NJ.com Revival houses have become a thing of the past By Stephen Whitty/The Star-Ledger January 24, 2010, 6:56AM http://www.nj.com/entertainment/movies/index.ssf/2010/01/revival_hous... When I was first falling in love with the movies, I wondered what it would be like if television showed my favorite films, uncut, 24 hours a day. If I could see any picture I wanted, on demand. If I could find information on any filmmaker, instantly. Well, now I can. Turner Classic Movies and other cable stations runs commercial-free films, back to back to back. Netflix will mail movies to my home or let me watch them on my computer. The internet offers literally millions of film facts, reviews and photos. So why do I feel cheated? Well, because there was a high price to all this change. The home- video revolution closed down revival houses. The establishment of a classic-movie channel starved out other stations. The explosion of the net shut down several magazines. And the cost of all of these advancements has been that I — and classic-movie fans like me — no longer have many of the simple but crucial pleasures we used to take for granted. We got the story we thought we wanted — except the end was rewritten. NOW (NOT) SHOWING The first victims of modern-movie progress were the repertory theaters. When I went to film school in New York in the late ’70s, there were several fleapits within walking distance, showing Bette Davis weepies or double bills of “Candy” and “The Magic Christian.” The truly adventurous went to Chinatown for kung-fu triple features, or to 42nd Street, where grind houses ran all-night programs of gory action films. Then came the much-vaunted “home video revolution.” For less than the price of a ticket, you could be your own movie programmer, watching whatever you wanted at home. Of course, most of the revival houses couldn’t compete with that (or pay their own rising rents). Those set up as not-for-profit arts groups held on. The rest eventually closed their doors, and to any real film buff, the list of names — the Bleecker Street Cinema, Theatre 80 St. Marks — is an elegy to vanished picture palaces. True, many of those cinema paradisos had sprung seats, sticky floors and their own peculiar clientele. (On 42nd Street, it was drunks and perverts; in the Village, potheads and slackers; in Chinatown, old men who spat on the floor). But they were still audiences. And seeing a film on a screen with any audience is still magic. For a while, though, buffs could accept the changes. Yes, it was sad that the Carnegie Hall Cinema was gone, but now we had Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s. Even suburban towns boasted their own, idiosyncratic mom- and-pop stores. We could still see all the old movies we wanted. For a while. WE INTERRUPT OUR PROGRAM But there was yet another change coming, and the next victims of progress were all the TV stations that programmed old films. Growing up in the pre-cable days — at least in the New York market — a film buff once had a variety of choices. Channel 2 had the MGM catalog; Channel 5 had all the Warner Brothers classics; Channel 9 had RKO and some poverty-row cheapies; Channel 13 showed foreign films and even silents. You knew when to look, too. When I was a kid, every weekday afternoon brought two competing 4:30 movies. Saturday nights meant “Creature Features” and “Chiller”; Sunday mornings were reserved for Abbott and Costello, and the Bowery Boys. And yet, predictable as the programming was, it still carried an element of surprise. If I hadn’t tuned into Channel 13’s screening of “Monika” pruriently hoping for some hot “European” footage, I wouldn’t have discovered Ingmar Bergman. If Channel 9’s thriftily programmed “Million Dollar Movie” didn’t run “Top Hat” five nights in a row, I wouldn’t have fallen for art deco. Yes, by the ’80s, some of this programming had already given way to talk shows and reruns. And the movies were cut, censored and interrupted by constant commercials for Ginsu knives, the Money Store and “beautiful Mount Airy Lodge.” But there were still a lot of movies. And the arrival of classic-movie channels promised to make a good thing even better. Until. Until American Movie Classics decided it wanted to be just AMC, and have commercials and original programming and simply run “The Godfather” over and over again. Until the Fox Movie Channel opted for a loop of self-promotion, filling its days with mediocre programmers and commercials for itself. And until Turner Classic Movies went from being a resource to being a monopoly. Don’t get me wrong. TCM does the best job around of archiving, annotating and programming its films. It’s clearly a channel of, by and for movie lovers, and a treasure. But it’s so good at doing what it does (and has such a firm hold on so much repertory, including the Warner Brothers and MGM libraries) that it’s driven other stations away. Yes, you can always find a great old movie on TCM. But that’s often the only place you can find it — and if you’re not in the mood