Your taste is impeccable. I will share my Vines with you.
When I was a kid, we didn’t get to go to the movies very often. We saw most of the biggest ones of the era (The Star Wars movies once each, courtesy of my eldest sister, plus Raiders and E.T. and some re-release of Fantasia… maybe two movies a year all told), but we’d typically go to the drive-in, which sounds horrifically quaint, but the Santee Twin we used to go to is still a going concern, last time I checked. We’d go to our local indie market to buy Red Vines and Jujubes and M&Ms, and bring a bag of popcorn that my dad popped on the stove. These days it’s apparently $9 for adults and $4 for kids, but it was probably $5 or $6 a carload when I was a kid. We’d park backwards in the station wagon, hoist the liftgate, and sprawl out on sleeping bags in the back of the car. The audio was shitty–nowadays they use an FM transmitter to send the audio through your car stereo, but it still had those crappy mono window speakers when we went there. It was a fun outing, but far from ideal viewing conditions.
Movies were rare enough for us that to this day, my sister’s favorite thing to do for special occasions like her wedding anniversaries is just to go to the movies without small kids in tow. Big bucket of popcorn and a cold drink and she’s happy as can be. Same with me. I love to go to the movies.
It’s been great since I moved to L.A. Lots of good theaters in town, half a dozen revival houses within a short drive, and some of the biggest and most spectacularly state-of-the-art screening rooms in the world, right at my fingertips.
I mean, look at these places:
The El Capitan Theater
The Chinese Theater
The Cinerama Dome
The Million Dollar Theater
I paid $29 to see Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D at the Chinese twice and I’d do it again. The screen is 46 feet tall and 94 feet wide. Sure, the popcorn and Red Vines and Mr Pibb are hugely overpriced, but I don’t care… it’s the one luxury that I indulge myself in without a moment’s hesitation. Because it’s really hard for us to find a babysitter, I still don’t get out to the movies more than three or four times a year, but I’d go every weekend if I could. Hell, when I was single, I’d go to the $4 weekday matinees at the Century 8 shitbox in North Hollywood just for the air conditioning!
Just for fun, here’s a timelapse of the renovation the Chinese underwent in 2013, showing how they dug down into the basement to extend the auditorium downward to make room for the massive screen:
