And they had cartoons before the first film, and sometimes in between the two!
When I was a kid (early- to mid-seventies), we almost always saw movies exclusively at the drive-in. It was cheap, you could bring your own snacks, and my mom, a single mother with two children, could count on me falling asleep in the back of the car before the second feature really got going. The movies definitely weren’t creature-features; I remember seeing “Tora! Tora! Tora!” at the drive-in (and falling asleep before any action started - assuming there was eventually some action).
There’s a theatre in Rochester that shows all the movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar each year when they’re announced. They use to do it all in one showing when it was just five nominees but now they split it into two showings. But you can buy one ticket for the whole event.
I go to a sci-fi movie marathon every year, from 8 PM Friday to 3 AM Sunday. But that’s different…it’s more like a lock-in (with no locks but with sleeping bags). It is in a regular theater, though. And there are concessions.
When I was in high school, we used to go to the drive-in basically every weekend and saw the double features.
Later, in my first marriage, we went to the same drive-in at least once a month in the summer. The quality of the movie matters less in the drive-in!
ETA: Just looked it up and they were doing a triple feature this weekend: Godzilla, Blended, and Neighbors. Too bad I don’t still live in the area!
Back when I was a kid and in high school you bought a ticket and stayed as long as you wanted - in fact you came in when you wanted.
Double features I remember are Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May, (or it might have been Seven Days in May and Failsafe) and Patton/MASH.
When I was in college we went to the Orson Welles in Cambridge to see WC Fields in “The Old Fashioned Way” and a similar WC Fields movie - and then “Night of the Living Dead” - which was ten times as scary when you were softened up by two comedies.
And I saw 2001 twice in a row after it moved to regular theaters.
I was a grad student at the University of Texas from 1974 to 1977. I saw that double feature several times back then, but there’s one time I remember particularly well. It was a Saturday in February or March of 1975. In 1983 I started to write a novel which, although actually set in 1986, opened with a flashback to that day in 1975. I tried to express my feelings about a whole lot of issues in that flashback. I finished the novel but was never satisfied enough with it to try submitting it to any publisher. In any case, the day that I saw that double feature was very important to me.
It may have been the theater on the Drag that you’re thinking about. It was a theater that didn’t do first-run films but rather older ones. I wonder if there’s someone there in Austin who’s such a fan of those two films that he/she makes sure that they do a double feature of them every year.
I appreciate reading about your memory of those films, that feeling of time-and-place connection can be so strong.
The double-bill was at the Varsity, right there across from campus, and it does appear it was a tradition. For me it was also the occasion of a second date with the girl I dated through most of college, but my memories of how that turned out aren’t so great.
If you mean 2 (or more) the same day, yes, almost every time I go to the movies. I saw 3 today and 3 yesterday. My max was 6 separate movies in one day (at 4 different theaters no less). If you mean 2 (or more) for the same price, quite often. Besides the occasional marathon (like Lord of the Rings) there’s a theater here that has double or triple features for $5 and I might go a few times a month.
All the time. This past Saturday, the wife and I watched Enemy and Bad Neighbors back to back in the same cinema hall. (Bad Neighbors is the new Seth Rogen film that seems to be called just Neighbors elsewhere in the world. Dunno why they changed the name unless it was to avoid confusion with a certain popular TV series in Australia.)
Movie double-bills were common until around the early 80s when VCRs became widespread. Often the second title would be an older movie that had passed out of first-run but had not yet been aired on network (and later cable) TV. However, since movies on cassette often came out four to six months after the film’s release, that all but eliminated the time period a movie could be used as a “B” title on a twin bill.
All the time in the early '70s. Multiplexes (2 - 8) theaters were around, but many suburbs had their own second-run single theaters somewhere in the town center.
Aren’t most multiplexes today set up so you could easily do this while only paying once? Ie. they take your ticket near the center of building and then you go off into a wing with anywhere from 4 to 8 theaters?
Seems like that in the theaters around here. In fact, on at least three occasions I’ve gone into theaters where the movie showing there didn’t match the movie I’d paid to see. Once, when I was 12-13, a buddy and I bought tickets for Ghostbusters (rated PG) and instead saw Revenge of the Nerds (rated R). Another, I snuck in to see the trailer for… some big movie that I was excited about, and then went to the theater for the movie I paid to see. And then once Mammahomie and I saw Harry Potter and the Whatever Whatever and then snuck into another theater to see the re-release of The Exorcist.
I saw double features at the drive-in fairly often - when I was quite young I saw “The Aristocats” and “Song of the South” as a double feature, for example. The last drivein double feature I saw was “Tron” and some other movie whose name escapes me.
Since the nearest multiplex was 45 minutes away when I was a teenager, my friends and I would always see two movies when we went the trip - otherwise we would have spent the same amount of time in the car as in the movie…
