American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing

Tom Stempel

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188751
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

A unique perspective on half a century of American cinema—from the audience's point of view. Tom Stempel goes beyond the comments of professional reviewers, concentrating on the opinions of ordinary people. He traces shifting trends in genre and taste, examining and questioning the power films have in American society. Stempel blends audience response with his own observations and analyzes box office results that identify the movies people actually went to see, not just those praised by the critics. Avoiding statistical summary, he presents the results of a survey on movies and moviegoing in the respondents' own words—words that surprise, amuse, and irritate.

The moviegoers respond: "Big bad plane, big bad motorcycle, and big bad Kelly McGillis."—On Top Gun

"All I can recall were the slave girls and the Golden Calf sequence and how it got me excited. My parents must have been very pleased with my enthusiasm for the Bible."—On why a seven-year-old boy stayed up to watch The Ten Commandments

"I learned the fine art of seduction by watching Faye Dunaway smolder."—A woman's reaction to seeing Bonnie and Clyde

"At age fifteen Jesus said he would be back, he just didn't say what he would look like."—On E.T.

"Quasimodo is every seventh grader."—On why The Hunchback of Notre Dame should play well with middle-schoolers

"A moronic, very 'Hollywoody' script, and a bunch of dancing teddy bears."—On Return of the Jedi

"I couldn't help but think how Mad magazine would lampoon this." —On The Exorcist

1 Childhoods

In the first week of May 1948, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Paramount case that the distribution and exhibition practices of the major studios of the American motion picture industry were a violation of U.S. antitrust laws. This decision, which led to the major studios having to sell off their theatre chains, was the beginning of the end of the major studio system of motion picture production. At the time, few people in Hollywood realized the enormous implications of the decision for American filmmaking. I certainly did not, but then I was not living in Los Angeles then, and I was not yet a professional film historian. I had only just gotten into heavy moviegoing the year before. And I was only six years old.

I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, where I was born and brought up. If you have seen the 1979 movie Breaking Away, that is my hometown, although when I was growing up there in the forties and fifties, absolutely no young men rode around on bicycles singing Italian opera as they do in the movie. However, a year after Breaking Away came out, I was back in Bloomington and saw several guys riding bicycles and singing Italian opera. Maybe movies do influence behavior.

They certainly influenced mine at the age of five. I had become hooked on movies in 1947 when I went to see what was a revival screening of Twentieth Century-Fox’s 1939 Western Jesse James. I am sure I had seen movies before, but this is the first specific film I remember seeing. It grabbed my imagination with its color and its setting, since the Missouri locations looked like the country around Bloomington. The action—riding, shooting, a train robbery, a bank robbery—helped, too.

Action is always one of the ways movies capture children, especially boys. Some twenty-five years after I got hooked on movies, Alejandro Munoz, one of the people who filled out the questionnaire on moviegoing for this book, got hooked by a different kind of action. He was living in Huntington Park, California, in the seventies and was taken to see martial arts movies starring Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. His reaction was “quite simple: I was left flabbergasted. I had been an avid comic book collector at the time, but nothing I could have read prepared me for the cinematic experience. It is difficult to describe, but my reaction to movies left me feeling that this was a fantasy. Seeing larger-than-life images on a big screen left me remembering details and scenes from a movie long after I had viewed it. In particular, I remember coming out of those martial arts movies, kicking and jumping around, trying my best to imitate the big screen heroes.”

We did not have martial arts in the forties, so like many of my generation, I played cowboy. And hoped that Jesse James would come back. He did. Shortly after I had seen Jesse James, the Harris Grande theatre, one of two in Bloomington running Saturday matinee Westerns, announced two other Westerns and Jesse James Rides Again (1947). I went. I was disappointed at first. It was in black and white, not color. And then twenty minutes into the picture, Jesse was trapped in a burning barn, and words on the screen announced that the story would be continued next week. It was a Republic Pictures serial. Naturally, I had to go back the next week to find out what happened. And the next. And the next. By the end of thirteen chapters, I was a confirmed movie addict.

