Theater Roots, Star Wars Edition: Notes From the O.G.

With Rogue One opening in theaters this week, it's an excuse for my favorite symbolic Star Wars-fan story:
In 2005, as the days led up to the big May 18 opening for "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith", the news covered the traditionally symbolic straw-man images of devoted core-cosplay Star Wars fans, with Jedi robes, Stormtrooper armor and plastic lightsabers, camped out six weeks ahead in front of Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theater (to even dare properly call it the current "TCL Chinese" is an insult to movies and theaters) to be first in line for tickets.

There was just one problem:  Episode III WASN'T opening at the Grauman's Chinese.  In a break with tradition, it was opening at the newer Hollywood Arclight theater, some distance across town.
"At a movie theater not so far, far away", LA Times, 4/8/05

"Yes, we know it's not opening yet, and yes, we know it's across town," one representative fan wearily explained.  The issue, they claimed, was not so much that the Arclight had more modern cineplex ticketing and different sound from the Grauman's, but that, well, opening at the Grauman's should be traditional!  They hoped that their camping out in front of the theater would be a statement that would inspire distributors to change theaters at the last minute.
When it, um, didn't, the fans in costume tried to portray their doomed vigil as a Fans For Charity stunt, getting sponsors to fund their marathon campout to raise funds for Starlight Children's Foundation...It wasn't about tickets, they explained, it was about celebrating the unity of a worldwide fandom!  Finally, on the big day of the premiere, the event concluded with legions of fan Stormtroopers rounding up the "Rebel scum" and leading them on a big charity parade across town to the Arclight opening.  Which was meant to be a big display of fan unity, but to the non-fans, came off as "Well, after all that, maybe you might like to go see it where it's actually playing, doyyy..."
The mainstream public's reaction in 2005 wasn't quite what it was in the glory days of 1977 and '78--Most '05 teen moviegoers looked at the diehard fans putting their spare time aside for the Glorious Cause and stared, "Dude...who stands in line anymore?  Why didn't you just buy your tickets online six weeks ahead at Fandango, like everyone else?"
It was thirty years too late to try and win back their hearts and minds for the days of Stunt Fandom to get the word out.

---
I have to admit, I love that story.  I may spend a lot of time saying what damage the Rise of the Multi and Mega-plex may have done to moviegoing in the 21st century, but I side with the "That's so 90's!" kids. Whatever else the plexes have corrupted the audience mentality with--now that every movie opens in every town, and your local shopping-mall 15-screen can serve all your one-stop needs, all day--worrying about getting tickets for a movie is one thing I do not miss anymore.

But y'see, I have a reason for that.  I'm a grizzled survivor of that sometimes revered, sometimes mocked, remaining audience of what the Star Wars fans call the "O.G."--Original Generation.
I DIDN'T grow up watching the Original Trilogy on VHS in my jammies, or first see Jar-Jar Binks on a Phantom Menace DVD.  I was thirteen when Star Wars opened at the big-city theater in the summer of '77 (in those days, it wouldn't hit the suburbs until a few weeks later), and I was IN those lines that the New Kids like to decade-mythologize about.  Ohh, was I ever.
And if I don't sound happy about it--proud, yes, wistful, maybe, but not happy--it's because it wasn't the myth that everyone thinks it is.   But it was something you don't see anymore.

Actually, I didn't line up in May, and I didn't go to the Hollywood Grauman's or NYC Ziegfeld, like all the iconic photos show. 

