Cinema Speculation

Little Q Watching Big Movies

In the late sixties and early seventies, the Tiffany Theater owned certain cultural real estate that made it stand out from the other big cinemas in Hollywood. For one, it wasn’t located on Hollywood Boulevard. With the exception of Pacific’s Cinerama Dome, which sat proudly by itself on the corner of Sunset and Vine, the other big houses all existed on Old Hollywood’s last refuge to the tourists—Hollywood Boulevard.

During the day tourists could still be seen walking down the boulevard, going to the Hollywood Wax Museum, looking down at their feet and reading the names on the Walk of Fame (“Look Marge, Eddie Cantor”). People were drawn to Hollywood Boulevard for its world-famous theatres (Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Egyptian, the Paramount, the Pantages, the Vogue). However, once the sun went down and the tourists went back to their Holiday Inn’s, Hollywood Boulevard was taken over by the people of the night and transformed into Hollyweird.

But the Tiffany wasn’t just on Sunset Boulevard, it was Sunset Boulevard west of La Brea, officially making its location the Sunset Strip.

What difference does that make?

Quite a difference.

During that period, huge nostalgia for all things Old Hollywood was taking place. Pictures, paintings, and murals of Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Karloff’s Frankenstein, King Kong, Harlow, and Bogart were everywhere you looked (this was the time of the famous psychedelic posters by Elaine Havelock). Especially in Hollywood proper (i.e., east of La Brea). But once you drove past La Brea on Sunset, the boulevard turned into the Strip and Old Hollywood as defined by the movies melted away, and Hollywood as the home of hippie nightclubs and the youth culture took over. The Sunset Strip was famous for its rock clubs (the Whisky a Go Go, the London Fog, Pandora’s Box).*

And right there among the rock clubs and across the street from Ben Frank’s Coffee Shop sat the Tiffany Theater.

The Tiffany didn’t show films like Oliver!, Airport, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Love Bug, or even Thunderball. The Tiffany was the home of Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, Yellow Submarine, Alice’s Restaurant, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, and Robert Downey’s Pound.

These were the movies that the Tiffany played. And while the Tiffany wasn’t the first theatre in Los Angeles to play The Rocky Horror Picture Show or even the first one to have regular midnight screenings, in terms of the legend the film would become it was the first cinema engagement where much of what constituted the Rocky Horror phenomenon really exploded—coming in costume, shadow cast performing, callbacks, theme nights, etc. Throughout the seventies the Tiffany would continue to be the counterculture home for head flicks. Some successful (Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels), some not (Freddie Francis’ Son of Dracula with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr).

The counterculture films from 1968–71, whether or not they were good, were exciting. And they demanded to be seen in a crowd, preferably stoned. Soon, the Tiffany would be far less of a scene than it was, because the head movies that came out from 1972 on were more afterthoughts of a niche market.

But if the Tiffany had a year, it was 1970.

That same year, at the age of seven, I first attended a show at the Tiffany when my mother (Connie) and my stepfather (Curt) took me to see a double feature: John G. Avildsen’s Joe and Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa?

Wait a minute, you saw a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa? at seven?

You bet I did.

And while that was a memorable screening, hence I’m writing about it now, for me at the time, it was hardly culture shock. If we go by author Mark Harris’ timeline, the beginning of the New Hollywood revolution was 1967. Then my first years of going to see movies at the theatre (I was born in ’63) coincided with the beginning of the revolution (’67), the cinematic revolutionary war (’68–’69), and the year the revolutionary war was won (’70). Which was the year New Hollywood became the Hollywood.

Avildsen’s Joe made quite a splash when it was released in 1970 (it was an undeniable influence on Taxi Driver). Unfortunately, in the last fifty years this powder keg of a picture has kind of faded away. The film tells the story of a distraught upper middle-class father (played by Dennis Patrick) who loses his daughter (Susan Sarandon, in her motion picture debut) to the hippie drug culture of the era.

While visiting the disgusting pad his daughter shares with her scumbag junkie boyfriend, Patrick ends up bashing his head in (she’s not there at the time). While sitting in a tavern, trying to come to grips with both the violence and the crime he committed, he meets a racist loudmouth blue-collar hard hat worker named Joe (played, in a star-making performance, by Peter Boyle). Joe is sitting at the bar, drinking his beer after work, carrying on a profanity filled “America Love It or Leave It” rant about hippies, black folks, and society circa 1970 in general. Nobody in the working-class tavern is paying attention to him (the bartender even tells him, obviously not for the first time, “Joe, gives us all a break”).

Joe’s diatribe ends with the sentiment that somebody oughta kill ’em all (the hippies). Well, Patrick just did and, in an unguarded moment, makes a barroom confession that only Joe hears.

What follows is the strangely antagonistic, yet symbiotic, relationship between the two different men from two different classes. They’re not exactly friends (Joe’s practically blackmailing the anguished father), but in a black-comic twisted way they do become compadres. The distinguished middle-class man of the executive class has enacted the fascistic rants of this low-class blue-collar loudmouth slob.

