Movie Heist

Blogger Eric D. Snider once wrote about going to the movies and watching a crime take place. A lame, gross, petty crime -- but a crime nevertheless. He saw a group of teenage boys sneakily root through a trashcan outside one of the theaters, dig out three large drink cups, rinse out the cups in the bathroom, and then take them up to the concession stand for free refills - as though these were large drinks they had paid for and already emptied while waiting for the movie to start.

When I read his story, I was simultaneously grossed out and fascinated.

Grossed out because, uh, those cups were garbage. Garbage. Plus, who knows who drank out of it the first time before it even went in the trash? Some crusty guy with no teeth and only smelly gum-holes could have been licking the inside of that cup trying to get the last drops of his Sprite while watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 for the third time. I don't think rinsing it out with tepid water in the theater bathroom would take care of that kind of skeeve, you know?

But I was also fascinated. I mean, who does that? Who thinks that way? Movie theater prices are obscene, and there's no debate about that. I'm pretty sure that when evil oil company executives retire from poisoning the world and dumping chemicals into oceans, they shift careers and take over movie theater chains. They have the same morals and make the same profit margins. Popcorn costs literally next to nothing to make. Same with soda. They charge three bucks for eighty cents worth of candy and think because they put it in a bulky cardboard box that we won't notice. The profit margin on a six dollar bucket of popcorn is astronomical.

Because theater concession prices are practically criminal and because I feel like they're taking advantage of a captive audience, I've never had a problem with bringing in my own candy, soda, popcorn, and occasionally sandwiches. (In winter, you can easily tuck a footlong sub into your coat and not be detected.) But bringing in your own stuff is very different than scavenging cups out of the trash and bilking the theater out of pop, you know? Not giving the theater unfair amounts of money is not the same as just flat-out stealing from them in my mind.

So I think poorly of these random teenagers I've never met. I judge them - that's right, judge them.

But wait! As I busily judge these little weasels, I am suddenly reminded of myself in junior high. A couple of my friends, Rusty and James, had a whole scheme to sneak into the movies and they wanted me in on their plan. There were two theaters in Rexburg, Idaho when I was growing up there - the Westwood, a cavernous single-screen on Main Street, and the Holiday, a low-slung, triplex just a block off Main. Both of them had two exit doors at the back of each theater that opened up onto empty parking lots, and the plan was for one of us to pay to get in and then sneak to the back exit, pop it open, and let the other two in.

Now, I was a good kid in junior high and high school - afraid to get in trouble, not interested in making waves, and seriously scared of my dad's white hot wrath. I stalled, tried to blow it off, tried to hedge - but eventually caved. I agreed to sneak them into a late show of Beetlejuice at the Westwood. 

My justification, the only thing that allowed me to do it, I think, was that I was the one who actually paid to get in. I figured as long as I was paying my own admission, I was close enough to blameless. (I conveniently overlooked the fact that I was instrumental in helping two other people not pay.) James and Rusty each gave me two bucks - that was my cut, I guess -- and I used it for admission. Timing was crucial. If I went too early, it would look suspicious to the theater workers. If I went too late, there would be other people there who would see what I was doing and report it to the Man.

I remember my heart pounding and cold nerve sweat under my arms. I was terrified I was going to get caught and that it would be the end for me. The theater manager, a pompous little man with a pencil 'stache, knew my dad and knew who I was. If he caught me, it was a sure bet my parents would hear about it. In the Westwood, there was a short, dark hallway between the theater and the actual exit door and it would shrouded by a curtain. I slipped behind the curtain, tapped quietly on the door, got the signal tap in return, and pushed open the door. Rusty and James hustled in, and we rushed back out to the theater before anyone else came in.

I don't remember if I was plagued by guilt or how long I felt bad, but I'm pretty sure I never helped anyone sneak in to the movie again. Once was enough for me. I managed to grow up and not be a felon. James and Rusty both grew up to be good guys, each of them married with a bunch of kids. Rusty got a degree in psychology and then took over his dad's cabinetry business. James is a computer engineer and spends his weekends fishing rather than sneaking into theaters.

So maybe there's hope for the three little weasels Eric Snider saw. Maybe drinking trash soda isn't the end of the line for them as human beings. More likely than not, twenty years from now, they'll be grown men with lives and responsibilities, and they'll laugh about the days back when they were willing to drink garbage pop in order to sucker the theater out of free refills.

Palaces

I know I wrote that a bad night at the movies is better than a good night doing almost anything else, and I meant that. Just watching a movie is an enjoyable enough experience that it often doesn't matter to me where I'm doing it. Movie-going is like pizza or ice cream -- even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. I've watched movies in hot, crowded theaters, on airplanes next to snoring fellow passengers, at my desk at work, in classrooms, on portable DVD players, on smart phones, on laptops, projected in city parks, and, of course, at home on the couch.

Still, can't we all agree that some experiences are better than others? Yes, Little Caesar's five buck special fills your belly and more or less resembles pizza, but isn't it a far cry from, say, Buddy's Pizza in Detroit where the crust and sauce are made fresh literally by hand every day? Isn't Italian gelato a whole other world compared to the generic half gallon of ice cream from the depths of the grocery store freezer?

So it is with movie theaters, I think. Yes, a movie is a movie wherever you see it - but how much better is it if you see it in a good theater? When movies first really began to take off as a form of entertainment and became a staple of American life, exhibitors had tons of money to sink into their facilities. Because these were literally the only places on earth where your average joe could see a picture, theater owners built elaborate, beautiful buildings that were essentially temples of film. They're commonly referred to these days as movie palaces.

