The Last Picture Show

In 1985 the Heights Theater closed its doors. Quite possibly it was due to the fact that they ran Ghostbusters for over a year. The Heights Theater was a local, neighborhood theater with only one screen. Blockbuster movies and multi-screen theaters put it out of business. It's a shame--it was a classic old movie palace, with a giant mural of the state in the floor of the lobby. I saw many films there growing up. During the summer they would do a special children's film series at 11am every week. In 1985 I would have been 12 years old. A group had decided to screen Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show as, fittingly, the last picture show at the Heights Theater.
My friends Stephen and Blake and I were determined to see the last movie to screen at the Heights Theater, so we rode up there on our bikes and parked them out front where we always had in the past. We went in to buy our tickets--it was a special event so tickets were $10, a pricey sum for a movie ticket in 1985, and several weeks' worth of allowance for a 12 -year-old. The woman selling tickets didn't know what to make of us three kids. She almost didn't sell us the tickets because the movie was R-rated. We made our case for how much the theater had meant to us just like everyone else there, so she finally gave in.
Our combined age still would have made us one of the youngest people there, so it's no wonder that the guy from the newspaper took our picture, perched in our standard seats on the third row. I just came across that picture this past weekend.
Four years earlier I had fallen in love with Film and decided that was what I wanted to do when I "grew up". I would like to say that the Heights Theater was my Cinema Paradiso, but it wasn't because it closed so early in my education. Coming of age when I did, I spent my time after school at the local video store--"That's Entertainment". It was the greatest place a boy could dream of. They sold TVs, VCRs, Albums, Cassettes, and rented movies in the superior but doomed Beta format (if you wanted VHS you had to go up the street to Al's Video). I could watch anything there, no matter what it was rated, on my choice of TV screens. That was my Cinema Paradiso, but I've always been nostalgic for the Heights Theater.
Shortly after the Heights Theater closed, a local Director/DP named Gary Jones bought the marquee and put it up at his production company. Now, 20 years later, that is where I work.