See that, over there?  That's the Boston Sack Charles, just down near the Charles River and Longfellow Bridge, just across big Cambridge St. from the old red-brick townhouses that led to the Public Gardens.  It was Boston's most cavernously elegant Cinerama theater back before the day, but now a strip-mall/office complex, still with the big wide-widescreen main theater, but split into cineplex mini-screens on the lower floor.  All the downtown commercial-chain theaters were owned by the Sack company, later bought out by Loew's, and with 1-3 screens each, which movie would be playing where was a matter of neighborhood real-estate reputation:  The movies that got the big audience would probably playing the Charles, or the Cheri next to the convention hotels, the snooty Oscar-bait would always play the Paris, across from the Prudential building, and the not-so-fortunate might be playing underground at the Beacon Hill across from New City Hall, or in a parking garage at the Pi Alley on Washington St.  
Suffice to say, the entire Original Trilogy played one by one at the Charles.  The location became such a local tradition (especially once the '77 movie played there for a year), it somehow didn't seem right to stand in line there for anything else.

Our family didn't move to the Boston area till June, after school let out, but Dad had already moved there in May for work, and wanted to take us in on the MBTA train to show us all the Boston-insider sights.  That meant a big movie night, and by that point, three or four weeks later, the little movie that Fox wanted to "bury" had become a hot ticket for the feel-good sleeper discovery of the summer, at least until the next 007 movie would come along in August.  (According to legend, theater-distributor demand had originally been so low, Fox resorted to illegally "block-booking", ie. blackmailing, theaters into booking Star Wars in late May, if they wanted to book the surefire best-seller adaptation of "The Other Side of Midnight" two weeks later.)  The press articles, quick to jump on stories about Francis Ford Coppola's discovery, the new young breakout American Graffiti director, homaging a sci-fi movie, played up all the "Tribute to old 30's cinema" angles, to make the movie look as if it was some Hollywood-genre labor of love to Flash Gordon...So even regular city-folk who hadn't bought the "secret" posters at sci-fi conventions were standing in line.  I'd never seen a three-screen cineplex before, and hoped that we wouldn't hear anything from "Exorcist II: the Heretic" playing downstairs.
And we stood in line for a very important reason--We were trying to get tickets.  It was playing on ONE SCREEN out of three, and if you weren't in line early enough, the movie would be Sold Out.  In fact, you weren't even realistically trying to get tickets for the next show, you knew that you were standing in line at 3pm trying to get tickets for the 9:45 show.  People about ten yards ahead of you would be the last to get 7pm.  Nobody was in costume, for one rather logical reason:  We didn't know who was in it, or what the heck it was about, apart from the fact that it was "old-fashioned" sci-fi.  I had some familiarity with the characters after a readup in a Scholastic children's magazine trying to target some underground hype, while every other upscale movie fan was looking for cineaste comparisons to John Ford westerns or The Wizard of Oz.  (Because Luke Skywalker came from a farm just like Dorothy, y'see, so that made C-3PO the Tin Man and Chewie the Cowardly Lion...)

Right up there, in that second-floor glass hallway over the CVS Pharmacy, was the line (which extended all the way down to the bottom of the escalator, or down the chair-ramp to the street out back).  With twenty minutes before the next seating, and trying to keep the midnight-show ticket lines from getting too long, the theater let the next-show audience into the lobby to keep down the crowds.  All we could see of the earlier show, still going on behind little glass panels in reasonably soundproofed wood and aluminum doors, was the climactic Death Star trench battle--Or rather, just isolated peephole bits and pieces of explosion sparks and cockpit closeups, at least, that's what they looked like.  A jam-packed crowded lobby of puzzled, impatient, stand-weary folk heard one Dolby-booming explosion after another coming from the inside theater with the sparks, and with some of the explosions...audiences cheering.  Okay, that was just strange.  We hadn't heard audiences mass-cheer anything for a long time, especially not during the gritty 70's Golden Age (okay, maybe Rocky Balboa after the fight), but whatever those lucky folks ahead of us had gotten to see, something had gotten them pumped.  

And in the Carter malaise of 1977, anything that could pump you to feel optimistic and happy enough to say that good things had happened to movie characters that deserved them was something that had come in from some magical Elsewhere.  This was NEW.

