There was a chef at a five-star restaurant. He was cutting up vegetables prepping for that nights service when he heard a knock on the back door. He opened the door and saw a homeless guy swaying back and forth. "Do you have any toothpicks?" He asked. The chef reached over and plucked a toothpick from the make table, handed it to the guy, and closed the door. He went back to cutting vegetables and heard another knock at the back door. He opened the door and saw a second homeless guy. "Do...do (hiccup) you have any toothpicks?" he asked, slurring his words. The chef reached and pulled a toothpick from the bin on the make table, handed it to the guy, and closed the door. He went back to cutting vegetables and heard a knock on the back door. He opened the door and there was a third homeless-looking guy standing there. "Do you happen to have a straw?" The chef replied "Ok, what's going on back here? Two guys ask for toothpicks and you ask for a straw. What gives?" The vagrant replied, "Well Jerry threw up and the other two guys got the best chunks..."
As someone who literally lived in a movie theater (twice!), I thoroughly enjoyed this. To this day "concession girl" still goes down in history as my favorite job of all time. And what I wouldn't give to watch "Stand by Me" fifty thousand more times on the silver screen. Happy Sunday!
Hah! Nuts-O true story. They shot Stand By Me near Cottage Grove, OR while I worked as a reporter on the Cottage Grove Sentinel. (Slightly before my time they'd shot the parade sequence for Animal House in Cottage Grove.) A sports reporter and I were sent out to stalk the production as it used the local steam train "The Goose" for the train track scenes. In 1926 Buster Keaton had used The Goose in his film The General. For several weeks I got as close as I could, getting yelled at and chased off by Rob Reiner.
More recently I stood in the alley behind Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. A publicist asked me, "Do you know where you're standing?" I didn't. The publicist said, "You're standing exactly where River Phoenix died." It was just outside the Viper Room. Sad full circle from seeing Phoenix as a kid in Cottage Grove.
Ha! I had a friend who was allowed to temporarily sleep in the projection booth of the theater I mentioned in another part of this thread. The couple hired to deep clean the theaters once a week were fired because they weren't aware he was staying over nights. It happened before I was employed there and he caught them doing the nasty when they should have been cleaning up the same. His description of what he saw in that Sarasota theater probably would have repulsed Paul Reubens.
When I was a kid, we slept upstairs in what is now the poster storage room. But it didn’t have good heat so a few really cold nights we camped out next to the heater in the auditorium. When I stayed there as an adult, heat was fine but the bathroom was in projection room and I couldn’t make that walk alone. My theater is super haunted. Couldn’t even look out the window at the dark, “empty” auditorium ‘cause I got the feeling I’d see someone standing down there. A temporary living arrangement for sure!!
Also by bathroom, I mean toilet crammed in a hallway next to the steps down to the other projector rooms, with a shower curtain for a door and no sink. :)
I have no clue as to how my buddy handled bathing/showering. Whatever difficulties he dealt with as a young man are dwarfed by your childhood and whatever haunted those theaters and weird set up. We had ghost sightings aplenty at the nearby college I attended (which was part of the noteworthy occultist John Ringling's property in his lifetime), some of which were likely drug-induced, but Burns Court was less than a decade old when I worked there. Fortunately I'm only haunted by Hot Chocolate's hit song "You Sexy Thing" which played during the credits of our longest-running feature. Listen to that song enough times and I guarantee it will get creepy. Still, like with Mr. Palahniuk's stories, what you've endured makes the stories from the three different cinemas who've hired me seem quite light-hearted in comparison.
Agreed! Not the usual definition of “theater kids” but the bond is real. Happy to hear your dad’s theater(s?) stir up such good feelings and pleased to meet someone with such a unique upbringing.
Did you know that theaters traditionally place a bright light on the stage when the place is empty? It's called a "ghost light" and I'd understood that it functions (?) to keep spirits from setting up housekeeping. My original name for "Haunted" was to be "Ghost Light" but another novel came out with that title a few months before mine. A spooky practice.
Did not know that! The original title sounds poetic but “Haunted” is more fitting, I think. Was instructed to stop reading aloud during an extended car trip because of the pool scene. Admittedly, the driver is also known to shield their eyes during violent film scenes, but still... powerful words you wielded there, Mr. P..
