roger, for a flashback worth remembering.

A movie runs through it. Indeed.

Ebert: The Duncan company had a team of touring professionals.

Think of that. "Profession?" "Yo-yoist."

I started going to movies in Chicago in the mid 1940's.
Back then there was a theater every other block in the city.
I grew up in the housing projects at Diversey and Clybourn. There was
a theater a couple of miles away called the Avalon and they
would send a bus that they owned or rented several times a day
just to the projects, there were so many kids there that
they pretty well filled up the theater.(by the way they didn't charge anything for the bus ride.) I was a movie fan then, and still am, but to a lesser degree.
For some reason I remember New Years Day 1950, being at
my grandmothers on 63rd street, and going to 3 different theaters on that day by myself, I must have seen 6 to 8 movies that day!
By the way Roger what Dan the YO-YO Man did during the week,was to spend his afternoons at the school stores!

Ebert: There was a man who was in deep do-do if he lost his business finger. The official Duncan guide had a photo indicating the correct finger, which we all sniggered at.

This echoes an entry in my blog from a couple of months ago. I'll spare you the link. I titled it "Losing it at the movies" in honor of Pauline Kael.

I can still remember the first time I ever really went to a movie. I don't mean all the Disney films and the like that I saw as a kid. The first time I ever had an *experience*.

We were vacationing in Kennebunkport, Maine. I was eleven or so, and it was the first (and only) time I'd been there. I'd love to go again someday, but the Kennebunkport I went to is long gone, I'm sure. This was a small New England town with miles of beaches, frigid Atlantic waves, and a street with lots of store fronts and wide sidewalks to walk slowly down. I still remember the sweet, hard crystalline rock candy on a string that we'd buy in the candy store there. My brother and I and the other family's kids would walk into town and buy candy and generally hang out. And in the evenings, our parents would drive us down to the movie theater, if there was something good in town.

I wish I remembered the theater better. I know it was one of those tiny ones which seated maybe fifty people, and it probably had a concession stand in the lobby. I know it had a cheap price, maybe a couple of bucks for the evening matinee, especially for kids. That's why our parents didn't object to our going (plus, it gave them some time to themselves, too). So we'd go in and buy our popcorn and Junior Mints and have a seat.

And we saw...*movies*. The real thing, on a big screen. Not these kiddie cartoons and crap like Doctor Doolittle (God, I still remember how horrible that thing was). These were...*adult* films. Oh, don't get me wrong. They were all PG. But they had words like "bastard" and "sonofabitch", and violence, and a lot of talk about sex. They were real *movies*.

The first one I saw was The Poseidon Adventure, with Gene Hackman, Leslie Nielsen and Shelly Winters in dramatic roles. Go figure. I sat there over my candy (I've never been a big popcorn fan) and watched, enthralled, as a tiny group of survivors in a capsized ship struggled to reach the bottom where they might be rescued. Big budget, dramatic tension, and some of the lead characters actually DIED. We went back to see that three times in all. I still remember walking back to where our folks were waiting and excitedly discussing our favorite scenes.

After that came Sleuth. I'm still a bit amazed that my parents let me see that, but they probably thought hey, she's already been through Poseidon three times, what more harm could it do? The twists in that film made me gasp the first time through. Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine seemed the epitome of British weirdness, and the mystery ended with a bang that made me shiver. I think we saw that one four times.

That was probably it for the films I saw in Kennebunkport, since we were only there a month. (Only. Hah. Wish I could do that now.) But it got me hooked on movies, for certain. I remember seeing the poster for Deliverance outside the theater--an R-rated movie, wow!--and staring fascinated at the painting of four guys tumbling into a river, screaming in fear and agony, and the tagline above: "This was the weekend they didn't play golf." Our parents put their foot down at that film, I remember. When I finally saw it years later, I understood why.

I spent my teenage years going to the Tuesday night dollar shows at the tiny theater in Webster Groves. That's the only way to see movies on a big screen: cheap, in a small venue, with a crowded audience. I saw Jaws four times, the incredible double bill of Annie Hall and Sleeper twice, Logan's Run three times, and a bunch of other films I can't remember now. They weren't all great. But when they were great...It really is like sex. Sometimes better. Don't tell my husband I said that. Pauline Kael, the late great film critic, entitled one of her books Losing It At The Movies. Exactly.

I thought of all this because I just saw The Last Picture Show last night for the first time. God, what a film. About nothing more than two young men in 1951 in a small town, where Sam the Lion runs the pool hall, cafe and movie theater. Beautifully filmed in black and white, and it could have been a melodrama in the wrong hands, but with Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges and Cloris Leachman and a very young Cybill Shepard and everyone else, it was magnificent. One of those films I'll have to buy, because I could watch it over and over. So good.

Nowadays I see most films on DVD, or in mall theaters which are even smaller than the one-pic theaters I patronized as a teen. They cost a fortune and overcharge for food (but then, they always have) and aren't the same at all. But sometimes, when there's a good picture on (and they're fewer and fewer nowadays, whatever young people may think), that magic happens again. You sit and stare at the flickering light onscreen, mesmerized by thousands of still images. And you lose it at the movies.

Ebert: So many people here have such specific memories of the movie and where and when they saw it. I saw Hawks' "The Thing" when my mother and I took the train to attend my cousin Tom's graduation from West Point. It scared the bejesus out of me.

The closest experience I've had like that has been at the Alamo Drafthouse theaters here in Austin.

I read about all the earlier days of movie theaters and it sounds wonderful. I'd rather have some teenage couple necking and throwing popcorn than a bunch of jerks sending text messages and talking on the phone.

Interesting, though, that there were commercials. Or rather, to ask a clarifying question, were the local commercials just slides put up on the screen, or were they video commercials like those that plague megaplexes today?

It was 1993, the Mosaic browser went online and digital reality had just taken the first steps towards making real reality obsolete. And that was where we came in...
Alright. I obviously wrote on the blog this week to exorcise a hideous habit. I will now put my viewing experience in the hands of the movie gods. Let's see what I've got. One Bloor Cinem and (hey hey!) at The Review Jaws is showing in a few weeks! Seriously, I live in such a suburb it's the place that rock band Rush wrote "Subdivisions" about, mercy.
Cheers! It's summer movie season the time when we buy our movie tickets and we don't look back. Except for you of course Mr. Ebert.

It's not the same, but the last few years I've loved going to the "Film on the Rocks" summer series at Red Rocks in Morrison, CO. I'm sure you've been at least once (possibly while at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder), but it's a great venue for a movie, and for $10 bucks you get an Emcee, a band, a cartoon, and the main movie under the stars. The 2009 schedule is due up in a couple of weeks, but here's the info from last year:

http://denver.about.com/od/artsentertainment/a/redrocksfilms08.htm

It's an eclectic mix for sure, but my favorite was still from a few years ago when they did "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and handed out coconut shells before the movie. To hear 6,000 people clacking along under the night sky was sublime...

My daughter and I got Wolverined at the midnight movie last night. She thinks your review was spot-on; I think you were on the harsh and unforgiving side. Would Luke Skywalker pass the Turing test? Would Neo of the Matrix?

As a kid who once owned X-Men #1 (yes, Mom fulfilled the cliche and threw them away), I loved seeing Scott Summers/Cyclops and The Blob as portrayed. This movie showed respect for its comic-book source material, and just about the same depth of characterization. If 1964 GeeBee had seen it, he'd have awestruck and delighted. --Hey, wait: let me ask him. --Yep.

Movie memories! I remember going to the Englewood on Halsted with friends. That first shot of Billy Dee Williams in Lady Sings The Blues- and how we girls all shrieked with teenage desire... Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon.... Good times, Roger, good times.

Aaaahhhh...the love of single screen movie theatres. Seattle still has a few of them and I love seeing movies there. Only one, though, the Cinerama, is worthy of seeing the huge blockbuster movies. The others are mainly for the intimate, smaller movies. The Egyptian theatre had the exclusive showings of "Milk" for months here. The Guild 45th(two screens but in seperate buildings) will also get exclusive showings. The Seven Gables is one of those unique theatre experiences that only enhances movies like "The Wrestler." I love all the single screen theatres here. Their sticky, cracked floors only show the history of the movies that have played. Sure, I wish the Landmark chain would fix them up, but at the same time, I fear they would go too far and we would lose what makes each of those theatres so special. Just don't mess with the popcorn--there's none better! There's also a few other theatres that have two or three screens each. And the new-ish Lincoln Square Theatre over in Bellevue is a perfect example of how modern movie theatres should be. A large lobby, a clean well-stocked concession counter, and wonderful comfortable seats that all have a perfect view of large, curved screens.

Cinematreasures.org is a fantastic website for old movie theatres. I found that site just a few months ago and spent hours reading about my favorite theatres of my childhood. I can never forget my experiences at the Northgate theatre. 2500 of my closest friends all watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Poltergeist", and "Ferris Buellors Day Off." And my mom remembers when it first opened up and it meant that she and her brother and sister could now see movies without having to go downtown. And I remember my first date ever, "Ladyhawke" with Lisa. Now, I wish it was still there so I could take my wife, Karen, and she could experience seeing a movie with 2500 of HER closest friends. But, it was torn down after "Blackhawk Down" and probably should've been demolished even earlier. Now, the Northgate Mall has expanded into that area, with a Barnes and Noble and Panera Bread.

I'm looking forward to seeing the new "Star Trek" movie at the Cinerama next week. I do wish they would bring back some of the three-strip Cinerama movies like they did after the remodeling 10 years ago. I never thought I could be in awe of movies again as an adult, but sitting in the 'sweet spot' for "How The West Was Won" brought me back to why you need to see movies in theatres.

See you at the movies!

