benbess
Senior HTF Member
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- Sep 8, 2009
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- Ben
Like many others here, I imagine, I grew up going to a revival theater. Ours was the Balboa on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. It was small, the seats squeaked, the floor was sometimes sticky, and the 35mm prints they had were sometimes scratched, dirty, and faded--and yet it was still magical! There's something about seeing a movie with a group of other people who you know are classic movie lovers that's just fun.
Like many revival houses, the Balboa would usually run a new movie every 2-4 days. And so over the course of a couple of months they'd show a lot of films, at least in the mid 70s to early 80s when I went. They'd mail you a flier every few months, printed in lurid 2 color, I think, with little pictures and explanations of the films. This is where I first saw Casablanca, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Forbidden Planet, and a lot of other classics. Some of the films I'd even seen all or part of on tv, but the theater was a different experience.
But, as I already said in the first paragraph, it was kind of mixed. I mean the theater was not that fancy, and the film prints really varied. Sometimes they'd have a new or pretty new print, and it was great, but other times it was just the dregs. Usually it was somewhere in between.
I can right now, any time I want, pull out my blu of Casablanca and have a superior experience to anything I had in that theater. In some ways it's better. But something is lost too. I love my blu-rays--don't get me wrong. I'm still amazed that I have better picture and sound quality in my living room than pretty much all revival theaters had back in the day.
But that's why sites like this are nice. They provide in a different way some of the communal experience of the theater. And in some ways it's better, because people share their analysis and experiences in a way that you would rarely get with a group of strangers.
The last film I saw at the Balboa was Jean de Florette, one summer when I was home from college, c. 1986. By then they'd had a change of management, I think, and they did first run art films too--that they would hold for a few weeks--along with the Hollywood oldies. It was a great experience. Pretty emotional for me, for some reason, and I got to walk out of the theater onto the beach with my mom and just chat about it as we watched the sand and the sea.
The Balboa closed a few years after that, It think. In any case, the last time I was back there a few years ago it had fallen into ruin. Which is weird, because real estate is still sky high there. There's now a campaign to try to reopen it, but it still has a ways to go to raise the one million or so needed.
Anyway, does anyone else have any thoughts to share about their revival theaters? Or how about any thoughts about how blu-rays are in many ways better but still different from that experience?
Like many revival houses, the Balboa would usually run a new movie every 2-4 days. And so over the course of a couple of months they'd show a lot of films, at least in the mid 70s to early 80s when I went. They'd mail you a flier every few months, printed in lurid 2 color, I think, with little pictures and explanations of the films. This is where I first saw Casablanca, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Forbidden Planet, and a lot of other classics. Some of the films I'd even seen all or part of on tv, but the theater was a different experience.
But, as I already said in the first paragraph, it was kind of mixed. I mean the theater was not that fancy, and the film prints really varied. Sometimes they'd have a new or pretty new print, and it was great, but other times it was just the dregs. Usually it was somewhere in between.
I can right now, any time I want, pull out my blu of Casablanca and have a superior experience to anything I had in that theater. In some ways it's better. But something is lost too. I love my blu-rays--don't get me wrong. I'm still amazed that I have better picture and sound quality in my living room than pretty much all revival theaters had back in the day.
But that's why sites like this are nice. They provide in a different way some of the communal experience of the theater. And in some ways it's better, because people share their analysis and experiences in a way that you would rarely get with a group of strangers.
The last film I saw at the Balboa was Jean de Florette, one summer when I was home from college, c. 1986. By then they'd had a change of management, I think, and they did first run art films too--that they would hold for a few weeks--along with the Hollywood oldies. It was a great experience. Pretty emotional for me, for some reason, and I got to walk out of the theater onto the beach with my mom and just chat about it as we watched the sand and the sea.
The Balboa closed a few years after that, It think. In any case, the last time I was back there a few years ago it had fallen into ruin. Which is weird, because real estate is still sky high there. There's now a campaign to try to reopen it, but it still has a ways to go to raise the one million or so needed.
Anyway, does anyone else have any thoughts to share about their revival theaters? Or how about any thoughts about how blu-rays are in many ways better but still different from that experience?