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| Luther Looking for a 2025 Auditorium Where Seats Are All Filled. No Luck So Far. |
Greenbriar Turns Twenty Today
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| I Bet the College Park Looked Like This Before They Finally Tore It Down |
Forgive freestyle stream of random as how else to cope with twenty years
at this? Yesterday on You Tube was a commentator I respect who called current moviegoing,
movies themselves, a “zombie” art form like opera and ballet. Fighting words?
He’s not alone to lament passing of the communal experience, the “magic” of
sardining inside a cinema. How meaningful is such loss if you have almost as
big a screen at home and no interruption unless you create it yourself? Darkened
space commands attention, but do half-watching watchers with digital doo-dads respect
darkened space? That’s me honestly wondering, for what do I know not having sat
through a theatrical feature since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where much as
I liked the movie, more of attention was on dim projection the bane of digital.
Do cinemas fill up anymore? All I’m hearing is how empty they are. A
friend who has worked at theatres since 1977 says his six plex is running on fumes. He
recently had twenty people spread across six screens for an entire weekend. People
have said since silent days that film was finished, a worse crisis perhaps in the fifties, but something always came to the rescue. What now, or is such a save
past possible? There are documentaries a-plenty at You Tube about paradise that
was movie palaces, interviewees basking in childhood clover. How close are we to
where nobody’s left to remember that? I used to think plenty would be around always to first-hand recall B westerns and serials (did I expect such fans to live forever?), but alas, none but some of us survive
to thrive on a gone generation’s memory of Ken Maynard and Spy Smasher. I
missed their bliss of moviegoing when it really was blissful.
28 Comments:
It was good of you to share with us the books you've found worthwhile over the years, as you have open eyes and a marvelous way of expressing what you see. So, pay no attention to soulless minders which have not been programmed to appreciate life in its variety. Certainly you're a fan, in that you have a real love of the movies and the people who made and enjoy them--even those who exploited them--but more than that, your skill as a writer and insight have placed you among the genuine scholars of film. In mining the oft neglected lode of showmanship, you've restored it as a living thing, no matter the number of academic careers you've undoubtedly launched. This blog, then, not only offers a perspective that I find endlessly fascinating, but an invitation to open my own heart to life as revealed through this special medium. My hope is that you continue your work for as long as you love it, and that such love should not fade away.
John, for years in the late 80s through the mid 90s, I had a 16mm projection system in my home (specializing in wide screen 50s-70s films - I had IB Tech prints of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, JUNIOR BONNER, DIRTY HARRY, etc.) One publication, The Big Reel, published in Madison, NC, allowed me to purchase these films from across the US. Each year, one of my business partners and myself (I worked for years as a commercial film director) would make an annual trek to Madison to visit with Don Key, The Big Reel's editor Don Key, had worked in the carpet cleaning business, but his interest in film collecting eventually led him to publish a tabloid size newspaper (monthly, then bimonthly) starting in '74. The Big Reel was literally the bible of film collecting for years, and allowed me, and so many others, to stockpile our collections.I get the feeling you might have crossed paths with Don (he passed away in 2018). Along with the late preservationist, Mike Vraney (Something Weird Video), Don helped collectors amass the lore that made collective entertainment special. Neighbors and friends would all gather in my living room to behold the wonderment of "The Magic Lantern," preferring the chatter of projection as opposed to the new media, "video tape." Fine article, John. It underscores the passion all of us share in the face of a modern world rife with AI and CGI.
Hey Tommy --- I got to know Don Key over the years he published THE BIG REEL. He would show up at all the Western Film Fairs, first in Charlotte, then later when the shows moved to Winston-Salem. Also ran into him once at George Ashwell's house when I went up to trade for a print of THE MISSISSIPPI GAMBLER. Don later put me in touch with Eddie Quillan, who was a BIG REEL subscriber. I wanted to interview Mr. Quillan about 1935's MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. Someday that talk will be part of a MUTINY column, whenever GPS can get around to it.
The art of putting bums on seats is not one that can be learned, if it can be learned, in a classroom. I say, "If it can be learned," because it is a throw of the dice every time. Still, there are things that can be learned when Providence decides to swing in our favour.
