Agreed. It’s the only place to catch a movie in DC. When I lived there I caught 2001, The Exorcist, Apocalypse Now, and Rear Window, along with a host of new releases (LOTR, etc.).[sup]*[/sup] Fantastic theater.
If anyone is heading to DC and has time to take in a movie, it’s worth it—you’ll be impressed.
Rhythm
[sup]* But I got a shot of penicillin, and I’m all better, thankyouverymuch.[/sup]
Return Of The King for me too. My girls were born a few months before it came out, it was kind of my first foray away from work or babies, and for whatever reason everything just hit me hard. I was a pathetic puddle of mush by the end.
July 1979 - Came back from 3 years in Germany and finally got to see Star Wars. In a drive-in. Wow. Who needs drugs to get an 8 year-old kid stoned?
I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy at the Dream Theatre in Monterey, California. The seats were all easy chairs that had had the legs removed, so you were sitting close to the floor, but with plenty of leg room. Just sit back and float. Very cool.
I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey 13 years ago in its glorious 70mm 6-track form, all polished up for its 25th anniversary. The theater was nearly empty as it was a Monday afternoon, so I had no problem picking a seat dead center and about ten rows from the screen for the ultimate immersion. Just because it was a Monday afternoon, didn’t mean they ran it with any less brightness, clarity or volume.
What you saw was the 2001 (heh!) restoration and re-mastering into DTS stereo.
Silence of the Lambs at the Rio in Santa Cruz, Ca. Spring, 2000.
The Rio showed a different movie every Saturday at midnight. They would have themes and for sucessive weeks follow that theme. In Spring 2000 they were doing Horror/Thrillers so for a period of a couple of months some friends and I were going every weekend. We’d start out with beers at the Crepe Shop and then go to the theater. It was a pretty cool, laid-back crowd…pretty typical for Santa Cruz. Anyways, the night we were to watch SofL there was something wrong with the projector and it was delayed about 45 minutes or so. While we were waiting various people starting getting up on the stage in front of the screen and “entertaining” the crowd. One guy told jokes, a woman grabbed a copy of the local free paper and read the sex classifieds, a couple of girls went up and stripped and started making out until this tall goofy hippy dude jumped up on stage, stripped down to nothing and danced around. It was hilarious.
Hah!
I took my 10 year old niece to see ALIEN, several years after it had originally come out. It was playing at the River Oaks theater in Houston, one of the few theaters left with a balcony, and it was packed. We got seats in the balcony.
In the movie, there is a scene where the alien is morphing and has “shed its skin”, so to speak. The carcass drops on Ripley’s shoulder while they are looking for the critter, scaring the hell out of her and the audience both. In the next scene, they toss the carcass in a dissecting tray and start to cut it up.
At this point, the audience is usually deathly quiet, recovering from the scare in the last scene, and this time was no different. Except when they started to cut and stuff oozed out, my niece says loudly, “OH, GROSS!”.
The entire theater cracked up laughing.
I saw Star Wars (back in the day when it was simply Star Wars during its first week. The theater was full (of adults) and when the Millenium Falcom jumped into hyperspace, the entire audience went “Ooooooooohhhhh!!!” When Han Solo came out of nowhere to shoot Vader’s fighter, everyone cheered, and when the movie ended, we cheered even more.
I don’t think an audience response like that could even happen anymore.
My husband and I lucked into getting to go to the first of the Serenity prescreenings. Nothing beats being in a room of people who’re going to see a movie for the first time, who all really, really WANTED to see that movie. It wasn’t the best movie I’d ever seen (though it was really, really good), but it was definitely the best experience that I’d ever had in a theater.
When I was a kid, my beloved uncle ran with a crowd of people who all worked in old historic theaters in Sacramento. My uncle took me everywhere as a kid, at all hours of the night. It was some of the best times of my life.
We used to go in to the theaters after the last show, walk behind the counter and pick up some popcorn and soda, and spend the rest of the night screening old classics (everyone in this crowd was gay, gay, gay) all by ourselves in these beautiful theaters. Thats where I learned to really love film, and i went on to major in film in college.
The second best has to be a midnight showing of The Big Lebowski a the Nick in Santa Cruz. Sneaking drinks in to the midnight movies is an old trick, but we snuck in a full bottle of vodka, a bottle af kaluha, a pint of cream and a few glasses- and we wern’t the only one in the crowd to do so. Let me warn you- mixing drinks in a darkened theater is a good way to get a strong drink.
Good times.
Oh man, I totally forgot…
In Sacramento, on summer nights, they used to show old movies projected on the side of an old building after the farmer’s market. I was a teenager at the time, working at a newspaper downtown. My friends and our boyfriends used to meet me after work and we’d spend the day at the market, sampling fruit, listening to bands, and doing whatever it is that teenagers do. Then night would fall and we’d all head over to the movie. After the movies our boyfriends would run off and our parent’s picked us up.
