Movietime
My movie habit began very solidly during high school in Rome, Italy. While growing up in Maine during Junior High School and also during ninth grade at Hebron Academy, I don’t remember caring too much about movies, or even TV for that matter. Those years were heavily dominated by getting into outdoor sports ranging from skiing and canoeing to golfing and tennis. TV and movies were at best an afterthought. That all changed when we moved to Rome in 1968. In those days, Italy was still in the later years of its post-war recovery with Italians graduating from scooters to small Fiat cars and Italian TV provided to the masses through two nationalized stations that played predominantly sports and news. That was so much the case that we didn’t even bother to own a TV in our home. The expatriate community in Rome was relatively robust with more than half a dozen schools providing boarding and day-student education for the global youth that found itself in Rome for one reason or another. While alcohol restrictions for young people were culturally scant, for some reason (perhaps there’s a lesson in that) we were not, as a group, all that alcohol-obsessed. That meant that doing what American kids of similar age were desperate to be doing, hanging out at places where alcohol was served, was not so special to us. What was very special was connecting to American culture in whatever form it was available. At the time, other than one burger joint (I think it was called Wimpy Burger, presumably in honor of Popeye’s pal Wimpy) located at Piazza Barbarini, the place where everyone wanted to gather was at the movie theaters. There were two; one in the far northern suburb of Parioli, which operated like a first-run theater in the U.S. with a change of billing every week or two. The other was the far-trendier Pasquino Theater in the oh-so-hip Trastevere artist quarter, just off the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. The Pasquino had a retractable roof for those hot summer nights and it changed billing every night with a full array of second-run movies for 500 lira (80 cents) per seat.
During the school year we probably went to the Pasquino twice per week, and during the summer, it could be as many times as five per week. It was our Malt Shoppe and we should ride our motorcycles there and park in the Piazza, and do like the locals before and after the movie by lounging on the steps of the central fountain in the square. It holds a very special place in my youthful memory and it burned the love for movies deeply into my psyche. The theater was configured as a longer and narrower theater, so we all got in the early habit of sitting as close to the front as we could since the screen was not so very big and we wanted to be absorbed into the movies we went to see. I really expanded my movie vocabulary by seeing so many movies of all ilk. I learned to be non-discriminating and to appreciate the good things in almost every genre. About the only genre I truly avoided was horror movies, which, for some reason, did not agree with my sensibilities. Those summer nights under the stars were magical to me and when I see the start of a movie like with the MGM Lion roaring, my soul also roars to life.
By the time I returned to the Unites States for college after three years in Italy, I was more addicted to screen time than many American youth that grew up in front of the TV. I spent time in college catching up on some of the TV shows that were not part of the Pasquino bill of faire. Those were shows like Star Trek and All in the Family. They were not movies, but they had all the narrative arc and pathos of movies, so they were very appealing to me as well. During my post-graduate years in New York City, I once again gravitated to movies as a source of entertainment. Not being a big drinker (I went from occasional social drinking to not drinking at all, which is where I am now), entertainment meant going to the movies, first in suburbia and eventually in NYC. Almost no one was as enamored with movies as I was. Most people of my age liked movies, but they were simply not as obsessed with the storytelling of movies as I was. It was one of the first clues that I had that I was, at heart, a storyteller.
By the time I moved into Manhattan about thirty years ago, I found that having access to an almost limited supply of every type of movie theater one could imagine felt a lot like being back in Trastevere at the Pasquino. If I had wanted to watch a different movie every night in a theater in Manhattan, I could. In fact, I got to the point where I averaged 2-3 movies per week and found that there were some weeks when it was hard to find that many first-run movies that I found interesting even though the industry releases about 400 new films a year in the U.S. alone.
When we moved out here to our hilltop three years ago, I wondered how I would fare without the theater array i was used to in Manhattan. There were plenty of theaters in a twenty mile radius, but they tended to be chains like Regal or AMC and did not have much beyond the normal big blockbusters and action films that are so popular with suburban youth. There ia an Angelica Theater in Carmel Mountain and an art film house in downtown San Diego, both of which were further away. Our move coincided with COVID, which furthermore coincided with the trend in movie-going that focused on more comfortable recliner seats and better food offerings. That meant that fewer/better movie visits quickly turned into no movie visits as we all hunkered down at home to avoid infection. We watched at the big movie theaters shut down (and they continue to do so) and, as I suspected when it all happened, led to them now mostly closing down. The universe had forced an issue that streaming and on-demand movies at home had foretold and the move die was cast. The movie-making power seemed to appropriately shift away from MGM, Paramount and Universal to the likes of Amazon, Netflix and the various cable networks. Time and trends march on, so we all adjust.
I wondered if I would ever go to another movie theater at all, but as COVID eased, we started going to the Angelika every once in while, but certainly not with the same frequency that we had pre-pandemic. On the other hand, the combination of forced COVID quarantine and retirement has made me someone that scours the Prime, Netflix, HBO Max and AppleTV SmartTV apps for any and every suggestion of a movie almost daily. I am sure I watch a far higher proportion of movies versus series or sports than most people. In fact, my use of TV is to watch movies and cable news and little else. If ESPN did not exist, I doubt I would notice. Strangely enough, what started as an attempt to become more like Americans when I was in Rome, has ended up with me being distinctly less like the majority of the American public at this point.
Tonight Kim and I are going to meet nephew Will at Liberty Station in San Diego to see Avatar: The Way of Water, a movie that is certainly best seen on not only a big screen, but,in this case, a 3D screen. THe theater is not only a comfortable recliner seat theater, but I am told by nephew Will that they have call buttons for food delivery to one’s seat. I’m looking forward to the experience as movietime is always a favorite time for me, but I’m prepared to moderate my passion sufficiently to fit the new American movie-going protocol.