Oh, and as one of the ultimate Elite O.G.'s himself, James Earl Jones, points out, when we O.G. folk first saw Darth Vader give Luke the big news about Anakin Skywalker in 1980's "The Empire Strikes Back"...we knew exactly what we thought, and so did Jones when he first got the script.  And oh, how we LOVE to frustrate N.G.'s that the "Big moment" wasn't quite what their fantasized nostalgia likes to dream it was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ1mmkKb_BQ
(As you can see, like most New Generations, the fanboy YouTube argument has since devolved into a nitpicking argument over whether the line was "No..." or "Luke..."--Even though we're clearly justified in remembering "No, Luke,..." muffled by '97 re-edits.)

And yes, Han Solo DID Shoot First.  That was because Han always shot first, it was his answer to everything.  No one appreciates that better than an O.G. who first discovered Harrison Ford in the seventies, when the future granite-face of "The Fugitive" and "Air Force One" still had a working sense of humor.

You may notice, in the YouTube clip, that most in the 2005 Sith-fan Parade are, it is safe to hazard a guess, under the age of 28, and most with a ticket for Rogue One are under the age of 39.  Star Wars had always been around as a Thing since literally before they were born, like the rocks and trees, and jumping onto the phenomenon was just something everybody geeky-cool did, sooner or later, like your first sip of Coca-Cola.  

The current generation's fan-love is an attempt to wish for something they were born too late to do.  It's a wish to see their favorite childhood DVD on the bigscreen, and try to capture Something Their Parents Did, just like 50's Grease-themed parties, or Civil War re-enactment societies.  If you dress up well enough, maybe, through some wishful miracle of time-travel, you'll have been Born Back Then too, even if you weren't.  
Even the attempt to bring "Star Wars: the Force Awakens" back to the "spiritual feel of the original", and bury the goofy George Lucas atrocities of the Prequel Trilogy, is essentially a story of a teen heroine too young to have seen the battles, against a teen villain who hero-worships a Vader-helmet relic, and snotty young new Death Star trainees trying to be Peter Cushing...A reverent New Generation dress-up movie for a reverent New Generation dress-up audience, until gray-haired old Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill show up for real.
Speaking for all us mad old grizzled O.G. hermits in the desert, it's not about Dressing Up.  It never was.  For Star Wars to be mentioned at all in the media in the fall of '77 (look, network TV's going to do a Holiday Special!) was validation that our little secret, which we called "A new hope", was finally starting to take hold with a grownup moviegoing society who were paying more attention to Vietnam-vet movies and Woody Allen comedies.  Hope for saving the Alliance went hand-in-glove with hope for discovering that Movies Were Fun Again, and our going to Star Wars was our trying to celebrate how much fun our grandparents must have had going to the Flash Gordon serial every Saturday.

The Boston Sack Charles?...Oh, that.  It isn't around anymore.  The downtown theaters all closed one by one in the 90's, to be replaced by the Loews' Boston Common 20-screen on Tremont St. (and some highway cineplexes in the Cambridge suburbs), and nearby Massachusetts General Hospital added six more floors to the future Richard B. Simches Research Center. When I went to MGH for a specialist appointment a few years ago, nobody I talked to could remember that Charles River Plaza North had ever been anything else.  You'll notice the CVS Pharmacy is still there, though.
Me, I can still remember a couple of Boston books I bought at the plaza bookstore nearby (not there anymore either), because to my Old Geezer memory, Star Wars was never a "franchise", a "phenomenon", a "Jedi religion" or a "fan lifestyle".  It was a movie night out with my folks in the big city, and even standing in the stupid line turned out to be worth it.

The TV Activist, Pt. 1: The Day the TV Guide

No, I haven't suddenly gotten bored with the topic.  It's occasionally necessary to look at what happened to television over the same time period as what happened to movies over the last forty years, to put them both into context.  You just can't talk about one for very long without talking about the other.

