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THE ALMOST FORGOTTEN THRILL OF MOVIE-GOING  This columnist had his faith in the movie-going experience renewed when he discovered THE COLOSSUS in Langley, B.C., an 18-screen mega-plex with an IMAX theater attached. From a distance, it looks like a spaceship that just landed in a parking lot, but it's about as perfect as a movie theater can get today. |
How to see a movie best: Go to Canada!
of TheColumnists.com
When I desperately need a major movie-going experience these days, I usually go to a foreign country. That's not as big a deal as it once was because I now live within spitting distance of a foreign country.
Not that I would ever actually spit at this particular foreign country, which is our northern neighbor, Canada. Quite the contrary. I love Canada--and one of the most obvious reasons is that I love being able to drive, in less than half an hour, to one of the greatest movie houses I've ever known in a lifetime of seeing movies where they are supposed to be seen--on giant screens in giant movie houses stuffed with people.
The theater I'm referring to is The Colossus in Langley, British Columbia, just south of Vancouver. Though, technically, it's an 18-screen mega-plex, it has no dinky boxes they dare to call theaters. No, it has nothing but huge individual theater rooms, all with stadium-style, rocking loge seats and flawless state-of-the-art projection with directional stereophonic sound. And, to top it all, it also has a mighty IMAX theater with a two-story floor to ceiling screen where you can see the latest and greatest of giant screen films in 3-D.
Viewed from a distance, The Colossus looks like the gargantuan flying saucer from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which has just landed in the middle of the world's largest parking lot. When I first arrived there, I waited to hear that famous five-note musical greeting from the aliens. That they didn't have at The Colossus, darn it.
The viewing experience at The Colossus is impossible to imagine being improved. You don't care if the center from the Harlem Globetrotters sits in front of you because each row of seats is elevated way above the row below. And if you're that giant basketball player, you're content to know you can sit comfortably with enough leg room that you don't have to hang your legs over the seat in front of you.
Yes, the delays at the border can make your trip to this theater a little unpleasant these days. They're tearing up roads everywhere to get ready for the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver in 2010 and security has been intense ever since the 9/11 attack of 2001.
But once you're settled into your seat at The Colossus, you forget all that immediately. And you also forget the miseries of attending movies in your regular chopped-up multi-plex where the automated projection often gets out of synch and the only pictures that seem to be clear are the ones in the commercials they show while waiting for the feature to start.
For me, the knowledge that I can go to a place and experience movies enjoyably the way I experienced them in my youth is wholly satisfying. I believe I became addicted to movies because going to see them at a theater full of people was such a pleasant activity. People in the 1940s behaved themselves in theaters. They didn't act like they were in their family room, watching TV and talking loud enough so the neighbors next door could hear.
My very young childhood was spent in San Jose, Calif., then a comfortably large town, but not yet a sprawling, noisy, smogged out parking lot for cars headed for the outer reaches of Silicon Valley. My childhood San Jose was the San Jose of Dionne Warwick's hit song "Do You Know the Way To San Jose?" That song was written by a composer who had visited San Jose during the 1940s and saw the lovely town I remember. I recall Dionne Warwick's reaction when she flew into San Jose to promote her record. I believe her comment was something like "EEEK!"
The biggest theater in town was The Fox. Mom would take me and my little brother there whenever a new picture opened. We went on weekdays during the daytime. The theater had this enormous lobby that seemed to stretch for miles. We often had to spend half the day there, waiting in line for the next screening. I remember waiting so long to see Betty Hutton in "Incendiary Blonde" (1945) that I wet my pants. I believe a couple hundred other kids also wet their pants that day.
Everybody went to the movies in the 1940s. I believe 1946 is still considered the all-time greatest year for movie attendance, in terms of bottoms filling theater seats. TV hadn't begun to siphon off the crowds yet and really wouldn't until 1949-50.
In those days, movie theaters were big and comfortable, even in small towns. In 1947, we moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., which had two movie theaters: The Del Mar, a huge rococo "palace" with a balcony, that was built in the early 1930s on the main street of town, and The NEW Santa Cruz, which was an old theater one block away that had been remodelled.
Theater Del Mar played two first-run double bills a week. The first played Sunday-Monday-Tuesday and the second double bill played on Friday and Saturday. On Wednesday and Thursday, they often slipped in a third double bill of films that weren't considered "mainstream" popular. For instance, I saw the acclaimed international film festival hit "The Little Kidnappers" there in 1954 and loved it just as much as Jim Bawden loved it when he saw it in Toronto (See Bawden's column in this edition). However, there wasn't that big a crowd for it in Santa Cruz in those days.
The NEW Santa Cruz, which also had a balcony, played second-run double bills. I loved that old place because that's where I saw the revivals of classic films like "Lost Horizon" and "It Happened One Night," all the "B" westerns with The Durango Kid, Jimmy Wakely and "Wild" Bill Elliott, the serials like "Brick Bradford" with Kane Richmond and "The Vigilante" with Ralph Byrd. My first mystery credentials were earned there because that's where they played Charlie Chan, The Crime Doctor and all the "B" detective movies.
On June 12, 1949, the Golden State theater chain opened a third movie house in Santa Cruz, The Rio. That was in my neighborhood, the East Side. It was trim and efficient and sparkling new. It had a curved "cyclorama" screen that was supposed to improve clarity. It even had a "crying room" where Moms could take their babies to squall without disturbing other patrons. On Saturday mornings, they had a special show for kiddies with cartoons. On Friday and Saturday nights, they had "BINGO" games on stage, run by the theater manager. Getting one of the theater's 936 seats on Bingo nights wasn't easy. The joint was packed. I spent so much time there--I even attended my junior high school graduation there--that it was like my own home, only with a persistent smell of popcorn and stickier floors.
