And A Happy New Year

My first proper job was at a movie theater. Or, rather, a "theatre," as they spell it. I was broke and needed money to keep going to school and they were hiring people like me, when nobody else would. Somehow I managed to show up looking for work just after one longtime employee had just quit. It was a lucky break because it's an ideal college job and there wasn't much turnover at this theater, so it was a hard job to get.

The River Oaks Theatre in Houston is an art deco styled theater, built at the tail end of the Depression. When I worked there it was pretty sleep--this was before the recentish popularity of independent cinema, so there were only a handful of people at any showing. It was a fading theater that had seen better days. The carpet was stained and paint peeled in spots. The paint, by the way, was the unfortunate color of Pepto Bismol--apparently the result of the theater's 50th anniversary sprucing up. Upkeep is tricky when there are barely enough customers to keep the doors open.

I spent many long hours listening to the muffled sound of movie soundtracks, while reading or staring at the carpet, musing about the subtle swastikas that were embedded in the pattern printed on it. Sometimes a co-worker--when there was a co-worker--would start a bored conversation about his conspiracy theory of the day, but conversations were rare. Mostly there was just the half-silence.

There was one other theater across town that showed the sorts of movies that River Oaks showed, sort of a rival theater. There are two kinds of arthouse movies: there is the hoity toity foreign language and period piece stuff and then there is the gritty indie film stuff. The River Oaks, on the edge of its hoity toity namesake neighborhood always got the former type. The Greenway, by contrast, got the fun movies. I thought that the people that went to see these movies were surely more interesting than the surgically altered types that frequented the River Oaks, so I was secretly envious of the people that got to work there.

A couple years later, the River Oaks' parent company, Landmark, bought the Greenway and through a roundabout path of leaving and coming back and working at other theaters, I ended up as a sort of a third-string manager at the Greenway. And I found that my envy was well-founded. There are people--regulars--who went to both Greenway and the River Oaks, but the non-regulars at the Greenway tended to be more interesting, more interested in movies, rather than being seen at some sort of cultural event. Maybe this had something to do with the Greenway's location.

The Greenway is located in what is technically the middle of a parking garage, but that can best be described as a labyrinth. I got lost there last week, in fact, after being directed into one of the lower parking areas by some overzealous security people trying to control Lakewood church traffic. There is--I kid you not--a hidden restroom that you can access by pushing open a door which is disguised as a section of wall. If you can somehow find your way to the proper level of the parking garage, find the proper section of the garage for theater parking, and then find your way inside, you must have more determination than the average moviegoer. You are the type that appreciates--literally--underground cinema.

In a lot of ways the Greenway was worse off than the River Oaks. The ice machine was never able to keep up with demand, so I would have to order ice to be delivered (by the drunk cowboy ice delivery man); the popcorn popper would fail, requiring that we drive over to the River Oaks to pick up trashbags full of the stuff to be served cold and chewy to unsuspecting patrons; and the Italian made projectors were constantly thirsty for oil, which they would then leak all over themselves (the River Oaks projectors were scrupulously maintained). It was all bubble gum and duct tape, but I preferred working there to the River Oaks by a mile.

This week, the Greenway announced that they will be closing. I can only imagine that the announcement was timed to occur during the week that people are least able to pay attention. There were many complaints about the possibility of the River Oaks closing recently, so maybe Landmark wanted to make the announcement below the radar in the way the White House makes announcements on Fridays in the hope that they will miss the news cycle. I went to one final movie last night and asked the guy in the box office how much notice they gave the staff before they were going to be out of a job. Nine days was his answer. Merry Christmas.

Related piece on what might have happened.

And now the links.

Don't be a popstar in Mexico.

Who is the biggest nerd?