Married … with Children is on where I live. I watch it at least four times a day. 
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Yeah, the big theatre had
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Main Film
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B film
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Cartoon
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Serial.
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Sing along.
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Beano or door prize thing with your ticket.
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Newsreel.
This ran twice a day on weekends, fours hours worth at least. You just came in when you got there, ushers would direct you. Some big films had a intermission.
I heard it differently.
How did the country singer get herpes in his eyes?
[spoiler]Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.[spoiler]
A flea goes to an employment agency looking for work. The clerk says, “Today’s your lucky day. There’s a job posted for someone to go live in Kenny Rogers’s beard.” Flea says great, goes, lives there. A week later he returns.
Clerk can’t believe he’s quitting. “Man, that has to be a glamor detail, hanging around big stars, etc.” Flea says, “He does NOT take care of that beard! There’s old food and drool and if he has a cold there’s snot. I quit!”
Clerk says “Believe it or not, we have another vacancy. We need to send someone to work in Dolly Parton’s crotch.” Flea sighs and says he’ll give it a try. A week later he comes back. Clerk asks why and he says, “She takes pretty good care of it but somehow, I ended up right back in Kenny Rogers’s beard.”
Slight hijack: the reason movie ushers in that era carried flashlights was so they could lead customers to vacant seats in the darkened theater while the movie was in progress.
Arriving in the middle of the movie would seem to spoil endings. E.g., you’d find out that “the butler did it” before knowing what “it” was. Did audiences just accept this?
They probably did accept it. It was a big deal when Hitchcock put forth a rule that no one would be seated after the first half hour of Psycho. It was parodied and joked about, but the reason was pragmatic: audiences arriving late would wonder why the star, Janet Leigh, wasn’t in the movie.
Actually, the marketing campaign said no one would be admitted after the film started. I don’t know how strictly the policy was enforced. Theater owners objected but until it became apparent that people lining up for performances helped publicize the movie.
Back in the 80’s the joke was about something different from VD and herpes. Imagine the hissy fit someone may have had if I had posted that version?
What do McDonalds and the government have in common?
They’re both have a clown named Ronald.
Yeah, this seems really bizarre nowadays. I do know that in the summer movie theaters used to be one of the only places with air conditioning so people just wanting to get out of the heat could explain part of it.
Yes, people just did accept it. Trailers of the era also often revealed what we would now call spoilers.
Were mystery movies even a big thing, at the time? Or for that matter, movies with a strictly chronological story at all? If you took, say, Wizard of Oz, and switched up the order of all of the scenes, it seems to me that it’d still work pretty well. And that’s a Classic Great Movie-- It’d work even better with a movie that consists primarily of cowboys and Indians shooting at each other, or Stooges poking each other in the eyes.
Tom Stoppard had some fun with this in “Artist Descending a Staircase,” where “I think this is where I came in” is the first line of dialogue.
A small theatre, during the morning/day, might just have only one film: something, film, something, film, something, film, something.
It occurs to me that traditional storytelling involves a great deal of telling stories over again; and that people with a limited number of books most likely read them repeatedly; also that people still often go to see plays, etc. that they already know the plot of. Maybe it’s those of us in modern times who are weird about this, and for most people through history most stories were expected to be familiar, in which case coming in in the middle wouldn’t make much difference. There’d be a first time you saw/heard anything, of course, but there might not have been considered to be anything really important about that first experience; which might have been when you were too small to remember it much anyway.
This is an I Just Pulled It Out Of My Butt Theory and there may not be anything in it.
Hitchcock claimed it was his idea. He also asked audiences not to reveal the twist and explained quite clearly to Truffault that he did not want people to wonder why there was no Janet Leigh when she was prominently billed.
Detective and mystery stories have always been big. The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, the Thin Man series, Sherlock Holmes movies, literally dozens of Hitchcock movies.
I dunno, the dialogue between young Gothic novel fans Catherine and Isabella in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (published 1817, but written around 1803) certainly suggests that mystery and suspense are a big part of the appeal for them, and their attitudes toward spoilers are not significantly different from modern ones:
"… But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”
“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?”
“Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”
Oh, well. I did say
I don’t know if this joke has been mentioned yet, but it may be obscure to a segment of the population.
Q. What did they find at Jeffrey Dahmer’s autopsy?
A. Jimmy Hoffa
Jeffrey Dahmer was the notorious serial murderer and cannibal who was murdered in prison in 1994. Jimmy Hoffa was the UAW leader who mysteriously disappeared in 1975 and presumed dead. Both events occurred far enough back in time that many adults may not know of them.
“Dial M for Murder” came before “Psycho”, and, IMHO, depended much more on the twist at the end. The difference with Psycho is that Psycho had an important twist at the beginning. That was new and unusual.