By blackmailing Patrick into a sort of alliance, Joe shares both the murderer’s dark secret and, to some degree, the culpability of the murder. This dynamic unleashes the desires and inhibitions of the blue-collar blowhard and buries the cultured man’s guilt, replacing it with a sense of purpose and righteousness. Till the two men, armed with automatic rifles, are executing hippies at a commune. And in a tragic, ironic freeze-frame, the father ends up executing his own daughter.

Pretty strong stuff? You bet.

But what that synopsis can’t begin to convey is how fucking funny the film is.

As harsh, and ugly, and violent as the movie Joe is, at its heart it’s a kettle-black comedy about class in America, bordering on satire, while also being savagely vicious. Blue-collar, upper middle class, and youth cultures are represented by their worst surrogates (every male character in the film is a loathsome cretin).

Today it might be controversial to even refer to Joe as a black comedy. But it sure wasn’t when it was first released. At the time I saw Joe it was easily the ugliest movie I’d ever seen (a spot it held till four years later when I saw The Last House on the Left). Frankly it was the squalor of the apartment the two junkies at the beginning lived in that creeped me out the most. In fact, it made me a little sick to my stomach (even the rendering of the junkie apartment in the Mad Magazine spoof made me a little ill). And the audience at the Tiffany Theater in 1970 watched the early section of the film in silence.

But once Dennis Patrick enters the tavern, and Peter Boyle’s Joe enters the movie, the audience started laughing. And in no time at all the adult audience went from repulsed repose to outright hilarity. I remember they laughed at pretty much every fucking thing Joe said. It was a superior laugh; they were laughing at Joe. But they were laughing with Peter Boyle, who enters the movie like a force of nature. And the talented screenwriter Norman Wexler gives him a bunch of outrageous lines. Boyle’s comedic performance alleviates the picture’s one-note ugliness.

It doesn’t make Joe likable, but it does make him sort of enjoyable.

Avildsen, by combining Peter Boyle’s bravura comic performance with this grim trash-o-logue, produces a cocktail mixed with piss that’s disturbingly tasty.

Joe saying fucked up shit is a crack up. Like with Freebie and the Bean a few years later, audiences might feel guilty for laughing, but I’m here to tell you, laugh they did. Even seven-year-old little me laughed. Not because I understood what Joe was saying or was appreciating Norman Wexler’s dialogue. I laughed for three reasons. One, the room full of adults were laughing. Two, even I was able to plug into the comic vibe of Boyle’s performance. And three, because Joe cursed all the time and there’s few things funnier to a little kid than a funny guy cussing up a storm. I remember just as it seemed the laughter in the tavern scene had started to calm down, Joe gets up from the barstool and moves over to the jukebox to drop some coins in. And as soon as he gets a look at all the (I assume) soul music on the jukebox’s playlist, he yells out, “Christ, they even fucked up the goddamn music!” The audience of the Tiffany Theater burst out laughing even harder than before.

But after the bar scene was over, and sometime after Dennis Patrick and his wife go over to Joe’s house for dinner, I fell asleep. So I missed the whole scene where Joe and his newfound acolyte go on a hippie-hunting murder spree. A fact my mother was thankful for.

On the ride home that night, I remember my mother telling Curt: “I’m glad Quint fell asleep before the end. I wouldn’t have wanted him to see that ending.”

In the back seat I asked, “What happened?”

Curt filled me in on what I missed. “Well, Joe and the father ended up shooting a bunch of hippies. And in the mess, the father ended up shooting his daughter.”

“The girl hippie from the beginning?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why did he shoot her?” I asked.

“Well, he didn’t mean to shoot her,” he told me.

Then I asked, “Was he sad?”

And my mother said, “Yes, Quentin, he was very sad.”

Well, I might have slept through the second half of Joe, but once the movie was over and the lights came on, I woke up. And in no time at all the second movie on the Tiffany double feature started, the more overtly comedic Where’s Poppa?

And right from the get-go when George Segal puts on a gorilla suit and Ruth Gordon punches him in the nuts, this movie had me. At that age, the height of comedy was a guy in a gorilla suit, and the only thing funnier than that was a guy getting punched in the nuts. So a guy in a gorilla suit getting punched in the nuts was the absolute pinnacle of comedy. No doubt, this movie was going to be hysterical. As late as it was, I was going to watch this movie all the way to the end.

I’ve never seen Where’s Poppa? all the way through since that screening. But so many visual moments have remained burned into my brain, whether I understood them then or not.

Ron Leibman, as George Segal’s brother, being chased by the black muggers through Central Park.

Ron naked in the elevator with the crying woman.

And of course, the shocking moment for me, but to gauge from the reaction of the auditorium, everybody else as well, the moment when Ruth Gordon bites George Segal on the ass.