At least that is the way I remember it: Jesse trapped in a burning barn. The image stayed with me for almost fifty years. In 1993, Jesse James Rides Again finally showed up on videotape. I bought it, made a batch of popcorn, watched it, and discovered that at the end of the first chapter, Jesse and the girl (I didn’t remember any girl!) are caught in a steamboat that is about to explode. The barn does not show up until the end of Chapter Eight, and then it is not on fire but just blows up.

Memory can play tricks, as many of the people answering the questionnaire either showed indirectly or admitted. “Arnold Quinlan” (Certain people responding to the questionnaire have preferred to have me use pseudonyms for them; their names are put in quotation marks the first time they are mentioned. In some cases, such as Quinlan, you can understand why they might want to use pseudonyms.) remembers at least some of his first experience, which happened on a rainy Saturday.

My father (at least at that age, I was pretty sure he was my father) had left us on the muddy curb. He handed me a sawbuck. Enough money for me, my half-brother’s ticket (later his “halfness” would fall under question), my half-sister (her “halfness” is a close call), three sodas, and a jumbo popcorn. The remaining change would have to be guarded with my twelve full years of existence. Of course, I never thought twice. Why should I? I was armed to the gills with two devastating “black belt theatre” moves. I played football and had three paper routes. How was I to know my pocket had a hole in it? How was I to know? Anyway, on that particular Saturday—that “the details seem fuzzy as I look back” Saturday—we would experience the likes of Buster Keaton (the one with the rock-dodging avalanche), the Keystone Cops and a Laurel and Hardy classic (I’m not sure which one). All I can think about is that damn hole and his damn precious money. “You’re tearing me apart! You say one thing, he says another and back again!” Needless to say, it would be a while before I would go to the theatre again.¹

Al Gonzalez, an actor and would-be filmmaker, tries to remember his first movie from the late sixties:

To the best of my recollection, my first moviegoing experience was either the Disney-type films or the Japanese Godzilla films. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Destroy All Monsters (1968) come to mind. Regardless of which came first, I remember them both as being very exciting for someone at age five. The sight of Dick Van Dyke getting that old car to fly was as much fun as seeing space dinosaurs beating the hell out of each other on Planet X. For that matter, seeing space dinosaurs beating the hell out of Dick Van Dyke would have been great, too.

I was not the only kid of my generation to get caught up in serials like Jesse James Rides Again. They were a standard part of the children’s Saturday matinee, and it often took some wheeling and dealing for kids to get to the theatres. Judith Amory, who was growing up watching movies first in New York and then in Houston at the same time I was a kid in Bloomington, had a particular problem:

Since my father was a rabbi, it took a lot of negotiating to get permission to go to [the Saturday matinees], but I finally did. I could go if I went to synagogue on the Friday night, and alternated weeks on Saturday morning—one week movies, one week synagogue. This did not work out too well, since the movies were primarily serials, and missing every other one led to complete bewilderment. The kids sat in the first few rows and bedlam prevailed. The serials—Westerns, cops and robbers, science fiction, horror—always ended on a cliffhanger. There were often yo-yo contests, raffles, and so forth, as well as movies.

Slightly younger than Judith Amory, Sam Frank remembers how the Garfield theatre in Alhambra, California, would have three-hour kiddie matinees in the fifties, but he recalls, “They would always advertise ‘loads of cartoons,’ but instead of an hour-long orgy of these Technicolor pleasures, we would only get three. I was one of many kids who felt cheated by the misleading ads in the local paper and the misleading poster in front of the theatre.” Not surprisingly, Frank grew up to become a film critic.

Both little boys and little girls enjoyed Saturday matinees. Peggy Dilley also remembers children’s matinees in the fifties. “The theatre was packed, nearly every seat filled with noisy, bratty kids eating sweets and popcorn and spilling them and sticky sodas on the floor, with hardly any adult supervision. It was a blast! We were in our element, our world, where we were king! I guess I noticed it more than most because I was one of the oldest. I was at the beginning of the baby boom, born in 1948, and I took care of most of the others, except for a couple of teenage boy bullies.”