Nothing beats being 16 years old, making out with your boyfriend on the cool grass on a summer night while a movie flickers in the background and the stars shine overhead. Pure magic.
Not counting my five trips to B-Fest, a 24-hour marathon of B-movies and awful crap - a sarcastic geektastic orgy of sight, sound and sitting - my best cinema experiences include…
Star Wars Ep. II. The movie sure did suck, but it was a midnight, opening-night crowd. Most of my friends went in costume, and in fact they also went to Burger King for a pre-movie snack in costume. You ever seen a BK counter jockey take a french fry order from a Storm Trooper? I have. At the theater, two of my friends (the ones in Jedi robes, of course) had a lightsaber duel before the lights went down. The audience loved it.
I’ve seen Rocky Horror in a handful of different places (in New York and Chicago, with and without the movie, plus the Broadway vresion). None have been quite as much fun as seeing the movie in a basement with my friends, as I did many times in high school, but the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas version came closest. I’ll see that again soon, and maybe it’ll take the top spot.
One really sticks out.
Independence Day (yeah, I know. Bear with me.)
It’d been out for over a month and was still at the regular theatres. A friend of ours knew it was out for its last week, so after school a big group of us went (about 20).
We’d all seen it before and we were the only ones in the theatre.
It was like Rocky Horror - some talked along with the lines, some of us had alternate dialogue. Even had a short tag game.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, at the grand, old, and aggressively misspelled Suniland Theater, in the Kendall neighborhood south of Miami, on a summer weekend afternoon with a couple of friends from seventh grade. What made this special for me was that I was seeing it with both a girl and a boy, and I’d bravely set up the whole thing myself (which meant, yes, I was calling up boys, for the first time! – and catching a couple of their parents first, yikes), and this was the first time I’d ever done anything like this, being painfully self-conscious and socially awkward, even when compared to other twelve-year-olds. This was a triumph for me, a real therapeutic breakthrough of sorts. It bore the intoxicating, seductive promise of the social whirl that might still be mine in the future, when I might be popular, and have a lot of friends, and even be – normal? – if I could only find a way to keep doing these kinds of things… like going to the movies with girl friends and boy friends.
And it didn’t hurt that the Suniland was the classic traditional movie palace, with stained, red velvet drapes of indeterminable age that would part before the show, a roomy balcony that cantilevered way forward in a seemingly impossible fashion over the back rows, and perpetually sticky floors. Disgustingly sticky floors. But it was the closest thing to traditional, if tattered, old-world glamour in our suburban neighborhood, a confidently sprawling suburb south and west of rather less new other suburbs on the outer edges of one of the rudest and most persistently booming cities in the country, where if it predates 1960 it’s solid, and if it predates the war, it’s positively old-timey.
We saw Raiders with mostly other kids in the audience. A decent showing, if far from full. The climactic Ark scene with the “melting face” effects caused a sensation. We spilled out into the harsh Miami glare, jabbering, rattling off our favorite moments, our own faces beginning to sweat in the midday glare.
Flash forward about fourteen years…
I’m watching Ed Wood in a raucous, full house at some soulless, undistinguished multiplex in New Jersey, with my guy-housemates, 'cause we’re all buddies. There’s this scene in the movie where the hapless director attends the premiere of his now-legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space at the Pantages in Los Angeles, where his party is waylaid by a crowd of young hooligans, who have been throwing popcorn and soda at the screen, jeering for the show to start, getting into all sorts of horseplay…
And then it hit me: this moviehouse mayhem was only a slightly exaggerated and senior-high-ish updating of the unruly [ten o’clock? noon?] four-hour-long kiddie shows held on selected weekday mornings during the summers at the Suniland in the '70s! Parents would drop off their elementary-school-age kids (including, one summer, my brother and I, when I was, oh, aged six or seven or maybe eight, tops) at the Suniland for a special program of marginally supervised chaos involving a host, maybe a cartoon or two, snack bags, an audience-participation game or singalong or talent show or something (with more giveaways – candy treats for the winners, or willing participants, or somesuch), and finally a short, silly G-rated feature (or maybe two!). Surely this explains the floors at the Suniland – tacky with the amberized remains of an elementary school’s worth of swilled sodas and candies, deposited week after week, summer after summer, and no amount of mopping could ever clean it all up, as if they even tried.
I’d completely forgotten about those morning shows at the Suniland, all about those thrilling outings, when just us kids got to indulge in a massive sugar buzz lasting hours in a cavernous space with, thrillingly, no parental supervision whatsoever. Hadn’t recalled them at all for years and years, in fact, until that scene in Ed Wood brought it all back. In retrospect, these shows must’ve been a godsend to our harried, stressed-out, or simply bored-to-Valium suburban moms. Our glamorous kiddie extravaganzas were just a regularly-scheduled and rather gimcrack babysitting service for the mothers, who would seize the opportunity to do some errands or catch lunch – no doubt, a sanity break – with a friend.
