Beautiful Naugahyde benches clear of the Thermopane and near twin easels of Coming Soon with their startling — it’s a first-run house — new posters, novel, like a king’s proclamation, banns, latest policy, fresh law, new rules. My patrons sidling up to these, studying them while they wait for the show to break.
The movie’s thick carpets, a bright, gentle meld and tie-dye of color giving ground to color like the progress of landscape, laws of geography. My movie’s toilets, its Women’s rooms and Men’s, with its urinals white as pillowcase, its stalls of decorator colors not found in nature, and its tiny discrete colored tiles like squares on a board game, its modern, functional sinks with their cockpit fixtures, their wonderful dials for hot water, cold, the pushbutton for soap pink as bubble gum. Paper-towel dispensers built into the walls like pewter mailboxes. My movie’s toilets’ textured walls with my movie’s toilets’ motifs, its indirect lighting and its hidden, gentling sound system that plays the themes from big hits at the box office.
Have I mentioned my movie’s sign? An immense white rectangle of tabula rasa, split down the middle by a length of black metal — CINEMA I, CINEMA II — and looking like a domino in a negative. The simple statement of the titles—The Longest Yard, The Gambler—in sharp black letters like the font of scare headlines, brooding and important as assassination or a declaration of war. The name of one actor up there, or none at all. This is my single whimsy: From time to time I call my manager. “What’s playing?” I ask. He knows I mean, “What’s coming soon?” “Godfather Part II,” he’ll tell me. “I’ll get back to you,” I’ll say. I do my homework. “We’ll go with Robert De Niro.” “It’s Al Pacino,” he tells me. “They’re doing a major piece in Time. Al Pacino is hot.” “Robert De Niro.” “We’ll catch shit from the distributor. It’s in the contract. We’ve got to put Pacino up there. It would only confuse people.” “They know by now. They know how I operate. They’ll love it.” It’s the truth. My sign has read “That’s Entertainment, Ann Miller”; “Airport, Helen Hayes.” And people do enjoy it. If they even notice. They think they’re in on some inside joke. And the film buffs — the Draper Lake Mall is close to Norman, where the University of Oklahoma campus is located — somehow have the idea that seeing a big commercial blockbuster — the only pictures I ever show — at Cinema I, Cinema II somehow endorses the film, makes it Cahiers du Cinéma material, themselves — what’s the word? — cineasts. But the truth is, I do not intend it as a joke, or even as a means of drawing people to my theater. (Though it may have that effect, I think. In the early fifties certain independent exhibitors took the chains to court on the grounds that their exclusive right to show particular films was in restraint of trade. People can go almost anywhere to see my movies. I saw in the paper that The Longest Yard and The Gambler are playing in at least five different first-run houses in the greater Oklahoma City metropolitan area.) It is an act of willfulness on my part, a blow against my franchise being. To see if I can take such blows. That go against the homogeneous grain of my undifferentiated heart. I cannot. But this is how I worry my loose tooth, push against my character, isometrize habit and inclination and the interchangeable parts of my American taste. I am really more comfortable that the sign reads “The Longest Yard, Burt Reynolds; The Gambler, James Caan.” I am glad that the girls behind my candy cases look like ex-babysitters, my ushers like high-school seniors who lack force, who will go on to junior colleges or take their courses at the extension centers of the state university. I am glad I show blockbusters, all the “PG’s” and “R’s” of our collectivized soul and Esperanto’d judgment.
I enjoy my customers. (My Travel Inn isn’t open yet, but I look forward. It will be the capstone of my career, I expect.) I enjoy watching them, being among them. Better than the Fred Astaire folks, the DQ and McDonald’s trade, One Hour Martinizing, the Jacuzzi Whirlpool bunch — arthritics — my Radio Shack and Chicken from the Colonel clientele. I prefer them to the patrons of any of the franchises I’ve owned. It’s the grandest part of my Grand Tour. This is the public I love. Oh, not the weekly matinee crowd so much, the Golden-Agers and widows and kids cutting school. The night-shift bunch and all those of the off-center life who come to my movies to nurse their wounds, or to sit quietly in my dark. (I have heard them weeping at my comedies.) But this is a Friday night, the seven o’clock show. In the lobby I mingle with the cream of my American public. Who have driven the Interstates to come here, the wide four-lane bypasses, the big new highways, median’d, cloverleafed, the great numbered exit signs every two and a half miles, every mile and half and quarter mile, the off-ramps that segue to on-ramps, such and such North, so and so South, over the great concretized, bulldozed no-man’s-lands of the new America. Shuttling at fifty-five miles an hour, sixty, better, past, through, the almost invisible suburbs, under the overpasses with the fine, clean names — Birch Road, and River, Town and Country Lane, Five Mile Road, Country Club Causeway (Port Wonderful, Heaven on Earth Way, Earthly Paradise Park, Good Life Gardens: this is not satire, only the realism of our visionary democracy) — going by so fast that the cyclone fences are a blur, the back yards and barbecues, the aboveground and in-ground pools seen as through a scrim, the cheesecloth vision flattering as mirrors in the suburban Saks Fifth and branch Neimans that perch the landscape, the low high schools like architects’ sketches. The prize-winning glass churches. Driving to the movies in their splendid, multi-thousand-dollar machines, and snappy, perky compacts — these would be the younger people — like bright sculptures or cars like tennis shoes. Where have all the headlights gone? What, has night been done away with? Where are the windshield wipers? What, it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more? See the aerials of the car radios laminated in the windshield glass, the ruled rear-window defrosters like blank sheet music, unfilled-in scales.
Two and a half dollars they pay, three, handing over their tens and their twenties with more nonchalance than people inserting tokens into subway turnstiles. A beautiful people, a confident, lovely paired public, casually well groomed and boisterously gracious, the clothes of the men bright as tattoos, of the women color-coordinated as the appointments in bathrooms. Later they will go to the International House of Pancakes and work their way down the sweet stacks and through the exotic combinations, experimental, choosy as chemists among the alembics of syrups. Polishing it all off, cleaning their plates. What could be better, more innocent? Their hunger piqued, whetted, honed, keened by the emotions in the film they’ve just seen, hunger an emotion itself now, at nine-thirty, at midnight. The cathartic omelet, the denouement of waffles and sausage and coffee.
“Do you want to go over the stats, Ben?” Cliff Lockwire, my manager, asks. “It’s remarkable. The economy’s supposed to be in a slump, but it hasn’t affected attendance much. Not that I can see. The other exhibitors tell the same story.”