Yay! We have a shared experience. At fifteen, I took my first job at a gorgeous old single-screen called the Rio Theater (http://www.riotheatre.com/). Amazingly, the movie house is still in operation today, although it doubles as a music venue. The fey Erika and I, along with Cindy, who hated people but loved animals, and Raffi, the Armenian that smelled like Pan, ran the magical place.
Cindy worked the box office. Just like it sounds, it was a ticket office in a box. A chrome polyhedron with vents in the sides so she could breathe. It looked like a tiny spaceship set down on the mosaic-tiled entryway under the marquee.
There were time portals in the old building, like the wedge-shaped storage area behind the sign filled with movie posters and displays dating back to 1946. The projector room was a mad scientist’s lab. But the most liminal of all the secret spaces was the Cry Room—this weird little glass-fronted mini-theater hung suspended above the other 900 seats. Its original purpose was to seal mothers with their crying babies away in a soundproof booth. By 1985, this segregation was no longer practiced, so it was abandoned. Erika and I would sneak up there to watch movies, smoke pot, and make love. It was heaven.
Did you ever have to change marquee letters? Using that long pole made your shoulders ache for days. Ours had a suction cup on the end. The trick was to spit into the cup and slap it against the plastic letters. To hang "Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings" took the collective saliva of seven or eight teenagers.
I work at 90-year-old cinema, so I have lots of experience changing marquee letters. Doing that task in the wintertime is sheer hell because you literally have to tear the letters off because they freeze. This creates gaps on the marquee because the plastic slots break, which means that we have to abbreviate the titles because if you put too many letters up, some will fall through the gaps and probably hit a poor passerby in the head, so, for example, instead of 9:00- "Monty Python & The Holy Grail" we just put 9:00-"Python"
The longest title I ever put on a marquee was the 1972 film "Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have The Key" The marquee wasn't as damaged then, so I didn't have to abbreviate that one!
Interesting how working in a cinema can offer opportunities for creative discovery/implementation. For example:
“So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel three, that’s when you’ll catch a flash of Tyler’s contribution to the film.”
David Fincher had worked as a teenage movie projectionist in Ashland, Oregon, just down Interstate 5 from Cottage Grove. It truly was the film dweebs job.
Does having people respond/relate to the more “unique/taboo” aspects of your work ever not come as a surprise/shock? Fincher splicing frames of illicit material into film reels and, also, the various ways in which people respond to your short story “Guts” and then relate their own unfortunate/embarrassing anecdotes to you, to name but a few examples. Like, have you ever had someone identify/relate with a specific aspect from one of your works to which you were just left thinking: “No fucking way...”
Hey, my job isn't to make people feel wrong. That would be like a psychiatrist presenting a Rorschach test and then telling the patient, "No, the ink blot dose not look like a butterfly." Instead, I marvel over what they reveal about their lives. A classic, once a flight attendant asked me if 'Fight Club' was about gay bathhouses and men having public sex. He seemed so sure of this, and it seemed like such a hint about his own life, that I just nodded. He's given me free drinks on every flight to Los Angeles ever since.
Ah, I didn’t mean “No fucking way...” in a negative sense. Apologies if it came across that way. I meant it in a, ‘that’s neat/interesting that you connected with this specific/unique aspect of the work’ kind of way. I can’t imagine how humbling/intriguing/great it must be to have candid interactions with people who are pretty much strangers. That’s one of the many aspects/virtues of your work that I find interesting/admirable. How people can relate to all manner of things which may seem strange, embarrassing, etc. If I recall, you said/think that the best stories are the stories which cause people to want to interject and tell their own stories. If I have indeed remembered correctly, I would say, from simply scrolling through the comments on this and past posts, that you have more than succeeded in telling those types of stories. If I have remembered incorrectly, You’re still doing something right so ignore my early onset dementia and keep doing whatever it is your doing. I mean that wholeheartedly.
P.S. congrats on the free drinks on flights to L.A. I’m not sure if nodding in response to questions about bathhouses and displays of public romantic affection so that you might get free stuff is the correct takeaway from that anecdote, but I can’t see what could possibly go wrong from trying it out.