TV and movies always seemed to be aware of their Shared Destinies, but back then we were more conscious of their being different animals.  We watched movies on TV, and they were more interesting than the shows, but the shows were on the rest of the time.  We knew which movies we wanted to go out to a theater and see, and which shows we wanted to stay home for every week; we were impressed by a show that looked like a movie, but we occasionally hated a movie for "looking like a TV show".  Each format served its own purpose in life.  
If we can look back at how we lost TV some time after the 80's or mid-90's, we might have a better enough parallel-example understanding of how we're losing movies now to be able to do something about it in time.

In the 70's and 80's, there was one magazine every house had to buy, and every social critic made us feel like moronic dirt because we had to read it.  It was the magazine with the largest circulation in the US.
It was not what might immediately look like interesting reading, and yet we would often pore over it at length, because it told us one of the most important things we needed to know every day:  What was on TV that week.  We had to, television stations managed their own programming, and we needed to be told ahead of time what shows and local movies were on when.
Every city had the magazine tailored for its own area--If you were in NY, you could buy an issue and take it back on the train to Boston, but it wouldn't do any good to read it there; the times, shows and channel numbers only meant something in the city and local stations where you bought it.



Because of TV Guide, it was in our heads to remember TV episodes as stories.  Not chapters of a serial arc, that never began and never finished until the season finale, and that never told you anything important but to string you out for the next one that would do the same (unless you maybe happened to be watching "Knots Landing"), but self-contained stories.  When we think of vintage reruns, we think of individual moments of the characters--We don't talk about "the series", we talk about, as Friends parodied, "The One Where" Lucy was on the chocolate line, or Radar announced the death of Col. Blake, or where Bob Hartley almost walked into an elevator shaft.  We knew one isolated hour or half-hour of TV programming, meant to fill out a series of 26 or 39, with the same familiarity that we knew a favorite book.
Debuting prime-time shows even had the guest casts listed, like a theater program.  Often we weren't just told what show would be on at 7:30, we were told which show:  Even the lowliest 9:30am local-station rerun of The Brady Bunch, we were told, was The One Where Marcia promised to bring Davey Jones to the prom.


The highest honor was to get a quarter-page Close Up, which called attention to a special event or episode that was must-viewing for that night, and would probably end up being TV history.

Sometimes, during Sweeps Week, so that the sponsors knew we were hyped enough to watch, the specific new episode would be enough of an event to merit a half-page network ad.

Wrapping the listings, on the slick pages, were the feature articles, usually one on the hit cover star interview or show of the week, but often going into what was then the big issue of the 70's:  TV's effect on our national culture, and its clashes with government, big business and news information.  The "important" articles were those pitched in the TV ads for the magazines on sale at newsstands now: 



As of current date, TV Guide is no longer the top circulating magazine in the US.  Leaving aside AARP's member magazines, Better Homes & Gardens is now the top circulating commercial magazine.  TV Guide, in its current format, is now 31st.
So, how did what was once the national calendar of our pop-culture, which united us as an entire nation of living rooms, become a splashy checkout-line sycophantic servant of entertainment publicists, to cultivate fandoms to keep hot-trending "binge" shows from cancellation? 
To draw some historical cutoff line, we must look back at a moment in time known as the J. Fred Muggs Awards.

TV Guide, which was becoming the main critical journalistic source analyzing the influence of the FCC and national networks, from '80-'81 tried spinning off Panorama, a short-lived conventional-format "prestige" magazine of articles and commentary on the growing national media culture (including the unpredictable rise of cable, VCR and home computers) and TV industry.  For its first and only year-end wrap-up, the magazine featured the "first annual" J. Fred Muggs Awards--named after Dave Garroway's chimp co-host on the 50's NBC Today Show--"looking back at the people and moments in 1980 TV that made monkeys of themselves":   Panorama Jan1981.pdf 

A tad similar to Esquire Magazine's annual "Dubious Achievements", the wrapup featured humor-bites of the most embarrassing TV trends, moments, fails and quotes of the year, with humorously snarky headers.

Though well-written, the magazine's editorial ambitions turned out to be a little too prestigious for its readers, Panorama folded, and the JFMA was moved to a favorite running year-end feature of the standard TV Guide, the magazine that America did read.

