Anyone here miss the days when going to the movies was a major highlight of the week?
Posted by TW on June 6, 2025, 1:14 pm Valued Poster
As a kid in the early '60s, I saw some great movies at this theater in Sedalia, Missouri.
An Elegy for Moviegoing By Philip Klein
The curtain falls on a ritual of American culture
For much of my life, it wasn’t a matter of whether we were going to see a movie on the weekend but which one. When I was a child, that meant leafing through the movie section of the local newspaper to see what was playing; as a teenager, I’d dial 777-FILM (“Hello, and welcome to Moviefone”); in my 20s, I’d check websites such as Fandango. But through it all, moviegoing was the default activity. If our first choice was sold out, we’d just see something else. Even if nothing was playing that we particularly wanted to see, we’d choose the movie with a showtime that worked best.
As I got older and took on more responsibilities, it became harder to get to movie theaters as often as I used to. Even as the activity became less a part of my own life, though, I took it for granted that a younger generation of moviegoers would carry on, and that theaters would always be there for me whenever I really wanted to see a film on a big screen. Sadly, I’m no longer confident that this will be the case.
These days, when I do manage to see movies, the theater is typically more empty than not. Things are sometimes so dead, it feels like I’m in a private screening room. I sit there and think about the massive footprint of the multiplexes, the number of employees required to keep them functioning every day of the year, the heating bills in the winter and cooling bills in the summer. I can’t see how the business model can be sustainable without the steady flow of customers purchasing tickets and overpriced refreshments.
That last paragraph struck kind of a different chord with me. Back in 1975, while in the Marines, I was stationed at the Naval Air Tactical Training Center in Millington, TN. Just a little north of Memphis. A friend and I went into town to watch a movie. It was Charles Bronson in Hard Times. We were the only 2 in the theater and sat in the middle, about halfway up from the front. It was a great time. No distractions of any kind. I had never in my life experienced such a screening. I probably never will again. You just never sat or never imagined sitting in a theater with nobody else in it.
I identified with much of the above article as well as with some of the comments made at the end of the piece:
gary_s_padgett Top Commenter It is not the theaters that have destroyed the movie going behavior. It is the quality of the movies. They are crap now. They are riddled with political ideologies that offend half the public if not more. The actors have become so politically active in their personal lives too that they have alienated half of their base as have the movie production companies.
Between the actors and the agendas of the companies making the movies they are the ones responsible for the decline in movie going.
oldschooldude Hall of Famer Back in the 20th century, after electricity was invented, I remember a big group of us meeting at my downtown Seattle apartment and walking from there to the Egyptian to see the director’s cut of Blade Runner. After the movie, we headed to a nearby place for beer and dancing. It wasn’t the movie itself that made the night so memorable—it was the whole experience.
Hourman Hall of Famer My take on what is wrong with the movies: every scene is too dark or has some odd tint to it. And every sound is too loud: the extreme close up of a mundane activity like opening the medicine cabinet with an eardrum-splitting sound of the light coming on and the cap coming off the ibuprofen bottle. Then the predictability of the male and female protagonists hating each other until they suddenly decide to have sex while their Rainbow Coalition assortment of associates says they were rooting for them all along.
I miss going to theaters, but also love watching movies at home on a big screen
in whatever level of dress that I want and not having to wait in lines to get junk food and assorted stuff.
There's a lot to be said for both Cinemax theater and home theater.
Growing up, there were multiple theaters on Main Street in the city next door to my small hometown. They had all been there for gazillion years. Double balconies, plush, roomy seating, reclining chairs, and multiple ushers working different sections. When their day was over, multiplex theaters opened, showing dozens of films daily. Smallish theaters with compact seating and none of the charm of the old theaters.
When I was a kid, our cuty had three downtown movie theatres; the Chief, the Ute, and the Peak. The Peak is still there not much changed. I think. It may be closed, but it is still there. I know for a while they showed old movies and foreign films.
The Ute and all the stores around it was torn down to make room for the Anschutz Building. Never been in the Anschutz building.
The Chief was a real theatre before it became a movie theatre. Had a balcony, and under the stage a maze of passage ways and trap doors for all kinds of magical surprize entrances. A former mayor owned the Out West building next to it, and had them torn down for urban renewal. Then he condemned the Chief as unsafe and ordered it torn down. Demolition crews had one hell of a hard time tearing it donw, it was so well engineered and built. The ex mayor wanted that property too, to sell for the urban renewal. When his wife was discovered dead in the trunk of his car, that ended his financial crime spree.
We had three drive in theatres. The Sky Vue, Eighth Street, and another- I forget the name. They're all gone now.
We went to the Chief for Saturday matinees. $0.25 Those were the many sci fi movies of the day. Robinson Crusoe in Mars, Attack of the 50 foot Woman, It Came from Outer Space. Big blockbusters premiered there. The Sound of Music, Planet of the Apes, Lawrence of Arabia, How the West was Won, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Mary Poppins.
Cooper moved in with their 70mm format. Then came Cinerama. They're gone too.
That was a fair time.
I have not been to a movie in a theatre since Star Wars I Phantom Menace. The mini and megaplexes charge you a small fortune to sit in absolute filth.
You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
I heard that Spielberg doesn't go to see films anymore due to cellphones and suchlike garbage. If so I don't blame him.
Going to see a big movie was awesome (Star Wars, Superman, Indy Jones). Going to see foreign or smaller movies was also wonderful (Heathers, any film by Almodóvar, and so on) was also fine. I saw Peter Greenaway films just to stretch my mind!
Cellphones should be banned from theaters.-greenman
Re: OMG, we all loved going.
Posted by Christopher Blackwell on June 6, 2025, 7:01 pm, in reply to "OMG, we all loved going."
Downtown Los Angeles still had the crumbling old theaters when I lived there in the 1970s. Even so I loved those old theaters, and their style created the effect that these were magical places in their day. I still have my movie night each week, but I would not ever go to a movie theater today, just the DVD on my computer. ChristopherBlackwell
Kids don't know but they first tried to make BIG theaters wirh big screens to show pictures. That wasn't as economically feasible as showing many movies in many mini-plexes.
I saw 'Lawrence of Arabia' in Cinerama. Freakin' amazing..-greenman
on June 6, 2025, 1:14 pm