Hey no offense taken. An old/good rule? Ken Kesey used to say, "It takes two people for an offense to occur. One to do the offending deed. Another to take offense."
Since hearing that, I always try not to take offense.
Neat proverb. Despite not seeing/hearing it articulated by Ken Kesey as such, I also take the advice on board/to heart. Seems like a lot a people could maybe benefit from seeing/hearing those words of wisdom in this current day and age. Do you think you might do a post on offense and censorship in the future? What with it unfortunately being relevant in the current zeitgeist.
I still remember walking into Friday the 13th part 4 as a family, my Mom and Dad beside me and people laughing as we looked for our seats. I must have been twelve at the time. I loved all those horror movies back then. I have a lot of fond memories of my Dad and I going to the theatre or renting stacks of VHS tapes.
My great tri-plex experience at almost the opposite corner of the states, Sarasota, Florida, doesn't even come close to comparing to yours in unseemliness. The more than a decade of societal evolution in between our experiences, the facts that my manager is currently a part-time comedian who works clean and that the cinema was an art house run by a not-for-profit all definitely factored into the equation. I got promoted to the position of Assistant Manager and did a fair bit of projection myself, though we had a very cool old main projectionist named Carl Leigh who kept the prints clean with hand-held velvet as they ran. Instead of Grease, we ran the same print of "The Full Monty" from opening day until after it had been released on videotape. The body of that print was still beautiful when it got sent back, a matter of pride for Carl, though it had chunks of the credits missing because of an evening projectionist (not me) with the nasty habit of falling asleep in the booth. We hosted festivals for international film, LGBTQ Film, Spike and Mike's, and, least successfully, black film. With good reason that festival's operators moved locations to a different part of, what was then, one of the ten most segregated cities in the United States. The celebrity guest the last year at Burns Court Cinema, Delroy Lindo, was overheard by one of our employees wondering where all the black people were. The blame for hosting improperly could probably be put squarely on the shoulders of the now-late founder who also overpromised on our ability to screen dailies. The now-comedian manager and I were running the first-and-last daily in the booth for Volker Schlondorff and others, somewhat distracted by the steamy scene between Elisabeth Shue and Woody Harrelson, when another employee came into the booth with the complaint that there was no sound. We were just dopey projectionists and had no clue that the "extra" sound reels supplied were meant to be run through a different machine we didn't have. Yet another venue was switched to elsewhere and, probably for the best. We weren't the most respectful staff, consisting of art-student concession workers who saw fit to greet Harrelson with the iconic "Kingpin" wagging tongue between fingers in a vee. Schondorff himself seemed annoyed with me in my one interaction. I had seen "The Tin Drum" at a very early age on cable. I let him know that it had had a very negative and jarring effect on me and was met with no response whatsoever. There may have been some schadenfreude on my part when "Palmetto" flopped at the box office.
I wish I had the nerve to tell the joke to all of you that I had my mouth washed out for. The soap was Dial and I had to stand in the kitchen for an hour with the bar in my mouth.
I first told it to my Uncle Randy— who was the funniest Uncle ever— I just wanted people to laugh at me the way they did around him— so I learned this joke— I told him— had NO idea what I was saying at the age of 9. He just stared at me and slapped me across the face. He marched me to my parents at home, I was told to tell them the joke. After I did, my Dad started laughing HARD, hiding his face. I started to blush and laugh— enjoying the attention. That’s when the punishment took place. I was paddled. Then, the soap. After, I was asked if I even knew why the joke was bad— I didn’t. They explained. My joke telling days were over until I was older and found a way to tell them during quiet moments at bars when I was alone and good looking men were around but weren’t even trying to look my way. Dirty jokes and Dad jokes lead to some sexy evenings. There’s one fire station I know the insides of a little too well. ☺️
The "Box Office" game really highlights the degeneration of kids' imaginations. With smart phones, etc., I can pretty much guarantee you that no group of kids in the industrialized world is doing anything like this anymore. Zero attention span, zero creativity. If we're never bored we'll never have to invent ways to not be bored.