In 1998, the magazine's ownership passed from Annenberg/Triangle, the founding owners, to News Corp., and then to United Video Satellite which was absorbed into Gemstar, a cable/electronics company that wanted to use the magazine in connection with VCRPlus+, a six-digit auto-programming code already being built standard into most new VCR's.  Although new revisions had shortened and condensed the TV listings (doing away with most of the weekday daytime-programming for a week-long grid), for a while this made the magazine more indispensable, since the magazine now delivered the shows, as long as you got your programming codes next to the listing.  But what was lost in the process was the controversy--The featured articles criticizing the FCC, censorship, networks and big-money sports were now replaced by pop-culture baby-boom lists of TV nostalgia and current hits.

For their first year-end crowd-dive into popularity, the new management took the JFMA label and turned it into a straight-up Esquire Dubious Achievements knockoff joking about the easy news and political-headline jokes that year.
Fans were....OUTRAGED.  It was heresy.  Letters poured into the editor asking what business did TV Guide have to do with the same old headline jokes as every other magazine, when nobody was there to "Muggsy" the real TV jokes that year?  Were the writers even interested in TV anymore?  What the new editors weren't interested in was reader outrage--It's our magazine now, the editor responded, and we thought this was funnier and a hipper reader draw on newsstands!

Finally, on July 26, 2005, the axe fell:  TV Guide was "restructuring" itself away from the couch-friend book format to a slick-paper large size magazine, focusing on entertainment articles, fandom and celebrity news.  The magazine would still feature TV listings, but only as a few pages of national-grid network/cable programming, as most were already getting their local listings from the cable provider.  (Which made sense:  Now that no local stations were showing "My Friend Irma" or "That Tennessee Beat" at 11pm or reruns of The Avengers, there was less and less need to describe individual movies or isolate local programming for every geographical area.)  
At one point in TV ads proclaiming the new format, one cheery female reader mentions the national-grid reduction, and says  "Now I don't have to go through all those boring TV listings to find the entertainment news I'm looking for!"
Er, ahem...(fiddles ear with finger)...Not sure I heard that correctly, care to run that one by us again?  I suppose the Wall Street Journal would be easier financial reading without all those boring pages of pages of stock prices?

United's other interest in acquiring TV Guide had been as owner of the Prevue Channel, which provided the program-scroll TV-listings channels for cable services--And previously, in February '99, had rebranded Prevue's top-half-of-the-screen entertainment as the new TV Guide Channel, focusing mostly on...celebrity interviews, fandom, and baby-boomer rerun-nostalgia countdown lists.

In the end, the real tragedy here?:  We have people to blame, but we don't ultimately know whose fault it really IS.  It's not all ours, but to see the new covers, we're reminded it's not all theirs.
With reruns and movies disappearing off of TV in the early 00's, replaced more and more by corporate network, syndication and cable, was it really just marketers thinking we "weren't as interested" in the shows as in the marketable stars?  Was it just cable channels giving us long interactive scrolls of the program listings for free?  Or was it just that there weren't as many listings on TV to write about anymore?

The lesson here is for movie fans as well as TV fans:  
When we stopped being told that TV was important to our culture, it stopped being important to our culture.  When our coast-to-coast living-room nation stopped believing we "had" to watch every Tuesday night, we stopped watching.  When we reduced TV to gushing binge-trend cults of fangirl audiences and celebrities, that became all the industry sold us.  
Like the saying you hear around election time, in the end, we got the TV we DESERVED.

It's a lesson to keep in mind when we give up just a little bit of loyalty for just a little bit of technological convenience.

Theater Roots, Pt. 1 - A Little Town Like Bedford Falls

In trying to pursue some goal of Movie Activism, I may have to veer briefly away into Personal Reminiscences, but there's a reason for that.  It's occasionally necessary for any of us to take a look at what we had, before we can even start to grasp a Big Picture theory of just where and when it slipped off its leash and got away from us while our back was turned.  Usually most of us find we had other things on our minds at the time, and just didn't notice.

