“Ready on the Set?… …Lights, Camera, Action!”

This past March, my wife and I watched the entire broadcast of the 95th Annual Academy Awards. I know you’re thinking, “So what?”. “Big woo”, millions of people watched the Academy Awards. But we don’t go to the movies much, although we both love movies, and we love the Oscars. The fashion, the speeches, the little snippets of films that we haven’t seen but we promise each other we will go see… and yet know we probably won’t.

At that moment I realized, what film does to you and me and why we go to the theater. Films create an alternate reality. Films allow us to immerse ourselves in something other than our lives. We get lost in a world previously unknown or even better, a world we have fantasized about and for two hours we are transformed.  The darkness of the theater is thrilling and the sounds coming from all around the theater, pounding on your chest, made the experience all the more fantastic. 

Try to remember the first movies you ever saw. You probably had to go to the local theater if you are as old as I am. The first for me was in 29 Palms, California on the Marine Corps base. My dad took me, and probably my brother too, ugh, to see lord knows what. It didn’t matter.  My dad was the movie guy.  Being a career Marine Corps officer, he was deployed frequently, and I imagine, though I never thought to ask, movies filled the downtime.  

I don’t remember the movie we went to see, but I remember seeing the “Batmobile” parked in front of the theater. It was 1966 and the original “Batman” TV show was airing, and I never missed an episode, so I was fully captivated by the illusion.  Years later my father told me the “Batmobile” was simply a Marine Corps jeep pulled from the motor pool and dressed up.  That made no difference to me; to an impressionable six-year-old boy, it was the Batmobile.

In 1966 my father was deployed to Viet-Nam for 13 months while my mom, brother and I lived in Ohio.  When Dad returned, we were stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina.  As with 29 Palms, we lived aboard the base.  This time I was a little older and living under the protective custody of being “on-station”.  MCAS Cherry Point ran an “Activity Bus” throughout the housing areas.  The bus took us all over the base to places I wanted to get to, the PX, the bowling alley, the gym, the golf course, and The Movie Theater.  With the activity bus, I no longer relied on anyone to take me to the movies.  The base had a bus that would do that.  All I had to do was check the show times, find a quarter (yes 25 cents), check in with the parents and away I go!  I saw all the great movies suitable for young kids, The Green Beret (1968), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The War Wagon (1967), True Grit (1969), Hang ‘Em High (1968).  

There is a point here, beyond telling you as a boy I saw movies.  I’m getting to it, I promise.

From North Carolina, our family is transferred to Northern Virginia.  Now we have to live “in town”.  No more movie bus.  Now we relied on someone to drive us to a theater and as such our movie viewing is curtailed.   I do remember seeing one film in particular that pulls us back to the second paragraph above.  The movie On Any Sunday (1971), is a movie all about motorcycle riding.  We lived in an area full of military brats, open space, and plenty of spare time.  We watched On Any Sunday, jumped on our Stingray bikes and took off.  We built ramps and tracks, and obstacle courses just like they had in the movie.  We had transformed into another world.  We became the riders in that movie in every way.  

Movies take us to a fantasy world that suspends reality for a moment.  What inspired me to share this story with you comes from reading Quentin Tarantino’s book, Cinema Speculation, and I am struck by how many movies he saw a young man.  Then I realized, I too saw a bunch of movies as a kid, and I then asked why.  Tarantino and I are about the same age (I am a little older) so I feel safe when I say “our generation” I can include him.  I understand you know Quentin Tarantino’s work and I equally understand you don’t know my work.  He does blockbuster hits; I do videos of my vacations.  So, while reading Tarantino’s book I realized that for our generation movies, and in particular the movie theaters, was “our generation’s” social media. That’s where we needed to go to see grand, larger-than-life adventures.   That’s where we needed to go to see and be seen by people, share the experience of a big-screen movie. We only had maybe 7 channels on TV and so for an experience that I could relive over and over it had to be the movie theater.  Where else would I get the huge theater sound, the excitement of being out after dark, the movie theater popcorn (not the Jiffy-Pop stovetop stuff), and the people in the theater?  Nowhere else!

Thank you, Quentin Tarantino and all the movie production people.  Most of all, thank you for sharing this memory with me.