Open Writing

I went to the movies a couple of weeks ago. “So,” I hear you say. “What’s remarkable about that?” What’s remarkable is that it was the first time in more than 20 years. Now I probably have your attention.

From being a child, until the early 70’s, I was an avid movie-goer, and thrilled to every film I saw, with the possible exception of “The Sound of Music,” which I watched to placate a friend, and never quite got over the overdose of syrup.

But there were many compensations: “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Dr. Zhivago,” “Ryan’s Daughter,” “The Bedford Incident,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Harriet and Her Sisters,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai” to name just a very few. It seemed like there was an endless supply of excellence.

Actually seeing the movies was just a part of my enjoyment. I followed every one of them in the media from the early casting days to the release. And yes, I stood in line for seats. Leaving the theater, I felt a sense of comfortable satisfaction that I’d been engaged in a thoughtful, visually excellent, often exciting and invariably moving, well-crafted experience.

When I arrived in the US in 1974, cinemas and the movie industry were in transition. Movie houses were old and badly maintained, and no new ones were being built. It seemed that all the best stories had been told, and that the Industry couldn’t decide what audiences would pay money to see. A movie of substance was a rare thing, unless you were fortunate to have a cinema in your area that showed foreign films.

So for me it wasn’t a matter of not wanting to go to the movies as much as it was the difficulty of finding a movie that appealed. The New York Sunday Times has a hefty section devoted to movie ads. and reviews, so even if the ad. claims were characteristically over the top in praise of themselves, one would have thought that the reviews would have redressed the balance, but seldom did I read an accurate critical assessment.

As my interest in the medium declined, so did my desire to watch the self-congratulatory awards shows, with their awkward emceeing, and great dollops of gushing.

Increasingly, the stars accepted their awards through a fog of alcohol and drugs, or made angry, selfish protests about matters that the TV audience didn’t understand, or care about.

My gradual disengagement from a medium I loved has inevitably reduced my familiarity with the players. Brad Pitt I know; Jack Nicholson, Jack Clooney, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and a few others are familiar, but these are stars approaching the end of their careers, and those coming behind are faceless and nameless to me.

In 1982, my wife and I decided we should give the movies another try. By now, the mini-cinemas had come on the scene, and on any given day you could go from auditorium to auditorium and watch three or four films without leaving the building. We waited until there was a performance we really, really wanted to see and plunged in.

It was a miserable experience. I don’t even remember the movie we saw. The audience consisted of ourselves, a dozen or so other people who seemed to be asleep, and a young couple making out at the back. Actually their antics were more interesting than the film, and they didn’t charge admission either.

The auditorium was without embellishment of any sort: just a plain box. The movie began without preamble, except for a couple of cheap, car dealer commercials. The sound was crisp – and deafening. Even a key turning in a lock rattled your eardrums. Within minutes, we knew why we hadn’t been to the movies in years.

We didn’t go back - haven’t been back, until two good friends, horrified at our cultural deficiency, persuaded us to go with them. The movie was The Debt, starring Helen Mirren, who we knew from TV, and a host of other actors we’d never heard of.
The theater had slightly more embellishment than our last experience, but not much, and the audience was probably up to 20 or so in number. The smell of popcorn clung to our clothes for days. THE SOUND WAS DEAFENING! The story of dirty tricks in the Israeli secret service was implausible to say the least, and the time scale had been seriously skewed to fit the plot.

We tried to put a good face on our reactions for our friends’ sake. Unfortunately we were so convincing they want us to go with them again! We’re already working on excuses.

Post script
Box office revenue in North America was down 4.9% in 2011, with the fewest tickets sold since 1992. I can’t imagine why.

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