I am personally responsible for the death of cinema.  Me and people like me who don’t go to the movies anymore.  As a freelance writer, the father of two children under the age of four, and the husband of a woman who routinely works an 11 or 12 hour day, I’m just otherwise engaged.  I’m invited out to the cinema all the time – for free, even – but I usually have to decline.  I feel bad about that, I do, and when people talk about poor cinema attendance and the slow death of the movie-going experience I just tug at my collar and make that comic “Hemmenah-hemmenah-hemmenah” sound that you hear in cartoons when a talking dog or Kodiak bear in a necktie is embarrassed.  So in addition to having my prints on the trigger of the gun that has mortally wounded going-to-the-movies, I also miss certain things about going to the movies.  There’s the candy, for one (about which Morlock Jeff wrote so sweetly the other day), and the general ambiance of a really good movie house, and the communal experience of seeing something with a hundred or two hundred other people… but the thing I’m thinking of right now, the experience I miss the most and don’t get from my home entertainment system, is when things happen at the movies other than the movie.

I don’t know what I thought of Disney’s THE JUNGLE BOOK (1967) when I first saw it because I wasn’t paying attention.  I was 5 or 6 at the time and the only memory I have carried forward forty years on is of running up and down the aisles of the Imperial Cinema in Putnam, Connecticut.  Maybe I fed off the excitement of Baloo’s battle with King Louie and I just had to get up and represent, I don’t know, but I have this very pleasant, exhilarating memory of going completely feral and feeling at once both unfettered and entirely safe in that environment.  I’m sure I was a complete nuisance to the adults in attendance and if I ruined the picture for you that day, I apologize.

At the time the  ironic value of the mix-up was entirely lost on me but I remember how the projectionist at The Danielson Cinema one day in 1970 intended to run the G-rated BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) and instead threaded the first reel of the X-rated BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) into the projector.  Mind you, BEYOND, for all its excesses and extremes (which run the gamut from homosexuality and transvestism to drug use and homicide) would have been no less devastating than BENEATH, which revels in physical deformity and inverted/perverted Christian imagery (apes crucified upside down) before killing everybody and, as if that weren’t enough, blowing up the world.  Have a nice day, kids!

Seeing WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971) with my older sister Cheri was ruined somewhat when somebody threw a wad of bubble gum down from the balcony and it got in Cheri’s hair.  Although I found my sister often very annoying, I took this affront personally and, rising from my seat and grabbing what gum I could out of her hair-do, I swung the length of it in the air over my head as if it were a Argentinean bolo and let it loose right back where it came from.  I don’t know if it found its mark but it sure as hell must have hit somebody.  At another movie, I don’t remember which one but I suspect it was TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1969), some girl insulted Cheri and, after the picture was over, I followed this person outside and, at a discreet distance from the cinema, kicked her in the ass.

Working one day out in Forrest Hills, in New York, I ducked during my down-time into a movie theater to catch a matinee of Woody Allen’s RADIO DAYS (1987).  What I didn’t realize was that it was a senior’s matinee and I was the only attendee there under the age of sixty.  That was fine in and of itself, but five minutes after the movie started this old lady with about eleven shopping bags came rattling down the aisle right at me as if guided by laser and would have dropped into my lap had I not scrambled at the last nano-second out of my aisle seat into the one adjacent.  It must have been her regular spot and she was led to it by smell.  She didn’t pay attention to me at all throughout the movie and as far as I could tell didn’t even know I was there, even when she used my left knee for leverage to hoist herself back onto her feet during the end credits.

At a rare revival screening of  THE MONSTER (1925) with Lon Chaney at Manhattan’s Film Forum, I was alone in the middle of my row (the theater itself being filled to only a quarter capacity) until this creepy old guy kept moving closer to me, a couple seats at a time, from several rows away.  I guess he thought he was being quite cool about it but unless he was very persnickety about his choice of seat cushion there really could only have been one thing on his mind. Maybe I led him on – I was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, black jeans and black engineer boots but I always dressed that way back then.  I can’t remember if he stopped one seat away from mine or actually plopped down next to me – I only know he must have left the theater sorely disappointed.   I loved the Film Forum and went a lot back when I lived in New York but you had to roll with the punches there and put up with a lot of extracurricular activity, from snooty cappuccino cineastes who would snort through their noses at everything to telegraph their sophistication to the psych cases who’d stage some freakouts in the middle of a movie, like the guy who sat mid-theater during a Vincent Price double feature with the volume on his Walkman dialed up all the way until a near riot ensued.

Going into a screening of SANTA SANGRE (1989) somewhere in the West Village, I was delighted to buy my ticket from a female dwarf.  I mean no disrespect, I don’t mean to say that little people are inherently weirder than anybody else, I just mean to say that the coincidence, if you want to call it that, struck the perfect note for seeing this movie, which I liked a lot.

When I saw BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992) in the cinema, I was fated to be seated just one row ahead of Inarguably the Stupidest Person Alive on Earth (at that time).  Hyperbole aside, this woman – young, working class, unmarried but in a relationship – had no division between her thought process and her ability to speak.  Finding much of this Victorian era fantasy beyond her ken, she proceeded (as early as the opening credits, if I remember correctly) to ask her companion a chain of questions (“Where did she go… What is she doing… What did he say… Did he he disappear…”) that did not stop or even slow until the tail of the last reel came slapping out of the projector.  It was so astonishing, so mind-bending and so much more entertaining than the movie itself that I felt then doubly-blessed and retain this as my favorite “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the show” movie-going moment.

I’m going to end on a whimper because things have quieted down for me in this regard.  Weirdness very rarely occurs now when I watch a movie to review or to write about or just for fun.  My trip to the couch is uneventful, my movie-watching experience routine, and nobody ever tries to cop a feel.  Recently, though, my wife and I put our children in the care of someone trusted and we actually went to the movies on a date.  We saw CLOVERFIELD (2008).  We loved every minute of it.  Free of the company of our kids, we felt carefree, giddy, ebullient.  We even held hands in our seats.  I love telling this story.