Featured

Ode to the Cheap Theater

With its “National Stay at Home Week” campaign, which coincides with the start of the new TV season, ABC’s marketing team has come up with a holiday that makes the candy/greeting card industries’ Sweetest Day look heartfelt. I’d like to say I’ll be boycotting the effort, but more likely I’ll be extending it until about November, when movie studios start releasing their Oscar-bait prestige pictures. Yes, it’s that time of year when Hollywood’s slate of summer films has come and gone, and now television gets its turn in the spotlight.

Yet for those film-lovers who refuse to succumb to the appeal of the small screen, there is another entertainment resource out there, one that I’ve found increasingly useful in recent years: The Cheap Theater.

May through August is chock full of movies, but these days who has the time, or the gas money, to get to more than a handful of them? That’s where the cheap theater comes in. Like a TiVo for the multiplex, the cheap theater helpfully preserves all the film offerings you didn’t quite want to make the effort to see. These one-time event movies and duds that no one saw are mixed in a delightfully random way. It’s not the carefully programmed selection of one blockbuster, one comedy, one cartoon, and one chick flick you’ll find at first-run theaters.

The price of admission at these theaters usually hovers somewhere around the going rate from the 1970’s, though on special days, it will drop to a dollar (i.e. the cost of seeing a movie in 1965).

The first thing you’ll notice when you buy your ticket is the flimsiness of the paper it is printed on. The paper stock is best described as having a glossy, almost tissue-like consistency, like the pages of a second-rate magazine. That is, unless the theater doesn’t have the ability to print at all, in which case you get an unmarked carnival ticket of the type you buy in rolls for school-sponsored game nights. Either way, it won’t be suitable for adding to your memento book; but on the bright side, they pass the savings onto you.

The next thing you’ll discover is that the concept of cheap doesn’t transfer to the refreshments. Even in the cheap theater, the value of a package of Milk Duds has little connection to reality.

The floors are not quite as well swept as you’re accustomed to, but it’s hard to blame the staff, since there is one high school girl selling tickets, ripping them, and directing patrons to the proper screen. The previews are somewhat surreal, since they feature films that have already lived a full life at the regular theater, but which are still a ways off for the thrifty.

And the movies themselves, even though they were in regular theaters only months earlier, somehow have a decidedly second-class feel. Perhaps it’s because the catch phrases have already made the rounds of the late night comedy shows. Or maybe it’s because the prints are beat up and the audio system isn’t quite state of the art. Or possibly you didn’t see the movie in the first place because you didn’t really think it would be any good. And you were right. Whatever it is, it only adds to the charm of the cheap theater.

Missed “Kung Fu Panda” the first time around? Not a problem at the cheap theater. There lives the clunker and the hidden gem, which, let’s face it, is the best you can hope for at any theater. And for 1970’s prices, can you really go wrong?

© 2008 Obsolete Vernacular.