The one great gap in my movie-going as a kid were all the movies made by MGM. None of them played in Santa Cruz during the 1950s. A new theater called The Osocales was built in nearby Soquel and another called The Capitola in the nearby beach town called Capitola-By-The-Sea. Those two theaters are where all the MGM movies played. I was too young to drive, so I never got out there unless I could hitch a ride with someone.
There also was a drive-in theater, but most high school boys who went there never even bothered to hang the speakers inside their windows because they were mainly there to make out with their girl friends.
Though theaters were messier then--and smoking was allowed in them all--I still remember being comfortable in all of them. Until well into the 1950s, most theaters had uniformed ushers who took you to your seats with a flashlight. Though candy and soft drinks may have been slightly more expensive than they were at the grocery store, they weren't outrageously costly like they are now--and the candy bars weren't a foot wide, nor did popcorn and drinks come in giant tubs. Garbage trucks didn't have to drive down the aisles after every showing.
Until I started college in 1956, I saw every movie that came to Santa Cruz from at least 1950-56, often more than once. I kept a log of what I'd seen, how many stars I gave it, who was in it and who directed it. I noted the price of the ticket and the date of the showing. Looking back at those logs today, I can understand why someone might say, "Get a life, Ron!" However, they didn't say, "Get a career, Ron!" As it turned out, all that knowledge I packed my head with at the movies provided me with my life's work in later years as a TV critic and movie reviewer.
I was rough on the girls I dated because when we went to the movies, I refused to enter the theater if the movie had already started. Reading the opening credits was essential to me. Some of the prettiest girls were the slowest to get ready to go to the movies. However, I finally knew I'd met my match when the girl I eventually married stood up to me when I refused to enter a screening of "War and Peace" with Audrey Hepburn.
"Once the lion has roared, I'm not going in," I told her.
"Well, the lion hasn't roared on this one yet--and it never will because this isn't an MGM picture," she replied.
"Wow!," I thought. How many pretty girls know which studio released a movie? This one is a keeper! Nearly half a century later, we're still going to the movies together, usually a few minutes earlier than most of the other moviegoers though. We also are the last to leave because we both like to read ALL the credits. I'm still crushed if I miss who was driving the honey wagon or who the company accountant was.
Once TV began to erode the movie audience, our theaters took it on the chin. The NEW Santa Cruz folded and was turned into a complex of other business uses, including a restaurant. The Rio closed for awhile, but reopened as a performance venue for music acts and other live shows. Theater Del Mar was divided into three miserable theater rooms. but finally was fully restored to its old grandeur, including the gilded ceiling, and is now both a movie house and a performance venue. Meanwhile, a wide range of multi-plexes sprang up all over the county and in several downtown locations. Santa Cruz remains a busy movie town with some reasonably decent venues.
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in downtown Santa Cruz, Calif., has been restored and now shows contempoary films again. |
Almost all the big movie palaces in downtown San Jose folded, but multi-plexes popped up throughout the sprawling business districts and San Jose remains one of the most bustling movie markets in the U.S., a favorite place for studios to test their new films with audience preview screenings.
Though my new home state of Washington has some great movie houses in Seattle, that's two hours by train from where I live on the Canadian border. We only go there when we want to make a weekend of it. We don't need to anyway, not just for movies.
In my lifetime, I've seen movies in the
best--and often the worst--of conditions. I saw "Finian's
Rainbow" in a three-story movie palace next to Hyde Park
in London. In between trailers and other fare, the theater served
you your beverages and treats, ordered ahead of time and delivered
to your seat by waiters in dinner clothes. I saw Rudolph Valentino
in "The Eagle" in a silent movie revival house in a
Parisian park, happily reading the subtitles in English while
the French scratched their heads in dismay. I've seen some of
Hollywood's best new films in state-of-the-art screening rooms
on the studio premises at MGM, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros.,
often with celebrity crowds. I've seen movies at Radio City in
New York with The Rockettes performing during intermission.
I saw Hitchcock's "Frenzy" at a San Francisco screening
room with director Michael Ritchie ("Downhill Racer,"
"Smile") after doing an interview with him for his
"The Candidate." I saw the 1925 silent classic "The
Big Parade" at Stanford University in a private screening
hosted by its director, the great King Vidor. I went to a studio
screening of "Angel" in 1984 with actor Rory Calhoun,
who came from my hometown of Santa Cruz.
But I also saw "The Ghost of Frankenstein" in an all-Mexican theater in the farm community of Castroville, Calif., with all the other moviegoers glaring at me and my pals for invading their turf. And I saw "The Catman of Paris" at a "flea house" on San Francisco's Market Street which actually left me covered with flea bites. And I can't even count the times I've been ushered out of a theater because they lost the final reel or the automated projector system broke down and the projectionist was somewhere else, fixing another broken down projector.
And I even had to leave The Silent Movie, the famous old theater on Fairfax Boulevard in Hollywood, when the print of Douglas Fairbanks' "The Black Pirate" caught fire in the projection room.
But whenever I need to refresh my memory on how wonderful it can be to watch a movie in a great theater that's properly run, we just head for The Colossus in Canada. In fact, I'll be heading there any day now just to see "The Dark Knight" on the IMAX screen, as The Lord intended us movie fans to do.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photo of The Colossus is courtesy of the Famous Players theater chain. This column first posted July 21, 2008.
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