My upbringing started about as iconically movie-fated as you could get:  The old hometown of Seneca Falls, NY, an upstate town of Finger Lakes scenery and Erie Canal mills, that now has a minor tourism industry in convincing the world it was the "real" inspiration for Bedford Falls from "It's a Wonderful Life".  And from the old Victorian houses and big iron bridge I remember from getting about town on my bike, I can't honestly say they're wrong--In fact, I think I passed the "Bailey house" on State Street every day on the way back from third grade.  (Of course, that didn't mean much to us at the time, since nobody back then had really heard of Frank Capra's public-domain movie until the 70's TV-remake with Marlo Thomas.)

It was a centralized small town, with my dad's college and Cayuga Lake a few minutes away by car, and we were lucky to have a house within five blocks of the main street--Middle school was two blocks away, and it was easy to pedal down to the library or hospital at the point where the town "started".  But it's the experience of walking downtown for a movie on Friday night or Saturday afternoon that sticks out clearly, probably because seeing movies I didn't have to depend on parents for represented the first 9-10-yo. image of independence.  I'm stuck to remember the names of any of my 5th-grade teachers, and yet I can name most of the movies, matinees included, that I saw at that little hundred-seater Strand between 1973 and 1976. 

That's not the theater, btw.  That's a 1915 picture of what was originally the Strand, a former stage theater that served as the town's main-street movie palace up through the end of the 60's.  I have dim memories of going to exactly three movies there--one was 2001, one was Disney, and one was a bizarre foreign kiddie matinee that someone must have done their own blog column upon by now--before it burned down in 1972.  I remember a balcony, and classic red-velvet curtains, and rumors of a bat up in the rafters.  I think I also remember hearing the new owners were playing a midnight-audience softcore when it caught fire.

The Strand theater I remember, I can't show you any pictures of.  I can dig up pictures of the Women's Hall of Fame Memorial Park that was built on top of the site shortly after our family moved away, as that's all that's standing in the spot now.  History and upstate-NY scenery became the town's main industry after a few longtime factories left, and I think I'd only been back once.
But the theater I remember was a little functional replacement Strand built in the vacant lot, just past the corner by the church and the hotel.  (The hotel's still there, btw.)  It was certainly a replacement building, as from the outside, it looked rather like a one-story industrial cinderblock bunker painted blue, with posters and marquee added.  The parking was what parking you could find in the remainder of the vacant lot, with a driveway out the back behind the laundromat on the corner, but the point of having a theater on the main street wasn't the parking anyway.

A local independently-owned downtown theater is not a cineplex--What downtown theaters you see today only have room for three or five movies, the one I went to had one.  They didn't have room to build twelve screens, and exile themselves out to the highway shopping-malls on the edges of town just for breathing room.  Each town had a little one to keep the local folks occupied--some were lucky enough to have two or three scattered around--you hoped that "your" movie would be the one or three playing, and if not, you took a jaunt to the neighboring town.  (Geneva, NY had one of those old-school movie-palaces with a skyline in the trim and "stars" in the ceiling.)  In the late spring, when it wasn't Friday-night-football season for the town, it was the gathering point for everyone you knew in school, for the weekly release ritual of No School-Night, and some hanging around the lobby afterwards for their parent-pickup.  You didn't wait to go to a movie, you waited to go to the theater, and saw anything goofy enough to strike your fancy if "your" movie wasn't playing there--You knew why you were waiting for the Friday afternoon bell, and you knew what would be talked about on Monday in school.
The lobby of the local theater was never the brightly lit blitz of corporate marketing that a cineplex theater is today (even the theater itself was the size of one cineplex screen, and no stadium seating)--It was more like someone's well-built home-theater den, with a popcorn machine and vintage posters, and curtains separating it from the seats.  If I remember movies from '74-'76, I remember them as the lobby posters on the wall, to Logan's Run and Silver Streak, Soylent Green and The Pink Panther Strikes Again.  Thinking "I have to see that here" attaches my memory to every movie I did see there, without having to leave the hometown comforts.