Chad

Thank you again, Roger, for your memories. My early movie memories are never far from me, and I've worked hard to share them with my own children, as well as to help make their movie memories enduring as well. For me it was the Kiggins in Vancouver, WA where kids under 12 could attend Saturday matinees for a quarter during the late 1950s-60s, changing to 90 cents when we turned 13 (there was a lot of scrunching down in the lines in those days among the Jr. High set). The cinematic objects of our desires were such treats as "Revenge of Frankenstein", "The Blob", "The Fly", "This Island Earth", wonderful, lurid films of the fantastic. In Jr. High it was the midnight Spook-a-thons with such low-budget fare as "The Brain that Would Not Die", "Last Man on Earth" and "Fiend Without a Face". Yes, the floors were tacky, the 'hoods' (as we called them) would congregate in the lobby near the seat entrances and the cute girls who promised to meet us there would never seem to show up. Yes, the single-screen cinemas are going, going, gone, and the movies as rites of passage have changed beyond recognition, but the old films themselves are still available to us and the medium continues to evolve in wonderful ways. I'm grateful that the old films are readily available for viewing at home...I have made a point of offering many wonderful old movies to my kids and their friends, and they are becoming mature lovers of film in their own right. And, more to the point, I am grateful for your memories, insights and stories, and the wonderful writing that I look forward to reading here every day.

NOTE: I began using Notepad to write my posts and ever since, stuff has been going MIA. Roger assures me it's nothing at his end, so now I'm wondering if maybe there's an unknown issue? I'm using Windows XP (ergo, an earlier version of notepad) and I assume everything at your end Roger, runs on Vista?

Has anyone else noticed any inexplicable weirdness, akin to missing posts that shouldn't be? I did see the thank-you message thingy after submitting my post this morning, around 6:00 am PST. And I did read all the new posts, so I know it's missing. Which makes it a mystery! For it's not Roger, meaning it's technology! But where?!

I didn't write this in notepad, and so I'm sending this as part of test. It's friday, May 1st 2:31 PST.

I'm going to re-send my post next!

Ebert: I'm all Mac at this end, but e-mail is platform neutral. You're the only one who has complained. I enjoy your posts way too much to delete one. Indeed, a handy-dandy Movable Type feature informs me I've happily posted 108 of them!

My best guess: You forgot to click on "Submit."

In re: your Wolverine review: you state that "Gavin Hood, the director, made the great film "Tsotsi" (2005) and the damned good film "Rendition" (2007) before signing on here. Fat chance "Wolverine" fans will seek out those two."

I'm going to see Wolverine tonight because I'm a huge X-Men comic fan and, well, it's Hugh Jackman. But I have also seen Tsotsi -- deliberately sought it out, in fact, based upon your own four-star review -- and still consider it one of the best films of recent years. Be sure to give yourself the credit of opening the minds of others to beautiful experiences like that one, but give your readers credit for being intelligent and open enough to have a variety of moviewatching taste as electic as yours, too. :)

Ebert: That's a variety, all right. :)

"Rendention" turns out to have been prescient.

Somebody just mentioned Cinerama, which brought back another childhood memory. The Folks took us to see the original Cinerama movie in the Loop one day. I don't know if the Michael Todd/Cinestage Theatre was in business then -- it seemed rather small when I went there as a grownup. The theatre I remember was bloody enormous! I hadn't seen so many people in one room in my life up to that point. They knew how to present back then. Just before the movie started a female-type usher person strode confidently to center-stage, waved her hand and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, This Is Cinerama! Then we heard the beepity beepity beep Morse code tag that Lowell Thomas used on his radio broadcasts, the house lights dimmed to about 50%, the curtains pulled back just enough to show a teeny little 1.33:1 image, and there was Lowell Thomas, his own self, telling us how absolutely knock-yer-socks-off wonderful Cinerama was. And then the curtains started pulling back again, and the screen got bigger and bigger and bigger, and when it got as big as it possibly could get, they killed the house lights entirely, the three projectors kicked in, and we were right there in the front seat of the roller coaster! Man, that was Showmanship!

Ebert: My parents took me on the train to Chicago to see the same movie!

The Glen (in Glen Ellyn) also had a curious feature in the 50's and 60's: a smoking room. It was a small cement-floored room that held a couple of rows of seats. A smudgy-tobacco-stained picture window let the smokers watch the movie, and those of us kids who tagged along with smoking parents often found ourselves there (can you imagine such a thing now?!) Those were the days when we didn't know any better. Life is a lot more fun when you don't know any better.

Thanks Roger for the memory recall.

From 1957 to 1962 we lived in Houston Texas. The Saturday Matinee of choice for me was the Village Theater in "The Village" near Rice University. (no longer there - the theater not The Village) We lived about 15 blocks away right off Greenbriar near S. Main and I would (and was allowed to) ride my bike into The Village every Saturday afternoon and pay a quarter admission. I remember those as glorious Saturdays but the truth is I don't remember the movies individually anymore. I was 7 at the beginning and 12 when we left so I don't know why more of them didn't imprint.

However there was one Saturday that is imprinted so vividly that now 50 years later it is still with me. It was a double feature of course. Over the years I have mentioned these 2 films to many many people when discussion warrants but I can recall nobody ever telling me they saw them too.

Thanks to IMDB I can actually pinpoint the year, 1960, and the two movies were "4D Man" and "House of Usher". I was 10 and I don't know if these were my first non-comedy horror films or not but they were the first ones to literally scare the pee out of me. Looking back I wonder why in the world I actually sat through both films and I don't even remember letting loose but I vividly remember getting up after House of User ended and being surprised at the wetness in my pants and the seat (some sort of absorbent fabric of course) being soaked completely. I also remember saying a hurried goodbye to my friends and rushing out the side door, before the lights came up, hopping on my bike and getting home as fast as I could. I really feel for the next patron who had to sit in that seat. If you are reading this "I'm SORRY!".

Your essays always seem to stir something. A memory or a wish or a vision but this one actually made me feel wet in the crotch one more time. I hope it's the last. Thanks and keep em coming.

John

By Marie Haws on May 1, 2009 4:36 PM
"NOTE: I began using Notepad to write my posts and ever since, stuff has been going MIA. Roger assures me it's nothing at his end, so now I'm wondering if maybe there's an unknown issue? Has anyone else noticed any inexplicable weirdness, akin to missing posts that shouldn't be?"

Marie, Marie, This has never happened to me on Roger's blog, however, it HAS on other ones. Usually it seems to happen if I spend an inordinate amount of time composing the piece directly into the comments box. (I don't cut and paste from a word processing program. Maybe I should.) My take is that the link times out, though it doesn't tell you this, so you don't have a clue. Unless you composed and saved your contribution on another program, it is just *poof* lost to the ether.

Enjoy this little tune that Shakey Stevens sings about you, Marie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x491nW4GNA0

You know, you really should read "Boy's Life" by Robert McCammon, if you haven't done so already. It's a coming of age story that, while set about 10 or 15 years after your own is very reminiscent of it in a more fantastical way. Imagine a Stephen King meets William Faulkner.

http://www.amazon.com/Boys-Life-Robert-McCammon/dp/0671743058

Here's a brief excerpt from the book, which seems as though it could have taken place at the Princess. Heck, maybe something similar ~did~ happen at the Princess. I STRONGLY recommend that you read the book, or at least look at the Amazon preview, starting from Page 33 to see how the matinee crowd reacted to one movie in the book...

...and then, without fanfare, the second feature began. It was in black and white, which caused immediate groans from the audience. Everybody knew that color was real life. The title came up on the screen: Invaders from Mars. The movie looked old, like it had been made in the fifties. "I'm goin' for popcorn, " Ben announced. "Anybody want anythin'?" We said no, and he navigated the raucous aisle alone.

The credits ended and the story started. Ben returned with his bucket of buttered popcorn in time to see what the young hero saw through his telescope, aimed at the stormy night sky: a flying saucer, descending into the sand hill behind his house. Usually the Saturday afternoon crowd hollered and laughed at the screen when there was no fighting going on, but this time the stark sight of that ominous saucer coming down silenced the house.

I believe that for the next hour and half the concession stand did no business, though there were kids leaving their seats and running for a view of daylight...

The rest? Buy the book or at least look at the preview. You won't regret it.

That last paragraph shore was purty.

Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten that movie theaters often had actual workable curtains over the screen; the first few frames of a COLOR! cartoon reflecting off the slowly receding fabric panels. Workable curtains add a worthwhile showbiz touch, I vote.

COLOR! Oh my gosh! Not much in life was, or is, so thrilling as were those big screen COLOR! cartoons back in early black & white, tiny TV days. Thrilling, as in you felt a powerful alive tickle in your brain and stomach. You did NOT want that cartoon to end. But you knew it would. In your little kid brain, even in the throes of cartoon delight, you knew the moment was coming when some awful hint would come off that screen signaling that the end was near. The plot would take a telltale turn, the music would begin to resolve, maybe a character's or narrator's voice would acquire a certain sing-song, "wrap it up" tone. The last few feet of film in the projector would start to clickety-clack, and that's when you naturally shifted emotional gears, abandoning the pang of "the end", and regrouping for the FEATURE! just beginning to pop and flicker from the booth.

Ebert: Rendition turns out to have been prescient.

I don't know if it can fairly be called prescient, Roger. The rendering of terror suspects to openly torturing allied regimes started under Clinton, then really kicked into gear under Bush after 9/11.

Ebert: Clinton also has a whole lot of 'splainin to do.

Your use of "uncanny valley" (which I originally learned of from you) in this article has me wondering if boys were going steady with robots when you were young?

Ah, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. By a strict application of IMDb's naming conventions, they have it as "Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein," which I suppose is what really does appear as the title in the film itself (unlike the trailer), but is nevertheless odd and a source of frustration for some. There's a thread about it on the message board for that film, and probably one (or more!) remaining on the Contributors Help board.

I've been curious to see Haram alek (1954) AKA Ismail and Abdel Meet Frankenstein, and Frankestein el vampiro y compañía (1962), both of which are supposedly remakes of the Abbott and Costello film. And while Harem alek is an Egyptian film, it calls to mind the unauthorized remakes produced in another country: have you ever had the pleasure of seeing any of the Turkish films like Turkish Star Wars, Turkish Exorcist, etc.?

i had two yo-yo's. one was a yellow and white butterfly type. the other was a navy blue imperial. the plastic had a very particular odor, similar to that of most new toys on christmas morning. it was interesting how they'd come and go, like "clik-claks" or those curvy metal things with the red magnetic wheel that rolled up and down when you twisted your wrist the right way. i was never any good at that paddle with the little red ball on the end of a thin rubber band. however, i'll gladly take those balsa wood airplanes any day. they'd only last about a half hour before they either cracked from smacking the sidewalk or your brother inadvertently (or so he said) stepped on it.

i grew up in the new york area of the 70's. every sunday morning my sister and i had the bowery boys, a.k.a. "eastside kids" from 9 to 10 am. then from 10 to 11:30 am you had an abbot and costello feature, which was never a bad thing even when it was a title you didn't understand like the windsome widow of wagon gulch or pardon my sarong. it was certainly a special day when they met frankenstein because it wasn't just frankenstein.

abbott and costello were local favorites, with lou having been born and raised in paterson, nj, just 15 minutes from my hometown and also where i went to college. but as special as they were, the day was just that much more special when we were lucky enough to get the marx brothers on the sunday movie at 11:30 am, which was a 90-minute laugh riot that took you to 1pm when it was time for new york jets football. it seemed that every other week was john wayne in the war wagon, and i don't think i ever watched it once.

my older sister is approaching 50 and me 47. nothing is more clear than summers at the jersey shore with our cousins and the film comedies that shaped our sense of humor. and nothing makes me feel both old and young at the same time than to type something like this.

