Coming In In the Middle

October 2, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I said that up until the 1950s, it wasn’t uncommon that moviegoers would come into the theater halfway through the film. After The End, they could stay in their seats, wait for the movie to start again — after the previews, newsreel, and cartoon — and, when the film reached the part they’d already seen, leave.

It’s hard to imagine now, when everyone is in their seat by the time the feature starts. (A very few people may be late but only by a couple of minutes.) The only historical evidence I could offer was Roger Angell’s memoir Let Me Finish. As a twelve-year old, Angell would go to the movie theater right after school, and it was rare that the movie showtimes coincided with school dismissal.

There’s also this: Danny Kaye’s big breakthrough came in his first film, “Up in Arms,” in 1944. His tour de force in that movie became known as “The Lobby Number.” Kaye and friends are in the lobby of a large movie theater, and he tries to dissuade them from going in to see the musical they’d come for. These musicals are all alike, he says, and launches a parody of the genre, starting with the credits and the MGM lion’s roar. It’s Kaye at his manic best. After about five minutes, as he is singing an up-tempo song, he stops suddenly and says calmly,

So here we are, back in Fresno, California.
And this is where you came in.
But do not fret my friend.                                                           
[singing] This is a picture that ends in the middle
For the benefit of the people who came in in the middle.
This, this is the end.

You can hear the whole thing. Or just push the slider to 5:10.*

If you can base the final joke on the idea of people walking into the theater when the film is halfway through, it must have been, as we now say, “a thing.”

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*There’s a YouTube clip (here) from the movie itself, and it gives you a better sense of the context for The Lobby Number. Unfortunately, the clip ends before the final line.

This Is Where We Came In

October 1, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a bit of cultural history — movie history — that you’re probably not aware of, even if you’re a cineaste (unless, perhaps, if you’re a cineaste who’s eligible to collect Social Security). It’s about what a movie is, or more accurately, it’s about the place movies occupy in our social and cultural lives.

When you go to the movies, it’s annoying when people arrive after the film has started. They crabwalk to their seats as everyone else in that row knee-twists to one side to let them by without spilling the popcorn. Even if you’re not in that row, your focus is unavoidably drawn away from what’s happening on the screen and toward the latecomers. It doesn’t happen often, what with the twenty minutes of trailers, and besides nobody wants miss any of the film.

But it hasn’t always been that way. It wasn’t until the mid- to late-1950s (just a guess, I have no actual historical data) that things began to change. Before that, it was not unusual for moviegoers to arrive well into the picture. In his memoir Let Me Finish, Roger Angell, who was born in 1920 and grew up in New York City, writes that when he was twelve or so, he started regularly ditching his after-school recreation program and sneaking off to the movies.

Mostly, I would turn up at the Orpheum or the 86th Street Garden while the second feature was in progress . . . Walking into the middle of movies was the common American thing during the double-feature era, and if one stayed the course, only minimal mental splicing was required to reconnect the characters and the plot of the initial feature when it rolled around again. The absence of the double bill has done away with this knack and has also expunged “I think this is where we came in” from the language — a better phrase, all in all, than “déjà vu,” and easier to pronounce.

I had forgotten. But reading that paragraph opened a childhood memory — not detailed and Proustian, just a moment in the dark theater with my family, hearing my mother or father whisper, “This is where we came in, isn’t it?” and all of us getting up and making our way out.

Why did things change? Angell blames it on the demise of the double-feature, and he implies that latecoming occurred mostly in the B-movie,* usually an uninspired genre picture. But I would guess that the norm of tolerating latecoming spanned the entire program, even when only one picture was on the bill (though that bill also included one or two previews, a newsreel, and a cartoon).

Here’s another guess for why mid-movie arrival was common: television, or rather the absence of television. Today, movies are special. They have had to keep one step ahead of TV. When TV was black-and-white, movies had color. Even today, movies have sex, violence, and language not allowed on broadcast TV. And even cable can’t produce the sound and screen size of the movies or, until very recently, the special effects and high-priced actors.

Before the mid-1950s, movies occupied some of the space now taken by television — everyday, ordinary entertainment. Today, in our homes we might turn on the TV to “see what’s on television,” not to see a particular show at a particular time. If it’s ten past the hour and we turn on the TV mid-program, that’s OK. (This was even more the case in the years before on-demand and the DVR.)

The movies were like that in the pre-television decades. People were less picky about what they saw. They often went “to the movies” rather than to a particular movie, especially if there was only one theater nearby.  And if they didn’t get to the theater exactly on time, that was OK.

It’s not that television allowed movies to become Art rather than Entertainment. Most people at the tenplex today aren’t thinking of what they’re seeing in terms of artistic categories. But even if movies are still entertainment, they fit into people’s lives in a way that’s different from that of the 1930s and 40s. And different as well are are the norms of going to the movies.

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* I once asked my students if they’d seen or heard of Jerry Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie.” Several people raised their hands. Then I asked them if they understood the double meaning in the title. Nobody raised a hand.

You Read It Here First

September 26, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

Today, the Facebook group Nerds With Vaginas posted this:

(Note the number of Likes, Comments, and Shares the post had already gotten in the first five hours.)

Four years ago, in a blogpost about swear words (here), I cited the work of Jack Grieve, who had been using Twitter data to discover regional and historical variations. Here is the final paragraph of that post.

You can find maps for all your favorite words at Grieve’s Website (here), where you can also find out what words are trending (as we now say) on Twitter. (“Unbothered” is spreading from the South, and “fuckboy” is rising). Other words are on the way down (untrending?). If you’re holding “YOLO” futures, sell them now before it’s too late. [Emphasis added.]

Oldsmobile, or Why I Am Not a Genius

September 26, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Montclair State professor, Jeffrey Alan Miller, has been awarded a Genius Grant, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship. Four years ago, he discovered the earliest known draft of the King James Bible.

The Times (here) reported the story at the time.

Professor Miller discovered the manuscript last fall, when he was in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge . . . He came across an unassuming notebook about the size of a modern paperback, wrapped in a stained piece of waste vellum and filled with some 70 pages of Ward’s nearly indecipherable handwriting. As Professor Miller tried to puzzle out which passages of the Bible it concerned, he realized what it was: a draft of parts of the King James Version of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is left out of many editions, particularly in the United States.

The true scholar who learns of Prof. Miller’s discovery will immediately think of its implications not just for the history of the most widely read book in English literature but also for the history of the English language itself, the history of England, and the Anglican church.

My reaction, alas, was different. My first thoughts — and still my only thoughts — turned to Woody Allen’s 1974 essay on “The Scrolls.”

Scholars will recall that several years ago a shepherd, wandering in the Gulf of Aqaba, stumbled upon a cave containing several large clay jars and also two tickets to the ice show. Inside the jars were discovered six parchment scrolls with ancient incomprehensible writing . . . . The authenticity of the scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word Oldsmobile appears several times in the text.