Check these out and consider how they compare to the last theater you went to:

Some were done in Art Deco, others were Art Nouveau, and some had some kind of ethnic theme like Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood. But attending a movie at a place like this made film going an event, not an afterthought.

Many of the original palaces have decayed or been torn down. Some have been saved and refurbished. One of my personal favorite old theaters is the Egyptian Theater in Boise, Idaho. Once on the verge of ruin, it's been restored to its former glory and then some, and now it is a jewel of the downtown area. Back in 2000, my wife and I saw a small, independent film called God's Army that is now a major part of my PhD dissertation, so I have a lot of affection for that place.

What's interesting to me now is that some of the big theater chains are trying to replicate the palace vibe in their giant multiplexes. In bigger markets, chains want to move away from mall theaters and instead create giant meccas of movie going. AMC, Loews, and Carmike all have big, glossy theaters in bigger cities. Stadium seating, surround sound, high def projection, gourmet snack bars, etc.  While they are kind of cliched in how they try to replicate old fashioned theaters, I still appreciate that they try to make movie going a special event.

There are a few theaters around here that just sort of make me angry in how shabby and cruddy they are. I've vowed to never pay money to see a movie a the Roxy in Ottawa ever again. The whole place appears to be rotting, the sound system seems to have been stolen out of a '73 Chevy Nova, the screens are the size of postage stamps, and the popcorn tastes like it's been around since the Clinton administration. I'd rather see a movie in a bad theater than not at all, but the utter disregard at the Roxy just makes me mad. And since there are other options, there's no reason for me to give another cent there. 

Speaking of other options, I've lived in this area for almost five years now and I have yet to see a movie at either the Majestic in Streator or the Apollo in Princeton. Maybe that will be part of this blog project this summer - to visit those two and maybe the drive-in up near Sandwich. If so, I'll be sure to take pictures and keep you posted.

Starting With Episode Four

The original Star Wars movie was released in 1977 when I was three years old. This was long before the days of VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, YouTube, or even pay-per-view, and so rather than hustling a movie out of theaters in a matter of weeks, films would stay pretty much as long as they were making money. Since people couldn't really watch movies at home and because TV went off the air at eleven or so, people went out to the theater a  lot more often. Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope showed continuously in some theaters for over a year. Got that? After it was released in May of 1977, you could take a date to see it for high school graduation, catch a late show after fireworks on the Fourth of July, dress up as a Storm Trooper to see it for Halloween, catch it again at Christmas, and then take your prom date to see it in the spring. Crazy, right?

In addition to these epic runs in theaters, there was also a time when a successful movie would get re-released in theaters after it had been gone for a while. These days, a movie generally only gets a theatrical re-release if it has been converted to 3D or if it's a significant anniversary or both. (Titanic's 3D ten year anniversary, anyone?) So Star Wars came out again in 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982. (It came out again in 1997 but that's another story, another blog post.)

All of this is to say, I'm not exactly sure when my first movie-going experience was. The only thing I have to help me nail it down is that I know my family was living in Burley, Idaho when my mom and dad took my brother, Jason, and I to see Star Wars. We moved from Burley when I was almost five - so that means I probably saw the 1979 re-release version.

Anyway, even though I was only four or five, there are a couple of things I still remember with great clarity. We saw it in a single-screen theater in a little town called Rupert, which is about ten miles from Burley. Jason and I sat together with Dad on one side and Mom on the other. All Star Wars movies start the same way: yellow words explaining the set-up of the movie crawling from the bottom of the screen to the top and then disappearing into space. I think I remember my mom whispering the words to me because, you know, I was four. After the words disappear, there's just a moment of silence and a field of stars.

Then comes the moment that I (and most other nerds) remember with perfect clarity: blazing across that field of stars comes a small, white space ship, its thrusters glaring against the darkness of space. In the next second, a giant, triangular ship a thousand times bigger than the first one plows across the screen, shooting streaks of red lasers at the tiny, obviously outmatched first ship.

I was four or five and had no idea what a "rebel alliance" or a "galactic empire" were, but I didn't care. For the next two hours, I was utterly transported - by Darth Vader and his obsidian-black samurai helmet, by Greedo and the other sketchy characters in the Cantina, by the weird asymmetry of the Millennium Falcon, the menace of the Death Star, and by the light sabers, oh the light sabers. Swords made out of lasers? Are you kidding me? Even at four, I knew that was a hot cup of steaming awesome.

I suppose we had popcorn and soda, those eternal standbys of American movie-going. I was probably tired and exhilarated when the movie was over. I'm not really sure about details like that - I mean, it was thirty five years ago. But what I do absolutely remember about my first time at the movies is that I wanted to go again and as often as possible.

I think it was a combination of feeling transported (literally to a different world in this case) and the sense of being together with my family that made that evening in south central Idaho all those years ago so memorable. Movies, I think, are both individual and communal. We go because of how we relate to them in our own unique, solitary ways but also for how we can share the experience with the other people sitting there in the dark with us. I loved meeting Luke Skywalker (what a name!), but I especially loved meeting him with my mom on one side of me and my brother and dad on the other. I have never minded going to movies by myself, but I have always preferred going with people I love. The movie is good, but how much better is it if you can experience it twice by talking it over with your buddy or spouse once it's over?