Jill Mitchell recalls Saturday matinees in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the seventies:

All us kids would line up around the block to see the 10 A.M. showing of something along the lines of Herbie the Love Bug [The actual title is just The Love Bug (1969); Herbie does not show up in the titles until the sequel] or Pippi Longstocking [1970]. Susie Johnson’s mother would make us popcorn to bring to the show. My mother never did anything like that; besides, it seemed to be sort of against the law or something. Her mom made us hide it to sneak it in. At first it seemed like a bad thing to do, but once we got it in, I felt like we got away with something and we were pretty cool. There was this old, unkempt ladies’ room at the top of these steep, smelly, carpeted stairs. It had this neat vanity mirror with fluorescent lights right over the top. The ladies’ room in the movie theatre must be one of the first entrees to womanhood for a little girl. You can go in with your girlfriend and stand in front of the mirror with all the other grownup women and do your best at primping, all the while watching and listening to how real women do it. It was always such a disappointment afterwards to have to walk into the theatre and have your peers screaming riotously and throwing popcorn everywhere. The world of adulthood seemed like forever away.

There were two theatres in Bloomington that played Saturday matinees for kids. The Harris Grande, a former vaudeville house, was the classier of the two and had the kinds of activities Amory remembers. The other theatre for B Westerns on Saturday was the Roxy, which was a little more primitive than the Harris Grande. The Roxy was long and narrow, which caused it to go out of business after wide-screen movies appeared in the mid-fifties, simply because there was no room in the theatre for a wide screen. It was also reputed to have fleas and maybe even rats, although I never felt the former or saw the latter. Sunday through Friday the Roxy played second- and third-run studio features, but Saturday morning, beginning at 9:15 A.M. it showed a complete program consisting of one or more cartoons and two B Westerns. The advantage to going to the first show was that it let out by noon and we could play cowboys on the way home, which took us through the central campus area of Indiana University, a wooded area of several acres that was the perfect place to play, especially cowboys.

Boys of my generation had their particular favorite cowboy stars. Mine was the Republic star Allan “Rocky” Lane. Years later, I saw several of his films again on television and he seemed rather bland. Jim Binkley, my best friend in those days, had a particular fondness for Lash LaRue, one of the more bizarre Western stars. James Horwitz, remembering his days as the self-styled “Front Row Kid,” describes Lash: “He had a certain something. You could not quite put your finger on it. He made the ‘Front Row Kids’ a little uncomfortable in their seats. The black gear. The whip. The sharp nasally voice. The droopy eyes. The vague resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. Lash LaRue seemed to hint at things the ‘Front Row Kids’ did not yet know anything about.”² Lash LaRue’s life after B Westerns lived up to his image. He turned to preaching, was arrested in Georgia on charges of drunkenness, and appeared in an X-rated movie called Hard on the Trail (1971).³

Boys were not the only ones who enjoyed the B Westerns. My brother’s wife, Susan, grew up in Kentucky in the fifties and liked Westerns, especially Lash LaRue. When I expressed astonishment that a well-brought-up southern lady would like Lash, she smiled and reminded me that southern ladies have their dark sides, too.

My brother, who is three years older than me, probably took me to most of those Saturday matinees. Most of us begin our moviegoing with the family, and some of us start very early. Dorian Wood, a nineteen-year-old operator of the Back to the Future Ride at Universal Studios, writes, “My mother told me a few years back about the time she went to see The Omen (1976) while pregnant with yours truly. She actually swore that the idea that she would give birth to the spawn of Satan crossed her mind and that she had nightmares about it for weeks. Anyway, when I finally came into this world, my parents dragged me along to the movies every other night.”