Ebert: Sometimes a comment will remind you of how old you are. I interviewed the producer of "The War Wagon" when it was premiering.

HAL9016 wrote on May 1, 2009 8:50 PM - "Marie, Marie, This has never happened to me on Roger's blog, however, it HAS on other ones. Usually it seems to happen if I spend an inordinate amount of time composing the piece directly into the comments box. (I don't cut and paste from a word processing program. Maybe I should.) My take is that the link times out, though it doesn't tell you this, so you don't have a clue. Unless you composed and saved your contribution on another program, it is just *poof* lost to the ether."

Hmmm. Interesting. That hadn't occurred to me; that it could time out! I do tend to work on a post on and off, approaching it like a painting; wherein I write a bit, go away, come back with fresh eyes, read what I've painted, edit the brushstrokes if I don't like them, chuckle!

And everything was fine, until I wanted to use HTML tags! Up until then, I'd compose a post in Word, and paste it in here - et voila. Maybe... the minute you type ANYTHING into the comment box, it "engages" said box, and that's what start some hidden clock thingy ticking? Like, maybe you've got only 30 minutes to write a post? GASP!

I've tried 4 times now, to post a post I'd written days ago! I have it saved. And I'm determined to succeed, dammit! I shall not be thwarted! :)

"Enjoy this little tune that Shakey Stevens sings about you, Marie:"

Chuckle; thanks for that! It made me smile.

Now I'm going to copy and paste my "Abbott & Costello" post, in here yet again!

It is May 2nd, 7:14 pm PST.

Ebert: And that post...is still not here. It is now 9:47 p.m. PST.

If you hang long enough, a lot of software will disconnect you. That's to deal with people who walk away from their computers and forget they were doing something. My advice: Sacrifice HTML and just give us your worthy prose.

In my casual observation, no HTML works on most message boards except bold, italic and blockquote. I'm not even sure you can embed a URL. I would love to post photos among the messages, but can't.

I'm using Internet Explorer now, instead of Firefox. And I'm going to paste my "Abbott & Costello" post in here; I want to see what happens when I change browsers.

Then I'm going to relaunch Firefox and write my post out all out again from scratch (no pasting now) in order to hedge my bets! Chuckle!

Roger wrote: "When Bud and Lou met Frankenstein, it scared the shit out of us."

According to Wiki you were born June 18, 1942 - that's how I knew you were a Gemini, chuckle! And if it was 1950 when you saw the movie, that means you were freaked out by it when you were 8 years old.

Jeeesh, what a weenie! (Grin.) When "I" was 8 years old, I saw the 1954 version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" with Kurt Douglas (this was back in 1974 when a local theater was showing it again and real butter was served) and when the giant squid monster attacked the Nautilus - now THAT'S super scary! Here's a really good trailer for it - includes squid monster!

http://classicscifi.com/index.php?option=com_csftitle&Itemid=36&sku=91

That said, I like Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein! I saw it again earlier this season, after watching "Supernatural" pay loving tribute to it, as set during Oktoberfest. :)

Technology has all but ruined cinema, imo. People don't know how to avoid regarding the theater as an extension of their living rooms, thanks in part to the introduction of VCR's and now cell phones. Everybody's living their life in public places these days. And I miss when it was really FUN to go to the movies!

Now? It's a pain in the ass more often than not; grumble, grumble.

As a kid, I used to dream of hanging a huge white bed sheet from the trees in our backyard and projecting "reel movies" onto it. And watching them from a tent (made of mom's best linens) while snuggled-up in a sleeping bag and a can of RAID. I never did that, but a friend had the pleasure of watching a film projected onto the wall of building once - Casablanca - in downtown Vancouver, and said it was wonderful and magical.

Whereas the following is anything BUT magical...

Roger wrote in his review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine - "That Wolverine has been voted the No. 1 comic hero of all time must be the result of a stuffed ballot box."

There's a great deal in life I do not know, but this much I can say with relative confidence:

1. Superman
2. Spiderman
3. Batman

Based on their popularity over past 40 years, that is. There's a reason the Iron Giant doesn't say "Wolverine" as he's saving the day! Wolverine doesn't interest me, never has. So either someone did indeed stuff the ballot box or they were spiking the kool-aid. At least I don't know anyone who reads X-Men for Wolverine.

Whereas "Doomsday" as played by Sam Witwer on "Smallville" has definitely caught my eye! The actor is from a small town outside Chicago, by the way. (Note: best known for being the only villain to have killed Superman, in this version of the Doomsday story, he's got a human looking alter ego called "Davis Bloome," a likable paramedic and orphan, whose struggling with a growing darkness inside him. Awww, poor dude!) And Davis falls in love with Chloe, who can't love him back; the writers have been drawing parallels between the two and a really dark beauty and the beast theme - think "Dexter meets a nice girl". There ya go.

But I digress and need to focus, as otherwise I'll just ramble on about a kiss scene no one wants to hear about in here. :)

What I really miss, is the experience I used to have when going to the movies. As otherwise, I too, enjoy the air conditioning and better seating. Ideally though, what I want is both! A nice time in a nice theater with nice people. And why I continue to envy everybody who made it to Roger's Festival this year.

I'd LOVE to attend a special outdoor version of it! Now that would be cool! Maybe we get to watch a scary B/W monster movie - you know, something with Abbott and Costello in it. :)

It is now May 2nd, 10:50 pm, PST.

Ebert: Also found in the Spam folder!

Roger wrote: "When Bud and Lou met Frankenstein, it scared the shit out of us."

According to Wiki you were born June 18th, 1942 - that's how I knew you were a Gemini; chuckle! And if it was 1950 when you saw the movie, that's means it freaked you out when you were 8 years old.

Jeeesh! What weenie! (Grin.) When "I" was eight years old, I saw the 1954 version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" with Kirk Douglas (this was back in 1974 when a local theater was showing it again and popcorn had real butter) and when the giant squid monster attacked the Nautilus - now THAT'S super scary! Here's the trailer, complete with squid monster..!

http://classicscifi.com/index.php?option=com_csftitle&Itemid=36&sku=91

I found this, too: "20 Million Miles To Earth" - it reminds me of those Ray Harryhausen movies!

http://classicscifi.com/index.php?option=com_csftitle&Itemid=36&sku=90

That said, I like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein - I saw it again earlier this year, after "Supernatural" paid homage to it in an episode set during Oktoberfest. :)

Technology has all but ruined going to the cinema, imo. People don't know how to avoid treating it like an extension of their living rooms, thanks in part to the introduction of VCR's and now cell phones. Everyone's living their life in public places these days. And I miss how it used to be really FUN to go to the movies!

Now? It's a pain in the ass more often than not; grumble, grumble.

As a kid, I used to dream of hanging a big white bed sheet from the trees in my backyard and projecting "reel movies" onto it. And watching them from a tent (made of mom's best linens) while snuggled up in a sleeping bag and holding a can of RAID. I never did that, but a friend had the pleasure of watching a film projected onto the wall of building once - Casablanca - in downtown Vancouver, and said it was wonderful and magical.

Whereas the following is anything BUT magical....

Roger wrote in his review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine - "That Wolverine has been voted the No. 1 comic hero of all time must be the result of a stuffed ballot box."

There's a great deal in life I do not know, but this much I can say with relative confidence:

1. Superman
2. Spiderman
3. Batman

Based on their popularity over the past 40 years, that is. There's a reason the "Iron Giant" doesn't say "Wolverine" as he's saving the day! Wolverine doesn't interest me, never has. So either someone did indeed stuff the ballot box or they were spiking the Kool-aid. At least I don't know anyone who reads X-Men for Wolverine.

Whereas "Doomsday" as played by Sam Witwer on "Smallville" has definitely caught my eye! The actor is from a small town outside Chicago, by the way. ( Note: best known for being the only villain to have killed Superman, in this version of the Doomsday story, he's got a human-looking alter ego named "Davis Bloome", a likable paramedic and orphan who's struggling with a growing darkness inside him. Awww, poor dude!) And Davis falls in love with Chloe who can't love him back; the writers have been drawing parallels between the two and a really dark Beauty and the Beast theme - think "Dexter" meets a nice girl. There ya go.

But I digress and need to focus, as otherwise I'll just ramble on and on about a kiss scene no one wants to hear about in here. :)

What I really miss, is the experience I used to have when going to the movies. As otherwise, I too, enjoy the air-conditioning and better seating. Ideally though, what I want is both! A nice time in a nice theater with nice people. And why I continue to envy everyone who made it to Roger's Festival this year.

I'd LOVE to attend a special outdoor version of it! Now that would be cool! Maybe we could watch a scary B/W monster movie - you know, something with Abbott and Costello in it. :)

It's is now May 2nd, 11:34 pm, PST

Ebert: Marie! I found this in the spam folder! Thanks for the suggestion by Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan. I suspect your use of weenie and ass in the same comment. Wash out that computer with Lava Soap!

K. Vonnegut Jr. said some writers say 99.99% what they want to say, and how they want it said, in the very first draft!

The rest agonize over every line, rereading and re-editing for hours every word and every phrase!

Remember when the internet was called PLATO? When the editor timed-out, it let you know!

Remember when the internet was paper and ponies? Mark Twain glorifying Saint Joan of Arc to a packed hall?

Remember evolving tales (and devolving tails!) around the campfire?

"Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand!"