I believe generalities like this are along the same lines as a person that declares no good music is made anymore. The human mind is full of potential. Who are we to declare that society is dead? It maybe a be paralyzed in a solid dopamine fix from the latest TikTok trend but still very much alive. I feel like we need to make such a loud declaration that we wake society up. The means at which we shock, scare, or break our addictions to the current system, remains to be seen. It's the reason why I am here. I want to learn and push humanity into evolving.
Though if we truly are dead, I am sure a few of us here can compose the correct necromantic ritual to bring it all back for one last fuck
These comments are great, and everyone has interesting stuff to say, but I suspect there are (and was hoping to hear) many more ignorant-when-we-told-them dirty jokes.
I was in 3rd grade, up to 6th maybe, and I would tell a joke about a “cream-pie.” Friends (and friends of friends) loved it. I don’t think any of us understood it. I knew I didn’t get it, but since I had never eaten an actual cream pie, I assumed that once I did, maybe the joke would make sense. The joke went something like, “little Eddie told Mary that if she held his hand, he would give her a cream-pie. Mary didn’t like Eddie, but she loved cream-pies so she held his hand. “When do I get my cream-pie,” Mary asked. Eddie said, “cream-pie comes later.” Eddie said, “Now, let me see your boobies and I’ll give you a cream-pie.” Mary didn’t want to show Eddie her boobies, but she wanted a cream-pie, so she agreed…. It goes on like this, escalating in a way a 3rd grader whose mom fast-forwarded through kissing scenes would… “touch boobies,” “see butt,” “touch butt,” etc. …what was fun about this joke is if you had a crowd you could really get creative and stretch it out… until eventually little Eddie asks for sex and Mary agrees and then asks when she’ll get a cream-pie and the punch line was “don’t stop now, here comes the cream-pie.”
It might not have been until I was in college that I remembered (horrified) how often I told that joke without understanding it as a kid.
I also remember believing and sharing (at same young age) that flipping someone off was bad because the middle finger meant ‘penis.’
I wonder if kids are still able to experience the wonder of being asked to share a joke they don’t understand? I don’t want to search for (or encourage the creation), but a YouTube channel hosted by an earnest junior high kid explaining dirty jokes to his targeted audience of elementary school kids would be hilarious.
I was always so jealous of the kids in my home town that worked at the theater. I worked at KFC, and my boss used to throw chicken at us if the customer complained it wasn't fresh enough...
At any rate, I have a tendency to watch movies a million times in a row if I like them, but I've never looked at it as an educational tool...which now seems like a pretty simple, logical thing to do.
I was a projectionist at the only theater in my small town, a quad-plex with two large screens and two smaller ones. Best job I could've hoped for as a teenager, though the $4.25 an hour didn't do much for my wallet. I'm not sure if this was common practice elsewhere, but when we received the reels for a new film, always in the same dented octagonal containers, we would build them and screen them the night before release. Only employees and friends were allowed, and it was always in the early hours of the morning. Our own private showing where we could smoke weed, drink booze, and yell at the screen with impunity.
I must've seen four hundred movies this way, and it spoiled me. I can't sit in a crowded theater anymore, not even before Covid. Out of all of those films, "Se7en" sticks in my mind more than any other. What began with fifteen or so kids laughing and burping quickly turned to rapt silence. It didn't push me to the edge of my seat so much as lift me out of it. By the final scene, I was standing on the fold-out cushion, screaming, "You know what's in the box! Fucking shoot him already!" Pitch-perfect storytelling, if you ask me. Which you didn't, of course.
There was a chef at a five-star restaurant. He was cutting up vegetables prepping for that nights service when he heard a knock on the back door. He opened the door and saw a homeless guy swaying back and forth. "Do you have any toothpicks?" He asked. The chef reached over and plucked a toothpick from the make table, handed it to the guy, and closed the door. He went back to cutting vegetables and heard another knock at the back door. He opened the door and saw a second homeless guy. "Do...do (hiccup) you have any toothpicks?" he asked, slurring his words. The chef reached and pulled a toothpick from the bin on the make table, handed it to the guy, and closed the door. He went back to cutting vegetables and heard a knock on the back door. He opened the door and there was a third homeless-looking guy standing there. "Do you happen to have a straw?" The chef replied "Ok, what's going on back here? Two guys ask for toothpicks and you ask for a straw. What gives?" The vagrant replied, "Well Jerry threw up and the other two guys got the best chunks..."
