In Baltimore, we give directions according to what used to be there. So if I was sending you to the Double-T Diner, for example, I would tell you to go down Route 40, past where the Westview Theater used to be.
Am I the only one to find movie theater names evocative? Baltimore had the Westview, which started as two theaters, rather grand ones, with a wishing fountain. Over time, it expanded — to four, then six, then 10, until it was so big that it was possible to miss the first 10 minutes of your movie while trying to navigate the lobby. You can catch a glimpse of the Westview in “Tin Men,” but it’s masquerading as a cocktail lounge. A Circuit City and Staples occupy its old lot, while a Home Depot has been built where the drive-in used to be.
Other theaters from my youth — the Pikes (now a kosher restaurant, saw “True Grit,” “Take the Money and Run” and “The Heartbreak Kid”); the Westway (storefront church/”Billy Jack” “Andromeda Strain” “M*A*S*H); the Patterson Park (Creative Artists Alliance/”Star Wars”) and the Liberty (strip center/”Animal House” and “Three Women.”)
Ah, well, The Rotunda (“Outrageous”) and The Senator (“Gettysburg”) and the Charles (“Stevie) still stand.
Laura,
When I was a kid we lived three doors from the “Majestic” in Homer, MI, a singularly misnamed movie theater–not unlike those in “The Last Picture Show” or “The Smallest Show on Earth.” It had no lobby, it did have a front overhang with a line of 25 watt bulbs (one in every other socket), but no marquee. The only way anybody knew the name was from the handbills I used to deliver with the monthly offerings on it. I remember two weekly schedules of features, “Tues. Wed.
and Sat. Sun.” and the expanded “Tues. Wed.,Thurs. Fri. and Sat.Sun.” My mother believed that the latter would ruin me.
The “first run” movies were about 6 mo. to 1 yr. behind Jackson, Battle Creek and the other “big cities” and there were numerous older films–which would now be called classics. There were a lot of “B” movies of every sort, especially “cowboy” movies (Roy Rogers, Gene Autry,Randolph Scott, Tex Ritter, The Durango Kid, et. al.) along with a lot of top movies (about 6 months to a year after release). I saw my first Marx Brothers movie there (A Night at the Opera), along wigh King Kong, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Frankenstein, Sands of Iwo Jima, just about every musical filmed at the time, and more than I have time or space to mention. I loved it–shabbiness and all (although the owner did put in upholstered seats and paint the inside once. I have loved movies ever since.
I used to fantasize about going back “home,” and rennovating the Majestic (and adding restrooms), renaming it “The Smallest Show on Earth,” and showing classic films–but I would probably be the only member of the audience.
Once my memory is jogged, it’s hard to turn it off.
Mike
Laura,
I am from the southwest corner of Virginia, Blacksburg, home to Virginia Tech (formerly VPI). All of my mother’s family is from there. When I was in early college, I had a crush on my cousin, Howe, and we went to see East of Eden with James Dean in the local theater, The Lyric. As time passed, we married others and the theater was replaced by multiplex theaters on the main road, leave the downtown Lyric empty and abandoned. It has since been rennovated, redecorated, refitted and reopened, with a plaque on one of the seats dedicated to my mother and Howe’s father. I wonder if East of Eden will be playing there some day? Nice, the way things work out sometimes.
Good morning Laura.
While my first movie memory was of seeing “Mary Poppins” at the Senator, it was the Strand Theater in the Dundalk Shopping Center where I spent much of my early movie time. The Strand is a Dollar Store now, but it lives on in the popcorn cup scene in “Diner.”
We didn’t often have candy in our house, so I will always associate the Strand with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I am also probably one of a handful of peole who can remember the entirely forgettable film “Burnt Offerings,” but only because I saw it at the Strand on my first date. Like most high school romances, our relationship didn’t last, but it played longer than the movie.
