The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [90]
On Saturdays there were also matinees to go to, usually involving a double feature of all the movies that my mother didn’t take me to—The Man from Planet X, The Return of Godzilla, Zombies of the Stratosphere, something with the slogan “Half-man, half-beast, but ALL MONSTER”—plus a handful of cartoons and a couple of Three Stooges shorts just to make sure we were maximally fired up. Generally the main features involved some fractious, jerkily animated dinosaurs, a swarm of giant mutated insects, and several thousand severely worried Japanese people racing through city streets just ahead of a large wave or a trampling foot.
These movies were nearly always cheaply made, badly acted, and largely incoherent, but that didn’t matter because Saturday matinees weren’t about watching movies. They were about racing around wildly, making noise, having pitched battles involving thrown candy, and generally making sure that every horizontal surface was buried at least three inches deep in spilled popcorn and empty containers. Essentially matinees were an invitation to four thousand children to riot for four hours in a large darkened space.
Before every performance, the manager—who was nearly always a bad-tempered bald guy with a bow tie and a very red face—would take to the stage to announce in a threatening manner that if any child, any child at all, was caught throwing candy, or seemed to be about to throw candy, he would be seized by the collar and frog-marched into the waiting arms of the police. “I’m watching you all, and I know where you live,” the manager would say and fix us with a final threatening scowl. Then the lights would dim and up to twenty thousand pieces of flying candy would rain down on him and the stage around him.
Sometimes the movies would be so popular or the manager so un-seasoned and naïve that the balcony would be opened, giving a thousand or so kids the joyous privilege of being able to tip wet and sticky substances onto the helpless swarms below. The running of the Paramount Theatre was once entrusted to a tragically pleasant young man who had never dealt with children in a professional capacity before. He introduced an intermission in which children with birthdays who had filled out a card were called up onstage and allowed to reach into a big box from which they could extract a toy, box of candy, or gift certificate. By the second week eleven thousand children had filled out birthday cards. Many were making seven or eight extra trips to the stage under lightly assumed identities. Both the manager and the free gifts were gone by the third week.
But even when properly run, matinees made no economic sense. Every kid spent 35 cents to get in and another 35 cents on pop and candy, but left behind $4.25 in costs for repairs, cleaning, and gum removal. In consequence matinees tended to move around from theater to theater—from the Varsity to the Orpheum to the Holiday to the Hiland—as managers abandoned the practice, had nervous breakdowns, or left town.
Very occasionally the film studios or a sponsor would give out door prizes. These were nearly always ill-advised. For the premiere of The Birds, the Orpheum handed out one-pound bags of birdseed to the first five hundred customers. Can you imagine giving birdseed to five hundred unsupervised children who are about to go into a darkened auditorium? A little-known fact about birdseed is that when soaked in Coca-Cola and expelled through a straw it can travel up to two hundred feet at speeds approaching Mach 1 and will stick like glue to anything—walls, ceilings, cinema screens, soft fabrics, screaming usherettes, the back of the manager’s