Are you, like me, a moviegoer who spent an unwholesome amount of time inside a darkened cinema in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, watching trash and watching masterpieces and eating unhealthy movie snacks? Do you remember Snack Canyon, which is what United Artists bizarrely called its popcorn counters in the 1980s? Do you remember “Pixote” and Mike Leigh’s “High Hopes”?
If you are a movie buff or cinephile like me, you will know what I mean when I refer to those movie directors of the 1980s who could not resist the urge to give us movie scenes about movie theaters, setting nostalgic scenes plucked from their own youth inside darkened cinemas. Movie theater nostalgia is practically a cinematic subgenre in and of itself. I certainly have at least a dozen times watched a group of boisterous boys with a shilling or nickel in their pocket (the young Spielberg, the young John Boorman) throwing Jujubes around and knocking the fedoras off irritated adult audience members, then turning their faces with awe toward the screen when fighter planes roar in during the newsreel.
The inside of my mind frequently runs one of these nostalgic movie reels within a nostalgic movie reel. The footage in my dark brainpan frequently revisits the darkened interior of the United Artists Cinema on Main Street, where I sat in anticipation with both a Charleston Chew and a bucket of buttered popcorn on my lap.
I don’t bear many parental grievances against my own children, but I do judge them harshly for not appreciating the moviegoing experience as they ought. What technology and progress have given them, instead, is worse than a paltry consolation.
Every six months or so, I succeed in convincing my son, the Teenage Werewolf, to accompany me to the Regal Cinema — as it now is — to catch a 6 p.m. show. Apparently they no longer sell enough tickets to warrant screenings at 2, 4, 7, and 9 p.m. as they did in my youth. I have to bribe Teddy with some other privilege and practically beat him with a stick. He drags his feet and finds the movies mostly boring. He doesn’t even care about Milk Duds or popcorn and cannot be lured by snacks.
The last time I talked Teddy into deigning to attend the actual movies, I made a terrible tactical error and, not having done my research, took him to see “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” not realizing it was a Guy Ritchie movie. I never walk out of movies and indeed sat all the way through “The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie” and “Look Who’s Talking” starring John Travolta, but we walked out of “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” It was atrocious, an intentionally cartoonish depiction of the Second World War with intentionally cartoon Nazis. If Teddy never goes to the cinema again, it’s fully Guy Ritchie’s fault. The film directors of the United Kingdom should revoke Guy Ritchie’s directing license. I left the Regal Cinema by the side door, 45 minutes in, shouting, “Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!”
On Monday night, I had the joy and privilege of watching one of the greatest achievements in cinematic history on the big screen, when the Sag Harbor Cinema showed David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” in the big main auditorium. It’s magnificent. Magnificent. The scene where Omar Sharif makes his entrance riding slowly in on camel-back dressed in all-black robes is a moment of high art. The score by Maurice Jarre is also magnificent.
It must have been either at the John Drew Theater or at the Sag Harbor Cinema that I first saw “Lawrence of Arabia” when I was Teddy’s age; by then, the movie was 20 years old and already “a classic,” and that’s where you saw classics in the 1980s. Seeing it again another 40 years later, I am retroactively impressed with myself that I had the good sense to recognize its greatness but also slightly puzzled by what I loved so much about it in my adolescence. I definitely didn’t get its messages about hubris or ethnic condescension.
Largely, I think, I just loved “Lawrence of Arabia” when I was 14 years old because of Peter O’Toole’s magnificent face. I remember drawing that face — attempting to draw that face — over and over in Ms. Herbert’s art class at East Hampton High School, and the face coming out as an amalgamation of David Bowie’s face and O’Toole’s. Also, I think, I responded to “Lawrence of Arabia” as a story of heroic individualism. O’Toole’s Lawrence was an extraordinary man who had grabbed his own destiny, as I wished to grab mine . . . and somehow, being 14, I failed to notice the hero’s equally magnificently sized flaws.
The older I get, the more I appreciate the power of beauty.
The faces of the old Hollywood stars.
Peter O’Toole had a face of remarkable beauty, but I think in my 14-year-old innocence and naïveté, I also completely missed how campy his performance is. I mean, he’s wonderful, yes, but if the movie has a flaw — and it doesn’t have many — it is that the magnificent director, David Lean, allowed the magnificent O’Toole to be quite so emphatically swishy, and allowed the makeup artist to put mascara on his lower eyelashes.
The other flaw is the prosthetic nose worn by Anthony Quinn in the role of Auda Abu Tayi. It looks very liver-colored, at least in the 1988 restored version of “Lawrence of Arabia” we saw on Monday night.
The rumor mill in the village this year has been suggesting that the Regal Cinema may come on the real estate market soon, due to falling audience numbers and mostly empty auditoriums. This better not be true, or I’m going on an actual rampage. I will have to overturn tables and may lie down in the middle of Main Street and have to be carried away in a paddy wagon. (Can we say “paddy wagon”? Possibly not?) East Hampton needs a cinema or it’s officially the end of civilization. If we lose our cinema, I suggest, we should all sell up and move away.
Or, alternately, if indeed the Regal Cinema goes on the market, it is essential for the survival of East Hampton as a community that some wise and worthy nonprofit organization buy the movie theater and reopen it as a movie theater. It can show new releases as well as Hollywood classics. I’m sure whoever this wise and worthy local nonprofit is, they will overdo the renovations and attempt to reinvent the wheel, even though there is no need for reclining seats or wine service and indeed those things can be annoying to an actual, card-carrying, Guy Ritchie-loathing cinephile. I insist there is no need to replace the popcorn machine. The popcorn at the Regal Cinema is excellent. We shall not speak about the popcorn at the Sag Harbor Cinema, because otherwise, and in all respects, the Sag Harbor Cinema is fantastic and I thank God it’s there.
After the final scene of “Lawrence of Arabia” had played out on Monday evening, and Lawrence had taken off the gold headdress and white robes of a sharif and put back on his British officer’s khaki and motored off into eternity, one of my moviegoing companions turned and said he was reminded of the Frank O’Hara poem “Ave Maria”: “Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!”
Yes. It’s true that fresh air is good for the body, but the soul grows in the darkness of the movie palace.
I think also of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
That’s also actually true. A face of remarkable beauty can lead us anywhere, even across the Nafud Desert.