I remember asking my mother as the muggers were chasing Ron through the park:

“Why are the Negroes chasing him?”

“Because they were robbing him,” she said.

“Why were they robbing him?” I asked.

And then she said, “Because it’s a comedy and they were just making fun of things.”

And in that moment the concept of satire was explained to me.

My young parents went to a lot of movies around this time, and usually brought me along. I’m sure they could have found somebody to pawn me off on (my Grandmother Dorothy was usually game), but instead they allowed me to tag along. But part of the reason I was allowed to tag along was because I knew how to keep my mouth shut.

During the daytime I was allowed to be a normal (annoying) kid. Ask dumb questions, be childish, be selfish, you know, like most children. But if they took me out at night, to a nice restaurant, or a bar (which they sometimes did because Curt was a piano bar musician), or a nightclub (which they also did from time to time), or the movies, or even on a double date with another couple, I knew this was adult time. If I wanted to be allowed to hang around during adult time, my little ass better be fucking cool. Which basically meant don’t ask dumb questions, don’t think the evening’s about you (it’s not). The adults are there to talk to each other and laugh and joke. It was my job to shut up and let them, without constant childish interruption. I knew no one truly cared (unless it was cute) about any observation I had about the movie we saw, or the evening itself. It’s not like if I broke these rules I was treated harshly. But I was encouraged to act mature and well behaved. Because if I acted like a childish pain in the ass, I’d be left at home with a babysitter, while they went out and had a good time. I didn’t want to stay at home! I wanted to go out with them! I wanted to be part of adult time!

In some ways I was like a child version of Grizzly Man, able to observe grown-ups at night in their natural habitat. It was in my best interest to keep my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open.

This is what adults did when they weren’t around children.

This is how adults socialized.

This is what they talked about when they were with each other.

This is the shit they liked to do.

This is the shit they found funny.

I don’t know if it was my mother’s intention or not, but they were teaching me how adults socialized with each other.

When they took me to the movies, it was my job to sit and watch the movie, whether I liked it or not.

Yes, some of those adult movies were fucking amazing!

MASH, the Dollars Trilogy, Where Eagles Dare, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Owl and the Pussycat, and Bullitt. And some, to an eight- or nine-year-old, were fucking boring. Carnal Knowledge? The Fox? Isadora? Sunday Bloody Sunday? Klute? Goodbye, Columbus? Model Shop? Diary of a Mad Housewife?

But I knew, while they were watching the movie, no one cared whether or not I was having a good time.

I’m sure early on, at some point, I must’ve said something like, Hey Mom, this is boring. And I’m sure she said back, Look, Quentin, if you’re going to be a pain in the ass when we take you out for an evening, next time we’ll leave you at home [with a babysitter]. If you’d rather stay at home and watch TV, while me and your father go out and have a good time—fine—that’s what we’ll do next time. You decide.

Well, I decided. I wanted to go out with them.

And the first rule, don’t be a pain in the ass.

The second rule, during the movie, don’t ask stupid questions.

Maybe one or two, at the beginning of the movie, but after that, I was on my own. Any other questions would have to wait till the movie was over. And, for the most part, I was able to follow this rule. Though there were some exceptions. My mom would recount with her friends about the time they took me to see Carnal Knowledge. Art Garfunkel is trying to talk Candice Bergen into sex. And their dialogue back and forth was something like, C’mon let’s do it? I don’t want to do it. You promised you’d do it? I don’t want to do it. Everybody else is doing it.

And apparently, in my squeakiest nine-year-old voice, I asked loudly, “What do they want to do, Mom?” Which, according to my mother, made the theatre full of adults burst out laughing.

Also, I found the iconic freeze-frame ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid too obscure.

“What happened?” I remember asking.

“They died,” my mom informed me.

“They died?” I yelped.

“Yes, Quentin, they died,” my mother assured me.

“How do you know?” I shrewdly asked.

“Because when it froze, that was what that was meant to imply,” she patiently replied.

Again I asked, “How do you know?”

“I just know,” was her unsatisfying answer.

“Why didn’t they show it?” I asked, almost indignant.

Then, clearly losing her patience, she snapped, “Because they didn’t want to!”

Then I grumbled under my breath, “They shoulda shown it.”

And despite how iconic that image has become, I still agree with me, “They shoulda shown it.”

But usually, I knew enough to know while my mom and dad were watching the movie wasn’t the time to bombard them with questions. I knew I was watching adult movies and some things I wouldn’t understand. But me understanding the lesbian relationship between Sandy Dennis and Anne Heywood in The Fox wasn’t what was important. My parents having a good time, and me spending time with them when they went out for the evening, that was what was important. I also knew the time to ask questions was on the drive home, after the movie was over.

When a child reads an adult book, there’s going to be words they don’t understand. But depending on the context, and the paragraph surrounding the sentence, sometimes they can figure it out. Same thing when a kid watches an adult movie.

