Okay, I take back anything negative I might have said about the Alamo theater chain (which wasn’t much to begin with) in my previous entry.
Alamo Downtown is going to show The Wild Bunch July 1-3, and I can forgive anything for a theater that will show The Wild Bunch. I am especially happy that they are showing it on a holiday weekend because the last holiday weekend (Memorial Day) was such a dud for movies showing in Austin. I can actually look forward to the July 4 weekend.
I may or may not have hopped up and down a bit and squealed when I found out. I have been dying to see The Wild Bunch on a larger screen than my TV ever since I saw it on DVD a couple of Thanksgivings ago (by the way, it’s a fine Thanksgiving rental … when you’re done you will certainly give thanks for Sam Peckinpah).
Now I am getting more than one chance. About a month after Alamo shows The Wild Bunch, the Paramount has a couple of screenings scheduled for the film (August 13-14).
I don’t know if I’ll want to see the movie more than once, but it is possible. The first time I saw A Clockwork Orange, I was so taken with it that I went back to the theater the next night and saw it again. (This was at LSU, when I was on the Union Films Committee and got to see the movies free anyway.)
Joe Bob Briggs, in his book Profoundly Disturbing, tells a charming story about director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham), who was a minor-league baseball player when The Wild Bunch was released. Shelton went to the theater every day for two weeks to see the movie again and again and it inspired him to become a filmmaker. So you see, The Wild Bunch may very well be the kind of movie that packs ’em in at revival theaters, sometimes the same people every day.
However, I still feel sorry for the Paramount, which had this movie on its publicly available schedule for much longer than Alamo did, to the point where a suspicious person might even wonder if the Alamo scheduled it ahead of the Paramount screenings on purpose. But I don’t know anything about the ways in which Alamo programs and schedules films, and my guess is that they’d planned this screening for months. Rachael Ray is going to be filming part of a TV show at the July 1 screening. Alamo Downtown publishes its schedule in two-month blocks, so I only just found out about the Wild Bunch screenings last week.
Obviously the Paramount and Alamo theaters are competitors, even though the Paramount is non-profit. Still, I wish that two revival/arthouse theaters in one town would try to cooperate with each other to increase their audiences, not to fight over them. The Wild Bunch isn’t the only movie that both theaters are showing within six months of one another: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, This is Spinal Tap, Duck Soup, Fast Times at Ridgemont Highand The Umbrellas of Cherbourg are movies playing at the Paramount this summer that have recently played or will play soon at Alamo, and I am sure there are more I’m forgetting. Admittedly some of the Alamo screenings were special events with high admission prices that included dinner or some other activity, but even without those, duplications abound.
Austin Film Society does a very good job of evaluating the Alamo and Paramount film schedules before finalizing a film series. For example, notes about their summer film series on European filmmakers mention that the series includes no Bergman films because the Paramount scheduled a comprehensive retrospective on Bergman a few months ago.
It’s not as though there are only a limited number of older movies that will draw an audience, either. I understand that Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the biggest draws the Paramount has during its summer movie series, so much so that they schedule it every single year. (I don’t get this, but then I’ve never been able to stand more than 5-10 minutes of the movie at a time.) And who wouldn’t want to see This Is Spinal Tap again with a lively audience? But I can think of plenty of good, popular movies that neither theater is currently scheduled to show this year. I also can think of many lesser-known movies that I would love to see these theaters show, which might still draw a decent-sized crowd.
The Alamo has some substantial advantages over the Paramount. First of all, the Alamo makes money from food and drink sales that Paramount’s little concession stand cannot possibly rival. Second of all, the Alamo is a full-time movie theater and the Paramount shows movies as a kind of sideline when no theatrical productions or other live performances are scheduled. I don’t even think the Paramount has a full-time dedicated film programmer (would you like one? email me).
The Paramount is trying to boost its film sales—the theater is hurting for money right now and needs donations of any kind. Unfortunately, when Paramount shows the same films as Alamo, it is not all that easy to see the benefit of keeping their film programming afloat. It is true that the Paramount doesn’t have the distraction of waitstaff hovering in front of you periodically while you watch the movie, but Alamo is overall a more comfortable place to watch a movie.
(Also, I can’t forget the horrible audience when the Paramount showed Double Indemnity a couple of years ago. People were laughing at the dialogue and making fun of the movie in a way that nearly spoiled it for me. It was the kind of audience that keeps people at home watching their movies on DVD. Admittedly that was an Austin Film Society-sponsored screening where a lot of people probably got in for free, but I can’t imagine that’s what drew the rowdy audience. I have encountered audiences much more often at the Paramount than at Alamo. I’m not sure why. It might be personal bad luck and not relevant to matters at hand.)
Can we somehow lure the programmers at Alamo Downtown and Paramount to a dark bar for drinks together? Gingerman has a lovely outdoor patio and is within walking distance for both. Or perhaps Cedar Door. I want both theaters to thrive, and I intend to support both of them (or rather, all of the Alamo theaters in town) as much as I can. But I do not think I can watch The Wild Bunch four times, guys. I cannot sit through any more Audrey Hepburn movies even once. How about another Peckinpah film … no, not Major Dundee, which Dobie already showed earlier this year and which Paramount is showing in a double feature with The Wild Bunch. Maybe Ride the High Country?
The last time Alamo Downtown showed Brazil, the theater sold out practically every night for a week. And autumn would be a great time for a Terry Gilliam retrospective, what with The Brothers Grimm and Tideland being released this year. Delicatessen still isn’t available on DVD in this country. Or how about a nice Marlene Dietrich retrospective? Just a hint, y’all.
And when you’re done with that, you could work on the difficulties of parking near either downtown theater. Okay, that truly is asking the impossible.
One way that the Paramount equals the Alamois that it has wi-fi, or at least it did a few months back when they showed The Last Waltz. This really caught me by surprise – I think it’s a shared network with the State next door – though I don’t know why it should considering the stretch of Congress between 7th and 11th probably has more wifi-per-square-inch than anywhere in the country outside San Francisco.
I saw “Double Indemnity” last night at the Paramount (with “The Postman Always Rings Twice”). If ever there was a double feature tailor made for inappropriate audience laughter and the like, this is it, but there was nary a peep. You started to make a connection between the Austin Film Society and rowdy audiences, and I think you should have kept with it.
I had the horrible misfortune to attend an AFS screening of Michael Powell’s “Black Narcissus” at the Texas Union several years ago, and you would have thought we were seeing a Three Stooges movie with all the howls of laughter. I could not believe it. After similar experiences at other AFS screenings, I just quit going.
You seem to chalk up the bad behavior to audience members getting in free, but they get in free only because they’re dues-paying members of a film society so these are about as far from people off the street as can be imagined. And yet these very same film society members act like such boors in the face of challenging or even, in the case of film noir and westerns, dated dialogue and situations. I just don’t get it.