I remember my first whole Hitchcock, when Family Plot turned out to be a "safe" PG--Oh good, it didn't have those seagulls in it.  I remember having some actual stake in staying up late to root for the Oscars every year, since I had actually seen Murder on the Orient Express and All the President's Men.  I remember Blazing Saddles (my dad sneaked me in), Young Frankenstein and Monty Python and the Holy Grail on opening week, before any showoff audience member could quote a single line.
And because this was the Gritty Golden-Age 70's, when there was nothing for families to go see except Disney revivals, I remember local mom-and-pop theaters stuck to show something on Saturday afternoon, which meant the Kiddie Matinee.  There was a big industry for it back then--Christmas always meant those two strange Santa Claus movies from the 60's--and even major studios like MGM and Columbia got into the act, trying to get their back catalog going by selling 10-yo.'s on the Saturday thrills of Forbidden Planet and Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.  In those days, old movies were "unwanted" enough to show to kids, and our Management believed that old 30's comedies, with a few Stooges Shemp-shorts thrown in, would keep fourth-graders in their seats when there was nothing else syndicating to show.  I had heard old-Hollywood mention of people like the Marx Brothers and WC Fields, but it was $1.50 Saturday-killing matinees that first exposed me to "A Night at the Opera" and "The Fatal Glass of Beer"--At school, some of my friends actually did recognize jokes about nights not fit for man nor beast (ploof!).
One afternoon, since Mom had gotten used to me getting out of the house to keep up with her Saturday-cleaning urges, I decided to stay after the "kiddy" matinee to the 3pm showing of the "real" feature that day:  Airport 1975.  (And yes, like everyone else back then, I wondered why a "1975" movie was being shown in 1974, and whether it would be more proper to wait.)  It was...okay--I've only learned to look back on Airport movies with nostalgia, but back then they were a bit of an annoyance--it had Helen Reddy in a bit part, and planes were cool in those days.  But it felt almost like a dare; I mean, ten, that's "PG age" isn't it?  It felt like independence, not having to sell the parents on a big drive-out movie night, with the usual family-restaurant dinner, and trying to make the movie sound interesting to grownups.  This was my thing.  And like the bike I took to get there, I was actually a Me enough to have a My Thing.

Growing up in a small town taught me a lot of things, not just about how to save banks or how angels get their wings--It taught me that what you have in the center of a town is the identity of the town, and everything that happens in it shapes what people think of themselves as members of the town.  Corporate chains don't shape a town, a town decides just how much of the outside world it really needs in it, and how much it does nicely without.
Driving out to the big cineplex out in the strip-mall wilderness, or attached to the shopping mall, with its ocean of parking, makes the cineplex feel as if it's establishing its own sovereign domain--You must come to it, if you want to be granted your allotment of blockbuster from the Studio Powers on High, and you bring your nasty texting cellphone to keep from being cut off from civilization.  And yes, the first cineplex I discovered did feel like an airline terminal, which made the movie's "gate departure" feel more like an event.  But a Main Street (or, in Seneca's case, Fall Street) storefront is not out to conquer your expectations, but meet them, as just one of the regular folks who live there full time.  It's part of what you're there to do on a weeknight, even if it's not the season when strange out-of-town folk might come into town to do it.  Whatever was there, you'll take with you down the road when you ever have to leave.

Like the towns that look down on the invasions of Starbucks Coffee and Wal-Marts, some towns are still lucky to have locally-run downtown independent commercial theaters, left over as a bit of local pride from the days when, well, that was just what they had.  Most are a sampling of the big blockbusters, some still run a few midnight classics in the college towns.
If you're living in such a town, support that theater you've got, treasure it, and do everything you can to keep it alive as a community staple.  It may not be the same as striking a match at the drugstore for good luck, but years from now, you'll still remember it.