Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on Movie Revival Houses of the Seventies)

“Revival houses in the 70s, nearly all of them shoestring operations, had their own distinct character, a creaky, lived-in, refuge-for-lost-souls wombiness that honored the passage of time and fostered sinking into reverie. It was as if the graininess of the films seeped into the worn carpets and seat cushions. The Elgin, despite its Deco exterior (preserved during its renovation and resurrection as the Joyce, home to contemporary dance), had a disreputable mise en scène, perhaps the residue of its midnight showings of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos. Architecturally, the Thalia was a true weirdo, with its reverse parabolic floor and flimsy soundproofing; ventilation didn’t seem to be a priority, either—'The air in the theater seemed left over from F.D.R.’s third term,’ one Thalia veteran recalled. (Now an adjunct to Symphony Space, the Thalia has been handsomely re-modernized and re-christened the Leonard Nimoy Thalia.) The seats at Theatre 80 St. Marks [pictured] were a stress test for the lumbar region, and the rear screen projection often made black-and-white films look bleachy, but the concession bar served Colombian coffee—singular then—and the audiences seemed more collegial than those at revival houses that attracted more solitary jaybirds. The much-traveled prints were usually far from pristine, at worst a flickering strip of scratches, blotches, missing frames, and faded colors. But there’s something to be said for encountering art in a primitive condition—it makes the synapses work a little harder.” —American essayist James Wolcott, “Revival of the Fittest,” Vanity Fair, February 2018

Though I had a chance to take a film class taught by a well-known film critic while I was an undergrad, I disdained the opportunity. It was a “gut” course—i.e., easy—I had heard, so my guilt overtook my curiosity. 

I had to wait until after I graduated in the early Eighties for my true education in classic movies to begin, in precisely the sometimes scruffy revival houses that Wolcott describes so well.

It started with a short-lived theater on Eighth Avenue in the Forties where I saw Body Heat and Gallipoli long earlier their original runs, before I advanced (or, maybe I should say, backtracked) to more vintage fare. 

At the Thalia, for instance, I saw silent films accompanied by Steve Sterner on piano (though I must say, nothing beat Lee Erwin on the mighty organ in a far different venue, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, for The Phantom of the Opera).

I continued with Theatre 80 St. Marks, where I saw Orson Welles’ 1948 version of Macbeth and wondered if the hideous voices was due more to a poorly recorded soundtrack or the director’s disastrous decision to attempt a Scottish accent. 

(Later, I continued to attend performances at this East Village space when it became for a number of years the home of the Pearl Theatre Company.)

The Regency Theatre furthered my education in film until, after 68 years of operation, it was taken over by the chain Cineplex Odeon (which many of us felt like calling “Cineplex Odious”) in 1987, then transferred my allegiance to the Biograph Cinema.

Though it only lasted from 1988 to 1991, it continued the Regency’s tradition of running weeks of themes so you could catch up on directors and theaters quickly. 

(For instance, in the “Screen Teams” series, for one segment devoted to William Powell and Myrna Loy, I saw the eightysomething but still game Ms. Loy in the audience, waving to fans in the theater’s front seat for well-deserve applause).

By the early Nineties, the proliferation of the VCR meant the decline of the revival houses. You’ll notice that I used the word “decline” rather than “extinction.” 

If you’re in the New York metro area, you will still find theaters devoted to classic or unusual older films—notably Film Forum or the Museum of Modern Art in the city itself and (mixed with current independent films and live events) the Barrymore Film Center near me in Fort Lee, NJ.

Yes, I am a TCM fan, and against all modern trends, I prefer DVDs to streaming. But nothing beats a movie classic on the big screen. 

It’s not just widescreen epics like Lawrence of Arabia, or silent films to live musical accompaniment, that are shown to their best advantage there.

Simply put, nothing beats sharing the laughs of a great comedy with an audience, or seeing how meticulously a black-and-white film was crafted with its contrasts and shadows. 

For any of my readers who haven’t tried yet these vintage theaters that have inexplicably survived into the digital age, seek them out. This is how movies were meant to be experienced in the first place.

Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on ‘The Grim Reaper Working Overtime’ in 2016)

