How has the Evolution of the Silver Screen affected the theater and movie going experience in the...

[Fading Fast]

^^^^
Because it's so easy to jump around online, people tend to jump around. So yeah, I concur: reading on paper more deeply engages me than does reading on a glowing screen....

As does going to the theater versus watching at home. I can remember particular points of days 40 years ago; I saw "Rocky" at the theater ($2 matinee Saturday special) with a friend and we got sodas and chips afterwards - I remember the friend, the soda, the chips, his mom dropped us off, etc. as seeing "Rocky" felt like a mini-event.

Now, we pop a disc in or click to stream, watch something and move on with our day - I doubt 4 months from now let alone 40 years, I'll remember anything particular about the day I streamed "Brooklyn," but I still know the bag a chips I had the day I saw Rocky - going to the movie makes for a deeper connect with the movie.

 

[tonyb]

Yes, going out to the movies is much more eventful than plopping down on the couch and fiddling with the remote.

The social aspects aside, one huge advantage the theater had over television was the immersion in the experience. The screen at the movie house filled a much larger portion of one's field of vision, and the viewing wasn't interrupted by the telephone or the doorbell or the spouse asking when the car is going into the shop.

Home video screens (hell, let's just call 'em TVs, which is about as fitting a description as is "phone" for the gizmo on which I'm banging out this missive) have all but eliminated that first advantage. The picture quality is great and only getting better, the size rivals and in some cases exceeds the field of vision offered by all but the front row seats at the movie theater. And the price is but a small fraction of what TVs cost not so long ago. (I don't predate TV, but I do recall when color TV was a BFD, and when working-class people might have to save up a month's wages or more to procure such a wondrous thing.)

Still, though, I doubt that most people, even those with home theater rooms (not such a rare thing anymore), will routinely watch feature-length movies uninterrupted on the home screen. This won't spell the end of such features, but expect more productions to reflect the contexts in which they will mostly be viewed.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I sometimes imagine what a different experience moviegoing could be during the Depression. You see a bit of this in Woody Allen's movie "The Purple Rose of Cairo." The shopgirl goes to the movies to escape her boring, humdrum world and deadend job. In the '30s, even if you had a job and a decent home, life was bleak and grim. Movies gave you glamour and magic and they were shown in palaces. Even modest, small-town theaters had ornate touches to make them seem glamorous and the big-city venues were indeed palatial. They had exotic themes: Renaissance palazzo, Chinese, Egyptian, Mayan, undersea with mermaids, extreme Deco futuristic, anything at all. In the 60s I went to one of the few still-functioning classic palaces, the Aztec in San Antonio. Near me in Albuquerque the Kimo theater has been lovingly restored to its original "Pueblo-Deco" glory. Until you've seen a proscenium surrounded by cattle skulls with glowing, red eyes, you haven't lived. In a place like that, you could escape the Depression. And you could spend half the day there: two features, a cartoon, previews and "selected shorts," usually travelogues or short comedies like the old one-reelers, with sound. I also imagine what a comedown going back outside must have been.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Our theatre is a lot more humble than that -- it was a neighborhood house, not a palace, but there were and still are a few ornate touches. Before the renovation, the ladies room had a little "retiring couch" in an anteroom before you went in to where the toilets were, and older patrons still to this day tell me how elegant that felt in a town where backyard one-holers were still common as late as the 1960s.

The most impressive theatre I've ever been in was the Fox Arlington in Santa Barbara, California -- the outside isn't much, but inside is built to replicate a Spanish mission garden, complete with a domed ceiling onto which clouds and stars are projected before the movie. I saw Abel Gance's "Napoleon" there in 1983, and despite the incongruity of the setting, it was the most memorable moviegoing experience of my life.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I know the Arlington well. Some of my family lived in Santa Barbara from 1960-2013 and it was a part of my life for more than half a century. Many Hollywood movies were sneak-previewed in the Arlington, perhaps most famously Capra's "Lost Horizon,"which was a huge disappointment. In Capra's autobiography he speaks of how shattered he was riding back to L.A., and how Harry Cohn comforted him and assured him that they would recut the film and make it a success, which indeed was done and it became a huge hit. This was perhaps the only good thing that was ever written about Harry Cohn.