To Marie & Roger,

Roger is right, there are only a limited number of tags that may be used here (it won't even let you choose the font style). However, aside from the bold, italic, bold italic and blockquote tags, which all appear as Arial, one can also use the very nifty anchor tag. Add to this the 'list item' tag, which I remember was used once by a contributor here. Anything other than these six tags will not function here in this blog (unless proven otherwise).

Roger, around last week, I sent a comment to Jim's blog and that particular comment of mine ended up in his spam folder. (No, I definitely am not a spammer; though, I do love to eat Spam, which I know is slowly killing me. Please note that I am not suggesting that people who lose their entries/emails are spammers. No such thing at all.) I am not familiar with Movable Type and how the program designates incoming entries. But perhaps, owing to some system-procedural reason, the entry might have been misplaced into another folder. If it happened to Jim's blog, then it may happen to anyone's.

And Roger, you say "sacrifice HTML"? I may have to apologise to you on this one regarding an upcoming entry bound within the next few days. Just this afternoon, our time, I used your Preview Pane to determine the locations of the lines which I will be sending you. And yes, it's filled with blockquote tags; but the end result is pleasing, which I think befits the occasion.

My mother said she took me to some movie theater in 1985. I was very young, so I don't remember the experience. It was "Amadeus", and probably that's why I felt something familiar while watching it on TV few years later.

Movie theaters in my town were not so sweet in 90s. They sold snacks and beverages, but they were just products you could buy and were more expensive than outside. They did not sell popcorn; they sold dried squid or dried fish jerky. Although some movie theaters had the first floor and balcony, they were usually tacky. They did not have air conditioning system; they just had one big machine near the screen. Some multiplex theaters still have that kind of machine, and I can't help being amused to see it.

In the time of VCR, going to movie theaters was luxury to us, so I can clearly remember what movies I watched in theaters during childhood. I voluntarily went with my older cousin to watch "JFK" (in those days, restrictions were not so tight), and then I watched it on TV everytime I got the chance. As a kid, I liked "Hook" a little and was traumatized with "Batman Returns". It was too gloomy to me(9) and my younger brother(8), and watching it in the huge dark space was memorable but bittersweet experience. I asked my mom permission to watch it several times, and she gave the money at last. And now "Batman Returns" is "Bambi"(I finally watched that animation five years ago) of my childhood.

Even in 2000, movie theaters in my town did not change. Some of them finally sold popcorn, but multiplex era was still on the horizon. In 2001, I watched "The Lord of Rings" in one of tacky theaters. They were not used to huge blockbuster like that. Usually, they just sold the ticket without seat number, and you could choose any place . After buying ticket, you could watch it more than once if you want. I watched "The Rock" and "Starship Troopers" twice in that way. I think "The Lord of the Rings" changed everything. After that, They sold the ticket with seat number, and we had to get out when the movie was over.

Although I miss big theaters in my town, I think multiplexes gives me many things instead. They provide clean bathrooms, better snacks and beverages, and comfortable environment. I usually watch 2-3 movies at a time, multiplexes give me big help. They sometimes have screen ratio problems, but the sound system is very good.

Yeah, I like multiplex theaters for several reasons. However, when I went to film festival yesterday, I thought about old times. They showed "Goodbye Solo" in big hall in local university. I sat in the center front area, and there were lots of people on the first and second floor. There were several times I and people around me laughed while looking up to the screen. However, in the end, audience were quiet at the finale. I don't know whether it was due to boredom or not, but I liked the ending a lot. I worried there would be one way or the other, but the movie surprised me. And watching it with so many people was great.

After it was over, some people said it was boring. I did not think so. The woman next to me said to her friends she did not understand William's motive. I could have told her important thing is not the motive but unlikely friendship between two realistic characters. By the way, as I predicted, Q & A session with Ramin Bahrani was canceled due to schedule conflict. Too bad. I wanted to ask him how he shot the sequence at Blowing Rock.

Ebert: Your opinion on the film is right on the money. I'm fascinated by how the film would play in Asia with subtitles, because for an American audience so much is nuanced by the accents and races of the characters.

Did your audience perceive William as a redneck, and Solo as, not an American black, but an immigrant who had French as his first language? And Solo's wife as a Mexican-American?

Roger, for the benefit of readers who might be interested, here is a variation of the Anchor Tag, tweaked in such a way that it jumps to a particular comment within a blog:

<A HREF="put link address here#comment-put comment number here">put intended-to-be-hyperlinked text here</A>

You can see Ron using this feature here. The words inside the command syntax that are in bold are meant to be filled in. The "comment number" identifying a specific post may be found by opening the Page Source of that webpage where the particular post belongs to. To do this,

1. Go to that webpage you wish to link to (preferably by opening it in another tab so as not to lose the current window.)
2. Under View of your browser, select Page Source.
3. In the following window, you'll see a lot of HTML DNA. Never attempt to change any of the sequences as it might bring about the end of the world (or in other words, I don't know what might happen). Press Ctl + F to invoke the Search function, and use that to look for a particular entry. Comment ID nos. precede the entries they represent, so they shouldn't be hard to find.

Ebert: Thank you! I suppose everyone already knows that if you simply want to find a comment, not link to it, you simply use your search function to find the author or a keyword.

I'm pretty sure all the Cinerama movies were shown in Chicago at the McVickers on Madison St.
I saw "How The West Was Won" there. It was in that idiotic roadshow way where you had an assigned seat.
I used to go to the Granada in Rogers Park all the time for 15¢ in the 50s. The balcony was never used & was closed off. I always hated when a movie I wanted to see was at the Nortown as Saturday/Sunday matinees there were awful as the kids who went never shut up. You couldn't hear a word of the dialog.
I know Gene Siskel went there as a kid just a few years before my time [I'm 59], did he ever mention anything about the noise at those matinees?
The weirdest place was the old 400 on Sheridan, it had those loveseats which were 1½ seats wide. You never saw any couples in them, just really fat people or two small children as no two adults could ever squeeze into them without being in agony for days afterwards!

Ebert: Gene never stopped talking about the Nortown, so maybe he never stopped talking in the row behind you.

The love seats in the 400!

Enjoyed your article. This is my take on downstate movie going during my high school days (1959-1963).

http://dannyshumorfile.blogspot.com/2009/02/high-school-days-emergency-landings.html

Danny Dunne

Ebert: Did your audience perceive William as a redneck, and Solo as, not an American black, but an immigrant who had French as his first language? And Solo's wife as a Mexican-American?

Excerpt from handed festival guideline in Korean/English.

"Goodbye Solo

Solo, good-hearted taxi driver, receives a special request. He is asked to be the old man's driver for his two week suicide trip. Solo decides to save the old man by changing his mind during his trip. The director whose previous films showed the lives of immigrants in America, gives a comic portrayal of the friendship between a Senegalese and a Caucasian man in the film. This is the third feature film of Ramin Bahrani, who received Special Mention in Indie Vision at JIFF(our festival) with "Man Push Cart" in 2006."

They knew about Solo's background, but I think they probably perceived William as some old American and Solo as some immigrant. I know Senegal is in West Africa, but most of them do not. In case of Solo's family, they seemed to see them as town people.

Roger: I suppose everyone already knows that if you simply want to find a comment, not link to it, you simply use your search function to find the author or a keyword.

True, Roger. It's a matter of affording convenience, really, which the user may opt to provide or not. However, the true usefulness of the 'anchor (comment) tag' lies in its ability to proceed directly to a particular comment located in another blog post, not necessarily within the same blog. I believe that is its primary function.

Roger, I almost forgot, there could be another reason why some entries end up in spam. The answer may be found in the links that contributors provide to support their expositions. The system may be deeming certain links as unfavorable and untrustworthy: such as those that lead to pornographic, commercial (ads) and suspected phishing sites. Just a hunch.

Best regards,
Robert

Ebert: The utility is invaluable in those cases. I have asked for Movable Type to number posts; apparently it cannot.

Your hunch may be correct, although I don't think Marie has linked to any pornography! I suspect she surpassed critical mass by mentioning willie and ass in the same post. I could just do it because my stuff bypasses the filter.

I am 21, so I have grown up in the age of cineplexes (I can't remember my first movie, but I do recall, like Brenda, seeing a re-release of Snow White and thinking it was actually made in 1992). Most of my life has been spent seeing movies in shopping malls, or multiplexes with stadium seating.
A few years ago I was in New York with my family, and the hotel we were staying at turned out to be right across the street from the Ziegfeld. Not that the Ziegfeld had any significance for me, but my parents go to sleep early so my brother and I decided to see a movie there. We were surprised that only one movie, Michael Mann's Collateral, was playing, and there were only maybe two showings per day. When we walked in, it was incredible. Everything looked like I would imagine it would have in the 1920s, and you had to go up a staircase to enter the theater itself. And, echoing others, it was the largest screen I have ever seen. It was the first theater I have ever been to with a curtain masking it before the show. The lights dim, the curtain gently slides away, revealing the screen in its true majesty, the audience applauds, all this before the movie even begins! Collateral was pretty good (though I didn't like the last 30 minutes), but who really cares? That was still probably my greatest movie experience, and frankly, people my age don't know what we're missing.

@jrdeaver: "The Glen (in Glen Ellyn) also had a curious feature in the 50's and 60's: a smoking room. It was a small cement-floored room that held a couple of rows of seats."

In 1979 I was assistant manager of the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood. (The British spelling was vehemently insisted upon by the owner on pain of death.) A custom of the time was that once in a while the staff of one theater would invite the staff of another to a free screening of something particularly juicy. That summer the Venice Theater generously had us over for a matinee showing of "Yellow Submarine".

When we arrived, we were escorted to a room in the back of the auditorium exactly like your description, where they plied us with all the free popcorn and drinks we could take. It was called a "crying room", and was intended for women with crying babies so they could still watch the movie instead of having to high-tail it to the lobby. It was sound-proofed, and the soundtrack to the film was piped through a speaker.

This was the original purpose of these rooms, because when the movie houses were built people smoked everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE, including theaters. As late as the early sixties in Uvalde, Texas I recall wincing from the cigarette smoke my doctor was belching as he fixed up a finger I'd smashed in a car door. Of course, Uvalde also still had a fluoroscope in the shoe store that blasted everyone around with unshielded X-rays, so it may just have been a regional thing. In any case, these rooms were turned into smoking rooms later, and probably not from any health concerns, but from the simple fact that tobacco smoke was very bad for the screens.