I don’t think the Suniland continued with the kiddie program much beyond my participation in it, if at all. Sadly, I doubt that kind of commercial activity would be remotely viable nowadays, what with the litigiousness of our culture, with its skyrocketing insurance rates for everything, our increased awareness of pedophiles and so forth and so on. Children are so neurotically fussed over now, so much more attentively supervised and chaperoned everywhere, so preciously safeguarded, you couldn’t just dump them off at a seedy moviehouse dive where a couple of untrained high-school- or college-aged wage-slaves would be responsible for the lot just so’s you can pick up the dry-cleaning and have your Tuesday lunch with Phyllis.
But it’s a wonderful thing, to have had your childhood bracketed by a movie theater like the Suniland!
– Back to the Future at Hollywood Cinerama Dome, 1985. Nothing special about the atmosphere, but I knew nothing about the movie in advance, and was just hopping up and down afterwards, claming it was instantly my favorite movie ever. Still in my top 10.
– Herbie Rides Again at a Saturday night drive-in, 1974(?). I was nine years old, all the neighbor parents took us kids, my mom opened up the back door to our van and we all just soaked it in, the Roughan kids, the Peterson kids, the Planansky kids and us. Just spectacular.
– And then there was that continuous handjob from Heather during Scrooged, 1989…
One more. Caught a pre-screening of Titanic on the Paramount Studios lot the day before it released. Despite the low-key approach most movie people bring to a screening, I was just taken by it, loved the ending when Winslett walks the stairway to be greeted by Leo and the other departed.
My best cinema experience was when a bunch of my stoner friends and I piled into the theater room of one of our friends whose parents had a full-fledged home theater room. Watching the cartoon that I made premiere on a 15 foot screen with the whole group of friends was quite an experience.
Thought of another: My then-roommate and I had been going to a series of crap movies all winter. So our expectations were low, very low, for this next one, an obvious piece of cheese called, um, Terminator.
Completely blew us away. I’ve never had such a (favorable) disconnect between what I expected and what I got.
A couple other memorable ones. I saw **The Crying Game ** in a huge packed theater in Chicago. If anyone knew The Secret, they weren’t telling so hundreds of us were surprised at once. The best part was when Stephen Rea’s dream turned into the smug-looking Forrest Whitaker; the laugh was HUGE.
Also, my mom, my brother and I went to see The Last Waltz in NYC (we lived two hours north and really good movies like that didn’t make it to our town; we regularly went to The City to catch up on a few movies and occasionally a show or play. And Flame Steak, can’t forget a full dinner for 2.99…but I digress). It was 1978 so I would have been ~10. I just remember it being a huge theater and the sound cranked up so loud we had to hold our ears the whole time. I thought of it as this hard rock deal until I saw it again and it rocks but not like that. It was the volume of sound and the huge images that left that impression.
Remembered another good one: Exorcist III. Not the greatest movie ever, but it had its moments.
There are a couple of scenes where George C. Scott, the cop in the film, is talking with the being that used to be Father Karras, now wholly ruled by a demon within. In a plain cell, with the demon-thing bound up in a straitjacket, they converse. And during those conversations, you could actually hear the entire crowd in the theater holding their breath, eagerly eating up every word. And when the scene ended, you could hear everyone start breathing again.
Like I said, not a great film, but a great moment in the theater.
I have several.
The Princess Bride when I was about 8 years old, maybe? My dad took me to see it and both of us laughed like crazy through the whole movie, and at the end when Inigo kills the Count, the entire audience applauded and cheered. It was fantastic.
Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond at the Bijou Theatre in Eugene, Oregon. They would show the greatest cult flicks late, late at night…I think this one started at like midnight or one. The theater was packed with all manner of drunk college kids and horror freaks…every time there was another gruesome death on the screen, people would leap to their feet screaming and cheering. Folks MST3K’d the dialogue all the way through, people got into yelling arguments across the theater…it was amazing. I’ve loved Fulci ever since.
And, once again, at the Bijou: Evil Dead 2. My husband, then boyfriend of only about 5 months, found out that for about $70 bucks, you could rent out one of the theaters in the Bijou and have them show a movie of your choice. All you had to do was provide them with a DVD of the film. So for my birthday, he rented the theater on a Saturday morning, got the Evil Dead 2 DVD, as he knew it was my favourite movie, called up all my friends, and we spent my birthday eating popcorn, sneaking drinks from various bottles and sneaking various, um…other substances as well, laughing at the movie and talking and having the most wonderful time ever. About 20 of my friends showed up to watch it with us. It was the best birthday of my life, nothing has ever compared to it.