Now obviously, some things that go over your head, your parents want to go over your head. But some things, even if I didn’t exactly know what they meant, I got the gist.

Especially jokes that made the room full of adults laugh. It was fucking thrilling to be the only child in a packed room of adults watching an adult movie and hearing the room laugh at (usually) something I knew was probably naughty. And sometimes even when I didn’t get it, I got it.

Even though I didn’t really know what a rubber was, by the way the audience laughed, I still more or less got the idea during the scene between Hermie and the druggist in Summer of ’42. Same thing with most of the sex jokes in The Owl and the Pussycat. I laughed at that movie with the adult audience from beginning to end (the “bombs away” line brought the fucking house down).

But when it came to the movies I just mentioned, there was something else about the adults’ reaction I couldn’t have pinpointed at the time, but I realize now. If you show children a movie with a guy cursing in a funny way, or a poop joke, or a fart joke, usually they giggle. And when they get a little older you show them a movie with a sex joke, they’ll giggle at that. But the type of laugh they do is a naughty laugh. They know this is inappropriate, and they know maybe they shouldn’t be hearing or seeing this. And the laugh reveals that they feel a touch naughty partaking in the exchange.

Well, in 1970 and 1971 that’s how adult audiences responded to the sexual humor in films like Where’s Poppa?, The Owl and the Pussycat, MASH, Summer of ’42, Pretty Maids All in a Row, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Or the pot brownies scene in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! Or when the football players smoked a joint on the bench in MASH. Or scenes that had a comic sting but wouldn’t have been possible a year or two years earlier. Like Joe’s introduction scene or Popeye Doyle’s bar roust in The French Connection, the laughter from the grown-ups had a similar naughty vibe. Which in retrospect makes sense. Because these adults weren’t used to seeing this type of material. These were the first couple of years of New Hollywood. These audiences had grown up on movies from the fifties and sixties. They were used to peekaboo, insinuation, double entendres, and word play (before 1968, in Goldfinger, Honor Blackman’s character name Pussy Galore was the most explicit sex joke ever uttered in a big commercial film).

So, in a strange way, the adults and I were sort of on the same page. But naughty giggles weren’t the only thing I heard coming from the grown-up audiences. Gay characters were constantly laughed at. And yes, sometimes those characters were presented as comedic cannon fodder (Diamonds Are Forever and Vanishing Point).

But not always.

Sometimes it revealed a real ugliness in the audience.

In 1971, the same year as Diamonds Are Forever and Vanishing Point, I sat in a movie theatre watching Dirty Harry with my parents.

On screen Scorpio (Andy Robinson), the film’s surrogate for the real-life Zodiac Killer, stood on a rooftop in San Francisco holding a high-powered sniper rifle pointing it down at the city park. In the scope sight of Scorpio’s rifle was a gay black man wearing a flamboyant purple poncho. What’s memorable about the tableau is the scene itself we see play out inside Scorpio’s rifle sight. Purple Poncho is on a date with a hippie-like cowboy type with a black mustache, who looks a helluva lot like Dennis Hopper’s character from Easy Rider. In the movie, we get a pretty clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t appear to be a couple; the two men are definitely on a date. The cowboy has just bought Purple Poncho a vanilla ice cream cone. And without any physical contact between them, and played completely silently, we can tell the date is going pretty well.

We can tell Purple Poncho is having a good time, and the Dennis Hopper–type cowboy is charmed by him. This silent scene might be one of the most nonjudgmental depictions of gay male courtship ever presented in a Hollywood studio film up to that time.

Yet, at the same time, we watch it all through the scope sight of Scorpio’s rifle, with the crosshairs aimed directly at Purple Poncho. But, when I was a little boy, how did I know the fella in the purple poncho was gay? Because at least five patrons laughingly said out loud, “It’s a faggot!” Including my stepfather Curt. And they laughed at his antics, even though their only view of him was through the rifle site of a vicious killer, while Lalo Schifrin’s eerie killer’s-got-a-victim-in-his-sights music accompanied the visual on the soundtrack. But I felt something else in that theatre full of grown-ups. As opposed to the other victims in the film, I didn’t really feel the audience of adults had a tremendous amount of concern for Purple Poncho. In fact, I’d say a few filmgoers were rooting for Scorpio to shoot him.*

On the ride home, even if I didn’t have questions, my parents would talk about the movie we had just seen. These are some of my fondest memories. Sometimes they liked the movie and sometimes they didn’t, but I was usually a little surprised how thoughtful they were about it. And it was interesting to review the movie I had just seen from the perspective of their analysis.

Both parents liked Patton, but the whole discussion driving home revolved around their admiration for George C. Scott’s performance.

