I once watched "The Maltese Falcon" in a tiny, storefront theater on Cannery Row. It was 1975, and I was in my Jack Kerouac phase, bumming around the country in a well-traveled Ford Mustang with money I'd saved in the Air Force. What was distinctive about Monterey's 812 Cinema, apart from its hole-in-the-wall size, was that there were no seats, just pillows and cushions on the floor, so you more or less reclined while you watched the movie. Which could be a problem if you were real tired. I think I fell asleep.
I once watched Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" in the Stiftskeller in the Memorial Union at the University of Wisconsin. The Stiftskeller was a small room just off the Rathskeller (a much larger room), and the screening was probably put on by one of the campus film societies. The place was packed, standing rom only, so I stood. Through the whole movie. This was the late '60s, before VHS, DVD and TCM. Before cable. Before video stores. Before streaming. Back then, if something like "The Great Dictator" turned up and you wanted to see it, you went. There was no guarantee you'd get another chance. Also, there weren't a lot of indoor smoking regulations and a lot of people smoked, which added to the ambience, I suppose. The Stiftskeller was definitely smoky.
I once watched "Night of the Living Dead" at the Badger Drive-In in Madison. This was in the late '70s, and it was one of the films on a dusk-to-dawn quintuple feature, along with "Toolbox Murders", "Hollywood Meat Cleaver Massacre", "Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon" and "Mansion of the Doomed". I don't remember whether it was my brother Bill or me who saw the ad in the paper, but the moment it crossed our radar, we knew we had to go. We weren't the only ones who did, but we might've been the only ones who stayed awake through all five movies. As a public service, the concession stand provided free coffee and donuts to the survivors around 3:30 in the morning.
I once watched "Tony Rome" and "The Green Berets" on a double bill at another Wisconsin drive-in. I don't remember what town it was, but the year would've been 1968. I had a summer job on a traffic survey crew with the state highway department, and we always stayed in cheap motels when we were on the road away from Madison. On this occasion, our motel was about a mile down the road from a drive-in theater, so as evening approached, I hiked down there, walked in the exit, found a place to sit under an available speaker, turned up the volume and watched both movies. I haven't seen "The Green Berets" since.
After 70 years or more watching flickering images flash across various screens, some experiences are bound to stand out, and the more offbeat they are, the more likely they are to stick in your memory. For me, the best was this:
About 25 years ago, there was a screening of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in Seattle's Gas Works Park. It was summer, so it was warm, and people brought food and blankets and found places to sit on the hill facing the iron wreckage that was once the city's gas works. Lang's vision of a dystopian future played out with all that industrial junk in the background, under a full moon, while a live orchestra played an original score timed to sync with the film. As a moviegoing event, it was magical, a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
Sometimes the stars line up and the cinema gods look your way and something comes along that's just too good (or crazy, or comical, or weird) to pass up. You can't anticipate an experience like that. When it happens, you've just got to go.
