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captainsblogMay 25, 1977. I was 32 days short of high school graduation, my housing deposit was on its way to Ithaca, and about five miles up the road from my home, geeks were about to take over the known universe.
There were literally hundreds of theaters in the Greater New York area then, dozens in Nassau County alone, most of them still standalones or perhaps twinned or triplexed. Of those hundreds in the region, precisely five were showing a film debuting that day, known then only as Star Wars. Two were in Manhattan, one each in Edison and Paramus, New Jersey, and then there was the one that mattered the most to me. It was at the recently re-christened Mann's Twin South cinema, next to the Mid-Island Plaza in, I am not making this up, Hicksville.
On the whole, five screens in a heavily populated area wasn't bad. There were only 32 cinemas in the entire country sharing in this moment. (As this retrospective page notes, the 25th was a Wednesday that year, and some chains didn't join in until the following Friday, which brought the total up to a whopping 43 screens in the whole country by Memorial Day weekend.)
Yet, one of them was ours- a nondescript 60s building that lacked both the panache of the classic old 30s vaudeville houses and the higher-tech sound and projection qualities of some newer places (UA's Cinema 150 just up the road, for instance, itself long departed from the scene.) The Twin South did, however, have the one technical feature needed to make this movie go into proper hyperdrive: 70 millimeter projection capability. Only four movies came out in 70mm that entire year, the first a one-day-only showing of Nights and Days, the last being a little Truffaut art-house piece called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. (Whadya think this is, Lost?) Hollywood clearly had no idea what it had on its hands 30 years ago today, and it took weeks for the celluloid supply to catch up with the demand that indicated, through televised reviews and newspapers but mostly word-of-mouth, that something was out there in the sci-fi universe other than Captain Kirk and we had damn better go see it and fast.
----
Within a week, I had. Memorial Day weekend itself was out- that was our annual spring in-tin-cantation as a Marching Band spent in oppressive heat for several hours. Sometime after that Monday, though, my friend Dennis and I hopped on our bikes (neither of us even having licenses yet, much less cars) and took the five-mile trek past the jail, the Childrens' Shelter (Nassau County's answer to Father Baker in the Parents Threatening You department) and Cantiague Park before pulling up to a surprisingly empty parking lot and checking out the afternoon matinee.
And, as Maxwell Smart would say, loving it.
----
I don't know why the film wound up there of all places. Ted Mann was a fawaway movie maven who hit the height of his fame in 1973 when he added Grauman's Chinese on Hollywood Boulevard to his stable of cinemas and, in a triumph of bad taste, named it for himself. The Chinese wound up being the most famous of the 32 Opening Day venues, even though I think I've read it wasn't supposed to be playing there that week. So maybe he got it for one of his few East Coast venues as part of the Chinese deal. No matter; it was there, and by summer's end, I'd seen it again, and of course added all the now-plentiful add-ons: the John Williams record, the novelization, and the Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of ...oops, that was another of my film obsessions, huh?
By the time the sequel came out, everybody knew what to expect in terms of demand, and we were well on our way to the camping-out phenomena which have marked the more recent premieres. This page from the Cinema Treasures site recounts that the Twins got sixtupletted sometime in the 1980s, and eventually gave way to a fancy-ass new multiplex inside the Plaza (now known as the Broadway Mall) itself.
An Ikea now stands where Darth and Luke once did battle for the first time, 30 years ago. Talk about the Empire striking back:(
There were literally hundreds of theaters in the Greater New York area then, dozens in Nassau County alone, most of them still standalones or perhaps twinned or triplexed. Of those hundreds in the region, precisely five were showing a film debuting that day, known then only as Star Wars. Two were in Manhattan, one each in Edison and Paramus, New Jersey, and then there was the one that mattered the most to me. It was at the recently re-christened Mann's Twin South cinema, next to the Mid-Island Plaza in, I am not making this up, Hicksville.
On the whole, five screens in a heavily populated area wasn't bad. There were only 32 cinemas in the entire country sharing in this moment. (As this retrospective page notes, the 25th was a Wednesday that year, and some chains didn't join in until the following Friday, which brought the total up to a whopping 43 screens in the whole country by Memorial Day weekend.)
Yet, one of them was ours- a nondescript 60s building that lacked both the panache of the classic old 30s vaudeville houses and the higher-tech sound and projection qualities of some newer places (UA's Cinema 150 just up the road, for instance, itself long departed from the scene.) The Twin South did, however, have the one technical feature needed to make this movie go into proper hyperdrive: 70 millimeter projection capability. Only four movies came out in 70mm that entire year, the first a one-day-only showing of Nights and Days, the last being a little Truffaut art-house piece called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. (Whadya think this is, Lost?) Hollywood clearly had no idea what it had on its hands 30 years ago today, and it took weeks for the celluloid supply to catch up with the demand that indicated, through televised reviews and newspapers but mostly word-of-mouth, that something was out there in the sci-fi universe other than Captain Kirk and we had damn better go see it and fast.
----
Within a week, I had. Memorial Day weekend itself was out- that was our annual spring in-tin-cantation as a Marching Band spent in oppressive heat for several hours. Sometime after that Monday, though, my friend Dennis and I hopped on our bikes (neither of us even having licenses yet, much less cars) and took the five-mile trek past the jail, the Childrens' Shelter (Nassau County's answer to Father Baker in the Parents Threatening You department) and Cantiague Park before pulling up to a surprisingly empty parking lot and checking out the afternoon matinee.
And, as Maxwell Smart would say, loving it.
----
I don't know why the film wound up there of all places. Ted Mann was a fawaway movie maven who hit the height of his fame in 1973 when he added Grauman's Chinese on Hollywood Boulevard to his stable of cinemas and, in a triumph of bad taste, named it for himself. The Chinese wound up being the most famous of the 32 Opening Day venues, even though I think I've read it wasn't supposed to be playing there that week. So maybe he got it for one of his few East Coast venues as part of the Chinese deal. No matter; it was there, and by summer's end, I'd seen it again, and of course added all the now-plentiful add-ons: the John Williams record, the novelization, and the Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of ...oops, that was another of my film obsessions, huh?
By the time the sequel came out, everybody knew what to expect in terms of demand, and we were well on our way to the camping-out phenomena which have marked the more recent premieres. This page from the Cinema Treasures site recounts that the Twins got sixtupletted sometime in the 1980s, and eventually gave way to a fancy-ass new multiplex inside the Plaza (now known as the Broadway Mall) itself.
An Ikea now stands where Darth and Luke once did battle for the first time, 30 years ago. Talk about the Empire striking back:(
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Date: 2007-05-25 04:23 pm (UTC)It's sad.
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Date: 2007-05-26 07:45 pm (UTC)