About twenty years ago I visited the Bluebird Theater in Denver. They’d left the balcony seats alone but installed nightclub seating in the lower part of the auditorium. Depending on what night you showed up there might be a Monty Python movie, a poetry slam, a bluegrass concert, a travelogue, open-mic standup, or an evening of Warner Bros cartoons. Regular movie theater snack bar, plus beer & wine.
If I could buy an old movie house and run something precisely like this, I’d eventually die a very happy (if probably destitute) man.
Yeah, they set up little tables in front of the seats and have a lower platform so the servers can walk on without standing in front of the screens. You just write the order on a slip and they pick it up and take care of it. I think they’ve sorted out that selling beer/wine and good food (and good popcorn) and tickets for events is a better way to go for revenue, since Hollywood does not exist to keep theaters open. They also show a lot of older classics, some as quote-alongs, and do shows like Master Pancake, a live MST3K type thing. It’s nice to see some theaters branching out in other directions than the pack-in-more seats, show ads before movies, and charge $8 for popcorn model.
Did you ever go to the Lido down in Newport? When I lived in SoCal long ago, they were great - they did a Rocky Horror showing on Sat., and ran all kinds of odd films/shows (I hit Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation there religiously). I always loved that place, they had a lovely Art Deco interior, not as impressive as Mann’s or El Capitan, but still lovely. It was always in some crisis from developers wanting to steal the property, though.
I never did; I grew up in San Diego and moved to L.A. 25 years ago, so the OC was essentially flyover country for me. I did my Rocky Horror time at the Ken Cinema in San Diego, and later at the Nuart in West L.A.
If the Lido is still there, I’ll check it out one of these days. I’d like to make a grand tour of all the cool movie houses in the area, to make up for all the time I wasted at the thirty (count 'em, 30) AMC screens in Burbank.
I’m the opposite. Why suffer all the hassle, inconvenience, and expense just to get somewhere that has a screen when I have multiple screens at home?
I did go recently and it’s certainly improved a bit. Nowadays we can buy our tickets online with reserved seats (no need to sit in the floor at the front of the aisle if you’re a few minutes late), and they actually have something that approaches a reclining chair in comfort rather than the cramped discomfort devices that you used to have to sit in (the floor wasn’t really so bad considering the seats back then).
Still not as good as watching in the comfort of my own home, though. There I can control closed captions and the volume, pause it when I want, rewind if I missed something, and watch on a smaller screen that’s much easier on the eyes and neck. Plus no crowd or obnoxious people and I don’t have to watch a half hour of commercials and nagging before it starts.
I think it’s nice that some people enjoy the theater but I don’t really understand why.
I used to go to movies by myself all the time. The people I know in my general area aren’t interested in the same movies as me (except like X-Men, Star Wars, Star Trek … and that’s about it). Then I started dating someone a state away who mostly didn’t like going to movies. With all the driving, I usually didn’t go see movies by myself.
We dated for pretty close to five years. And now I can’t quite bring myself to go by myself. Anxiety: here’s something you used to love, now stressful for no concrete reason.
Every time I do go to the theatre now, it’s kind of terrible. Ads before the show. Long form commercials for shows I don’t want to watch. The expectation everyone will buy online and then use some kiosk with an inscrutable interface with a line of people waiting behind them.
The prices in my area haven’t raised by much since I started watching movies without a group of people but between everything else, I’d usually rather stay home and see what the internet is up to.
Some of us are spoiled with great theaters, that’s all. As home theaters have grown in size and capability and affordability, movie theaters have tried to make themselves worth going to. I’ve been to shitty, crowded theaters with no reserved seating, dim projection, sticky floors, irritating customers, bad sound, poor focus and framing, torn screens, bad smells, no soundproofing from the auditorium next door, cold popcorn, busted seats, short legroom, and no rake so everyone else’s head is in the way of my view.
But I don’t have to go to those theaters anymore. Now I get reserved seating, helpful and attentive ushers, very comfortable seats, awesome sound and projection, excellent soundproofing, and prices juuuust high enough to keep the families with small children away.
Man, it’s totally worth it to me. I don’t go to the local Herpes Cineplex anymore. I go to the Arclight for most movies, and the Chinese or El Capitan for special occasions. (Oh, and the American Cinematheque kinda ruined the Egyptian, but I’ll still go there for their excellent revival programming.)
I’m lucky enough to have three screens within a few minutes’ walk of my place (a twin cinema and a small single screen). Between them, they usually manage to cover all the new releases I want to see (exception: I had to drive to a mall theater to see Warcraft). They’re not fancy, but they are cheap, and I can get beer and food. Fellow moviegoers are generally not too obnoxious–maybe because we’re in our own neighborhood, instead of a generic cineplex in the middle of a parking lot. I got it pretty good
Yow that is nice.
MrsTobinL and I used to frequent the Paramount here in Seattle for the Silent Movie Monday shows but life and the current serieses have been not our thing. But oh man big screen and live music from a fully restored Wurlitzer.
A nearby theater has recently added MX4D, which is a much toned down version of the “dancing chairs” sort of movie experience you get at theme parks. The chairs move and wiggle and sway, air blows in your face, there’s spritzes of water when people get splashed on screen, scent pumped into the theater, all of that. I haven’t tried it yet, myself, but at least it’s an experience that can’t be replicated with blu-ray.
I used to buy hoagies all the time at the Wawa near me when I lived on the East Coast. Always face-to-face—until one day when I walked in only to see a shiny new touchscreen ordering system. I said ‘fuck that noise’ and started talking with one of the guys behind the counter. He shrugged and said that’s how orders have to be placed now.
I swore under my breath every second of having to used that blasted thing.
Now I’m ‘used to it’ but what I really feel that means is that I’m now complacent with this tiny shift towards an even more impersonal future.
The last movie I saw in a theater was “A Rocky Horror Show” and the entire audience was so rude. Yelling at the screen, throwing all sorts of things around… And they wouldn’t refund my ticket! I’ll stay at home by myself “chilling with Netflicks” thank you.
I’ll show my age here and mention seeing Wait Until Dark when it first came out. You could just feel the tension rising in the theater as it played. But, oh, when Audrey Hepburn panics and begins smashing all the light bulbs she can think of, that’s when the theater began turning down whatever lights it had on! When the jump scare came, you learned just why it was called that. A simple, but very effective trick that doesn’t work well at home
I went to see dark knight rises with the missus. I said “two tickets please”, they said “that’ll be £30 (GBP)”. Stunned and stupefied, I paid and waddled away with my mouth open.
“Have… have I just been robbed?” I wondered.
I did my Rocky Horror time at the Ken Cinema in San Diego, and later at the Nuart in West L.A.