Damn, you told that so elegantly! I've already retold it six times and been met with six grimaces. Thank you.
As someone who literally lived in a movie theater (twice!), I thoroughly enjoyed this. To this day "concession girl" still goes down in history as my favorite job of all time. And what I wouldn't give to watch "Stand by Me" fifty thousand more times on the silver screen. Happy Sunday!
Hah! Nuts-O true story. They shot Stand By Me near Cottage Grove, OR while I worked as a reporter on the Cottage Grove Sentinel. (Slightly before my time they'd shot the parade sequence for Animal House in Cottage Grove.) A sports reporter and I were sent out to stalk the production as it used the local steam train "The Goose" for the train track scenes. In 1926 Buster Keaton had used The Goose in his film The General. For several weeks I got as close as I could, getting yelled at and chased off by Rob Reiner.
More recently I stood in the alley behind Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard. A publicist asked me, "Do you know where you're standing?" I didn't. The publicist said, "You're standing exactly where River Phoenix died." It was just outside the Viper Room. Sad full circle from seeing Phoenix as a kid in Cottage Grove.
How sad. I loved River Phoenix.
Ha! I had a friend who was allowed to temporarily sleep in the projection booth of the theater I mentioned in another part of this thread. The couple hired to deep clean the theaters once a week were fired because they weren't aware he was staying over nights. It happened before I was employed there and he caught them doing the nasty when they should have been cleaning up the same. His description of what he saw in that Sarasota theater probably would have repulsed Paul Reubens.
When I was a kid, we slept upstairs in what is now the poster storage room. But it didn’t have good heat so a few really cold nights we camped out next to the heater in the auditorium. When I stayed there as an adult, heat was fine but the bathroom was in projection room and I couldn’t make that walk alone. My theater is super haunted. Couldn’t even look out the window at the dark, “empty” auditorium ‘cause I got the feeling I’d see someone standing down there. A temporary living arrangement for sure!!
Also by bathroom, I mean toilet crammed in a hallway next to the steps down to the other projector rooms, with a shower curtain for a door and no sink. :)
I have no clue as to how my buddy handled bathing/showering. Whatever difficulties he dealt with as a young man are dwarfed by your childhood and whatever haunted those theaters and weird set up. We had ghost sightings aplenty at the nearby college I attended (which was part of the noteworthy occultist John Ringling's property in his lifetime), some of which were likely drug-induced, but Burns Court was less than a decade old when I worked there. Fortunately I'm only haunted by Hot Chocolate's hit song "You Sexy Thing" which played during the credits of our longest-running feature. Listen to that song enough times and I guarantee it will get creepy. Still, like with Mr. Palahniuk's stories, what you've endured makes the stories from the three different cinemas who've hired me seem quite light-hearted in comparison.
Ah—nothing to have endured, I loved/love the theater (ghosts and all)! Fun to read and share a common thread here with everyone. :)
Agreed! Not the usual definition of “theater kids” but the bond is real. Happy to hear your dad’s theater(s?) stir up such good feelings and pleased to meet someone with such a unique upbringing.
Did you know that theaters traditionally place a bright light on the stage when the place is empty? It's called a "ghost light" and I'd understood that it functions (?) to keep spirits from setting up housekeeping. My original name for "Haunted" was to be "Ghost Light" but another novel came out with that title a few months before mine. A spooky practice.
Did not know that! The original title sounds poetic but “Haunted” is more fitting, I think. Was instructed to stop reading aloud during an extended car trip because of the pool scene. Admittedly, the driver is also known to shield their eyes during violent film scenes, but still... powerful words you wielded there, Mr. P..
I ushered at the Edens 1 & 2 during the early 1990s. Best job ever.
They’re both long gone, but you can see just how unique they were from these old photos: http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/4528/photos
Don’t forget when you want to illustrate the folly of Architecture & Dialogue I’m your girl. It’s my specialty. 😁
And a dish.
