PRESIDENT'S CORNER - May 6, 2016
A New Director! Jascenna Haislet has arrived and met with your Board last Monday, May 2. We introduced ourselves to her, let her tell us about her background in theater management and marketing, and then we went around the table and each noted a priority to work on during the next year or two. The big “vote-getters” seemed to be: more volunteer involvement, resolving our facility uncertainty, reviewing our fee structure, recruiting new faculty and the like. We’ll try to give you a more complete report at Annual Meeting when Jascenna will be our keynote speaker.
The Flickers… You’ll know from the Catalog entry on Film Forum that I learned everything at the movies. Last Sunday’s NY Times had an interesting dialog between film critics Manohla Dargis and Tony Scott about the current state of movie-going that seems to be under attack from every hand-held electronic device and 70 inch curved screen 3D home flat-screen TV. My story today is that I have lived through a fascinating epoch of cinema and its presentation, so none of this is new. I started working at our local cinemas in Oceanside, CA as a sophomore in high school, staying until I moved on to college. We had four cinemas—two first run, premium houses, and two second-run houses that regularly showed triple features. From 1960 to the present, I have lived through all the newest gimmicks and technology whose main objective was to get more butts into the seats and sell a lot of pop and corn, some on screen, some in that box you munch from. We started with wide screen Cinemascope in the late 50’s followed by the giant wrap-around Cinerama that required 3 projectors to fill the 105’ x 35’ screen, then wider screen Panavision, and silly gimmicks like Smell-o-vision, Vista-Vision, Thunderama (don’t ask), old 3D, new digital 3D, stereo, Dolby, THX surround sound, and the relentless march of Industrial Light and Magic, purveyors of CGI (computer generated imagery) and the MRI machine, and, do we really need real actors any longer? I also fondly remember with gratitude my years living in Los Angeles, with ready access to those legendary Hollywood Blvd. movie palaces, and watching as a country-wide movement started to turn those decaying old picture palaces into symphony halls (Heinz Hall) or community performing arts centers (Benedum Ctr and our own Metropolitan Theater). We moved from going to movies in fine old palaces to dark, sterile rooms with a bare screen at one end. No wonder many of us would rather just sit at home, especially when we know that a movie playing locally today will be out on DVD or Netflix in 6 months or less and can be watched from any hand-held device. Do you really want to watch “Lawrence of Arabia” on a 4” screen in your hand or on your IPad?
I suspect what is really killing the movie-going experience is not the technology, but the cost. Even with senior discount, it costs us close to $40 to buy two tickets and a few goodies. One thing the cinemas don’t want you to know is that they make nearly all their money from the goodies, not the film. The studios take an appalling percentage of the ticket price, leaving the exhibitors the option of charging whatever the market will bear for popcorn, soda and candy. Ironically, if all the exhibitors banded together (and they do have a powerful organization), they could, with the stroke of a few pens, refuse to pay the studios 90%+ of the ticket for first run movies. Since studios are no longer allowed to own their own chains of theaters, they are completely reliant on theater owners to show their product.
I hope you enjoyed my little diatribe. I am planning an 8 week Summer Film Forum that will be free to OLLI members. Watch for details: July 13 to August 31, Wednesdays at 3 PM (subject to approval of the Curriculum Comm).
Can you believe this is my 40th column? A mini-milestone! What will I talk about next week? Stay tuned, my friends…
Jim Held, President