Incidentally, given the film we were watching and the decade in which we watched it, we also used it as a smoking room, although with some minor variations.

Ebert:Your hunch may be correct, although I don't think Marie has linked to any pornography! I suspect she surpassed critical mass by mentioning willie and ass in the same post. I could just do it because my stuff bypasses the filter.

I wonder what the filters would think of Marie's work as an animator in the cartoon industry? I just recently clicked on her URL and discovered she was involved in drawing "Ren and Stimpy." Now, Ren and Stimpy are the most graphic and zany cartoons ever made, and probably my favorites of all time. They take "grotesque" and "bizarre" to a high art form. It takes a real genius to create such an experience and someone equally disturbed to enjoy it. I see she is from Canada, the last bastion of freedom in North America, and the point of origin for "Tripping the Rift," another bizarro world cartoon universe. Marie should hook up with my friend Dennis Valdron in Winnipeg and transform some of his incredible science fiction into animation. Honestly, America's fantasy world would be so incredibly diminished without Canadians. We never would have had Kirk and Spock, to begin with.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ren and Stimpy:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2026885/the_top_5_ren_and_stimpy_moments_of_all_time/

Ebert: Not to forget Cronenberg.

Ah hah!

The SPAM folder!

In my post, I quote you, Mr. Potty mouth! Chuckle; so there's also the word s**t. Not just *ss. I think that's what caught your filter, as another word for hotdog is otherwise pretty harmless and not immediately vulgar. :)

Note: yesterday, I sent an e-mail to a friend and it was rejected by her filter, twice. Today? Everything's getting through. So I think there's some weirdness in general going on with security settings, as various networks strive to beef-up their servers.

And I ran into some issues while surfing last night; Firefox recently updated their browser software, and it's not as stable or secure anymore. First, I got attacked; Nortons blocked it. Then Firefox stopped responding when I tried to close the browser (to prevent being repeatedly forwarded to another site) and in the end, I had to restart my PC to resolve the problem.

And no, I wasn't looking at a dirty website; chuckle!

When it comes to computers, I get totally neurotic when I don't understand "why" something is happening (I have control issues with technology) and so excuse me for writing about it, to the extent I have.

But at least the mystery has been mostly solved. Now we know where missing posts, be for whatever reason rejected, likely go - if not into the ether, the dreaded spam folder! And thank-you so much so helping out, Robert! That's probably where my missing "Urbana" post went too; maybe it didn't like some of the photo links I'd used? And it disappeared once the folder was automatically emptied. As I certainly didn't use potty language while talking about Roger's home town. :)

For what it's worth, when it comes to tags, I just use italic and bold. That's it. And when I want to find something, I use the search feature as Roger mentions, to find what I'm looking for inside a thread.

If I ever don't see a post now, I'll let you know to check your folder! :)

Your description of your childhood matinee experiences brings back a memory of when I and my other twelve year old friends went to see the Friday 3:00 showing of "Malibu's Most Wanted," with a few exceptions:

1) The popcorn, and sodas we bought amounted to the modest sum of twenty dollars (and that's with the bag of twizzlers we snuck via shoving up a pant leg).

2) The only other people in the theater were a napping employee and a nine year old movie-addict who boasted seeing every movie in the theater twice, in the day and the night.

3) It was the first, and only, matinee I went to alone, for a group of children walking the mile down Main Street and alone into a dark theater would weigh too heavily on the good conscience of a conscientious parent.

4) The movie was Malibu's Most Wanted, and my friends and I had seen it twice already, visiting again simply to quiz ourselves on how well we know the most memorable lines (I did an especially good rendition of Jamie Kennedy's "King Kong ain't got nothin' on me," which I later learned was orginally said by Denzel in "Training Day."

I don't know what I'm trying to say here.. maybe that I thought going to a movie pointless if I could sit around and watch TV instead, maybe that matinees are, for the people of my town, a thing that one does if they have no friends and a lot of time, but probably that "going to the movies" didn't thrilled me until I started going on my own (I didn't even know what "matinee" meant until last year).

Ebert: I wouldn't belong to any club that didn't have you as a member, as Groucho said, sort of.

my favorite groucho line is, "i've got a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it."

when i was in 6th grade back in '74, i was a bit of a clown with curly red hair. now i'm a 7th grade teacher with very little red hair. groucho is still one of my inspirations, but it was no surprise who played harpo in the skit we did in jefferson elementary school. at least i didn't forget any lines.

Ebert: I think my Esquire interview with Groucho is online here.

Waitress: Would you like a fork?

Groucho: Your place or mine?

Testing assertion that Marie's posts timed out because of a certain hidden label in the form. If this reaches you, the assertion is WRONG.

Having grown up in a later era and a different town, my movie memories are mostly of my parents taking us to the drive-in. With three children and one income, it was a bargain that couldn't be beat, especially since my mom would make enough buttered popcorn to fill a grocery bag to take with us. We kids would put on our pajamas - a common drive-in practice in our town - and we'd go about a half hour before dusk. There was a little play area for the kiddies, and we would play with the other children - yes, many also in pajamas - until it got dark, then go back to the car to watch the movie. The sound was through that heavy, gunmetal window-mount speaker, so it was harsh and tinny. But you got used to it quickly enough. My parents sat in the front seat of our station wagon, and we three kids lay on our tummies on the folded-down backseat.

There were previews, then two movies or a cartoon and the movie. In between, my mom would take us to the bathroom. It was peculiar to me that also using those bathrooms were the fattest women I'd ever seen, who could barely fit their girth into the stalls. To me it was like a sideshow. It never occured to me then that their weight was why these women went somewhere less conspicuous and more comfortable than a sit-down theater. Nowadays they might fit right in, of course, and the seats are wider to accomodate our ample American rears, but back then someone weighing in at 3-400 lbs was an oddity, and I would never, except at the drive-in, expect to see a half dozen or more at a time.

After our bathroom break, we would go back to the car and watch the movie, usually some semi-amusing Disney film - not the great cartoons but the ones they churned out featuring Sandy Duncan or Dean Jones. (Hey, there were a lot of Saturdays to fill, and they can't all be gems.) Sometimes it would be more adult fare - a spaghetti western or a drama, or a comedy where I didn't get the jokes. I think we covered every single one of the Planet of the Apes movies. One memorable time it was The Godfather. At ten years old, I didn't get the scene with the horse and asked a lot of questions. All three of us did. That was the other reason my parents didn't want to inflict us upon regular theater audiences until we were older.

I didn't see the end of The Godfather either. I rarely saw the end of any movie at the drive-in. Snug in the backseat, under a blanket and full of popcorn, I'd drift off to sleep with the tinny speaker squawking like a parrot soothing itself. Then my parents would drive home and carry any sleeping children in, and tuck us into bed. It was easy when we already had our jammies on. There are dozens of movies floating disjointedly somewhere in my memory, incomplete and perhaps still running, Dean and Sandy still flirting shyly, Burt or Clint still sweaty and getting too much sun, the bad guys hot on their trail. I didn't see The Godfather all the way through until I was in my 40s, but at least viewing it in middle age, I finally fully got the scene with the horse.

Ebert: An offer he couldn't refuse.

HAL9017 wrote on May 3, 2009 4:37 PM - "I wonder what the filters would think of Marie's work as an animator in the cartoon industry? I just recently clicked on her URL and discovered she was involved in drawing "Ren and Stimpy."

I wasn't actually an animator; chuckle! I started out as cel painter, this job - and it REALLY did look like that; don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise! That's a typical work station, with an inset light table and drying shelves overhead...

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/438229061_f3761ebf94.jpg?v=0

I found I had a natural talent for hand inking however, and quickly switched to that, using a brush mostly, but I could use quill and technical pens too. I worked on the pilot for Ren and Stimpy - "Big House Blues" and wound-up inking almost half of it. It was my first inking job too; baptism by fire!

"I see she is from Canada, the last bastion of freedom in North America, and the point of origin for "Tripping the Rift," another bizarro world cartoon universe." - HAL9017

Ren & Stimpy was a deeply twisted and subversive cartoon, God bless it, and I'm glad I was able to do my part as a Canadian in the corrupting of young American minds; for we sort of look upon that as being our moral duty, given we're neighbors. :)

Ebert wrote: Not to forget Cronenberg.

Ah, Croneberg; smile. See? I told you we were fearless up here! Anyone remember his infamous 1996 film "Crash"..? Oh! Hey! Look everybody, it's Gene Siskel! And he's arguing with Roger about the movie...

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/educational/watch/v15609904HR3gqtTN

Chuckle!

My favorite local drive-in is long gone, but the places that took up its location kept the name. Here's the evolution, on ol' Route 50 in Saratoga County, NY:

The Super-50 Drive In

Super-50 Hardware

Super-50 Self Storage

Bah.

I purposely held off for a few days to see where the thread was headed; as a mid-50s kid, i'm one or two generations too late for the Saturday matinee exprience of which you write. That said, the mentions of the Southtown (63rd and Halsted), the Coral (95th and Cicero in Oak Lawn), and Cinerama at the Palace (now the Cadillac Palace legit house) set the Waybac Machine into warp drive. In order:

(1) In the mid-50s, moviegoing was considered an Event due to its rarity. The Saturday matinee had been subsumed by television: cartoons, B-westerns, serial adventures, and two-reel comedies were all provided by the tube in abundance, both vintage and tv-grown. To compete with the home screen, theaters had to provide what you couldn't get at home: big screen, big sound, and (most of the time) color. This the Southtown provided in spades, and the duck pond in the lobby was a major part of the presentation. In those days, our family went basically for either Disney (OLD YELLER vintage) or Martin & Lewis. As a kid of single-digit age, I thought of movies as Big TV; after all, I always seemed to see the same performers in both places, except on TV they were smaller and in B&W (for a while it seemed unnatural for a movie in a theater to be black-and-white; hey, I was 6, what did I know from reverie?) There were a couple of other neighborhood houses in the general area, the Marquette and the Colony, and the Double Drive-In, which we would pass while driving to and from Grandpa's house on Sunday nights. But the Southtown was the movie palace - and it was the first one to close.

