Cinema Flashback - what movie would you see?

It’s become increasingly difficult to be surprised or amazed when we go to the movies anymore. By the time a movie’s opening weekend has arrived, it’s been teased, publicized, hyped, critiqued and spoiled by Web sites, bloggers, test screening audiences and screenplay reviewers. Studios try, with ever more futility, to protect their product while at the same time find ways to successfully sell it to the masses, and it’s little wonder why critics are becoming increasing frustrated by the studios and why the theatrical distribution window is shrinking every day.

I still love going out to the movies, maybe because I don’t go as frequently as I once did. While it’s rare to go at all anymore, it’s often, paradoxically, less special. I tend to know too much; I’ve seen too much of any given release before I’ve plopped down into my seat and the lights go down. And I do this willingly, by zipping from one movie site to another, by searching for tidbits of information that I can’t seem to prevent myself from consuming.

So here’s the premise of Cinema Flashback: you’ve got a time machine - a DeLorean, a magic phone booth, a starship that slings around the sun, whatever. And rather than going back and making sure your parents meet, or murdering the mother of some pesky unborn anti-cyborg resistance fighter, you can go back in time and attend the opening weekend of any movie in history.

You get to sit in a packed theater full of people who know virtually nothing about the movie. There’s no Internet, no information age. There may have been some studio publicity - a trailer, cast interviews in the media - but nothing like there is today. The audience is fresh, blissfully ignorant - except for you, because you’ve got the benefit of knowing the future. You know exactly what happened with this movie; you know the phenomenon that it created, how it cemented its place in cinematic history - or how it didn’t.

So what movie would you choose? I’ve got a whole bunch of them, for a bunch of reasons. Join me after the jump and we’ll talk about the first one.

We’ve all got favorite movies that we’ve probably never seen the way they were meant to be - on a big screen with great sound and surrounded by people reacting to it. Sure, we can more or less replicate that in our home theaters, but we’re fooling ourselves thinking that it’s the same. Quite simply, I wasn’t born yet for the release of certain movies, and for others, I wasn’t old or aware or clever enough to go to the theater for films that would later become my favorites on home video. And some movies aren’t even necessarily my favorites - I just think of how amazing it would be to go back in time and see them before the rest of the world had.

Like King Kong in 1933.

What must audiences have thought upon seeing this for the first time? If they’d watched the trailer, they got some idea of what was to come and the spectacle of the film. But imagine being a moviegoer in 1933 and seeing Kong - watching a 50-foot ape pound a huge wall into splinters, terrorize an island full of running, screaming people. Imagine witnessing the destruction of the elevated train or watching him climb the Empire State Building; how amazing it must have been!

Audiences loved King Kong - it enjoyed the biggest opening ever for the time, and it’s credited with rescuing RKO Radio Pictures from the brink of bankruptcy. So much of Kong’s success is due to the work of Willis O’Brien, the special effects artist who pioneered the stop-motion animation that brought such character and nuanced emotion to the various puppets that became Kong. O’Brien’s work inspired and informed generations of artists and directors from Ray Harryhausen to Dennis Muren, George Lucas, James Cameron and so many more. And O’Brien’s astounding success with King Kong unfortunately did him little good in the long run. Stalled and abandoned projects and personal tragedy plagued him for much of his life, but he remains a fascinating, influential figure in the history of film.

Of course, Kong would go on to become the stuff of legend, dissected and revisited through documentaries, books, sequels, parodies, homages and - naturally - multiple remakes with varying degrees of success. But still, I wonder what it might have been like to be there when it all began, when no one had ever seen anything like this before, how the current must have run through the theater as it unspooled; how the people must have been buzzing about it as they walked out, energized and buoyant by what they’d seen, heard and felt.

So what would be your Cinema Flashback? What time period would you return to and what would you see?

I’ve got a bunch of these on deck, films that are meaningful either historically or personally, that I never saw in the theater. I’d like to write these posts every so often, maybe weekly or when other news is slow. Let me know in the comments what you think or if you’re interested to see more - and I’ll even take requests if it’s a film for which we share an admiration!

Thanks for reading. Go see more movies in the theater!