Lol - you’re not in the doghouse. I’m very confident in my fallback attributes.
Yay! We have a shared experience. At fifteen, I took my first job at a gorgeous old single-screen called the Rio Theater (http://www.riotheatre.com/). Amazingly, the movie house is still in operation today, although it doubles as a music venue. The fey Erika and I, along with Cindy, who hated people but loved animals, and Raffi, the Armenian that smelled like Pan, ran the magical place.
Cindy worked the box office. Just like it sounds, it was a ticket office in a box. A chrome polyhedron with vents in the sides so she could breathe. It looked like a tiny spaceship set down on the mosaic-tiled entryway under the marquee.
There were time portals in the old building, like the wedge-shaped storage area behind the sign filled with movie posters and displays dating back to 1946. The projector room was a mad scientist’s lab. But the most liminal of all the secret spaces was the Cry Room—this weird little glass-fronted mini-theater hung suspended above the other 900 seats. Its original purpose was to seal mothers with their crying babies away in a soundproof booth. By 1985, this segregation was no longer practiced, so it was abandoned. Erika and I would sneak up there to watch movies, smoke pot, and make love. It was heaven.
Yes! One of our theaters had a Cry Room too!!
Did you ever have to change marquee letters? Using that long pole made your shoulders ache for days. Ours had a suction cup on the end. The trick was to spit into the cup and slap it against the plastic letters. To hang "Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings" took the collective saliva of seven or eight teenagers.
The girls never did the marquee. Sexist? Maybe. It was the 80s, though.
When I was a kid, I helped my dad put them up, but we used a claw. If you slipped they’d smash to pieces on the sidewalk.
Thank goodness teenagers have lots of extra saliva.
I work at 90-year-old cinema, so I have lots of experience changing marquee letters. Doing that task in the wintertime is sheer hell because you literally have to tear the letters off because they freeze. This creates gaps on the marquee because the plastic slots break, which means that we have to abbreviate the titles because if you put too many letters up, some will fall through the gaps and probably hit a poor passerby in the head, so, for example, instead of 9:00- "Monty Python & The Holy Grail" we just put 9:00-"Python"
The longest title I ever put on a marquee was the 1972 film "Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have The Key" The marquee wasn't as damaged then, so I didn't have to abbreviate that one!
Thank you for these posts. I need them. Seriously.
Interesting how working in a cinema can offer opportunities for creative discovery/implementation. For example:
“So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel three, that’s when you’ll catch a flash of Tyler’s contribution to the film.”
David Fincher had worked as a teenage movie projectionist in Ashland, Oregon, just down Interstate 5 from Cottage Grove. It truly was the film dweebs job.
Does having people respond/relate to the more “unique/taboo” aspects of your work ever not come as a surprise/shock? Fincher splicing frames of illicit material into film reels and, also, the various ways in which people respond to your short story “Guts” and then relate their own unfortunate/embarrassing anecdotes to you, to name but a few examples. Like, have you ever had someone identify/relate with a specific aspect from one of your works to which you were just left thinking: “No fucking way...”
Hey, my job isn't to make people feel wrong. That would be like a psychiatrist presenting a Rorschach test and then telling the patient, "No, the ink blot dose not look like a butterfly." Instead, I marvel over what they reveal about their lives. A classic, once a flight attendant asked me if 'Fight Club' was about gay bathhouses and men having public sex. He seemed so sure of this, and it seemed like such a hint about his own life, that I just nodded. He's given me free drinks on every flight to Los Angeles ever since.
Ah, I didn’t mean “No fucking way...” in a negative sense. Apologies if it came across that way. I meant it in a, ‘that’s neat/interesting that you connected with this specific/unique aspect of the work’ kind of way. I can’t imagine how humbling/intriguing/great it must be to have candid interactions with people who are pretty much strangers. That’s one of the many aspects/virtues of your work that I find interesting/admirable. How people can relate to all manner of things which may seem strange, embarrassing, etc. If I recall, you said/think that the best stories are the stories which cause people to want to interject and tell their own stories. If I have indeed remembered correctly, I would say, from simply scrolling through the comments on this and past posts, that you have more than succeeded in telling those types of stories. If I have remembered incorrectly, You’re still doing something right so ignore my early onset dementia and keep doing whatever it is your doing. I mean that wholeheartedly.
