Again within the aughts, a fellow movie buff known as me from a video retailer in Stamford to inform me it was closing and promoting DVDs for a couple of dollars every.
My spouse and I hustled over and snared as many classics and arthouse gems as we might (we discovered lots, as most individuals have been shopping for multiplex fare).
The man in entrance of me in line requested the proprietor why it was a stealth, word-of-mouth closing.
“I simply need to retire. I don’t need any reporters coming over and doing a kind of, ‘The loss of life of the video retailer’ tales,” he replied. “Who wants that?”
I might recognize the view from the opposite aspect of the display.
One yr in the past, I wrote a column that revealed Greenwich was with no movie show for the primary time since 1914. I didn’t get a lot suggestions. Simply one other pandemic casualty.
Extra cinemas have shuttered in Connecticut in current months, as we catalogued in a news story final week. Waterbury … Westbrook … Stonington …Branford … New Haven.
The story quotes University of New Haven film scholar Tom Garrett opining that COVID arrived at a time when film followers have been embracing streaming, making it “type of the ultimate nail within the coffin” for theaters.
TV snuffed Hollywood’s Golden Age within the Nineteen Fifties. Video allegedly killed the movie star circa 1980. DVDs erased the VHS and streaming knocked off the DVD like paper beating rock (nonetheless that works).
However motion pictures are in regards to the artwork, not the electronics. We must always not want reminders 30 months into COVID that cinema continues to be finest appreciated on a big display whereas surrounded by our fellow man. We’d be capable of acknowledge an Edward Hopper portray on a U.S. stamp, however that’s no solution to expertise the art work.
So I’m not shopping for that the ultimate credit are rolling for the massive display.
Neither is Stuart Adelberg, the chief director of the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford. Adelberg responded to the story with a letter to the editor detailing how the impartial theater has been working in the identical Bedford Avenue location since 1939 and continues to be screening “new releases, artwork home, documentary, overseas language movies, and even month-to-month cult classics.”
The Avon is a part of the rationale I can’t think about theaters fading to black. I believed it was useless as soon as, however the Avon is extra resilient than Michael Myers in “Halloween” flicks.
Its 1939 opening was celebrated with streamers, indicators, a banner that crossed Bedford Avenue, a band efficiency and a full-page advert within the Stamford Advocate that showcases a theater constructed by Frank D. Wealthy that primarily seems similar right now. Blueprints used the identify “The Colonial” to mirror its structure, however somebody clearly favored winking at Shakespeare.
For the following scene, think about a “12 months 2000” title card and a montage of me strolling to work season after season previous the Avon’s “Coming Quickly” body for 1998’s “Twice Upon a Yesterday” starring Penelope Cruz.
“For anybody who wants a second likelihood” … the tagline learn.
The Avon bought its second likelihood. After the theater shuttered, longtime Advocate columnist Don Russell (who had been Jackie Gleason’s tv announcer) expressed a written hope that the Avon would sometime be remodeled right into a showcase for impartial and overseas movies.
Which is what Greenwich residents Deborah and Chuck Royce did, including classics to that lineup when the doorways reopened in 2004. Once I introduced my mother to the Avon that yr, she stunned me by saying she’d been there earlier than. She and a buddy would take the prepare from New Rochelle, N.Y., within the mid-’50s to go to the Avon. A number of years later, my spouse and I walked out of the theater one Sunday to be greeted by rain. We rotated and purchased tickets for the film on the theater’s second display. We later took our son to a free exhibiting of the “Polar Express” there as a toddler as a result of I used to be too low cost to pay for what I suspected could be a cameo at his cinematic debut. The Child left his seat to face solely so he might stroll as much as the display for a closeup of the ultimate credit.
The massive display all the time invitations the viewers to contemplate a film for the primary time, even when the viewer has already seen it in miniature. I can’t think about a greater instance than one Adelberg supplied Friday. He got here to the Avon in 2019 after a profession that included 16 years as president of Greenwich United Manner. Adelberg had a whole lot of expertise helming nonprofits after initially pursuing a profession as an actor/director, totally on stage (the place he not too long ago returned for a job in “Laughter on the 23rd Ground” at Curtain Call in Stamford). Movie was not his wheelhouse, however the Avon’s schedule stays in good palms with Adam Birnbaum, who has been director of programming since its revival.
The 80th anniversary screening of a sure Hollywood basic satisfied Adelberg he’d made the proper transfer. Like so many children of his era, he watched “The Wizard of Oz” yearly on community tv within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s. He had even directed a stage model of it. However he had by no means seen it the best way it was supposed.
“That evening was after I stated to myself, ‘that is cool. I’m actually comfortable to be right here,’ ” he remembers. “I do know each phrase. I can sing each tune. There’s nothing I don’t learn about that movie.
“However it was a unique movie seeing it on the display, in a packed home, listening to folks giggle at components I by no means thought have been humorous earlier than. Listening to folks hiss on the witch. It was a completely totally different expertise.”
This is the reason theaters matter, he realized. That is the best way the film was meant to be seen.
So his recommendation is to discover a movie you suppose you’ve seen, after which watch it on the massive display. Then there are motion pictures that simply don’t work with out the viewers, like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” which the Avon will display on Oct. 27 (“Certain, you possibly can watch it on TV, however who would?” Adelberg jokes).
Nobody is pretending there’s a Hollywood ending within the subsequent scene. The film trade nonetheless has provide chain points. Dwelling theaters aren’t going away. Some older movie buffs are nonetheless reluctant to return to a crowded theater.
However artists will catch up. It might get lonely in house theaters. And if Zoomers might be satisfied to purchase vinyl data, they’ll in all probability be lured into theaters by a path of popcorn.
So let’s reduce it out with “The Last Picture Show” forecasts. This isn’t an “finish of the films” story.
Like the person stated, who wants that?
John Breunig is editorial web page editor of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. jbreunig@scni.com; twitter.com/johnbreunig.