for that particular film, that particular day, you’re out of luck. We have more channels now. But we had more choices then. CAUGHT IN THE NET The internet was the final Trojan Horse. It looked like a wonderful gift, at first. But then movie buffs realized there was a catch. Of course, it’s hard now for many young film lovers to imagine, but there really was a time when there was no Internet Movie Data_base_ or Wikipedia. The movie reference books available were either incomplete or prohibitively expensive. Just looking up an actor’s filmography could mean a trip downtown to the library. By the middle ’90s, though, all that was changing. The IMDB (and other similar sites, dedicated to everything from Hong Kong films to Broadway) made it easy to check facts, settle bar bets and research careers. New websites sprang up to pass along news and reviews. And all that seemed like a great thing, too. At the time. But as the next decade went on, and ad dollars began to migrate to the web, movie magazines — a genre nearly as old as the movies themselves — began to stumble. A new generation of readers arose, demanding information that was both immediate and free. New media responded, blithely rewriting (or simply ignoring) the rules along the way. And the old movie media collapsed. The once-literate Premiere slashed its staff and dumbed down. The snarky Movieline “reinvented” itself as a _style_-and-fashion rag. (Shadows of their former selves, they exist now only on the web.) Entertainment Weekly, at least, lives on, but like some troubled teen, dangerously slim and obsessed with “Twilight.” So, yes, I got what I wanted. There are movies around the clock on television (except most of them are trash). I can get hundreds of DVDs instantly (except the ones I really want to see). I can look up any fact I need (except if I really want to read something, I have to run a gantlet of illiterate bloggers, fanboys and studio hype). Suddenly, the bad old days don’t seem so bad after all. Not that there aren’t a few fanatic — and fantastic — film buffs still fighting the good fight on behalf of classic films. Bruce Goldstein does terrific repertory programming over at Manhattan’s Film Forum and there are consistently interesting programs at the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, BAM and venues closer to home. It’s difficult, but still possible, to see movies the way they were meant to be seen — in a theater, with other movie lovers and a box of real popcorn. And although Netflix ended up killing off local video stores as easily as video stores killed off local repertory theaters, I don’t blame it. Instead I use it — mostly trolling through the “classics” section, hoping that more films make it to disc. Browsing online will never be as much fun as poking around a real store, but at least I know I can get my promised copy of “The Flesh Eaters” or “The Damned Don’t Cry” within a couple of days. And return it postpaid. And though many movie blogs care only about new films, there are others with a sense of history. The excellent Self-_style_d Siren blog, for example, has a particular fondness for Hollywood films of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s (and — a rarity on the web — a writing _style_ as light and literate as Nick and Nora Charles). Other sites, like Some Came Running and Hollywood Elsewhere, occasionally take sharp looks at DVD releases. Of course, those aren’t real, printed-on-paper magazines; I still miss Castle of Frankenstein and Psychotronic. But I’m happy that there are plenty of other ’zines for genre fans — particularly Little Shoppe of Horrors, a labor of love dedicated to English monster films; and Retro Cinema, a periodical (and website) with a fondness for James Bond, spaghetti westerns and other popcorn entertainments. STILL WORTH SUPPORTING The world of classic-movie culture isn’t what it was — what is? — but it’s still worth supporting, and even fighting for. Because even as I grumble about my own narrowing choices — and sympathize with similarly annoyed readers — it’s the next generation I really worry about. How are they going to get an appreciation of movie history if they never see a movie made before 1995? How are they going to understand new films if they don’t know the old ones that are being saluted (or, more often, simply being ripped off)? And, if they don’t get that information, then something pretty fundamental to our culture is going to change. Because classic movies and their heroes — Cagney and the Duke, Marilyn and Judy, “Dirty Harry” and “42nd Street” — are the closest thing we have to a national mythology. The tricks and tropes of classic Hollywood — the cowboy and the moll, the meet-cute romance and the 7th Cavalry rescue — are as much a part of our culture as the great sagas are to Norway, or samurai legends are to Japan. We share little enough as it is in this polarized world. What happens when we can’t even share this? Stephen Whitty may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or (212) 790-4435.