As far as the 60s went, not nearly as many movies were made when compared with today, there were far fewer distribution channels, and movies were reels of physically moving film that were expensive to reproduce and slow to deliver to theatres (think delivery by Greyhound), whereas new movies today are often digitally delivered and usually digitally displayed (regardless of whether they were filmed on film or filmed digitally), and home theatre has blown apart the distribution channels. This combination has made it far easier to get more movies to the markets and to juggle how long a movie will be shown before it is pulled to make a screen available other movies, particularly at multiplexes and megaplexes. In the 60’s it was a heck of a lot easier to have a film come into town, show it for a few weeks (or significantly longer if it had been marketed as a hit), and replace it with another film, than it was to build multiple screens and multiply the delivery issues.
In the 60s and decades preceding it, if you wanted to watch a movie, you usually had to watch it when it was first distributed, for once it had been shown in your town, you might never have the chance to see it again. No downloading it off the internet. No ordering it on a DVD. No renting it from a videotape cassette store. What you had was your parents’ or grandparent’s memories of the single time they saw their favourite movie, or pictures and articles in magazines, or brief recollections mentioned on TV (and there was not that much TV compared to today either, if you put TV and online video into the same category of “stuff you can watch at home in your skivvies.”
Up until 1948, the major studios pretty much controlled the production and distribution of movies, right down to the ownership or control of individual movie theatres. They limited the number of different movies and limited the number and frequency of each movie’s run to maximize their profits per movie. This led early on to the building of large movie theatres that were large enough that everyone in town would be able to see a film before the end of it’s run.
In the larger theatres, going to the movies was an event. Palace theatres were built, particularly in the 20s, that sat more than a thousand people in front of the big screen (which fostered filming in 70mm, which itself was usually higher resolution than 35mm – think high definition rather than standard). They were so large and so grand that they were called palaces – and they were the were palaces. Toronto’s University Theatre had a two-story foyer and grand staircase, and it’s hall with balcony sat over 1300 people – and it wasn’t even the largest or grandest palace in town, for Toronto’s Odon Carleton sat over 2300 people, the main hall of the Elgin seats 1500, and directly on top of it, seven floors up, the Winter Garden seats nearly 1000. If you have not done so, go to an opening at a palace theatre, for the grandeur of the architecture and the excitement, tension, laughter, sobs of the huge crowd adds to an atmosphere in which a good movie will emotionally sweep away the people watching it.
By the 60’s, the post-war trust busting, the migration from densely packed cities to moderately populated suburbs, and the nuclear family now being composed of a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, a male dog and a TV (usually black and white, but with more and more people being able to afford colour), palace theatres had difficulty putting enough bums in enough seats, so they began to be chopped up. A palace theatre might be divided into two, thee or more theatres to take advantage of the ability to screen major release films from more than one studio.
Having a wider variety of movies and not having as many empty seats at an given screening toward the end of runs, led to making even smaller movie theatres in the 70s. When multiplexes took hold in the 70’s in major urban markets, which made it possible to people to have a greater variety of movies to pick from, but greatly limited the ability to become totally immersed in the palace theatre experience.
The nadir was Toronto’s Cineplex proto-megaplex. Instead of a royal foyer, palatial main hall, and a huge single screen being watched by an equally huge audience, there were 21 wee little screens tucked away in waste space underneath the Toronto Eaton’s Centre 10 story parking lot, in which the size of the screen was dictated by the size of the waste space. The difference between the smallest of these “theatres” and today’s home AV rooms is that the resolution was not as good (many more screens in the market resulted in further generations of copies of film, and you lose quality with every generation) and sound was not nearly as good. Rather than a moving communal experience that came with watching a film at a palace theatre, it was much more like a small-box, back-street porn theatre where in a booth with a wee screen and a dozen or so seats there are two or three men enjoying the communal experience of masturbating. Instead of being welcomed into a magnificent palace filled with a thousand fellow travellers, a screen as wide as Lawrence of Arabia’s desert filmed in Super Panavision 70mm, and sound that made your bones move, you were now wandering the steam corridors under an urban parking lot to find a room with a wee screen, crappy sound, and a handful of other equally disappointed people. To add insult to injury, the proto-megaplex soon went over to having simultaneous screenings of the same few films rather than screening a different film in each booth. It was a place for incurious pococurantes.
The movie-theatre chains have continued to experiment with megaplexes that collectively seat more bums than palaces seat, and the more recent ones (particularly the 70 mm IMAX grade ones) have excellent projection and sound that would exceed that of the palaces of the 60s, albeit usually lacking the huge screens that do justice to 70mm width and resolution, and stadium seating so you can watch something other than the big American hair of the woman sitting in front of you. This can make for a very good viewing experience that also maximizes profits, but IMHO still does not meet the overall impact of being immersed in the big screen along with a thousand other people. To quote Herbert Morrison: Oh, the humanity! Well, as good as it is today, and it is very good today, by comparison to the palaces in the 60s, we are now left with Les Nessman.
As a society, we lost our innocence in the 60’s, and when it comes to movie-going, we lost our humanity in the 70s. The cavalry’s last stand was a charge led by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in 1979, when Apocopalyse Now opened simultaneously in movie palaces in Toronto, L.A. and N.Y. I was at the Toronto University Theatre opening. It was a moving experience: a truly great, multifaceted movie arising out of a equally great and multifaceted book (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), presented in one of the few venues capable of transmitting its scope and power, ripping through us visually, aurally, thematically, emotionally, and forcing us to face our conflicting feelings and our society’s koyaanisqatsi, as more than 1300 of us sharing the experience together.
That film played there at Toronto’s University Theatre for about a year, and the grand old palace closed with a whimper in 1986. It had originally opened with a film that made audiences and critics whimper: Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc, in 1948, the same year that the studios lost their control over the theatres. The 1948 roots of Toronto’s University Theatre’s demise were set in its own foundation that depended on the studio system that controlled both film distribution and individual theatres, but for the decades in between it was a grand palace that made a far better venue for screening grand movies than the boxes of today. Today, blockbusters knock you back in your seat with their wall of sound, one explosion after another, and motion too fast to follow. In the 60s in the palaces, you and the hundreds of other viewers fell into the truly big screen, into a world of imagination and wonder and laughter and heartbreak, leaving you exhausted and satiated.
In it, Bugs was in a theater and he flipped the intermission light on and off several times so the crowd, rushing out to smoke, would run over Elmer. It wouldn’t make sense in 1948 if smoking was allowed in the theater itself.