I read a story about George Lucas ages ago(wish I had a link) -in 1977 George was being interviewed on the radio on the day Star Wars was released in an American city. A caller rang up and said he had watched the movie 4 times. ‘Impossible’ said George-it only came out that day. The kid informed George he had simply paid for the 11 am showing and just stayed in the cinema all day and saw the movie 4 times in a row.
Apparently it was a trend. Cinemas had to start letting people stay for only one session of a movie.
Is it true that you could pay for a movie and simply stay all day until Star Wars’ watchers caused cinema owners to stop the practice ?
I worked in a cinema in New Zealand and there were a few customers who wanted to go into a session half way through and then watch the start of the movie the next session. We had to charge them for two sessions(some people have too much money). Seems to show that people had the idea they could stay for as many sessions a sthey wanted.
When I was little, I was 8 when Star Wars came out, you could go to the movies and stay as long as you wanted. I remember many times where we missed part of the movie and stayed for the next one so we could see the parts we missed.
Yes. Movies were not emptied out after each show. My family would alway show up late for a film, missing as much as the entire first hour, then stay to catch the beginning of it in the next show. This was in the 1960s on eastern Long Island.
It wasn’t a big issue before Star Wars. People didn’t want to watch the same movie over and over again. Once you saw one film, you wanted to see something new. (Frankly, I can’t think of any movie I’d ever want to watch twice in a row.)
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Star Wars* created the “movie as thrill ride” trope, so people wanted to see it again and again. Theaters probably realized they could make more money charging the same people over and over, so they cleared the theaters after each show.
At the big chain theaters here, you can’t. They clear the theaters out between showings.
At a pair of little theaters in my old neighborhood (Sangenjaya), however, you could stay all day. Each theater (they had the same owner. One showed art films and obscure foreign releases, the other showed mainstream films about 6 months after their initial release) showed a double feature, and you bought a single ticket to watch both films (they changed half price if you were going to the last show). They never bothered to keep track of who bought a ticket when (and since the place was never packed full, it never really made a difference), so you could sit and watch as much as you wanted.
They also sold beer and were cool with bringing in food from outside, so you could have yourself a nice afternoon there.
I forgot, there are several all-night theaters in the Kabuki-cho district of Tokyo (not those kinds of theaters, I mean ones that show mainstream movies) that have the ‘all-you-can-watch’ system after a certain hour. It’s not uncommon for people who’ve missed the last train home to use these as a place to crash for the night. I saw The Game and Tomorrow Never Dies twice each this way.
But decades ago, it was EXPECTED that people would stay at a movie theater for hours on end. They’d have two feature films, a few cartoons, a few newsreels… a kid who went to the movies at 11 AM in the 1930s might be there all day.
By the time I was a kid, in the early Sixties, there were no more cartoons or newsreels, just feature films… but movies weren’t as popular as they had been and the theaters were rarely filled to capacity any more (television was largely responsible for that). So, when I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, my Mom never checked timetables too closely when she took us to the movies. If we missed the beginning, well,. so we’d stay around to see what we missed. Heck, we could have stayed to see the same movie over and over, and nobody would have cared. It’s not as if we were taking up seats another paying customer wanted.
What changed things was the advent of blockbuster films like “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” Once big event films like that started coming out, theaters were filled to the bursting point again, and theater managers started getting more forceful about kicking people out.
Not that you’re supposed to do this, but at the giant cinema complex by my parents house we used to go and pay for one early movie, and then just wander from theatre to theatre for the rest of the evening seeing every movie that was out that week. The entire place was staffed by 16 year old kids. After you came in the door, nobody checked tickets.
My mom would drop my sister and me off at the movies and we’d watch the same film throughout the day. I distincly remember doing this with Young Frankenstein, a couple of the **Pink Panther ** movies, and Smokey and the Bandit. Others have slipped my mind, but it was pretty common. These were daytime showings and I’m not sure if it was just a child’s perspective or what, but there did not appear to be too many other people in the theater except maybe other kids.
Nowdays, a parent dropping two young’uns off at the movies all day would be brought up on charges.
Comon wisdom is that it’s Psycho that changed movie-going. Hitchcock didn’t want people wandering in partway through a movie ostensibly starring Janet Leigh (who dies about a half an hour or so in) and wondering where the hell Janet Leigh was. He also wanted people to see the movie all the way through from the beginning for maximum impact. So he got theatre owners to refuse to admit people after the movie had started (and also put together an advertising campaign imploring people not to reveal the ending).
You can definitely do this in the big cinaplexes. When we lived outside of Denver, Mr. Athena and I used to go see double features in the summer, as much to be able to sit in air conditioning as to see the movie. We’d come out of the first show, then decide if we wanted to see another. The first couple of times, we went to the customer service desk and paid for another ticket (the main ticketing booths were actually outside the theater). We were always met with astonishment at our request to actually pay for another ticket, and usually given several free coke & popcorn coupons at the same time.
We finally wised up and quit paying. It seemed like more trouble than it was worth, and the workers didn’t seem to care at all.
Ditto. I’ve yet to find a theatre where you can’t do this. The exception being on Friday and Saturday nights when some new releases are sold to capacity. Then they check your tickets at the theatre door. Any other large megaplex I’ve been to you buy your ticket, guy about 10 feet away rips it and says “Theatre 12”, and from there your on your own to wander the place for as long as you like.
Nothing to add here except that as a youth I would sometimes watch the end of one showing, then the beginning of the next showing, and no one thought anything of it (except for the rare “No one will be seated after the first 10 minutes” horror-film stuff).
I always figured what happened was that movies got shorter, and the theaters had time to shoo those damn kids out before the next showing.
He may have done this, but this tactic was used throughout the 1950s, IIRC. You won’t be allowed in once the movie starts! was an advertising gimmick that was well worn by the time Psycho came out. It was on the same level as Odorama and all the other gimmicks that panicked theater owners tried to combat the loss of attendance to television.
When I was a theatre manager in the mid-80s, this was strictly against policy, but we constantly turned a blind eye to it. If the theatre didn’t fill up, and if it was an old movie, we didn’t care. If the movie was selling out and the between times were an “all hands on deck for cleaning” situation, then we cleared the theatre in a no-nonsense way. As managers, we were given an enormous amount of flexibility in this policy.
If you want to make the theater workers happy, keep stocking up on refreshments, since that’s where the bulk of their profits come from. Most of the ticket price goes to the studios.
I remember me and my cousins being dropped off at the theater by our parents and told to stay in there until they came back to get us. That was The Empire Strikes Back and we ended up watching it about 2 1/2 times. Then the ushers came in with flashlights to get us because our parents were out in the lobby. That would have been… 1980, I guess.
When I was in college in the late 60s, I sat through 2 showings each of Fantasia and 2001 (on different occasions, of course). And no, I was not stoned.
I’m pretty sure I did this with a few other movies, but these are the only ones I remember.