(2) After moving to suburbia in '58, the Coral was the neighborhood theater. At first it was a small. second-or-third run place, getting pictures that had run downtown a month or so before. In the early '60s, to compete with a double theater that had opened at Evergreen Plaza, the Coral's owners redid the place in toto; expanded the auditorium, renovated the lobby, added a smoking garden. These changes were completed just in time for the arrival of showcase booking, which meant the Coral could get first-run movies. Initially, it was a success, but ultimately, the economics changed, and the Coral was too large to survive. It closed sometime around 1990, I can't recall exactly (among the last pictures I saw there were NETWORK, THE IN-LAWS, and MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, but I stopped going there long before the actual shutdown). I do recall that wonderful year 1963, when my brother and went forth to see grown-up pictures (as opposed to "adult", and stop that snickering in the back); in no fixed order, they were THE BIRDS and THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER. THE BIRDS was Hitchcock, and it did have kids in it; anyway I had a good time spotting the familiar TV faces (Richard Deacon, Doodles Weaver, Joe Mantell, Charles McGraw, Karl Swenson, and some others whose names I didn't know yet - and thank you, TV GUIDE). As for ADRIAN MESSENGER, that was the one with the major stars in MASQUERADE PARTY-type disguises; I still have some residual affection for this one, even after learning a couple of years ago that the disguise business was at least three-fifths of a hoax. Anyway, the times went and changed on us, first Evergreen Plaza, then Ford City, then Chicago Ridge, all went the plex route, dooming the single theater to extinction. The Coral is gone, long replaced by a strip-mall.

(3) As I mentioned above, Cinerama's home in Chicago was the Palace, in what was then the Bismarck Hotel. The theater had the only stage area large enough to accomodate the curved Cinerama screen. As memory serves, they would run those first Cinerama travelogs in rotation, putting one in for a multi-month run, the bringing in another, then another, and back to the beginning; the Palace did this for years. I believe I wrote here about seeing SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD in about '61, reissue, on a school field trip. Not long after that, the hotel shut the theater down, and Cinerama moved to the McVickers.

At the risk of sounding pretentious ("Pretntious? Moi?" "Yeah, vous!"), I seem to have provided a mini-history of movie distribution in the '60s. Little ole me... imagine that.

Once again, it's a merry trip down memory lane...

New Orleans theaters were unique in their own right. You have on Canal St. the famous Saenger theater (later turned into a stage theater but still with the original pipe organ) and the Joy Cinema and Loew's State Theater across the street. You had the Prytania Theater on Prytania (about a block or two south of St. Charles Ave.) which still exists and remains the only single-screen theater in the area. And you had the old Robert E. Lee theater on Lakefront Dr., where I first saw movies like Blade Runner and Conan the Barbarian in their full majestic glory from the balcony. There were others, such as the Gentilly Woods (where Rocky Horror first appeared in the city) and the Pitt (on Elysian Fields, where it had a snack bar that still offered cherry, vanilla or chocolate cokes). In fact, I remember being allowed to sort through the collection of old movie posters and one-sheets that the owner had stored away, and snagged a few for my bedroom.

But those were the old days, back when General Cinema had only two screens per theater (Star Wars opened at Lakeside and seeing it on a nearly-cinerama style screen was mind-blowing), and neighborhood movies were still common enough. Such as the Planet of the Apes marathon at the Algiers Drive-In, starting at sunset and going until the wee hours of the morning.

Ah, such was the fun back then.

By Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan on May 3, 2009 7:43 AM

put intended-to-be-hyperlinked text here

Hey, Robert, how'd you get your A HREF example NOT to show as an anchor tag with embedded text?!? I wanted to demonstrate how to avoid having to type anything in the linked comment url, just copying the link location from the date/time stamp of a comment (using Firefox), then pasting between the double quotes in the opening A HREF tag, but it's acting as a tag (which, I suppose, it should).

Ebert: Gene never stopped talking about the Nortown,...

Ah, the Nortown, where I saw Children of a Lesser God in '86 or '87, and lamented the seeming dissolution of Jackie's and my great (albeit brief) love story...

Wow, Roger. Thanks for churning up the memories. I remember going to the Paramont Theater in Austin, Minnesota. The lobby smelled like popcorn, but I loved the Lemonheads or Junior Mints.

Inside the theater was magic. The sides were designed to look like box seats in theaters that one would expect in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles, though no one every sat in them.

There were paintings of the masks of Comedy and Tragedy near the screen which was covered in heavy velvet drapery. I remember once being able to sit in the balconey, but I recall not caring for it.

But the absolute best was the ceiling. It was painted the color of the night sky just after dusk, with small stars twinkling in it. When I was really little I remember how disorienting it was to walk outside after seeing a movie with that sky, and it would still be daylight.

It was magical.

Marie Haws said: "Ren & Stimpy was a deeply twisted and subversive cartoon, God bless it, and I'm glad I was able to do my part as a Canadian in the corrupting of young American minds; for we sort of look upon that as being our moral duty, given we're neighbors. :)"

Plus, you made wonderful zombies in the 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead!" And where would TV scifi be without the many shows produced in Vancouver, starting with "Friday the 13th," "The X-Files," "Highlander," and the various incarnations of "Stargate?" I'm sure I left out more than I included.

I was absolutely captivated by Vancouver when I visited the place. What a stunning skyline set against the snow-capped mountains, a marvelous eclectic mix of downtown architecture (love that gothic-looking pointy skyscraper), and that other-worldly science exhibition centre used so often as a set in movies and TV episodes. The anthropology museum has an impressive collection and is in a stunning location. The vegetation, especially on the UBC campus is a botanist's delight--the weather is so mild! The area near the ocean reminded me of northern California and the neighborhoods east of downtown were like 1950's Chicago, including the electric trolley buses. Wonderful transit system, including the el train... I could go on and on.

I remember a charming Canadian-produced movie, titled "Lotus Land," about family life on the Vancouver peninsula. As my friend Valdron suggests, Canada has kept an open mind, but has also kept the values that made America what it was in the 50's, a time Roger and most of his contributors love to reminisce about here.

I think, when the Blue States secede from the Union, they should annex Canada... or something like that. ;)

Just so you know, Marie, you are not the only one to lose posts. I had to recompose this entire piece from scratch because I accidently dragged my clumsy right hand across the keyboard and everything vanished except for a single "n." The original was probably better :(

By Anonymous on May 4, 2009 4:37 PM

But the absolute best was the ceiling. It was painted the color of the night sky just after dusk, with small stars twinkling in it.

That's the same ceiling that the Patio, mentioned by me and someone else in this blog, has in Chicago.

Ebert: The most fun theater in Chicago has a twinkling ceiling and an organ. That would be the Music Box. And what programming!

www.musicboxtheater.com

Thank you for another great memory, Roger. I follow you by just a few years and have a few intersects with your experience.

The fancy movie theater was in Hopkinsville, twenty-five miles away. The Alhambra. It was as exotic as it sounds. We went there for special movies sometimes. My understanding is that it has been restored to its former glory. I have not made the pilgrimage yet. Our little town had a show. We went to the show every week. Given thirty-five cents, quarter for the ticket and a dime for either a Coke or popcorn. Paper bags for popcorn and they let us ruin it with extra salt if we wanted. Not a lot of choices. Not sure there was a bathroom. No movies in the summer, no air conditioning.

My best friend and I would comb the newspaper for ads for horror movies playing in Paducah or somewhere and beg the owner to bring them to Cadiz. The Tingler was one of them, scared us silly. But, you have to admit that being nine years old and having an influence on the choice of a picture was pretty cool.

My mother and her friend came late to a showing of Psycho. The projectionist talked them into waiting until it ended and ran it especially for them after closing. Two women in the whole place being scared half to death by Hitchcock. He probably would have liked knowing that.

Yo-yos were big in Cadiz, but no connection to the movie theater. I remember someone coming to school though and demonstrating tricks, probably worked for Duncan. My older brother and his friends would customize their yo-yos, switch the string out for some special nylon. Thank you for bringing all that back, Roger.

Ebert: It's amazing they sold enough yo-yos to maintain a traveling cadre of professional demonstrators.

I wonder what the pros thought when kids told them, "Mister, when I grow up, I want to be just like you."

there's a little theater/theatre/movie house in pitman, nj, a small town only 15 minutes east of philadephia. it's called "the broadway theater," and naturally it's on a street called broadway.

http://www.thebroadwaytheatre.org/

it's got a beautiful marquee, a tiny concession stand, a stroll through catacombs to find the mens room, ushers with bowties, a way-high balcony that's always open - not just when the floor is full, a huge, red curtain that opens before the show, an orchestra pit, and those little private balconies along the sides. it's a total throwback.

in december they show it's a wonderful life and other black and white holiday classics. in the spring they show the wizard of oz. in february it's casablanca. two years ago i saw george carlin there, and he's been there every few years since forever. the lobby is lined with pictures of artists from the 50's through today. they also have a series of plays each year with all of the standards like damn yankees, south pacific, little shop of horrors, and the odd couple. this year they had the coconuts and oklahoma!, and there's also a children's series. auditions are open to anyone.

there's a summer theater camp, which my 11-year old daughter will attend this year. it's $300 for two weeks, monday to friday, four hours a day culminating with all of the kids participating in a children's show. she wants to be an actress, and i can't think of a better way for her to start.

when unbreakable showed there, i was the only person in the theater for the 8pm show. at first i felt guilty that i caused everyone to have to stay for another two hours. then again, i allowed them to get paid for another two hours. i also put my feet up and left my cell phone on.

Hi Ron, use this:

<code><a href="the URL address here">hyperlinked text here</a></code>

or,

<code><a href="the URL address here#comment-comment number here">hyperlinked text here</a></code>

*Each symbol, such as ">", has a acsii code.