Neither liked Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row for reasons I’m not sure of. Most of the sexually oriented stuff they took me to bored the shit out of me. But Pretty Maids All in a Row had a genuine liveliness about it that caught my attention and kept it. As did Rock Hudson’s cool savoir faire, which wasn’t lost on an eight-year-old. Naturally, my stepfather made homophobic slurs against Rock Hudson the whole car ride home, but I remember my mother sticking up for Mr. Hudson (“Well, if he is a homosexual, that just shows what a great actor he is”). I remember Airport being a big hit with my family in 1970. Mainly due to the surprise of Van Heflin’s bomb going off. The moment the bomb exploded on board the aircraft was one of the most shocking moments in any Hollywood movie up to that time. As Curt said on the ride home, “I thought Dean Martin was going to talk the guy out of it,” subtextually remarking on how a Dean Martin movie of 1964 or 1965 would have played out, compared to a film—even a relatively old-fashioned one—of 1970.

And the scene that followed—the hole in the aircraft sucking people out—was the most intense cinematic set piece I had ever experienced. But in that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit.

The eagle-claws-through-the-chest initiation rite in A Man Called Horse blew my fucking mind. As did Barnabas Collins’ blood-squirting slow-motion wooden-stake evisceration in House of Dark Shadows. I remember, during both moments, staring at the screen with my mouth wide open, not quite believing a movie could do that. On those nights, I’m sure I was the most vocal one on the car ride home (I thought those movies were incredible).

At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 15, 1971 (not long after my eighth birthday), the Academy Awards for the films of 1970 were held. The five films up for best picture were Patton, MASH, Five Easy Pieces, Airport, and Love Story. By the night of the Oscars, I had seen all five (obviously at the theatre). And the film I was rooting for, MASH, I saw three times. I saw practically every big movie that year. The only two I missed were Ryan’s Daughter and Nicholas and Alexandra, which I didn’t mind missing. Besides, I saw the trailers so many times for both I felt like I did see them (okay, I didn’t see Duck, You Sucker! because Curt thought the title sounded stupid. Same thing for Two Mules for Sister Sara).

My two other favorite movies that year were A Man Called Horse and, probably, Kelly’s Heroes. To illustrate how these movies were molding my taste, in 1968 my favorite movie was The Love Bug. In 1969 my favorite movie was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But by 1970, my favorite movie was MASH, an anarchist-themed military sex comedy.

That didn’t mean I didn’t like Disney movies anymore. The two big Disney movies that year were The Aristocats and The Boatniks, and I saw and liked them both. But nothing made me laugh harder than Hot Lips (Sally Kellerman) being exposed in the shower. Or Radar (Gary Burghoff) placing the microphone under the bed as Hot Lips and Frank Burns fucked, then Trapper John (Elliott Gould) broadcasting it throughout the camp. (However, the whole middle section with Painless, the camp dentist, going through homosexual panic never meant anything to me. Of course not, it’s the lousiest part of the film.)

Again, while I really enjoyed MASH, part of the delight I had watching it was sitting in a cinema full of adults laughing hysterically, all getting off on their own naughtiness. Not to mention the fun I had going back to school and describing those scenes to the other kids in my class who could never dream of seeing a movie like MASH or The French Connection or The Godfather or The Wild Bunch or Deliverance (there was usually one other kid allowed to see some of the wild shit I saw).

Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was.

At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren’t letting their children see, I asked my mom about it.

She said, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.”

Right fucking on, Connie!

After being exposed to all these images, did any of them disturb me? Of course, some did! But that didn’t mean I didn’t like the movie.

When they removed the naked dead girl out of the hole in Dirty Harry, it was totally disturbing. But I understood it.

Scorpio’s inhumanity was beyond the beyond. All the better for Harry to blast him with the most powerful handgun in the world.

Yes, it was disturbing to see a woman in hysterical agony being dragged through the street and whipped by the villagers after she’d been condemned for being a witch in the Vincent Price movie Cry of the Banshee, which I saw on a double feature with the great Spanish horror film The House That Screamed. What a great night!

Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. Whether it was James Caan being machine-gunned to death at the toll booth, or Moe Greene being shot in the eye in The Godfather. That guy cut in half by the airplane propeller in Catch-22. Stacy Keach’s wild ride on the side of the car in The New Centurions. Or Don Stroud shooting himself in the face with a tommy gun in Bloody Mama. But just listing grotesque moments—out of context of the movies they were in—isn’t entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother’s point of view—that she later explained to me—was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story.

However, one of the earlier sequences I saw that genuinely disturbed me was when Vanessa Redgrave, as Isadora Duncan, was strangled by her scarf getting caught in the wheel of a roadster in Isadora. I guess I was so affected by that ending because I was so utterly bored by everything that preceded it. On the drive home that night I was full of questions about the dangers of accidentally dying by getting your scarf caught in the wheel of your car. My mom assured me I had nothing to worry about. She’d never allow me to wear a long flowing scarf in a convertible roadster.

One of the most terrifying things I witnessed in a film at that time wasn’t some act of cinematic violence. It was the depiction of the Black Plague in James Clavell’s The Last Valley. And after the movie was over, my stepfather’s historical description of it had my hair standing straight up.