P.S. congrats on the free drinks on flights to L.A. I’m not sure if nodding in response to questions about bathhouses and displays of public romantic affection so that you might get free stuff is the correct takeaway from that anecdote, but I can’t see what could possibly go wrong from trying it out.
Hey no offense taken. An old/good rule? Ken Kesey used to say, "It takes two people for an offense to occur. One to do the offending deed. Another to take offense."
Since hearing that, I always try not to take offense.
Neat proverb. Despite not seeing/hearing it articulated by Ken Kesey as such, I also take the advice on board/to heart. Seems like a lot a people could maybe benefit from seeing/hearing those words of wisdom in this current day and age. Do you think you might do a post on offense and censorship in the future? What with it unfortunately being relevant in the current zeitgeist.
I still remember walking into Friday the 13th part 4 as a family, my Mom and Dad beside me and people laughing as we looked for our seats. I must have been twelve at the time. I loved all those horror movies back then. I have a lot of fond memories of my Dad and I going to the theatre or renting stacks of VHS tapes.
My great tri-plex experience at almost the opposite corner of the states, Sarasota, Florida, doesn't even come close to comparing to yours in unseemliness. The more than a decade of societal evolution in between our experiences, the facts that my manager is currently a part-time comedian who works clean and that the cinema was an art house run by a not-for-profit all definitely factored into the equation. I got promoted to the position of Assistant Manager and did a fair bit of projection myself, though we had a very cool old main projectionist named Carl Leigh who kept the prints clean with hand-held velvet as they ran. Instead of Grease, we ran the same print of "The Full Monty" from opening day until after it had been released on videotape. The body of that print was still beautiful when it got sent back, a matter of pride for Carl, though it had chunks of the credits missing because of an evening projectionist (not me) with the nasty habit of falling asleep in the booth. We hosted festivals for international film, LGBTQ Film, Spike and Mike's, and, least successfully, black film. With good reason that festival's operators moved locations to a different part of, what was then, one of the ten most segregated cities in the United States. The celebrity guest the last year at Burns Court Cinema, Delroy Lindo, was overheard by one of our employees wondering where all the black people were. The blame for hosting improperly could probably be put squarely on the shoulders of the now-late founder who also overpromised on our ability to screen dailies. The now-comedian manager and I were running the first-and-last daily in the booth for Volker Schlondorff and others, somewhat distracted by the steamy scene between Elisabeth Shue and Woody Harrelson, when another employee came into the booth with the complaint that there was no sound. We were just dopey projectionists and had no clue that the "extra" sound reels supplied were meant to be run through a different machine we didn't have. Yet another venue was switched to elsewhere and, probably for the best. We weren't the most respectful staff, consisting of art-student concession workers who saw fit to greet Harrelson with the iconic "Kingpin" wagging tongue between fingers in a vee. Schondorff himself seemed annoyed with me in my one interaction. I had seen "The Tin Drum" at a very early age on cable. I let him know that it had had a very negative and jarring effect on me and was met with no response whatsoever. There may have been some schadenfreude on my part when "Palmetto" flopped at the box office.
I wish I had the nerve to tell the joke to all of you that I had my mouth washed out for. The soap was Dial and I had to stand in the kitchen for an hour with the bar in my mouth.
I first told it to my Uncle Randy— who was the funniest Uncle ever— I just wanted people to laugh at me the way they did around him— so I learned this joke— I told him— had NO idea what I was saying at the age of 9. He just stared at me and slapped me across the face. He marched me to my parents at home, I was told to tell them the joke. After I did, my Dad started laughing HARD, hiding his face. I started to blush and laugh— enjoying the attention. That’s when the punishment took place. I was paddled. Then, the soap. After, I was asked if I even knew why the joke was bad— I didn’t. They explained. My joke telling days were over until I was older and found a way to tell them during quiet moments at bars when I was alone and good looking men were around but weren’t even trying to look my way. Dirty jokes and Dad jokes lead to some sexy evenings. There’s one fire station I know the insides of a little too well. ☺️
(Pssst. Your book went out today. Watch for it.)