Best regards,
Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan™

Garry wrote of the Granada. I didn't get to see the place until shortly before it was put down, in the early '80s it must have been. Every so often some starry-eyed romantic who'd made a bundle in, I dunno, pork bellies or something, would have a Vision of bringing the Granada back, throw a few barrels full of money at it, then suddenly realize how many more barrels it would take and retire from the field, a broken man. This latest guy was scraping money together by renting the theater out to practically anybody, so when some Doctor Who fans wanted to put on a convention they got it for a weekend for nearly nothing. This was back in the days before fan cons went all huge and corporate; plain old folks like you and me could put on a decent show and actually get stars to show up! We had Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor) and Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), who were very nice, very friendly, and totally jet-lagged. It was sad though, to see how badly deteriorated the Granada had become. The funny thing was that one eye was looking at it objectively and dispassionately, but the other eye kept going starry-eyed romantic: "No, really, look, new carpeting, new curtains, freshen up the plaster, lick of paint, the Granada could be great again!" Yeah, and if pigs had wings we could get Avian Swine Flu.

ampersand L T semicolon might get it started?

<anchors-aweigh!>

Through screeching jungle haunts, across the veldt of violence, past lion fang and boa coil... they shadowed the 'Dead man of the Transvaal' they had to bring back alive!

Duel in the Jungle(1954) is the first childhood delicious film in memory, mixed up with the a childhood spent in Shimla ---the Queen of the Hills and the old British summer capital of India where Kipling lived in what has been turned into a medical college. I frequently visit Shimla and now the cold has dissappeared from the winter and snow is a rare and much missed visitor---this time particularly there was no snow at all leading to an expectedly poor apple crop. Tarsem Singh of The Fall eminence also studied in Shimla.

Every movie was a landmark event and memory ( frequency about once a year) and almost too painfully intense specially those Hindi films of B/W era since they tended too be sad and brought the incomprehensibly fearful phenomenon of death into my child mind inevitably linking the possibility with my parents.

Ever heard of Enid Blyton? She was (in fact still is) what Rowling is to this generation, Strangely she seems little mentioned in the US.

Leonard Nimoy isn't Canadian; he's from Boston. James Doohan, however, was Canadian, as were Leslie Nielsen and Walter Pidgeon, the stars of Forbidden Planet, the movie which inspired Star Trek. A.E. Van Vogt is probably the most important science fiction writer Canada has produced. My favorite, however, is Spider Robinson, one of the funniest SF writers ever, and a great guy to boot.

In search of the... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7PPIjY0rTc

...the cinema show? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr9ErxWW4bA

I never went to the movies like you did. Alas, I wasn't alive at the time, and my grandparents have never regailed me with tales of their childhood (my parents, they too seem to have been amnesiacs until around 15.). I watch DVDs, or recorded movies. I hardly ever watch movies over and over again, though I think I've seen The Pianist around four or five times, and it never gets old. Same with Silence of the Lambs, and even Jurassic Park (though I admit the latter is more for sentimental reasons -- the only reason I enjoyed science class when I was littler was because I wanted to learn how to clone dinosaurs).

I don't watch a lot of television in general. Or go to movies all the time. I don't have time, and nowadays it seems more and more like a chore to watch a movie than anything else (I suppose the same goes for reading books, but not exactly. You can't put down a movie for a few days and pick up where you left off -- not exactly.). Attention spans are shortened, people get their kicks off of YouTube and Hulu, and evidently watching too much TV will decrease your IQ. Or something like that (I've never been inclined to care).

A movie takes a couple hours, but if I go to one I feel like I'm being dumped into another world -- even if it's startling close to my own, it's still another, alternate, universe. Not really like being a voyeur, unless the camera angles make it so, but something close to being a fly on the wall.

I remember seeing The Silence of the Lambs when I was seven. Well, not all of it. My mother made me play my computer while she watched it, but good God did those people scream! I didn't actually look at the screen, really, but hearing a girl stuck at the bottom of a well was enough to give me a few nightmares. Now I like the film a lot, but that and The Little Vampire when I was in kindergarten (oh, and Halloween) count as very scary. One of my guy friends has confessed to getting nightmares from scary movies, which I think is very gallant of him to do so.

I think it's interesting to compare childhoods. Nowadays we have things like computers, which I've grown up with, and iPods and fancyshmancy cars and technology intersecting with the classroom, even. We took four of our six standardized tests on the computer this year (math, English, fine arts and music [appreciation]). Notwithstanding the fact that our standardized tests in this state are ridiculously easy, I think it's interesting how the era influences everything from politics to gender roles to the average psyche. I watch movies and analyze them for the particulars, clashing motives and interrelations between human beings, while others go for enjoyment. I've watched quite a few movies on my computer, and my parents never do that.

I wonder if I'm being deprived of some kind of magical childhood, or that I've grown up too fast. Hmmm. (People tell me that all the time, you know.) I'm working on being a kid these days. It's kind of a fun job.

It's even sort of freeing. It's a little hard to live when you think too much about genocide and theories about the universes and "Hey, why exactly am I here?" and all that. I like films that try to explain those things, but I also like films that are just silly and fun (but don't get me started on Twilight... blech...).

So I guess we all have our childhoods, and perhaps mine's just begun.

Ebert: It is wise to have your childhood at an age when you can understand it.

To Ron,

Correction: just substitute the "less than signs" & "greater than signs" with their respective HTML names (these can be found inside the ascii link provided in a previous post). That should do the trick. No need to place <code></code> before and after the command syntax. Sorry for bungling up, Rog & Ron.

<a href="the URL address here">hyperlinked text here</a>

Best regards,
Robert

Ebert: Sort of like learning to swim without getting wet.

I'm enjoying all these trips down memory lane. Unfortunately I took the walk of shame at J.C. Penney's in 1975. The Duncan Yo-Yo man held a contest very similar to what you described. In the first round he came down the line pointing a finger and commanding "WALK THE DOG!". Alas, my mastery of dog walking folded up under pressure and I was the first one tossed. I cried like hell. I still have the "Champion" patch they gave me for getting into the contest. Thanks for digging that out of the vault Roger. I'll forward the therapy bill to you.

Ebert: You have exposed me as a shabby honorary champion.

Here you are Ron. I was finally able to force the HTML codes to surface without them being embeded. Copy and paste the first set at will.

&#60;a href="your URL address here"&#62;your hyperlinked text here&#60;/a&#62;

will appear in the final as

<a href="your URL address here">your hyperlinked text here</a>

TIPS:
For "<," coded as &#60; - insert "#38;" in between the ampersand and the pound sign.
For ">," coded as &#62; - insert "#38;" in between the ampersand and the pound sign.

Testing:
Roger Ebert's Blog

Ebert: The most fun theater in Chicago has a twinkling ceiling and an organ. That would be the Music Box. And what programming!

Agreed, it's a great theater with great programming, but for me it doesn't resonate emotionally like the others I've mentioned because a) I only know it as an adult, and b) I only recall seeing films there with a gay cinephile friend of mine. Just doesn't fire all the necessary neurons for mnemonic longevity, I guess. :)

By Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan on May 5, 2009 12:45 AM

Sorry for bungling up, Rog & Ron.

Thanks for the tips, Robert, and no worries: The only way to get better at something is to make mistakes and/or lose to/be taught by those who are better at it.

Ta da: <a href=""></a>

As I was trying to comment before to anyone interested, just keep this series of tags available for copying and pasting, do so when you wish, copy and paste (using either Firefox's right-clickable Copy Link Location or copying straight from the address bar using either Explorer or Firefox -- Does Explorer have a Copy Link Location function?) the url of your target (one of my favorite comments & replies from my participation in Roger's blog) between the double quotes and embed your desired text between the 1st > and 2nd < symbols.

Someone said that memory is the greatest liar of them all, and that's why we have nostalgia. All the stories of theaters from the long-ago show a running theme: deterioration. That's a gradual process, one that goes pretty much unnoticed while it's happening. The way the movie palaces in the Loop were allowed to disintegrate over a 30-40 year span - we all saw it, right there in front of us, and what could we do? Fewer people were coming downtown; why bother when you only had to go to the plex in the mall? Even neighborhood houses like the ones we've mentioned above all had huge overhead costs (Variety called that the "nut"), and that was what led the chains to go to the malls and let the big houses wither away.

Old multi-purpose joke:

You too can make a small fortune running a movie theater!

Just start with a large fortune...

someone mentioned the tv guide. back in the 70's, likely before, not sure how long after, but before the cable era, there were about ten pages of just movies for the week in chronological order. my sister and i would sit with a magic marker and highlight the good movies for the week. back then we had the abc sunday night movie, which was wonderful when i was too young to get myself to the theater. in december and june there were plenty of world war II movies, like where eagles dare, the longest day, von ryan's express, and the best was probably the great escape. that's where i learned all about clint eastwood, charles bronson, and other tough guys. it's where i learned about my favorite director, alfred hitchcock, and my favorite actor, gene hackman. my mother was a huge movie fan, and she'd tell me all kinds of trivia about each week's films and stars.

when i was old enough to walk three miles to the next town over, to rutherford from lyndhurst, nj, my friends and i trekked to see the exorcist. that was 1973, so i was 11 or 12 and successfully talked my way into a R-rated movie. i'm not sure if i was more terrified during or after the movie as we walked home about 11 at night. there were five of us. as we neared the next person's house, another boy would break from the group and run home. eventually, it was just pete mizerak and me. pete was afraid of nothing except his report card, but i've probably never run faster than when he went right and i went left on third avenue, two blocks from home. many years later, i took a similar sprint through a parking lot to get to my car after the silence of the lambs.

roger, i need your help on a movie i remember from the sunday night movies of my childhood. it was about a crippled allied (likely american) airplane and a crippled german tank. the tank was chasing the plane across the deserts of north africa in world war B. the plane couldn't get airborne, but the pilot would get far enough away to buy time before the tank got closer. just when the tank commander was about to blast the plane, the pilot would fix something and take off for another mile or two before the plane again broke down. finally, when the tank had caught up and the plane was (i think) out of fuel, the tank commander suffered a mutiny, and his crew shot him. then the pilot and the soldiers worked together to get out of the deser alive. i have no clue who was in it, when it was made, if it's at all available anywhere in any form, nor if my recollection is even half accurate. i got nothing. you?