The Strand was also the setting for a memorable “Mother knows best” incident. I whined endlessly when my mother decreed that we would spend the afternoon following the last day of 1st grade seeing the “Sound of Music.” I knew nothing of the movie, and I thought the title sounded much too babyish. I remember leaving the theater surprised at how much I liked the movie, probably because of all the army uniforms.
Once upon a time, way back in 1976, there was a wonderful man I met in a movie screening and discussion group for film fanatics from the Philadelphia area, where we both grew up and where I still live. We got to be friends, and even after he moved to New York a couple of years after we met, we stayed in touch. Maybe, just maybe, there was a little romance involved in our later encounters in the Big Apple, but the timing was never right, so until recently, we had not talked for a long, long time – almost 12 years.
I found him again through the thinking girl’s do-it-yourself finder of lost loves: a Google search. And from the first moment I heard his voice on an archived website for a radio station, doing a story about Episode I of “Star Wars” opening in Prague, I knew I was a goner and that I had to get in touch with him. Yes, I did say Prague – that would be the Czech Republic, where he now lives. I emailed him, he emailed me back, and we were off to the races. So for you fans of wildly impractical, deeply romantic, geographically undesirable love stories – you know, the kind of tale that the Lifetime Channel would reject: this is the story for you, because I am *so* the co-star of this movie, and it is a blast.
You might never know we are 4000 miles away from each other – there are a lot of emails, I have embraced the world of instant messaging, and God bless the person who invented the internet phone hookup that provides my guy with a Philadelphia area code phone number in the Czech Republic. Our frequent conversations travel all over the place, but they often return back to what brought us together in the first place – the movies. We share memories of favorite films, acting heroes, and the movie houses that we both went to growing up. The names of these theaters don’t necessarily swell with the poetry of a Lyric or a Majestic, but when we talk about having gone to the movies at the Pilgrim Gardens, the Lawrence Park, the Boyd, the Clifton Heights, the Yeadon, the Waverly, the TLA – well, magic *is* happening. We are denying the time/space continuum, and I feel that we are as close to one another as those long ago years when we sat in the dark together and watched “Smokey and the Bandit”, “The Muppet Movie”, or “A Little Night Music” (yes, there was a film version with Elizabeth Taylor – it was lovely).
My love of movies has been a touchstone all my life, as important a part of defining who I am as just about anything I can think of. To have this love resonate on so many different levels in this impossibly beautiful sequel to a relationship I thought had passed me by years ago – well, it’s almost too much to comprehend. But it *is* happening, praise the Lord, so these days, I find myself scanning the internet for a whole new set of theaters to explore: the movie houses of Prague. I look forward to the time ahead spent with my guy, together in the dark at the Kino Svetozor, the Evald, or the Bijasek Kotya. There is just one important question I have remaining: I wonder what kind of candy they serve in Czech movie theaters? I’ll keep you posted.
The first movie I ever saw was Disney’s “Fantasia,” when I was three years old. My mother tells me that I laughed so hard at the elephants dancing the ballet that I got the hiccups and had to be taken out to the lobby and plied with cups of water — I was too small to manage the drinking fountain — until I recovered. This was in San Francisco, but I don’t remember the name of the theatre.
In my home town (Eugene, Oregon), though, there were three theatres downtown and one near the campus of the University of Oregon. Dates took you to the Rex, the Heilig, or the McDonald, all on Willamette Street. You went with your girlfriends to the Mayflower on campus and giggled if any of the college boys glanced at you.
The last time I went to the Heilig was with my mother and grandmother to see the newly re-released “Gone with the Wind” when I was in college. We sat in the balcony and ate Milk Duds and Raisinets and Walnettos, and everyone cried when Melanie died. My grandmother was born in Tennessee to a family whose fortunes survived the Civil War, only to be lost by the turn of the century through bad investments, early deaths, and general inertia, but she grew up very like Scarlett O’Hara, with devoted family retainers who stayed on after emancipation to work for wages. It wasn’t until we’d seen this movie together that I realized Grandma had been a real person before her life became centered around husband and children and running a household without servants. Lordy, how I love the movies!