Some of the most intense experiences I had at the cinema weren’t even the movies themselves. It was the trailers.

Hands down the most terrifying movie I saw as a child wasn’t any of the horror films I watched. It was the trailer for Wait Until Dark.

Before I even knew what homosexuality was, I watched the male sex scene between Peter Finch and Murray Head in Sunday Bloody Sunday. I wasn’t shocked, I was confused. But I was shocked by the naked wrestling match by the fireplace between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the trailer for Ken Russell’s Women in Love. I also got the gist of the terrifying implications of male subjugation in the trailer for the prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes. And for some reason I found the trippy trailer for Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels frightening.

Was there any movie back then I couldn’t handle?

Yes.

Bambi.

Bambi getting lost from his mother, her being shot by the hunter, and that horrifying forest fire upset me like nothing else I saw in the movies. It wasn’t until 1974 when I saw Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left that anything came close. Now those sequences in Bambi have been fucking up children for decades. But I’m pretty sure I know the reason why Bambi affected me so traumatically. Of course, Bambi losing his mother hits every kid right where they live. But I think even more than the psychological dynamics of the story, it was the shock that the film turned so unexpectedly tragic that hit me so hard. The TV spots really didn’t emphasize the film’s true nature. Instead they concentrated on the cute Bambi and Thumper antics. Nothing prepared me for the harrowing turn of events to come. I remember my little brain screaming the five-year-old version of “What the fuck’s happening?” If I had been more prepared for what I was going to see, I think I might have processed it differently.

There was, however, one night my parents went to the movies when they didn’t take me along. It was a double feature of Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback and Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud.

They went with my mom’s younger brother Roger, who had just returned from Vietnam and was casually dating my babysitter Robin, a nice young middle-class red-haired girl who lived down the street.

The evening was not a success.

Not only did they not like the two movies, my stepfather and uncle proceeded to bitch about them for days after. Brewster McCloud is one of the worst movies to ever carry a studio logo, and that’s fully acknowledging Altman also made Quintet for a studio as well. Quintet is just terrible, boring, and pointless. But Brewster McCloud is the cinematic equivalent of a bird shitting on your head. Nevertheless, it’s kind of amusing imagining my parents, and my young uncle, and my seventeen-year-old babysitter buying a ticket to Brewster McCloud expecting to see a real movie.

They were just baffled (my uncle, especially).

However, the Altman film was the lower half of the double bill. The film they paid to see was Sweet Sweetback.

Now the reason I didn’t attend that screening was because since it was rated X (“by an all-white jury!”), I couldn’t. I’m sure Curt, Uncle Roger, and Robin didn’t know what to make of Melvin Van Peebles’ howling cry of black empowerment any more than they did Brewster McCloud. But while I’m sure they couldn’t fathom why anyone would bother to make Altman’s malarkey, the Van Peebles film was something.

Something they didn’t understand.

Something they couldn’t grasp (which made them mad).

Something that wasn’t for them (after it rejected them, they rejected it), but unlike Brewster McCloud, something they couldn’t deny.

The interesting part of my memory was the only reason they saw it was due to my mom. I doubt, other than her, any of them had ever heard of it (she hipped them to it). Also, mom never used the short version of the film’s title. Always referring to it by its full soul title, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. And while I remember the men coming home complaining about the movie (for days), my mother didn’t say much. She didn’t defend the picture, but she also didn’t join in on the diatribe. She remained (strangely for her) quiet on the subject.

Less than a year later she would leave Curt and exclusively date black men for the next three years.

During that time my mom and I went to fewer movies together, because she was going to more movies on dates. And on these dates she saw some of the early films of the Blaxploitation genre. One of those movies was Super Fly.

Now, I knew of Super Fly because she already owned the smash hit soundtrack album, and it was played constantly in the apartment. The movie was also advertised heavily on Soul Train. And in our apartment, come Saturday, we never missed Soul Train. By this point I was living with my mother in a pretty hip apartment building that she shared with two cocktail waitresses that were her best friends at the time, Jackie (black) and Lillian (Mexican).

All three were young, hip, good-looking women in the funky seventies, with a penchant for dating athletes. Three sexy women (at the time my mother looked like a cross between Cher and Barbara Steele), one white, one black, one Mexican, sharing an apartment with the white one’s ten-year-old son: we were practically a sitcom.

My mother’s verdict on Super Fly? She thought it was a bit amateurish. But she thought the bathtub scene between Ron O’Neal and Sheila Frazier was one of the sexiest scenes she had ever seen.

Another Blaxploitation film she told me about was a movie called Melinda, starring Calvin Lockhart (again, heavily advertised on Soul Train). Many years later I saw the film myself. It’s alright (it’s sort of a Blaxploitation version of the film noir Laura, with a bunch of kung fu fights at the end). My mother really liked it. And I told her I wanted to see it too. But this time she told me I couldn’t. Now she didn’t say that often (the only other two movies she said I couldn’t see were The Exorcist and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein). So, I asked her why. And while the film Melinda wasn’t memorable, her answer to my question, I’ve never forgotten.

