When I’m nine years old my mother takes me and my sister to the UA Quartet on Northern Boulevard to see Jaws. You have to get there early because every showing is sold out. I don’t know if you’d take a nine-year-old today to see Jaws, but in the ’70s no one gave a shit. We saw everything my mother wanted to see. As far as I was concerned this was a family film. It was so horrifying at one point that I hid on the ground and could only watch between the seats in front of me. My mother asked if I wanted to leave. “Leave?! Are you out of your fucking mind?!” This was the highlight of my life up until that point. I loved being terrified. That same year she takes me to see The Stepford Wives. Women are killed and turned into robots and the entire cast is dead by the end of the film. I loved it. There was never any “Hmm, maybe this isn’t appropriate for a nine-year-old” from her. And thank God. My mother wasn’t the kind of mother to take you to Pinocchio but she would take you to The Omen. You didn’t talk about processing what you saw after or how it made you feel either. It was a fucking movie. She gave us enough credit to know that. (Also, children did not have feelings in the ’70s, this was not something that was developed until much later.)
I was consumed with going to the movies, studying the film guide in the Daily News like the Torah. Just thinking about the ad for The Poseidon Adventure can to this day make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Getting my mother to take me always involved careful planning beforehand. “I hear this new Alfred Hitchcock film is supposed to be really something,” I say to her while memorizing the screening times for Family Plot. (This will be Hitchcock’s last film and stars Karen Black of Airport ’75. One of the best disaster movies of all time. “The stewardess is flying the plane!” remains one of the more iconic lines in cinema history.)
“Oh,” my mother would say half-interested. “Who’s in it?” I’d run down the bio of the cast, summarize the plot, and give her my own take on early reviews. I was our family’s Rotten Tomatoes. “That could be fun,” she’d say. But if I’d add there’s a show in fifteen minutes we can just make, she’d see right through me. “We’re not going to the movies in fifteen minutes,” she’d say. As if it were the most ridiculous thing a person could propose. You’d think I asked her to go trekking in Nepal. I had to play it just so. Wait a day. And then maybe, “It’s supposed to rain on Saturday. That could be a good day to see that movie you wanted to go to.”
“We’ll see,” she’d say. And then I’d have to let that sit for a few days.
Then on Friday: “The movie’s on at 1:10 and 3:25 tomorrow, which one should we go to?”
“What movie?”
“Family Plot.”
“I never said we were going to that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I said we’ll see.”
And this played out exactly the same way with dozens of movies throughout the years. And sometimes “we’ll see” meant yes and sometimes it meant no. I have to hand it to my mother, she was not easily manipulated and she had no qualms in shutting down a seven-year-old whose only desire was to see Battle for the Planet of the Apes. It made going to the movie that much more thrilling knowing it so easily could have gone the other way. The excitement I felt sitting in the theater was matched in intensity only by its inverse reaction the times she said no. A crushing depression that could cripple me for days. During my childhood I was basically on the same emotional roller-coaster as a heroin addict. The highs were very high and the lows were really low.
Other times I’d go to the movies with my sister or our neighbor Carol Ann, who was my sister’s age. But even they would be hard to convince. Carol Ann shared my taste in horror films, and when a new one came out I’d have to beg her to go with me. “My dad will drive us and pick us up.” More often than not she’d say no. Nobody was interested in going to the movies as much as I was. Eventually I just started going alone. (But a scary movie alone, even today, is no fun.) I felt it was something I had to keep to myself, this obsession. There was something not right about it. Another thing that made me other. And I couldn’t afford one more of those. As much as I seemed to love movies to everyone around me, like an iceberg, 90 percent more was underneath the surface. But I was good at hiding things. Most of what I liked, who I was, I knew from the earliest age, was not something to be shared. Everything about me felt a bit off. A bit wrong. The things I liked, I liked too much. The things I didn’t, all other boys did.
(My favorite theater was the RKO Keith’s in Flushing. It was one of the most impressive movie palaces in New York, originally built in the ’20s as a vaudeville house and cinema. Mae West and Judy Garland performed there. Premieres were held there. Celebrities arrived in limousines. Of course I knew none of this as a child. In the ’70s its glory days were already far behind it. By the time I start going it’s a triplex. Two smaller theaters on the main floor and an enormous one that you had to climb a gigantic horseshoe staircase to reach. In the middle of it all was an ornate fountain. The theater had not been kept up and as a result had a Grey Gardens crumbling grandeur to it. I see The Amityville Horror there, and it feels as though not only the house in the film, but the theater itself, is haunted. Everything that was once beautiful, but no longer is, has a sadness to it. I see pictures of what the RKO Keith’s originally looked like only many years later when I accidentally come across them online. And it’s breathtaking. We tramped up and down one of the grandest theater staircases ever built, dropping popcorn, spilling soda, without a thought for any of it. Judy Garland sang there for fuck’s sake! (It’s also where I see my first on-screen penis after sneaking into American Gigolo. As far as penises go, Richard Gere’s was a very good first penis.) RKO Keith’s closes in the ’80s. Nobody cares. The shell of the building still stands, rotting. Like the upside-down Poseidon at the bottom of the ocean floor.)
When I’m eleven Star Wars opens. It’s playing at only two theaters. One in Manhattan and one on Long Island. Movies didn’t always go immediately into wide release then. They would tease them out for weeks, months, build word of mouth. Today something comes out on Netflix on Friday and it’s forgotten by Monday. But Star Wars ran for over a year. It just became part of the fabric of your life after a while. Like another family member. When something hit it big in pop culture then it stayed around a long time. Getting picked apart till every bit of marrow had been sucked from its bones.
Star Wars was such a thing that my father took me to see it on Long Island long before it even came to Queens. We drove out to UA Cinema 150 in Syosset, and I had never seen a line that long for a movie. I was certain my father would not want to wait. He didn’t often take me to the movies and when he did, it was an event. We waited in line for the next showing. The one we wanted to see was already sold out. This was incredible, that my father would do this, I had never seen him wait in line for a movie much less for two hours. And he seemed happy to be doing it. When we were finally in the lobby they sold programs. And my dad bought me one. A program for a movie?! What the fuck was this?! I can still remember the feeling of watching that movie, having never seen anything like it before. I felt at once so small and so big. It expanded what could be. And I noticed, sitting in that theater, looking out at the crowd, that there were other fathers and sons there, too. Lots of them. And they all seemed as excited as I did. And for that day I was like everyone else. I kept the program for years. It’s long gone now though.