Even for people who grow to be movie fans, the first experience can be terrifying. The first movies Wendi Cole remembers seeing “are all scary. My mother took me to a double feature. One was about bugs that set fire to people and the other was about dogs that were killing people. I remember burying my face in her lap and crying. I could still hear the sounds of people screaming though. It was awful. It was my absolute worst moviegoing experience. Today I am deathly afraid of most bugs (especially roaches); however, I love dogs.”

Lam Yun Wah, whose parents took him to see movies in Hong Kong when he was just three or four years old, recalls, “It was a knight-killing-monster-saving-princess-type of cartoon film. My memory was that I was frightened by this movie. I didn’t understand anything about the film, and I was horrified by the darkness of the theatre and by the huge images with sharp, bright colors. A few years after, I had to watch The Jaw [He may mean Jaws (1975)] with my family. I turned away from the screen most of the time and watched the light coming from the projection room. I thought then that people must have been crazy to pay and go through all these torments.”

Sometimes the scariness had an opposite effect. Carlos Aguilar’s first experience was seeing a revival of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with his parents. “It was the scariest time I had ever experienced up to that day. I remember feeling good about having companionship in whoever it was that took me to see it. I knew I would survive it, but it did not feel like a day at the park. That affair taught me to love movies. After that, I knew that I could feel alive in a dark movie house.”

Most moviegoers’ early experiences were more pleasant. Ervin Riggs, a mechanic in his twenties, can’t recall his exact age at the time but definitely enjoyed his first movie experience. “[My] feet were too short to touch the ground while sitting in the movies chair. The movie was about a bunch of Muppets. I can still remember the curtains opening and the Dolby sound beating against my heart while I’m trying to stretch my eyes open to see the big movie screen. It scared me at first, but as the movie continued I seemed to get more relaxed. After the movie was over, I turned towards my mom and said, ‘Turn the big TV back on.’ My mom just laughed and shook her head.”

Lam Yun Wah’s mother also helped him get over his earlier frights when she took him to see Gone With the Wind (1939) at the age of ten.

It was then shown in an art house quite far from my home. To go there one had to take a bus to a pier, take a ferry, and then a bus again. My mother secretly longed to watch the film and relive her youth; I longed to watch it to experience the glamour of the Hollywood classics. This film became a little secret between us. She bought the tickets days before, and on that day we had a quick early lunch, spent two hours going to the cinema. My heart throbbed with excitement. We watched this four-hour-long movie, and then spent another two hours to go home. Once home, my mother hurried to prepare dinner for us. I was about to tell my brother and sister about this film we saw, but I stole a look at my mother and, even with my ignorant heart of a ten-year-old, I felt mother looked guilty. She is always a traditional Chinese housewoman, and she’d never come home so late. And she did it because she’d gone to a movie! Now my father would be back any time, and she still hadn’t prepared us dinner. I shut up and felt as guilty as my mother did. I’ve seen that film many, many times now, and every time I remembered those eight hours with my mother when I was ten. My mother is sixty-five now, and sometimes I wonder whether she remembers that special film of ours.

It is not only the movie itself that people remember from their first experiences. Javier Rodriguez, a California telephone operator, recollects “going to the concession stand to buy sodas and popcorn with my family. And I remember fighting with my brother over the sodas and who gets to hold the tub of popcorn my mother had just bought for us to share between us. . . . It was a family get-together and a nice evening out.”

Angela West’s recollection of her first moviegoing experience, at the age of five, also involved food.

My father took me and my sisters to see The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) at a drive-in movie theatre in North Carolina. I remember my father laughing so hard at Don Knotts that he almost cried. I’d never seen my father more happy and less worried about responsibil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Childhoods
• 2. Hollywood’s Fifties
• 3. Sex and Seriousness
• 4. Opening the Sixties
• 5. Television and Movies
• 6. Closing the Sixties
• 7. Dark and Golden
• 8. Black and Dark
• 9. Star Wars
• 10. Film Education
• 11. Directors
• 12. Spielberg
• 13. Studios and VCRs
• 14. Promoting Habits
• 15. Changing Experiences
• 16. Experiencing Emotions
• 17. Eastwood
• A Concluding Thought or Two
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index