Movies suck now

You're in the height of the summer season, where movies compete to become blockbusters and get family vacation money. But you know that.

That’s a pretty typical summer slate. This your first time watching a movie in the summer in 40 years?

Well, in the summer of 1957, the small little neighborhood theater in Shreveport, the Broadmoor Theater on Youree Drive, ran all of these:

A Face in the Crowd, The Spirit of St. Louis, La Strada (1954, Fellini), The Bachelor Party, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Tattered Dress, Fire Down Below, Giant (1956, still circulating), Desk Set, Loving You (Elvis), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943, re-issue), An Affair to Remember, The D.I. (Jack Webb), Something of Value, Band of Angels, Trooper Hook (Joel McCrea), The Lonely Man, and about ten or fifteen others.

Same summer, the Saturday matinees included: Davy Crockett and the River Pirates, Jungle Moon Men (1955- Jungle Jim), The Monster from the Ocean Floor (early Corman cheapie), Sunset in the West (1950- Roy Rogers re-issue), Riders to the Stars (Ivan Tors sci-fi), No Holds Barred (1952-Bowery Boys re-issue), among others.

All in the same theater, for the three summer months of 1957.

quote:

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This your first time watching a movie in the summer in 40 years?

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He's in the office, and doesn't have time for summer movies if it's not a holiday. He is feeling guilty and bored because he isn't marking his territory around the water cooler being ultra productive.

Oh, I don't recall it personally. Before my time. But I copied some logs, long time ago. So, I know the films screened each month there. Back then, theaters ran a lot more, sometimes with certain titles screened on Sun-Mon-Tue, then a different one on Wednesday evenings (usually a b-film), then a different title run on Thu-Fri, and a Saturday matinee double-feature (one showing), and sometimes a Saturday night 'drive-in' type horror/sci-fi double-feature thriller. All in all, you could go to the theater in a single week, and sometimes catch seven different films.

Box office variety is probably as bad as its ever been.

Getting slightly drunk with the boys and going to a late night showing of Old School or Wedding Crashers isn't really a cultural thing anymore. That used to be my jam along with many others.

If you're not into comic book movies, not sure what you're supposed to go regularly see.

quote:

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A Face in the Crowd, The Spirit of St. Louis, La Strada (1954, Fellini), The Bachelor Party, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Tattered Dress, Fire Down Below, Giant (1956, still circulating), Desk Set, Loving You (Elvis), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943, re-issue), An Affair to Remember, The D.I. (Jack Webb), Something of Value, Band of Angels, Trooper Hook (Joel McCrea), The Lonely Man, and about ten or fifteen others.

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Thats a ton of movies for a time when theaters usually showed no more than one film per week. You sure about this?

Yep. But this was a 'neighborhood' theater. Second run. Not like the downtown theaters. The 'nabes' often stuck to that same format they'd pretty much had in the late-1930s and 1940s. Approximately 20 movies a month, especially if the Saturday matinee was a double-feature (which was often the case).

The number (at least at The Broadmoor) drastically shrunk down by around the summer of 1959, where each month might have only 6 or 7 different films running. Eventually maybe even only 5 by the time you get well into the 1960s.

Yeah..that's what happens.

Im glad tubi exists with their 1970s exploitation stock