She said, “Well, Quentin, it’s very violent. Not that I necessarily have a problem with that. But you wouldn’t understand what the story was about. So since you wouldn’t understand the context in which the violence was taking place, you would just be watching violence for violence’s sake. And that I don’t want you to do.”

Considering this would be a conversation I would have for the rest of my life, I’ve never heard it articulated better than that. However, it’s not like I understood the confusing plot machinations of The French Connection, other than the cops were after the French guy with the beard. But as far as my mom was concerned, I suppose that was enough.

During this time my mother was dating a professional football player named Reggie. So, in an effort to score points with her, Reggie asked to hang out with me.

Being a football player, he asked her, Does he like football?

She told him, No, he likes movies.

Well, as luck would have it, so did Reggie. And, apparently, he saw every Blaxploitation flick that came out. So late one Saturday afternoon, Reggie (who I never met before) dropped by the apartment, picked me up, and took me to the movies. He took me to a part of town I had never been before. I had been to the big movie theatre districts in Hollywood and Westwood. But this place was different. This theatre row had huge cinemas on both sides of the street, which went down for about eight blocks (I realized, when I got older, Reggie took me to the theatre district in Downtown Los Angeles located on Broadway Boulevard, which included, among others, the Orpheum, the State, the Los Angeles, the Million Dollar Theatre, and the Tower). Not only were all the cinemas big, with large marquees out front, they also had giant (what to me looked like twenty-foot-tall) paintings of the movie poster towering above the marquee. And, with the exceptions of the chop-socky classic Five Fingers of Death and (strangely) My Fair Lady, all of them were Blaxploitation films. Films I had never seen, but was aware of from either seeing the TV spots (especially on Soul Train), hearing the radio ads on 1580 KDay—the soul music radio station of Los Angeles—or reading the exciting and graphic-looking movie ads in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section.

The sun was beginning to set and the flashy colorful marquees started turning on their buzzing neon. My new friend told me I could pick any movie I wanted to see (except My Fair Lady). Playing on that street that Saturday night were Hit Man with Bernie Casey (a black remake of the British film Get Carter) and the soon-to-be classic The Mack, starring Max Julien and Richard Pryor. “How about The Mack?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve already seen The Mack,” he informed me.

“Is it any good?” I asked.

“It’s sensational!” he told me. “And if you really want to see that I can watch The Mack again, but let’s keep looking.”

Also playing was Super Fly, Trouble Man, Cool Breeze (a black remake of The Asphalt Jungle), and Come Back Charleston Blue (a sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem), all of which he’d seen. But the new movie on Broadway, having opened just last Wednesday, was Blaxploitation superstar Jim Brown’s new motion picture, Black Gunn. I had seen the TV spots a lot that week, and it looked really exciting. I even remember the radio spots proclaiming, “Jim Brown’s gonna git the mutha who killed his brotha.”

Well, Black Gunn was definitely the movie Reggie wanted to see. One, being the connoisseur that he apparently was, it was the only one of the movies playing he hadn’t seen. Also, it was pretty fucking obvious he dug Jim Brown.

I asked him who his favorite actors were. He said Jim Brown, Max Julien, Richard Roundtree, Charles Bronson, and Lee Van Cleef.

He asked me who my favorite actor was.

I said, “Robert Preston.”

“Who’s Robert Preston?”

“He’s The Music Man!” (I was a big fan of The Music Man at the time.)

This being the Saturday night showing of the brand-new Jim Brown movie, the huge auditorium (there were probably 1,400 seats) wasn’t exactly packed, but it was definitely busy, and buzzing with anticipation.

My little face was the only white one in the audience.

This was to be my first movie in an (except for me) all black movie theatre in a black neighborhood. This was 1972. By 1976 I would be venturing on my own to a mostly black theatre called the Carson Twin Cinema in Carson, California, which is where I would catch up on all the Blaxploitation and kung fu film classics I’d missed in the earlier part of the decade (Coffy, The Mack, Foxy Brown, J.D.’s Revenge, Cooley High, Cornbread, Earl and Me, The Watts Monster, Five Fingers of Death, Lady Kung Fu, The Chinese Connection) as well as all the other exploitation films that came out around that time. And by the early eighties, I found my way back to that theatre row on Broadway. Though by that time, the neighborhood was far more Mexican than black, and the 35mm film prints they showed usually contained Spanish subtitles.

Also, later in the seventies, I’d often spend the weekend at Jackie’s house (remember my mother’s old roommate?) who lived in Compton. By this time Jackie was like my second mother, her daughter Nikki (who was four years older than me) was like my sister, and Jackie’s brother Don (we called him Big D) was like my uncle.

