Touring Broadway’s Last Great Movie Palace: the Los Angeles – Curbed Inside – Curbed LA.
Greetings, Beguiling Hollywoodians,
I love movies.
Surprising I know! I remember being taken as a child to see various things and it was always a treat. Sitting there, in the dark, as a different world came into flickering life on the screen. Be it E.T. The Extra Terrestrial or Pinnochio (“a real live boy”) it was a perfectly pleasurable experience, and as I grew older (I won’t say “grew up”!) it mostly remained so. As a child it almost didn’t matter how good the movie was, there was a magic just being in the theater, as I aged and my tastes refined the magic remained but I became almost *hungry* to experience as many different kinds of movies as possible, and, of course, quite apart from the cinema, there was television. Perhaps some of you are similar to me, many of my favorite movies were first encountered as a teenager and adult on t.v., video, and dvd. The magic of a good or great movie is always there wherever you first see it. Yet there’s a particular kind of happiness in seeing movies on the big screen in the dark of an auditorium. (for the younger among you there was a time when there were still a few cinemas around that were less like battery farms, it’s true!) I recall when I was fifteen years-old and not so happy that going to the movies was as much of a lifeline as reading or music or watching movies at home. Then one day I was coming home with a friend from seeing Sneakers starring Robert Redford, Mary McDonnell, and Sidney Poitier (a fairly entertaining trifle) when I was mugged, needless to say that refuge, that haven, was ripped away from me for a time. Happiness in the dark would return but I never again saw as many movies in the cinema as I did in my early teenage years. I still love movies although I haven’t seen any in the cinema for years for various reasons (sad but, alas, boring tales!) and the onslaught of slop that besmirches the screen is disheartening, there are still good movies out there. I still believe in the magic of Cinema. Do you?