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  • Saturdays at the Paramount
  • Robert Lacy (bio)

My wife and I don't go to the movies much anymore. The soundtracks are too loud, they run too many trailers, the morons two rows back won't shut up—all the usual geezer complaints. These days when we get the itch we mostly let the movies come to us, via dvd or the Movie Channel; and we enjoy them (or, often as not, fail to) in the privacy of our own living room.

It wasn't always this way, though. In my long-ago youth in east Texas I was an avid moviegoer. In fact, when it came to entertainment, moviegoing back then was mainly what we did. I was cinematic long before I was literate.

There were two theaters in my hometown of Marshall: the stinky old rundown Lynn and the tonier, more up-ticket Paramount, both of them on Washington Street just north of the courthouse square. The Lynn offered [End Page 483] Westerns and serials and other B-grade fare, and was where you went as a little kid, plunking down your nine cents for the Saturday afternoon double feature plus cartoons plus the umpteenth installment of "Don Winslow of the Coast Guard." The Paramount was where you graduated to at about age thirteen. It showed all the major-studio first-run films on a schedule that, as I remember it, had them rotating in and out of town at the rate of about three each week, the Saturday-Sunday feature being the big one. In high school we took our dates to the Paramount.

How many hours must I have spent in the cloistered darkness of the Paramount Theater? A thousand? Two thousand? Three thousand? It seems to me now, looking back on it, that I was there, inside, intent, popcorn and Jujubes in hand, every time the feature changed. So, if you figure three times a week for, say, eight years, that comes to, my God, 1,200 movies! And if you figure two-and-a-half hours per movie counting the cartoon, newsreel, and previews, as we called them back then, that comes to, yes, 3,000 hours. And that doesn't even count the midnight shows on Saturday or the foreign-film series sponsored by the Altrusa (women's) Club one night a month on Tuesdays.

In high school those midnight shows were a social must. Everybody in our crowd attended. You went to see and be seen, usually after you'd taken your date for the evening home. I remember one midnight show in particular. It was called The Thing, and whoever planned its publicity knew exactly what he was doing. For several weeks leading up to the showing billboards outside the theater simply said "The Thing Is Coming." No credits, no actors' or directors' names, no still photos—just "The Thing Is Coming." So that when we settled into our seats that night we didn't know what to expect. The movie turned out to be a space-alien thriller, set on an isolated military outpost up in the Arctic, on what was then called the dew (for "distant early warning") Line. The howling wind, the drifting snow, the utter desolation of the place—all added to the atmosphere of impending terror. The director—the legendary Howard Hawks, as it turned out—built suspense by withholding from view the captured—but now suddenly escaped—space creature until about halfway through the film. All we saw was the carnage he was creating: the dead sled dogs, the silent power generator, those odd little pods growing (and throbbing, throbbing) out in the greenhouse. When from behind a final door the monster did at last make himself plain, the screams in that theater could probably have been heard all the way to Dallas, a hundred and fifty miles away. To this day I have never witnessed anything quite like it. It made me understand the impact Orson Welles's infamous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 must have had on his radio listeners, the kind of collective hysteria that can take hold. Because that's what happened in the Paramount that night. We had...

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