And Nikki and her girlfriends would take me to the movies in Compton where I saw Mahogany, Let’s Do It Again, A Piece of the Action, and Adiós Amigo (we didn’t just see black movies, we also saw Airport 1975 and Foul Play). Nikki and one of her girlfriends also took me (when I was fourteen) to the Pussycat Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to see my first porno movie: the classic double bill that played at that theatre for eight years, Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. (We didn’t understand what all the fuss was about Deep Throat. But The Devil in Miss Jones we thought was a pretty good movie.)

How did I get in at fourteen?

One, I was kind of tall. Only my squeaky voice would have given me away. So, I just let Nikki do all the talking.

Two, the theatre was open all night. So, we showed up at two in the morning. I don’t think any woman buying a ticket at two in the morning was ever denied admission to the Pussycat Theatre.

Later, when I became sixteen, I got a job as an usher at the Pussycat Theatre in Torrance.

But back to me, Reggie, and Jim Brown.

Black Gunn was playing at the Tower Theatre on a double feature with another film. Some amateurish black-themed social drama called The Bus Is Coming.

We entered the theatre with about forty-five minutes left before The Bus Is Coming was finished. As I have demonstrated, when it comes to a little kid watching challenging films with adult audiences, I was pretty sophisticated. I had watched many different adult audiences react to many different types of movies. And I had even experienced audiences turn against a movie and jeer it off the screen (that happened to a Crown International film I saw called The Young Graduates). But I had never experienced anything like this audience’s reaction to The Bus Is Coming.

They fucking hated it.

And they proceeded to constantly yell profanities at the screen for the remaining forty-five minutes of the movie. The first time in my life I ever heard the expression Suck my dick! was when one of my fellow audience members screamed it at a character on screen. Since I had never experienced anything like this before, at first, I didn’t know how to take it. But their insults to the characters just got dirtier and dirtier, and every minute the movie unspooled, the audience seemed to find a deeper level of contempt for it, and the funnier their insults became. Until I began to giggle. And then pretty soon I was giggling uncontrollably. I’m sure my reaction and the uninhibited giggling of my squeaky nine-year-old voice must’ve tickled the football player with me as much as the audience was tickling me.

“You havin’ a good time, Q?” he asked.

“These guys are so funny,” I said, not meaning the movie.

He smiled at me and patted my shoulder with his huge hand. “You’re a cool kid, Q.”

And then I felt emboldened to join in. So, I screamed something at the screen. And quickly checked to see if it was okay with a side glance at Reggie. But Reggie just giggled at the fact I felt comfortable enough to join in. So, join in I did. And I even yelled out at the screen my new favorite expression, “Suck my dick!”

And that cracked up Reggie and a few other older guys sitting by us.

Wow! What an evening.

But the night had just begun.

The last thing I remember about The Bus Is Coming is at the end of the movie, the twelve-year-old black kid who’s waiting the whole film for the bus (I think the bus was supposed to be a metaphor), starts repeatedly screaming the line that gives the film its title when the bus finally arrives. At which point somebody in the audience yelled back, “Yeah well get on it, and go fuck yourself!”

I was wiping tears of laughter from my eyes as the lights came up in the massive auditorium. I started figuring out, because of my mother, Reggie was trying to get in good with me. So, I asked him could I get a Coke and some candy at the snack bar. But instead of taking me to the concession stand, he just dug out his wallet, whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Get anything you want.”

As far as I was concerned, mom could marry this cat.

So, in a huge movie theatre that was practically the size of the Metropolitan Opera House, I made my way to the snack bar. Then, loaded down with ten dollars’ worth of junk, found my way back to my seat as the lights began to dim. Then, on a Downtown Saturday Night, Jim Brown’s new movie, Black Gunn, began flickering through the film projector’s shutter gate for an extremely excited audience of about eight hundred and fifty black folks, eight hundred of them male.

And frankly, I’ve never been the same.

To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972. The closest thing to that experience I had prior was the year before, when I saw my first James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, with the way the audience knowingly responded to every quip Sean Connery made. And I’d probably add the way the audience had responded to Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry as well.

Still . . . there was no comparison.

When Jim Brown sat behind his desk, and Bruce Glover (Crispin’s father) and his other white gangster henchmen threaten him, and Gunn hits a button under the desk and a sawed-off shotgun dropped in his lap . . . the massive theatre full of black males cheered in a way the nine-year-old little me had never experienced in a movie theatre before. At the time—living with a single mother—it was probably the most masculine experience I’d ever been part of.

And when the movie ended with a freeze-frame of Jim Brown as Gunn, the guy behind Reggie and me proclaimed out loud, “Now that’s a movie about a bad motherfucker!”*

Sadly, after that night, I never saw Reggie again. And to this day I have no idea what happened to him. From time to time I’d ask my mom, “Whatever happened to Reggie?”

She’d just shrug her shoulders and say, “Oh, he’s around.”