The Cinema Was My Babysitter

When I was a young boy, around 7 or 8 years old, my mom would take my older brother and sister and me to the theater in Chicago and drop us off around 1 PM and pick us back up at closing time, sometime after dark. It was a little theater called The Lyric and was in the small Chicago suburb of Blue Island.

That was in the mid-Sixties, around 1966 and 1967. Back then, you could purchase a ticket for 75 cents and stay all day. Usually they had two, sometimes three features that would show over and over again, all day long. I have very fond memories of hanging out and watching the movies again and again until closing time. My brother and sister and I would then hang out under the street lamp until my mom picked us up. As she told us later, it was a cheap babysitter. All we needed was money for admission, and money for popcorn, soda pop and jujubes.

I saw many movies back then, and I loved it. It no doubt made a great impression upon me, the extent of which I did not realize until much later in life when I struggled to make my own ultra, ultra, microscopic-budgeted movies. As that young child, after having gorged myself on popcorn, soda pop, Clark bars and jujubes, I would daydream about the movies I had seen, imagining myself as the hero. The following days I would corral my friends and I would have them reenact the movies with me, at my instructions. I would “direct” them, so to speak. Of course, I was always the hero, and my friends were always my sidekicks and supporting actors, or even the bad guys. You have to have bad guys too to make a movie, right? Or as Nietzsche said, “Ye moralists be a little less severe – we monsters are necessary to nature also.”

I’m not sure how I was allowed to see many of the movies I did at that age, but I was. The most memorable were the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, such as Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. I went home, cut a hole in the center of a towel and draped it over my shoulders, using it as a poncho like the one Clint Eastwood wore. I chewed on pencil stubs for a cigar, as I fanned my plastic, Mattel .45 caliber revolver in front of the mirror. No wonder my screenplays are so full of violence and gunplay.

I absolutely loved seeing Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde over and over again, until I had most of the lines memorized. My toy guns went with me everywhere after that, as well as my newly purchased fedora, and the suit I normally wore to church on Easter Sunday. I was instantly transformed into the Texas desperado, Clyde Barrow. The cute little blond 6-year old down the street, newly arrived on our street from Oklahoma, became my very own Bonnie Parker, and her older brother became Buck Barrow, as I orchestrated many imaginary bank robberies.

Other movies I remember making an impression upon me at The Lyric were The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Lost Continent and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Others were the Elvis Presley movies: Spinout, Frankie and Johnny and Clambake, to name but a few.

My mom told me a story once of a mother she knew in the 1940’s who forbade her children to go to the movies. Her young, teenage sons received severe beatings if they were found out to have seen a movie at the theater, where they would often sneak into with their girlfriends. According to the mother, the movies were the product of the devil, what with all the kissing, dancing, violence and sinful ways. Then in the mid-fifties this same woman bought one of those newfangled televisions, which would miraculously beam movies directly into your living room! She would sit for hours and laugh and be entertained as she watched the very same movies she had beaten her children for watching 10 years earlier. I still wonder to this day if her sons forgave her for all the beatings they received for watching movies!

All of those movies I remember seeing in Chicago were all exciting fodder for a child such as I growing up in the psychedelic, turbulent Sixties. What a great babysitter that celluloid screen was, as I sat and stared with rapt attention. Thanks, Mom!