“How many sucker punches can we be expected to take? Here and abroad it has been a rotten year, one of the rottenest on record (within the last half-century, only 1968 is within hailing distance), a real Philip K. Dick acid-rain dystopian production….The year started off bad, then kept throwing beanballs as if testing how much bad news we could take before we cradled our heads and moaned, ‘No más.’ David Bowie’s death in early January, a grievous shock that thumped all the harder because his cancer had been such a tenderly guarded secret (Bowie seemed so ageless and diaphanous a presence as to appear immortal), was the first augury that all would not be well—the webbing was torn….Not a week later, Alan Rickman, the actor whose coaxing voice and wincing smile made him ideally moving in Sense and Sensibility, died, another sorrowful surprise. Glenn Frey, the guitarist, singer, and co-founder of the Eagles, permanently checked out of the Hotel California that same January. One by one the mighty went. Prince, the purple Peter Pan of ambisexual delight, dead at the unjust age of 57; Merle Haggard (no country singer could have been more aptly named); Beatles producer and studio Merlin George Martin; the magnificent Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion, civil-rights hero, and trickster demi-god for whom the acronym GOAT—Greatest of All Time—was an understatement; former First Lady Nancy Reagan; Garry Marshall, the producer, director, and actor (his big scene, as a casino manager, in Albert Brooks’s Lost in America is a stand-alone classic) who gave middlebrow entertainment a slap of extra mustard; a gallery of famed, beloved authors, including Harper Lee, Jim Harrison, Pat Conroy, and, a personal favorite, the discreet, deceptively cashmere-soft novelist Anita Brookner; and nearly all of these illustrious figures gone before the year was half done, the Grim Reaper working overtime.”—James Wolcott, “It’s Only September, and 2016 Is Already a Huge Garbage Fire,” Vanity Fair, October 2016

Since Wolcott wrote that, the toll of the Grim Reaper has only mounted, now taking into account Arnold Palmer, Janet Reno, Shimon Peres, Greg Lake, Edward Albee, Ron Glass, Tom Hayden, Leonard Cohen, Gwen Ifill, Robert Vaughn, Florence Henderson, Alan Thicke, John Glenn, Zsa Zsa Gabor—and, just this week, George Michael. 

(The one conspicuous omission from the latter list is Fidel Castro. Point blank, I refuse to honor in any way, shape or form the life’s work of a dictator responsible for “surveillance, beatings, arbitrary detention, and public acts of repudiation,”  to quote a Human Rights Watch statement after his death.)

Somehow, all of this feels like more than the inevitable actuarial destiny of the celebrities contemporary with the lives of Baby Boomers or the older heroes they worshipped, such as Col. Glenn. It was almost as if all the deceased could not stand the prospect of seeing more of what Queen Elizabeth II once called (speaking of a particularly horrid run for her own children) an “annus horribilis.”

Wolcott's article took in a landscape extending from individual deaths to massive, unnecessary calamities. But he could only begin to discern the tawdry toll of national politics on our psyches this past year. He called this a time of the “garbage fire,” all symptomatic of a planet that, metaphorically and actually, is “exhausted and sick of having us around."

Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on TV as the New Religious Devotion)

“Post-Sopranos, television has brainwormed into something richer and deeper than an entertainment spectrum, a babysitter for our brains, a night nurse for insomniacs, a humming narcotic. Addiction has heightened into devotion, and devotion carries the ache of religious hunger. God may not be dead, but He’s been seriously demoted, and in His eclipse the flat screen summons forth. People identify with some of their TV passions as if choosing a denomination, a scripture to follow. Church on Sunday morning was how it was done in the idealized America of Norman Rockwell paintings and white picket fences. Television on Sunday evening is how we do it in the holed-up America of Instagram selfies and padlocked foreclosures. The gnostic battle of damnation and salvation is rigged out on TV in genre formats (the police procedural, the gangster saga) where even the saints and dharma bums have serious blood on their hands. Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle propped up in his hospital bed in the season finale of True Detective (HBO) couldn’t have looked more Christ-haggard.” —James Wolcott, “Hollywood And Divine,” Vanity Fair, June 2014

Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on Writers’ Brands)

“As if writing itself weren’t taxing enough on mind, morale, and tailbone, novice byliners who have yet to earn their aviator wings are advised by teachers and mentors to fashion a brand—to entrepreneurialize a persona that will distinguish them from all the other content providers out there trying to hurl themselves over a transom that no longer exists. In some college communication and writing courses, playing social media like a harp is considered as integral to future success as teaching your paragraphs how to roll over and fetch. I’m just glad I came along when the writing game was mostly a matter of fighting your way up Pork Chop Hill with long naps in the foxhole and didn’t require daily, hourly upkeep and depend upon the kindness of mouse clicks. Raising a brand from infancy, nurturing it, tending to it as it teeters around the track, sprucing it up when it gets stale—it sounds exhausting, like being a stage mother, a helicopter parent to your own career.” ―James Wolcott, “From Ink to Inc.,” Vanity Fair, April 2014

Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on NYC in the ‘70s)

“It wasn’t just the criminality that kept your radar alert, the muggings and the subway car shakedowns, it was the crazy paroxysms that punctuate the city, the sense that much of the city had suffered a psychotic break.”—James Wolcott, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York (2011)

That sounds like the New York I knew in the late ‘70s, when I began attending Columbia University and became more familiar than I expected to be with the various lowlifes hanging around Gotham’s subways, among many other places. I can still remember as late as 1991 that the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42^nd Street was still a grungy and not-altogether-safe place after the rush hour traffic dissipated. Let’s hope that, in this age of budget cuts, we won’t see a similar “psychotic break” anytime again soon.