I remember reading about a picture that bombed everywhere except in one location. That one location threw out the ad campaign that went with the picture. They created their own.
For myself I watch the audience. If they walk out excited I know I have something I can work with. One year I booked the first 16mm screening of WOODSTOCK for New Year's at Rochdale College in Toronto. In the bottom right corner I had a Gustav Klimt drawing of a naked woman dancing with an alligator. In typewriter type I wrote 7pm Sunday, THE LOVES OF ISADORA. That was all. WOODSTOCK did fine but ISADORA was packed. When the picture ended everyone walked out in shock. It had hit me hard. It had hit them hard. I called Universal. I asked what they were doing with the picture. They said, "No one wants it." I said, "Leave it here."
I ran it seven days a week twice daily for months.
People who run a different movie every night (as most do outside the industry today) are, in the main, clueless. They don't know beans about show business though they can talk for years about the art of the motion picture.
Theatres are sitting empty that should be full.
The motion picture industry today is run by people who came out of colleges, universities and film schools. They wasted their money and time. Pleasing professors is the goal there.
The audience for the arts, the real audience, has always been the opposite of academia. It is working class people that make up the bulk of humanity. They are the audience.
Terry Ramsaye, in A MILLION AND ONE NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES, wrote that the audience for movies is between 11 and 30, primarily between 14 and 24 and primarily working class girls.
In the 1970s the decision was made to go after young boys because the people making movies were the boys who had grown up watching them. Doing that the industry lost the girls, the women and the men.
Beginning with THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) "A" movies were first seen at Legit Theatre Prices.
What motion picture today opens at Legit Theatre Prices?
I have done programs that have resulted in HUGE turnouts at the venues they played in. I insisted on premium prices. Theatres said, "Our audience won't pay a premium price." I said, "They will." They did.
I learned this wonderful art/business while doing. Perhaps I am the only one who did.
At a university the people who had brought me there said, "This is the biggest turnout we have ever gotten." I said, "How many do you usually get?" They said, "Four."
The worst part is that they were happy getting four.
William M. Drew asked me to re-score the 1925 LES MISERABLES. I had thought it was an American picture. I learned not only that it was French but also that it premiered at Legit Theatre (Broadway) prices to enormous success. New York got a 4 hour cut. Europe got a Six Hour Picture.
I decided to show the 6 hour version at what today is Legit Theatre Prices, $100 a seat.
People are excited about coming.
The movies shot themselves in the foot when they labelled the industry as cheap entertainment.
So, yes, the movies today aren't packing theatres.
Don't write off theatres. The fault is not with them.
I want to see those dead theatres brought back to life.
John, you can certainly include your two books in any film buff's "must own" list. I know I have. Time is kind of a double-edged sword: we have all these books, and many of the films themselves, more easily available to us, but we've lost the public venues to actually see the films as intended, or phenomenon of movies all over the tube at all hours. However, I'm always thankful for people like you, Richard M. Roberts, Rob Stone, Steve Massa, Kit Parker, et al, who continue to let use have and enjoy nice things. Happy Anniversary!
Thanks, William. One problem public venues now have, I think, is home systems being better in terms of quality and consistency, since consumers attentive enough to equipment they maintain and digital movies they collect can assure themselves and guests of a first-rate show every time.
"The Art of Selling Movies" remains a favored random browse. Also the Greenbriar archives, where I've often looked up and revisited essays. Where else are we to find thoughtful commentary on "Babes in Toyland"
(Continued because hand slipped on keyboard) ... "Babes in Toyland", or Abbott and Costello, or how movies now held in high or low regard actually performed in the real world? In this age where it seems like every film is a high-budget swing for the fences, it's almost shocking that studios could crank out Bs and programmers guaranteed to break even.
In Argentina when VHS editions were booming, the major labels almost never bother to publish the classic films that were surfacing in the United States. This led to minor domestic labels issuing them with no problems because copyrights were never enforced as long as they pay some taxes. Plus, a few film collectors offered their collections of that included films that were NOT issued in the United States. After moving to Massachusetts, I was able to watch "Filmoteca, Temas de Cine" that frequently presented both traditional Cineclub titles along with titles available nowhere else, and along with me people in here began to follow this show and save the presentation that included some lost films in the United States. COVID-19 put an end to this, although the show moved for a few years to YouTube were at least it continued to show obscure shorts. The YouTube channel was, sadly, abandoned when they were able to go back to television, but after the Milei's government took over, everything ended. Then, the YouTube channel was reactivated until it was abandonned, although there have been announcements of restarting it.
