Cinema Flashback

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?

King Kong, 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.

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Blazing Saddles, 1974
It’s safe to say that 1974 was a pretty good year for Mel Brooks. Although he’d made a name for himself having directed and won a screenwriting Oscar for The Producers and for creating the TV series Get Smart, he was by no means a well-known filmmaker to the general population.

How great would it be to go back in time and see the opening weekend of the film that changed all of that?

Brooks’ one-two comedy punch of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein would cement his status as a legendary comedy writer/director/producer/actor in a way that hadn’t quite been seen before. It’s hard to guess when movie audiences, having sat down to watch Blazing Saddles, first realized that they were seeing something special - did the opening theme, sung by Mule Train crooner Frankie Laine, come across as genuine or parody? Did the movie’s first scenes, shot on dusty prairies, fool audiences into thinking they were watching a “real” western?

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The Exorcist, 1973
So you’re standing in line at the movie theater. It’s 1973 and you’ve decided to see a film based on a best-selling book about a little girl who is possibly possessed by a demon. Maybe you haven’t read the book, but you’ve seen the trailer and you’re definitely interested.

You’ve been standing in line a long time, and now you’ve bought your ticket and you’re entering the theater lobby. There’s a lot of commotion going on and, curious, you notice a crowd of people are watching a team of paramedics attending a woman passed out in a chair. Then you see some others who are exiting the theater, and they’re upset, crying, completely freaked out. An usher races past you, dragging a mop and bucket and you hear his boss tell him that several people have thrown up inside the theater.

How totally excited are you to be seeing The Exorcist for the first time?

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A Clockwork Orange, 1971
This could be test question to see what kind of moviegoer you are. Let’s say that you’re living in England between 1971 and 1973. You’ve heard rumors that Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange may be pulled from theaters - by the director himself - due to several violent crimes perpetrated by thugs claiming to have been inspired by the characters in the movie.

So naturally, you’d race out to see the movie in the theater before it was gone, right?

In fact, Kubrick’s reasoning behind withdrawing the film from theaters in the U.K. wouldn’t be known for years afterward. Reportedly, he and his family received death threats while Clockwork was in the theaters, and police authorities suggested that it might be better for all concerned if he withdrew the movie from exhibition. Because he enjoyed a rather unprecedentedly close relationship with Warner Bros., Kubrick made the request and the studio supported him; the studio even went so far as to successfully sue a popular London film club that screened the movie without permission in the early 1990s.

Copycat violence. Death threats issued to a famous and controversial director. A film that has been deemed too incendiary for the public to see.

And even though my mom would shake her head in sad resignation, I’ve just got to say DANG, but that sounds like a good time at the movies!

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Now it’s your turn.

What would be your Cinema Flashback? What groundbreaking, historically important movie that you’ve never seen in the theater would you travel back through time to see on its opening weekend?