I was 11 years old, managed to convince my Dad to take me to Gerrard’s Cross cinema in the first week. (think Gerrard’s Cross may have been cemented over by now).
He hated it. Me, blown the fuck away.
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I knew nothing about it except it was science fiction. Memory says there were generic posters (they showed nothing) up for months ahead if time, though when I mentioned it.much later, someone who was an usher at the time said no. The friend I went with knew about it, but he read movie magazines.
We went the first day (well it didn’t open everywhere at the same time, so it was late June when it arrived here), in the afternoon, maybe the first show. We went to a further away theatre “because the sound was better”. We sat throughtwo showings.
It was crowded, it seemed like a lot of kids (I was 16, so it was relative).
I’ve seen it so many times since that it’s hard to remember what it was like. It wasn’t so much the story, but the music, and the opening text, and then suddenly a big ship across the screen.
It’s been watered down from watching, and it moving into the culture, and other movies like it.
But there was a difference from what had come before.
Logan’s Run the previous year was a movie I liked, but was minor to the reception Star Wars got.
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I was 7. We were visiting my aunt in Silverton, Oregon. We were visiting all weekend and my dad got antsy. So he and I escaped for awhile to the movie theater. I don’t recall either of us knowing in advance what this movie was. It was the only option and we just bought tickets spur of the moment with no expectation. Add me to the list of people that found this first viewing life altering. This was so beyond anything else at the time. My mind was completely blown and I became obsessed like every other kid.
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My favorite story about star wars goes back to 75 where a friend and I went to downtown Seattle to watch Wizards. After the movie they screened a the first trailer I had seen for Star Wars. In fact it was the first we even heard of star wars.
Leaving the theater I was all wow that looks really cool and he was all it looks stupid.
He also voted for trump last fall.
When it dropped in the summer I was working as a bus boy at a Restaurant that was open until 3 AM up on Broadway. We called the after hours drunk crowd Bar Wars. We we so with it.
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I turned 11 that summer and I remember seeing it twice. The first time our mom took my brother and me.
We were blown away, of course. What kid wouldn’t be? Was completely magical. Then we had to have the comics and toys and all that.
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I saw it in the old Loma Theatre in San Diego when I was 11. The Loma was one of the last of the great “palace” theatres. I remember watching it and being awed. My grandfather was underwhelmed: “It’s a b-grade western in space.”
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This was the Hicksville Twin theater attached to the Broadway Mall on 106/107. (It was two theaters, with separate entrances, but sharing the same box office and candy stand. You couldn’t easily switch theaters like you can with a multiplex.)
Roosevelt Field was a bit far a field for me at the time, but after I learned to drive went to a lot of movies there, after they put in a multi-story multiplex.
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I was 4 when it came to our local cinema in Berkeley (UK, the OG).
I remember jumping in to my Dad’s lap during the trash compactor scene!
Scared the bejesus out of me.
Dad told it was okay to be scared, and that when he was a kid, he went to see King Kong and got so scared he dropped his Mars Bar.
I remember visiting my Mum some years after, and she had a VHS player and a copy of the movie. I watched it 18 times!
The cinema in Berkeley is long gone now, but there’s a page dedicated to its memory with wonderful pictures:
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10 in 1977? Why you young whippersnapper, I was 11!
I knew exactly nothing at all about whatever movie my Dad was taking me to see, but it blew my mind.
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I’m fairly certain we saw Star Wars at the Century 21 Theater in San Jose. Could have been Cinema 150 in Santa Clara, but I seem to remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at that one.
Anyway, Century 21 was a huge domed theater part of a larger complex on Winchester Blvd. It’s no longer there.
Here are some pics I found online -
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I was a little too young to catch in the theater in 1977, though my parents took my sister to see it. I didn’t get to see it until 1982 when we bought the VHS of A New Hope. By the mid 90’s I had the widescreen versions of the trilogy on VHS when I lucked into a secondhand Forte VFX1 (an early stereoscopic “VR” headset). The first thing I did was figure out how to connect it to a VHS player and binge the original trilogy. That was my first opportunity to see it “on the big screen” and I have to admit it was a step up. I didn’t really care for VR though so I soon sold the headset to a collage buddy.
Just in time too before Lucas got his hands on CGI.
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I was 10 in 1977 as well, but that was right around the time my family had fallen into deep, abject poverty. There was no way to get to the distant towns with big theaters that had it, so I ended up having to wait almost a year until it re-released in 1978 with the Star Wars: A New Hope title change and our small, local theater carried it. That was… a hard year. In many ways. But that movie absolutely blew me away. I only got to see it twice because my mom thought it was weird I’d want to go to a movie more than once and I had to lie about the first time by saying “I fell asleep during it” so she’d let me go again.
Childhood is weird and wonderful.
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My two buddies and I first saw it in a big theater in Manhattan. The queue was the longest that I had ever seen, Both outside and inside, there came down an announcement that the audience at each sitting would have to leave the theater after the viewing; no stragglers. We hadn’t planned on it, but the three of us — still being stoked at the film’s end — stuck around for a prohibited second viewing, a first and only time, for me. This altar boy/boy scout stopped panicking only after all were seated and the film was rerun.
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I think I saw it at the Atwater in Montreal. By the time Empire came out, they’d built a new theatre for movies like that: The Imperial, heh.
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I was 28 or so when it came out. I’d grown up on 50s sci-fi but what I heard about “Star Wars” made me think it was more space opera than the hard-science (Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein) stuff I’d adored. A friend said it was like “Flash Gordon” but with better special effects and, for me at least, that was/is about right.
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Add me to the Ten Year Olds club, the Born in 1967 Club. One of the kids who saw it when it came to the town cinema, whose parents weren’t sure because it was PG, and who went from being a Trekkie to falling in love with that fantasy, with the hyperspace jump and the roar of the Millennium Falcon over the forest moon of Yavin. Who dreamed of piloting an X-Wing. Who a year later kept listening to the soundtrack at the local library.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture won me back into Trekkie-dom, but yeah, Star Wars was a world changer. Before, the big sci fi movie was Logan’s Run, and we kids were still playing with Space:1999 Eagles.
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I was 7 when Star Wars came out. I first saw it with a friend and his family at a crappy shopping mall theater, but was still blown away (like many others here) by the star destroyer filling the screen. Came home and told everyone about how it was like the best movie ever. Eventually my dad took us all to see it at the late lamented Coronet Theater in San Francisco. I forget how many times I saw it. Many. We argued in school about who really saw it the most times. I think I said 15 times but I probably made that up. Or did I?
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I saw it 7 times in '77, at the theater.
My friends and I took different drugs each time.
We smoked pot in the theater.
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The generic posters I remember seeing were in the tunnel between Westmount Square and Alexis Nihon Plaza.
But I actually saw it at Plaza Cote des Neiges.
The Imperial had long existed, I think that’s where I saw “2002”, so maybe I saw other Cinerama films there.
For awhile around 1977 or 78, the Imperial was a rep house, I thought divided into two theatres. But it didn’t last long.
I saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark” there. I bought an advanced ticket, and maybe saw it at midnight.
That will be forty years in June.
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Friends had heard about it and scooped me up for the 9:00 show opening night in DC. Since that was sold out we got midnight tix and went up to the local pub to wait it out–I distinctly remember Ireland’s 4 Provinces in neon but no idea which theater. Apparently so did the many of the midnight audience what with all the noise. Plot was entirely secondary.
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