The only times my wife & I go to a movie theater is for very special occasions. "The Irishman" at a Broadway house, and "One Battle After Another" in VistaVision (one of only three theaters in the world running it that way). Both had respectful audiences; both looked great. My wife still can't stop talking about how wonderful an experience VistaVision was. Other than those, we're happy with our 49" HDTV while eating dinner.
By the way, I commend you for making it through "What Makes Pistachio Nuts" cover to cover. I gave up 2/3 through and promptly dropped it off in our co-op's library/basement. It struck me as someone's thesis for a Masters Degree. Now, Curtis' WC Fields bio is worth another read.
I agree that "What Makes Pistachio Nuts" has a heavy academic bent, but there's much there I had not considered about screen comedy and how it overlapped, and differed, from vaudeville and humor preceding it. Jenkins did a fine job too of explaining why it was necessary to dilute comedy with romance subplots in order to satisfy a mass audience. Academic works can he hard to sift through, but often there is wheat amidst chaff, an informative and insightful chapter after four or five that are deadly dull or so jargon-laden they can't be understood. "What Makes Pistachio Nuts" is for me one of the really good academically inclined efforts.
Your list of "must have" film books reminds me of my own modest library as a teen in the late 60s: I wore out a copy (paperback) of Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By and had to buy a used hardback copy a few years back. Brownlow's book sparked my interest (obsession) in searching out old and classic movies. Volume 15 of the 1937 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, in the Motion Picture article(s), had an article about movie make-up written by L.C. (Lon Chaney), and anything by the great Kalton C. LaHue.
I remember checking Lahue's books on Keystone and silent serials out of the library and writing a grade school book report on "Kops and Custard". Most of my earliest film reading came from local libraries, and eventually the UCSC library (which also had back issues of Cinefantastique). I bought Everson's "Films of Laurel and Hardy" with birthday money, fantasizing about features that never aired on television (not in complete form, anyway) until I was nearly voting age. Books about old movies weren't always easy to come by, but they were far more accessible than actual old movies (beyond Blackhawk Bulletin offerings).
As a self-supporting adult with some discretionary income, I began acquiring treasures from clearance tables and used bookstore stacks, with the occasional splurge. Eventually scored two Lahue volumes on Keystone, and a lot of assorted boomer pop culture books. Recently bought the big new one about Laurel and Hardy merchandise. Books on collectibles, from coffee table tomes to softbound prices guides, can be as satisfying as owning the actual artifacts. Sometimes more so, since the Remco Drive-In Movie does not live up to promise of the box. And often you simply want proof that a Marx Ben Hur Playset (with little plastic slave market) really existed.
For whatever odd reason, I did not come upon any of the Lahue books at stores in our vicinity, not even larger ones in Winston-Salem. I do remember Blackhawk offering them. The author certainly was prolific. For all I know, there are several more by Lahue that never crossed my path.
Read somewhere that Lahue was ill used by his publishers and abandoned writing about cinema. His name appears on numerous books on auto repair and such, pramatic but evidently more remunerative.
So my New Year's presentation of LES MISWERABLES (1925) went on. People never asked, "$100 for a movie." They left saying, "What else are you doing?"
Dan Mercer tells how he almost got to see KING KONG VS. GODZILLA:
"King Kong vs. Godzilla" was the attraction at a "kiddie matinee" of the Fox Theatre and I really wanted to see it. Apparently, every boy in the town had the same itch. When I got to the theater, a deep line already stretched from the box office and along the sidewalk fronting the property. I was by myself, as usual, though it had never been a problem before. When I would settle into my seat and the lights dimmed, it was as though I was among the other boys there and this was an experience we were sharing together. At school the following Monday, I might hear them talking among themselves about what they had seen, or rather, what we had seen. Waiting among this throng, however, I realized that most of them were as young as I was when I first started attending Saturday matinees and, at 13, I was much older than them. I felt out of place. The last ticket was sold long before I would have gotten to the box office window, the crowd disbursed with a disappointed murmur, and I went on my way. It was the last time I came to a "kiddie matinee," except much, much later, when I would take my son to midday showings.