For Richard Voza:

That movie you saw with the downed plane and the tank in the desert... it's a 1973 made-for-tv pic which was originally called DEATH RACE. Doug McClure and Roy Thinnes were the downed fliers, and Lloyd Bridges played the Nazi tank commander. I still remember the promos, with Bridges screaming "No prisonerss! No prisonerss!" in his most Premingerian accent. Most TV-movies from this period disappeared into public domain; you might possibly find this one by accident in the DVD rack at a dollar store. Apparently this picture's had a title cahnge or two over time; check IMDb under DEATH RACE (1973) for details.

miguel doran - muchos gracias, señor. you prove that we do more here than read the initial post, think up witty comments, and then scan past the comments of others just to see our own names or pseudonyms.

vaya con dios, maybe

Roger, I thought I was the only person who remembered Saturday matinees for nine cents! I'm 73, and my nine-cent matinees were at the Ritz, in Long Beach, California. For our nine cents, we'd get an installment of the serial, the newsreel, two feature films, three cartoons and coming attractions. The one cent left over from Mom's dime paid for a small Tootsie Roll. My mother said it was a bargain: the kids were in the theater for several hours so the mothers were free, free, free!

Wo! Andy! The Super 50 Drive-in! On Route 50! Saratoga County! Just down from Ballston Spa! New York!

Man! Remember anybody who ever snuck in there? I remember Pud, Vetz, Gunther, Bub, Hendo, Kokomo, Moose, Milbert, Bozzy, Roachie, Garnsey, the Dude, the Tonger, the Kell, the King... in fact I was the only one without a nickname so maybe that's why I never did myself.

Been a long time and thousands of miles. Thanks for the memory.

As ever, a lovely posting Roger . . . the first memory it brings to mind stems from your title, as my Stepdad (who grew up on the South Side) always calls us kids up every May 1 to sing "Hooray, Hooray, it's the first of May; outdoor f**king begins today!" (Don't worry, we're in our forties and he's done this only since we became adults)

But after your post title gave me a warm chuckle and knowing internal wink, I then read on and savored the special place that movies have occupied in my life - as well as being able to experience them in some unique (and now sadly extinct) movie theatres . . . such as The Wink in Dalton, Ga (where I remember seeing a tremendous Saturday premiere and matinee showing of "A Man Called Flintstone", which of course began with Looney Tunes and other shorts); The Varsity in Palo Alto, Ca (which has now been blasphemed by being turned into a Borders bookstore), where I enjoyed so many revival movie nights and even was lucky enough to perform improv there in the 80's; The Tower in Sacramento, Ca (where I had a memorable first date with my future ex-husband watching "2001, A Space Odyssey").

Now I live in New Orleans (not too far from the Robert E. Lee, which was taken out by that b*tch Katrina and still sits empty with the floodwater line still patently visible on its facade); here, I am pleased the Prytania is still in existence - even as I mourn the passing of the Varsity on the West Coast and celebrate the restoration of the Wink in North Georgia, although it's only being used as a church (no, not a church of Cinema - the other kind). Infuriatingly, the Tower in Sacramento is in constant danger of being "repurposed" (an awful word) or outright torn down.

Why can't we better treasure and preserve our cinematic history as well as we do our military history? Yes, we have our memories - but it would be wonderful to be able to pass these special places and experiences on to "the kids today" and in the future (I even think they'd put down their PS3 and iPods for such a movie viewing event).

Dear Spam Filter;

I do not like you.

I do not like you because you do not like my links; harmless and benign though they may be. And so you block me and label it verboten along with the Urbana photos I wanted to share - and I shall not be thwarted, Spam Filter! I shall defeat you!

For it's personal now, we are at war - prepare to die.

Chuckle; I'm going to share these old photographs if it's the last thing I do on the planet. But I have to sneaky, it's waiting for me, I can feel it.

HAL9018 wrote on May 4, 2009 4:44 PM - "Plus, you made wonderful zombies in the 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead!" And where would TV scifi be without the many shows produced in Vancouver, starting with "Friday the 13th," "The X-Files," "Highlander," and the various incarnations of "Stargate?" I'm sure I left out more than I included."

If you look out the right-hand side of the Skytrain while traveling between Royal Oak and Metrotown Stations, you can see the back lot of the Studio for the series "Smallville". I remember heading to work one morning, and catching sight of Superman's "Fortress of Solitude" - the prop pieces were leaning up against what looked like the back of a shed. :)

"...As my friend Valdron suggests, Canada has kept an open mind, but has also kept the values that made America what it was in the 50's, a time Roger and most of his contributors love to reminisce about here. I think, when the Blue States secede from the Union, they should annex Canada... or something like that. ;)

Just so you know, Marie, you are not the only one to lose posts."

An ironic statement, Obi-Wan. Time now to use the Force....!

The following link has been CUT into 2 parts. Cut so it cannot be read as "whole". To see the photographs of Urbana in 1975, copy and paste both parts into the hurl of a new browser window.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/

(then) galechicago/sets/72157603780066885/

And if you thwart me again, Spam Filter, the next post shall be filled with very bad words indeed cleverly disguised.

Ebert: Those photos seriously moved me. I worked at that News-Gazette office, ate in the diner, took lessons in the dance studio...

I've tested sending the URL to myself as a comment. Why should it be spam?

Ebert wrote: Those photos seriously moved me. I worked at that News-Gazette office, ate in the diner, took lessons in the dance studio...

I've tested sending the URL to myself as a comment. Why should it be spam?

HURRAY! (Jumping up and down and making noises!)

Marie 1
Spam Filter 0

Roger, you have no idea how many times I tried to share that link with you! It's what started the whole "missing post" thingy; chuckle! And now you understand. THAT'S what moved me about your Urbana blog entry, as I call it. The one describing your house and neighborhood etc. I was able to "see" what you were describing, and it amounted to parts of New Westminster BC where I grew up; a Canadian equivalent to Urbana and where you can still find bits and pieces of it, today.

As to why it's considered spam: I didn't link to the main page itself - galechicago's photostream - as hosted on flickr; it's extensive (there's a LOT of photos) and I was ironically trying to make is EASIER for readers to find the Urbana 1975 set! I've since run some tests and it turns out that's considered "hot linking" from flickr's point of view; owing to how she's managed her page settings. You can't link to a set or a single image, or copy one. And I dare say that rattled your spam filter because the link refused access or redirected it.

Here's the addy for the entire collection itself - again, cut into 2 parts just in case! NOTE: inside the B/W sets, there's also Champaign 1975, The University of Illinois in 1975, etc. She's essentially photographed (without knowing it) a huge chunk of your childhood and adolescence....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/

(then add) galechicago/collections/

I was there for hours, the first time I stumbled upon it! I took a long walk through your home town, and wandered down Goose alley and past Bunny's Liquor and cut over to the Cinema on Main Street, where I saw the News Gazette and peered inside the window of McCellan's and the Brash Flower Shop, smiling at Curry's Cafe on the corner (good food, steaks chops!) and over all, had tons of fun snooping around and investigating things - with help from a map no less!

Here's the City of New Westminster, BC, where I grew-up at the crossroads of everything; note: I lived up the hill from the Fraser River, at the "9 o'clock" position so to speak, on the photo...

http://www.nexterra.ca/media-resources/KrugerProductsNewWestminsterMillCityView.jpg

You can't see it in that shot, but Washington State is 60 miles to the right (3 o'clock.) Your gas is cheaper but our beer is better so it's a tie and why we get along; smile.

I just wanted to add that a lot of the old science fiction films mentioned on this thread genuinely do hold up well, and you won't be disappointed if you try to revisit some of them. The 4-D Man, for instance, is a surprisingly effective and intelligent film (from the director of The Blob), with an excellent performance by Robert Lansing as the title character. And mind you, I was born long after these movies were made, and I didn't get the chance to see most of them until I was an adult, when my critical faculties were fully developed. I'm probably one of a handful of people below the age of thirty-five who still insists that 1951 version of The Thing is a masterpiece and one of the greatest films of any genre, and that the 1982 adaptation is ridiculously overblown and overrated.

Ebert: Hawks' 1951 version is a masterpiece.

I am not sure (and there will be plenty who disagree) but I think mine was the last generation to really have a child's view of "going to the movies". I remember clearly the late 1960s and early 1970s Park Forest(IL) Theater and the Glenwood (a HUGE theater, with plush seats, mood lighting and classy carpeting) where the kiddie matinee were 75 cents. I saw all kinds of Disney films at these places, after the previews, a short, a cartoon and the advert for the concession stand. As I grew up, ticket prices went up from 75 cents to $1.25--which was some serious money. I saw Oliver, The Wizard of Oz*, No Deposit, No Return, Escape to Witch Mountain, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and many more. Once I saw a strange short about how spaghetti grew in trees in Italy. Somehow, I doubted that.... I watched The Electric Horseman and Towering Inferno on the huge Glenwood screen--overwhelming.

Thanks for the memories, even though I had no YoYo man in my childhood cinema experiences. Just sticky floors, great popcorn and magic once the lights dimmed.

*which scared the shit out of me. Those damned flying monkeys STILL scare me and I dislike horror and scary movies to this day. I faked dropping coins on the floor when the monkeys came on and spent the whole scene where they take Dorothy "finding" the money.

If this is a double post, I apologize. The "submit" timed out and I'm not sure if it went through.

By Shad on April 30, 2009 7:22 AM
It's funny how reading something like this can make me nostalgic for a period of time I didn't live through.

There's a word for that: retrostalgia.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Retrostalgia

1. Retrostalgia
Nostalgia for something one wasn't alive for.
"Maybe it's just retrostalgia, but I really wish disco would make a comeback."

I think retrostalgia partially accounts for why people my age (early 30s) enjoyed Indiana Jones in the '80s despite the fact that it was designed partly to pay tribute to movies from the '40s.

Roger,

Your blog entries never cease to amaze me. After reading both this entry today and the entry you wrote concerning your memories of your childhood home on East Washington Street, I have been overcome by intense feelings of nostalgia for my own childhood. I sent my wife a link to both blogs and tried to explain the emotions that welled up inside me.

As I am now 29, I am too young to have had the matinee moviegoing experiences that you speak of here, however, I am not so young that I do not share some of the same memories of the neighborhood I grew up in. Living in an old creaky house that was my world and had so many hiding places... On a short dead end street where all the houses backed onto a park and we played there all day without our parents worrying about us... I can still hear my father's booming voice calling me home at the end of a day.

Thank you for stirring up so many memories...

Marc

We had pickle juice at the Yale Theater in Claremore, Oklahoma as well.
Large dill pickles were also sold, why waste the juice?

Ebert: Pickles used to be sold at county fairs, back when they allowed real food.