A lifetime in thrall to the movies
At first it terrified him, but decades on, James Croot has never given up on the magic of the cinema.
My first trip to the movies ended in tears. I can’t quite recall what age I was, but I have a distinct memory of walking down Dunedin’s main street slightly traumatised by what I’d seen.
Yes, like so many other young children of a certain vintage, it was Disney. No, it wasn’t Bambi or Snow White, but rather Fantasia.
But before you jump to the conclusion that I was a sensitive boy unable to cope with dancing hippos or anthropomorphic buckets, it was that devil that made me do it. Night on Bald Mountain truly became the Nightmare on Bald Mountain for me.
Clearly that incident didn’t scar me or my parents for long. By the age of eight, I’d not only sat through the sustained animated bunny trauma that is Watership Down, but also, now I think back on it, rather bizarrely, the New Zealand thriller The Scarecrow.
If you’re over 45, you know the one, the movie based on Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s book. The one with the memorable tagline: ‘‘The same night our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.’’
For so many of my vintage around the globe, our childhood memories are wrapped up in visits to the flicks and the movies we saw.
Why else do you think Ghostbusters was reimagined, Top Gun has a sequel in the works and a TV show all about 1980s nostalgia – Netflix’s Stranger Things – has been one of the most-popular and talked about programmes of the past couple of years?
However, I fear the movie industry may be facing one of the biggest crises in its 120-year history.
Variety reports that the North American box office will be down at least 2 per cent this year, while at the end of November, local figures were down around 10 per cent on last year’s Hunt for the Wilder-people-fuelled bonanza.
A couple of things may partially explain the latter. The third-wave of the ‘‘added-value’’ 3D craze is now officially dead and most of the urban cinemas have slashed their everyday prices by at least onethird in the second-part of this year.
But the mere fact that the likes of Hoyts, Event and Reading felt they had to make tickets probably the cheapest they’ve been in two decades suggests there is a problem.
Audiences are staying away in droves, seemingly preferring to watch their movies on demand and at home.
Take a recent Friday night at a near 25-year-old Christchurch suburban multiplex.
A few years ago, the foyer would have been fairly full at 8pm, but on this evening there were just a few scattered souls and most of them would have been born when Ulysses played to segregated audiences in Cathedral Square (1967).
It was a slightly depressing sight for someone who subsidised his university education by working in a multiplex and has subsequently spent almost a quarter-of-a-century writing and talking about movies.
I’ll admit there’s certainly a convenience about the ability to watch a film in the comfort of your own home. The popcorn is cheaper and less nutritionally suspect for a start.
But those experiences don’t sear into my memory the way a trip to the cinema does.
Curling up on the couch or sitting at the dining-room table just doesn’t have the same effect as immersing yourself in a story in a vast darkened room with surround sound.
I’ve come to the conclusion that movies are my religion and cinemas are like churches to me. They are where I and others can express our emotions most freely and without judgment, and either escape from the current world’s woes or find something to identify with.
I actually understood that from an early age; I just didn’t know it.
My late father was Presbyterian lay preacher. When we travelled around the world together just before I turned 11, we visited church services of a number of denominations (just because he wanted to see ‘‘what the opposition were up to’’).
But he also took me to a variety of movie theatres. We saw Star Trek III in central London, The Bounty and Rhinestone in other UK locations and most hilariously a subtitled Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different in Copenhagen. Those experiences left a significant impression and probably explain why the first thing I do when I visit a foreign city is find out what’s playing, when and where.
In the ensuing nearly 35 years, I’ve been lucky enough to visit Singaporean multiplexes in the dead of night, stylish Melbourne arthouse cinemas, a budget Pasadena complex, a revival theatre in Toronto and a former ‘‘adult’’ picture palace in downtown San Francisco (they were playing Dragonheart months before it came out in New Zealand – OK!)
I’ve revelled in helping one of my schoolmates see Total Recall in a mall in the US when he wasn’t old enough to see it back home, listened to an Englishman blame the Tories for a series of projection failures at a Greenwich picturehouse, and watched in awe at midnight at a San Jose cinema on July 2, 1996 as the aliens blew up the White House in Independence Day.
As a multiplex worker, I dealt with people passing out at Interview with a Vampire and Pulp Fiction, had to explain to those who’d come to see Schindler’s List why they’d just watched the opening minutes of an inadvertent screening of Demolition Man, and kept an entire session of Warlock running literally by hand.
Meanwhile, as a reviewer, I’ve watched The Hobbit in Peter Jackson’s screening room, felt immense national pride while being one of the first in the world to see Whale Rider (in Toronto in September 2002) and listened to Darren Aronofsky try to explain mother! to more than 1000 people just after midnight in that same Canadian city just a few months ago.
It was a chance meeting while waiting in line for that polarising psychological thriller to premiere that really reminded me of the uniting power of movie-watching.
I had been talking to a young Canadian couple and listening into our conversation was an older woman who clearly had some knowledge of the movie industry.
Indeed, she ventured that she’d produced a number of films over the years.
When she mentioned her name was Gale, I clicked, and suggested to the male-half of the duo that he google her.
He was shocked to discover this ‘‘Gale Anne Hurd’’ had been married to famous directors Brian De Palma AND James Cameron and had produced such seminal films as The Terminator, The Abyss and Armageddon (oh, and a little TV show called The Walking Dead).
We then hung on her every word until the line finally started moving.
But before we parted, I knew there was something I had waited more than 30 years for the opportunity to say: ‘‘Thank you for making Aliens, it inspired so many New Zealanders of my age to try to sneak into the cinema underage’’.
To my delight, she immediately responded with the quip. ‘‘I’m so glad I was able to corrupt an entire generation.’’
By the age of eight, I'd not only sat through the sustained animated bunny trauma that is Watership Down, but also, now I think back on it, rather bizarrely, the New Zealand thriller The Scarecrow.