"Dim projection the result of digital." When I gave up the ghost on 16mm what sold me was the quality and the brightness of my first digital projector as compared to my theatrical 16mm. It is the theatre owner not the equipment. Reducing the brightness so that lamps last longer saves money but will cost the theatre its audience. So too will allowing people in the theatre to talk and behave rudely. An interviewer once said to me, "People in the industry say you are crazy. They say you throw people out for talking during your presentations." I said, "I do not believe people go out to the ballet, a concert, the opera, the movies or the theatre to hear the audience talk during the presentation nor to experience them behaving rudely." The person said, "I never thought of that." KING KONG VS. GODZILLA was, I understand, the top box office picture of the Toho Godzilla series. I was able to see it in an evening screening. By myself, like you. I love the enthusiasm of kids at the movies.
I for one hope you continue posting for many more years, your experiences make your insights invaluable for those interested in cinema history.
As to what's happening with cinemas today: judging from the box office numbers I see at various places online, it seems to me that you could still find crowded children's matinees if you knew where and when to look for such, because animated and semi-animated films made for young people - that is to say, those under 15 or so years of age - are still producing, and are still capable of producing, very large profits.
Those films are usually successful at the box office not only in North America, but around the world too.
Perhaps the medium of movies has always been most appropriate as a venue for children's entertainment, and movies were only attempting or pretending to be for adults for a few decades - until the dazzle and novelty of the tech being used to make and display them wore off, the attempt failed and/or the pretense collapsed, and the adult public moved on to something more entertaining.
Had not occurred to me that animated features could be the salvation for latter-day theatre exhibition, since as you say they would have more worldwide appeal.
Also, from what I understand, Asian features currently lead the animation field, more popular even than what Disney has lately produced.
Congratulations!!
"Greenbriar is cocktail peanuts beside these tall drinks." Not true. They are good. Greenbriar is better.
Most grateful for these and other kind words.
There's an article about Kalton C. Lahue in "Comique: The Classic Comedy Magazine," volume 1, number 1, available in the Internet Archive. He gave up writing about film simply because those books never sold well enough to support himself and his family. His later books were mostly automotive guides, which may not have been as satisfying a topic as silent comedy, but at least he was making a living.
Lahue died fairly young at 59. At least that seems fairly young to me.
Re: that photo of Don Knotts as Luther Heggs from "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken." That was one of my grandfather's favorite movies. My dad recalled that "Chicken" continued to turn up every so often at the local drive-in, this ever after it had run on television, and Grandpa would load everyone into the car and they'd all watch Luther confront a ghost one more time.
I'd be curious to know if these periodic revivals of "Chicken" were unique to the small town in rural Tennessee were my folks lived or if they happened elsewhere, too.
Heartiest congratulations on two decades of blogging, and thank you for being one of my favorite sites!
Love your column featuring favorite film books, many of which are on my own shelves.
Best wishes,
Laura
Thank you so much, Laura. We've both been at this for quite some time, haven't we. And I hope for a whole lot longer.
Very hard to say when SAN ANTONIO (or any other pre-'48) first turned up in color on the Tube, John. No idea when it was even AVAILABLE in color (to deep-pocketed stations) after its 1957 theatrical reissue via Dominant (double-billed with VIRGINIA CITY). First dibs in New York went to WCBS (2/21/60), which very rarely showed any features in color until 1965 and certainly didn't spring for color prints of any the hundreds of pre-'48s it had under license. SAN ANTONIO made its prime-time premiere in our market via WNEW on 1/3/67. The Times and Daily News lists it as being in color, but in more experience newspapers of this era where highly unreliable when it come to color movie broadcasts. The Times listed hundreds of black-and-white movies as being shown in color. So who knows?
Appreciate this info, Lou. I'm guess we didn't have SAN ANTONIO in color down here until the early seventies, simply because most VHF stations were done with the pre-49 WB titles and by this time they were being picked up by UHF independents. These, including Channel 36 in Charlotte, did have color prints, and used them frequently in prime time.
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