Awwwh. (All smiles and blushing) Thank you for that, really means a lot. Glad I found your books when I did.
The "Box Office" game really highlights the degeneration of kids' imaginations. With smart phones, etc., I can pretty much guarantee you that no group of kids in the industrialized world is doing anything like this anymore. Zero attention span, zero creativity. If we're never bored we'll never have to invent ways to not be bored.
I believe generalities like this are along the same lines as a person that declares no good music is made anymore. The human mind is full of potential. Who are we to declare that society is dead? It maybe a be paralyzed in a solid dopamine fix from the latest TikTok trend but still very much alive. I feel like we need to make such a loud declaration that we wake society up. The means at which we shock, scare, or break our addictions to the current system, remains to be seen. It's the reason why I am here. I want to learn and push humanity into evolving.
Though if we truly are dead, I am sure a few of us here can compose the correct necromantic ritual to bring it all back for one last fuck
These comments are great, and everyone has interesting stuff to say, but I suspect there are (and was hoping to hear) many more ignorant-when-we-told-them dirty jokes.
I was in 3rd grade, up to 6th maybe, and I would tell a joke about a “cream-pie.” Friends (and friends of friends) loved it. I don’t think any of us understood it. I knew I didn’t get it, but since I had never eaten an actual cream pie, I assumed that once I did, maybe the joke would make sense. The joke went something like, “little Eddie told Mary that if she held his hand, he would give her a cream-pie. Mary didn’t like Eddie, but she loved cream-pies so she held his hand. “When do I get my cream-pie,” Mary asked. Eddie said, “cream-pie comes later.” Eddie said, “Now, let me see your boobies and I’ll give you a cream-pie.” Mary didn’t want to show Eddie her boobies, but she wanted a cream-pie, so she agreed…. It goes on like this, escalating in a way a 3rd grader whose mom fast-forwarded through kissing scenes would… “touch boobies,” “see butt,” “touch butt,” etc. …what was fun about this joke is if you had a crowd you could really get creative and stretch it out… until eventually little Eddie asks for sex and Mary agrees and then asks when she’ll get a cream-pie and the punch line was “don’t stop now, here comes the cream-pie.”
It might not have been until I was in college that I remembered (horrified) how often I told that joke without understanding it as a kid.
I also remember believing and sharing (at same young age) that flipping someone off was bad because the middle finger meant ‘penis.’
I wonder if kids are still able to experience the wonder of being asked to share a joke they don’t understand? I don’t want to search for (or encourage the creation), but a YouTube channel hosted by an earnest junior high kid explaining dirty jokes to his targeted audience of elementary school kids would be hilarious.
I was always so jealous of the kids in my home town that worked at the theater. I worked at KFC, and my boss used to throw chicken at us if the customer complained it wasn't fresh enough...
At any rate, I have a tendency to watch movies a million times in a row if I like them, but I've never looked at it as an educational tool...which now seems like a pretty simple, logical thing to do.
I was a projectionist at the only theater in my small town, a quad-plex with two large screens and two smaller ones. Best job I could've hoped for as a teenager, though the $4.25 an hour didn't do much for my wallet. I'm not sure if this was common practice elsewhere, but when we received the reels for a new film, always in the same dented octagonal containers, we would build them and screen them the night before release. Only employees and friends were allowed, and it was always in the early hours of the morning. Our own private showing where we could smoke weed, drink booze, and yell at the screen with impunity.
I must've seen four hundred movies this way, and it spoiled me. I can't sit in a crowded theater anymore, not even before Covid. Out of all of those films, "Se7en" sticks in my mind more than any other. What began with fifteen or so kids laughing and burping quickly turned to rapt silence. It didn't push me to the edge of my seat so much as lift me out of it. By the final scene, I was standing on the fold-out cushion, screaming, "You know what's in the box! Fucking shoot him already!" Pitch-perfect storytelling, if you ask me. Which you didn't, of course.